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David Park

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"The Grand Contraption is the long-needed antidote to all those top-heavy histories of scientific thought that pass brusquely over the philosophies of the ancient world, eager to find the sure footing of modernity. Park tells us not only what science now knows, but how it got to know it: from an enthralling mix of myth, genius, logic, careful observation, guesswork, invention, and a dash of inspired lunacy."--Philip Ball, author of Life's Matrix and consultant editor, Nature

"This book literally grabs you. The facts presented, the stories told, the author's reflections on the information he presents, are rendered beautifully-and masterfully. This is a labor of love, and the passion with which David Park has written the book is readily apparent and makes one want to keep on reading. And in doing so one is richly rewarded with keen insights, judicious appraisals, and with questions regarding courses of action and consequences that are not only thought provoking but also relevant."--Silvan S. Schweber, Brandeis University and Harvard University, author of QED and the Men Who Made It (Princeton)

"The Grand Contraption is an impressive feat of scholarship in the history of science, and it is even more impressive if one considers that it is written in clear and unpretentious English. Park offers, in plain language, an attractive way to think about cosmological ideas from a single perspective. No one will put this book down without having their level of consciousness raised by a few notches."--Christian Wildberg, Princeton University

"Physics, astronomy, geology, and poetry all come together here in the grand quest to understand what out universe is and how it works. "Only a handful of authors have both the expertise and the courage to write a book of this sweep and depth. David Park has woven together a vast tapestry of humankind's vision of the cosmos, from ancient myths to our contemporary curiosity about intelligent life on other worlds."--Owen Gingerich. Professor of Astronomy & the History of Science, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

"An exceptional and well-written introduction to the history of ideas, viewed from the perspective of their creators, who were adapting their thinking to new facts and conceptions as they went. We found the book engrossing and illuminating."--Elizabeth Wayland Barber and Paul T. Barber, coauthors of When They Severed Earth from Sky

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The Grand Contraption

Princeton University Press

Chapter One

When my hair was half done I remembered I love you I forgot my hair I ran to find you Now let me finish I'll only be a minute. - Egyptian, before 1200 BCE

IN ANCIENT MESOPOTAMIA or in the valley of the Nile, you could look around at a landscape interrupted only by a farmhouse or a town or a temple and imagine that the world continued like that. What would happen if you just walked in a straight line, day after day? If there is an edge, would it be a wall or more like the edge of a table? If a wall, what lies behind it? If a table, what would you see if you looked down? And if you could fly straight up, would you hit something? And finally, in those days everybody knew that the world is full of supernatural beings that you never saw. Is there a domain somewhere on Earth or perhaps up in the sky where these beings spend their time? Unless they are invisible, they have to be somewhere. This chapter is about how people have imagined the layout of the Earth and the regions around it, how the Earth started, and some things that have happened to change it. It is just a beginning; these questions will be looked at from many angles as the story develops.

1.1 THE BIBLICAL UNIVERSE

In the beginning God created the Heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day. On the third day God separated land from water beneath the firmament and created the vegetable kingdom; on the fourth: Sun, Moon, and stars; on the fifth: birds and fish; on the sixth: animals, a man, and a woman, and on the seventh day he rested.

The mind cries out for more. Why was all this done, and how? The Bible doesn't say. Was the watery waste there to begin with? Some Judaic commentators imagine a wild chaos that had to be tamed by an act of will before the work of creation could begin. Others say no: first there was nothing, then water, then light. We shall return to the question in chapter 5. What is clear is that the watery waste came first, and next came light and the imposition of a plan where there was no plan. Where do we look if we want to see the plan? Look at a forest or a pond. Each is a collection of plants and animals, insects and creatures too small to see. No appearance of order there, but think how they combine to make a living environment. One creature eats another; later it nourishes a third. A bee on the way to its hive leaves a grain of pollen on a flower whose seed will nourish other creatures. Flowers bloom at different times so that bees will be kept busy. The order of the natural world is more apparent in the way it functions than in the way it looks.

When the Bible begins all we see is water, but underneath is a layer of earth. So that this can appear, God creates a great sky-vault known as the firmament. One might have supposed that its purpose, in that barren land, was to raise the celestial waters above the earth, but the Bible says it was to separate water from water. Even in a dry countryside, every inhabited place is near water, flowing on the surface or a few feet down in a well. You may remember that a few generations later, when the Flood came, water spurted out of the ground to augment the rain. The authors of Genesis saw humanity living in a bubble with water above and below. A midrash, or comment, says: "Why did he separate them? Because the upper water is a male, whilst the nether water is female, and when they desired to unite they threatened to destroy the world. The water roared up mountains and hurtled down hills, the male in hot pursuit of the female, until the Holy One, blessed be He, rebuked them ... Between the upper and nether worlds are but three finger breadths, and the vault of the firmament interposes to keep them apart." We shall see that the bubble has a long history.

The vault is raqia in Hebrew; the word often refers to a pot hammered out of copper. Later, when Job's young neighbor Elihu reproaches him for his protest against God's injustice, he contrasts God's greatness with that of any mortal: "Can you as he [did] beat out the vault of the skies, hard as a mirror of cast metal?" Beneath the vault moved the Sun, stars, and angels. How high was it? When Moses took Aaron and seventy elders of Israel to meet with the Lord, they walked up Mount Sinai "and they saw the God of Israel. Under his feet there was, as it were, a pavement of sapphire, clear blue as the very heavens." There is an inconsistency here, for later the Lord told Moses, "No man shall see me and live." The conventional explanation is that the seventy elders saw the vault from below. Figure 1.1, from the Regensberg Pentateuch, c. 1300, shows Moses receiving the Ten Commandments and handing them to the Elders below. The Lord stands on a vault painted blue. Moses stands on what is perhaps a tree stump and is careful not to look behind him.

Here, then, is a vision of a world that functions with the aid of divine powers. In modern terms it resembles a submarine with windows. From time to time the windows are opened to let water come in and nourish the rivers and soil, and for a few years manna dropped down from Heaven to relieve the Lord's people as they wandered in the desert. Above the vault was water; perhaps on its shore was the City of God where Ezekiel, seated on a sapphire throne, saw a figure resembling a man who spoke to him and told him to prophesy. That is about all we learn about the geography of Heaven from the canonical scriptures, but later writers filled what they must have perceived as a vacuum. The most complete account, and the source of many conventional ideas of Heaven, is the apocryphal Apocalypse of Paul, a Greek text that probably originated in Egypt about the middle of the third century. It takes off from a passage in 2 Corinthians 12 in which Saint Paul says that he once felt he was "caught up into paradise, and heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter." Later, his guardian angel shows him the mysteries of Heaven and Hell. After Paul has seen how the souls of the recently dead are sorted out according to their deserts, he is raised to the third and highest heaven. The angel leads him through a gold door above which are inscribed the names of the just-not only their names but their pictures, so that every angel will know them. Paul is greeted by Enoch and Elijah and is shown the premises, but he is forbidden to tell anyone what he has seen or heard.

Then the angel carries Paul down to a place where they stand on top of the firmament. This is paradise, the second heaven. As one might...