Introduction
1. Alex Vilenkin, “Creation of Universes from Nothing,” Physics Letters B 117 (1982): 25–28, and “The Birth of Inflationary Universes,” Physical Review D 27 (1983): 2848–55; Andrei Linde, “Eternally Existing Self-Reproducing Chaotic Inflationary Universe,” Physics Letters B 175 (1986): 395–400, and “The Self-Reproducing Inflationary Universe,” Scientific American, November 1994, 48–55; David Deutsch, “The Structure of the Multiverse,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London A 458 (2002): 2911–23; Martin Rees, “Exploring Our Universe and Others,” in “The Once and Future Cosmos,” special issue, Scientific American, December 1999, 78–83; Paul J. Steinhardt and Neil Turok, “Cosmic Evolution in a Cyclic Universe,” Physical Review D 65 (2002): 1–20; Max Tegmark, “Parallel Universes,” Scientific American, May 2003, 41–51; Lauris Baum and Paul Frampton, “Turnaround in Cyclic Cosmology,” Physical Review Letters 98 (2007): 1–4; Mark Buchanan, “Many Worlds: See Me Here, See Me There,” Nature, July 5, 2007, 15–17; Bernard Carr, ed., Universe or Multiverse? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Laura Mersini-Houghton, “Birth of the Universe from the Multiverse,” September 22, 2008, available only through arXiv/0809.3623.
2. Brian Greene, The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos (New York: Knopf, 2011). See also Michio Kaku, Parallel Worlds: A Journey Through Creation, Higher Dimensions, and the Future of the Cosmos (New York: Doubleday, 2004); Alex Vilenkin, Many Worlds in One: The Search for Other Universes (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006); Leonard Susskind, The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design (Boston: Back Bay Books, 2006); Paul J. Steinhardt and Neil Turok, Endless Universe: Beyond the Big Bang—Rewriting Cosmic History (New York: Broadway, Books, 2008); Louise Lockwood, “Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives” (manuscript, 2008); Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, “DIY Universe,” Radiohb, WNYC, March 25, 2009, and “The (Multi)Universe(s),” Radiolab, WNYC, August 12, 2008; Nathan Schneider, “The Multiverse Problem,” Seed Magazine, April 14, 2009; Heather Catchpole, “Weird Data Suggests Something Big Beyond the Edge of the Universe,” Cosmos, November 24, 2009; John Gribbin, In Search of the Multiverse (London: Allen Lane, 2009); Sean M. Carroll, From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time (New York: Dutton, 2010); Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design (New York: Bantam, 2010); “Multiverse,” ed. Terry Gross, Fresh Air, NPR, January 24, 2011; George Ellis, “Does the Multiverse Really Exist?” Scientific American, August 2011, 38–43; Steven Manly, Visions of the Multiverse (Pompton Plains, N.J.: Career Press, 2011); “The Fabric of the Cosmos: Universe or Multiverse?” NOVA, PBS, November 23, 2011; John D. Barrow, The Book of Universes: Exploring the Limits of the Cosmos (New York: Norton, 2011); and Helge Kragh, Higher Speculations: Grand Theories and Failed Revolutions in Physics and Cosmology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
3. Seth MacFarlane, creator, Greg Colton, dir., and Wellesley Wild, writer, “Road to the Multiverse,” Family Guy, season 8, episode 1, FOX, September 27, 2009. In addition to the Family Guy video game, see, for example, Michael P. Kube-McDowell, Alternities (n.p.: iBooks, 2005); Paul Melko, The Broken Universe (New York: Tor Books, 2012), and The Walls of the Universe (New York: Tor Books, 2009); Super Mario Galaxy (Nintendo, 2007); and Super Mario Galaxy 2 (Nintendo, 2010). See also the newly released Multiverse magazine, a roundup of news from the world of superhero comics (volume 0 available at http://issuu.com/richjohnston/docs/multiverse__0 [accessed May 29, 2013]).
4. Kragh, Higher Speculations, 255.
5. Lorraine Daston, “The Coming into Being of Scientific Objects,” in Biographies of Scientific Objects, ed. Lorraine Daston (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 1–14.
6. The idea of multiple worlds finds slightly later but far more extensive elaboration in the Hindu and Buddhist traditions than it does in the West, and these cosmologies certainly suffer far less controversy at the hands of their host cultures. Although this book makes occasional connections to these schools of thought, its focus is on the Western tradition for two reasons. First, this tradition tends to provide the metaphoric registers on which contemporary Western-based scientists (many of whom are not Western born) tend, for better or worse, to draw. Second, I have neither the historical nor the linguistic training to offer careful readings of Hindu or Buddhist texts. I hope that this work might contribute in a small way to other scholars’ projects on these resonances. In the meantime, a compelling historical connection between Atomist, Stoic, and pre-Mahayana cosmologies can be found in Akira Sadakata, Buddhist Cosmology: Philosophy and Origins (Tokyo: Kosei, 2004), 9–25. See also Jamgon Kongtrul Lodro Taye, Myriad Worlds: Buddhist Cosmology in Abhidharma, Kalachakra, & Dzog-chen (Boston: Snow Lion, 1995).
