The Pageant of the Cosmos

MYSTERIOUS new world of expanding space, stars older than the universe that gave them birth, matter formed of waves, paradox piled on paradox—does the contradictory jumble hide an underlying unity, a system, order and not chaos? Yes,answers Willem de Sitter, the Leiden astronomer, in Kosmos (Harvard University Press, $1.75). However revolutionary and undisciplined it may appear, modern science is still science and trying to do what science always has done: to correlate different phenomena. The story of these attempts through the centuries is the theme of this packed book — and it is a beautiful story, appreciatively told. From Pythagoras, ‘first who had the courage to think of the earth as freely floating in space in the centre of the universe,’to Einstein and the later moderns, there march through these pages glimpses of world builders and of their worlds—each an upsetter of old ideas, and yet each building on the fragment of truth that was in the discarded dream of his forerunner.

This pageant of supplanted scientific theories recalled to me a scene from Carlyle’s Heroes and Hero-Worship. He imagines the voice of the dead generations calling to us, from the depths of the past, their interpretations of the cosmos: ‘This then is what are made of the world: this is all the image and notion we could form to ourselves of this great mystery of a Life and Universe. Despise it no. You are raised high above it, to large free scope of vision; but you too are not yet at the top. Your notion too, so much enlarged, is but a partial, imperfect one.’

Now our current notion, according to this book, is of a distending universe, a vast bubble blowing up with incredible rapidity. Is this idea final? Will it last? No, concludes de Sitter; it too ‘bears all the marks of a transitory structure,’and to-day the theory of the expanding universe ‘is much less definite than we supposed it to be a few months ago.’

GEORGE W. GRAY