The Number of the Heavens: A History of the Multiverse and the Quest to Understand the Cosmos

353 Pages·2019·18.394 MB·English

by  Tom Siegfried

The Number of the Heavens

THE
N U M B E R
OF THE
H E A V E N S
A History of the
Multiverse and
the Quest to
Understand
the Cosmos
TOM SIEGFRIED
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
2019
Copyright © 2019 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of Amer ic a
Cover design: Tim Jones
Cover art: MirageC/Getty Images
9780674243385 (EPUB)
9780674243392 (MOBI)
9780674243378 (PDF)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
is available from loc.gov
ISBN: 978-0-674-97588-0 (alk. paper)
Contents
Preface vii
Introduction 1
1 • Out of Chaos, a Multiverse 8
2 • Robert Grosseteste’s Multiverse 29
3 • Aristotle versus the Atomists 47
4 • The Condemnation of 1277 62
5 • Condemnation Aftermath 78
6 • Cusa and Copernicus 97
7 • Wandering in Immensity 113
8 • Planets and P eople 132
9 • Island Universes 150
10 • E Pluribus Universe 166
11 • Many Quantum Worlds 185
12 • Anthropic Cosmology 208
vi | Contents
13 • Brane Worlds 229
14 • Defining the Multiverse 247
Epilogue 270
Notes 285
Illustration Credits 317
Index 319
Preface
After his conquest of most of the known world, Alexander the
Great wept, legend has it, because there were no more worlds to
conquer. But actually, as the black-h atted villain played by Ed
Harris informed us in season two of Westworld, Alexander cried
when told that there was an infinity of worlds—a nd he h adn’t yet
finished conquering one of them.
The popu lar, erroneous story of Alexander’s sorrow is a mis-
quotation of the Greek- Roman scholar and biographer Plutarch.
He reported that the existence of a multiplicity of worlds was re-
vealed to Alexander by the phi los op her Anaxarchus, a follower of
Democritus, the phi los o pher of the fifth century BC who taught
that every thing is made of atoms. Democritus also believed that
the known cosmos—believed in Alexander’s time to be a set of
spheres carry ing planets and stars around the Earth— was just one
of countless many. Anaxarchus contradicted Alexander’s e arlier
teacher, Aristotle, who argued with Vulcan-l ike assuredness that
logic prohibited the existence of multiple worlds.
In the view of most ancient and early medieval phil os o phers,
Aristotle won the argument. But following an edict contradicting
Aristotle, issued by the bishop of Paris in 1277, medieval phil os o-
phers revisited the possibility of a plurality of worlds. Scholars
continued to debate that proposition over the centuries that fol-
lowed. The debate never died, but its terms continually shifted as
scientists revised their notion of what constitutes the “world,”
or the universe. From the sun- centered solar system described
by Copernicus, to the vast “universe” of stars known as the Milky