Samuel Arbesman
Applied mathematician; postdoctoral research fellow, Department of Health Care Policy, Harvard Medical School; affiliate, Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Harvard University
The scientist Nicolaus Copernicus recognized that Earth is not in any particularly privileged position in the solar system. This elegant fact can be extended to encompass a powerful idea, known as the Copernican Principle, which holds that we are not in a special or favorable place of any sort. By looking at the world in light of this principle, we can overcome certain preconceptions about ourselves and reexamine our relationship with the universe.
The Copernican Principle can be used in the traditional spatial sense, providing awareness of our sun’s mediocre place in the suburbs of our galaxy and our galaxy’s unremarkable place in the universe. And the Copernican Principle helps guide our understanding of the expanding universe, allowing us to see that anywhere in the cosmos one would perceive other galaxies moving away at rapid speeds, just as we see here on Earth. We are not anywhere special.
The Copernican Principle has also been extended to our temporal position by astrophysicist J. Richard Gott to help provide estimates for lifetimes of events, independent of additional information. As Gott elaborated, other than the fact that we are intelligent observers, there is no reason to believe we are in any way specially located in time. The Copernican Principle allows us to quantify our uncertainty and recognize that we are often neither at the beginning of things nor at the end. It allowed Gott to estimate correctly when the Berlin Wall would fall and has even provided meaningful numbers on the survival of humanity.
This principle can even anchor our location within the many orders of magnitude of our world: We are far smaller than most of the cosmos, far larger than most chemistry, far slower than much that occurs at subatomic scales, and far faster than geological and evolutionary processes. This principle leads us to study the successively larger and smaller orders of magnitude of our world, because we cannot assume that everything interesting is at the same scale as ourselves.
And yet despite this regimented approach to our mediocrity, we need not despair: As far as we know, we’re the only species that recognizes its place in the universe. The paradox of the Copernican Principle is that by properly understanding our place, even if it be humbling, we can only then truly understand our particular circumstances. And when we do, we don’t seem so insignificant after all.