8. William James, “Is Life Worth Living?” International Journal of Ethics 6, no. 1 (1895): 10 (emphasis added).
9. Wayne Proudfoot, “Pragmatism and ‘an Unseen Order,’” in William James and a Science of Religions: Reexperiencing the Varieties of Religious Experience, ed. Wayne Proud-foot (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 32–33.
10. James, “Is Life Worth Living?” 10, 16, 23.
12. Ibid., 24 (emphasis in original). On the possibility of making oneself believe in the moral order of the universe (or in anything at all), see William James, “The Will to Believe,” in Pragmatism and Other Writings, ed. Giles Gunn (New York: Penguin, 2000), 198–218.
13. On this transformation, see William James, A Pluralistic Universe (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 196–98, 206–7.
18. Martin Rees, “Cosmology and the Multiverse,” in Universe or Multiverse? ed. Carr, 59.
19. Andrei Linde, “Inflationary Theory Versus Ekpyrotic/Cyclic Scenario: A Talk at Stephen Hawking’s 60th Birthday Conference, Cambridge University, Jan. 2002,” in The Future of Theoretical Physics and Cosmology, ed. G. W. Gibbons, E. P. S. Shellard, and S. J. Rankin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 801–38, arXiv:hep-th/0205259; Paul J. Steinhardt, “The Inflation Debate,” Scientific American, April 2011, 36–43.
20. Tegmark, “Parallel Universes.”
21. This is especially the case when it comes to the “landscape” of string theory. Some theorists (for example, Andrei Linde and Leonard Susskind) argue that the landscape expresses the distribution of the inflationary multiverse. Others (Stephen Hawking and Thomas Hertog in particular) argue that it maps onto the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics. And others still (most notably, Laura Mersini-Houghton) argue that all three models can be reconciled with one another. See Linde, “Eternally Existing,” 399; Susskind, Cosmic Landscape, 12; Stephen Hawking and Thomas Hertog, “Populating the Landscape: A Top-Down Approach,” Physical Review D 73 (2006): 1–9; and Laura Mersini-Houghton, “Thoughts on Defining the Multiverse,” April 27, 2008, available only through arXiv/0804.4280.
22. Greene calls the two configurations of this type the “Quilted” and “Inflationary” multiverses, respectively, in Hidden Reality, 10–71.
23. Examples of works on contemporary temporal or cyclic models include Lee Smolin, The Life of the Cosmos (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Baum and Frampton, “Turnaround in Cyclic Cosmology”; Steinhardt and Turok, Endless Universe; Martin Bojowald, Once Before Time: A Whole Story of the Universe (New York: Vintage, 2010); and Roger Penrose, Cycles of Time: An Extraordinary New View of the Universe (New York: Knopf, 2011).
24. David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality (New York: Penguin, 1997); Colin Bruce, Schrödinger’s Rabbits: The Many-Worlds of Quantum (Washington, D.C.: Joseph Henry, 2004).
25. R. A. Montgomery, Space and Beyond, Choose Your Own Adventure (Waitsfield, Vt.: Chooseco, 2006); Jeff Melman, dir., and Chris McKenna, writer, “Remedial Chaos Theory,” Community, season 3, episode 4, NBC, October 13, 2011.
26. Tegmark, “Parallel Universes”; Max Tegmark, “The Multiverse Hierarchy,” in Universe or Multiverse? ed. Carr, 99–125. Some direct and very recent philosophical precedents include Robert Nozick, Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981); and David Lewis, On the Plurality of Worlds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).
27. Greene, Hidden Reality, 294; Paul Davies, Cosmic Jackpot: Why Our Universe Is Just Right for Life (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2007), 210.
28. G. W. Leibniz, Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man, and the Origin of Evil, trans. E. M. Huggard (Eugene, Ore.: Wipf and Stock, 2001), 377–88. Voltaire parodically represents this position through Dr. Pangloss in Candide (1759).
29. Tegmark, “Parallel Universes,” 49.
30. Martin Rees, “Concluding Perspective,” January 16, 2001, in New Cosmological Data and the Values of the Fundamental Parameters: Proceedings of the 201st Symposium of the International Astronomical Union Held During the IAU General Assembly XXIV, the Victoria University of Manchester, United Kingdom, 7–11 August, 2000, ed. Anthony Lasenby and Althea Wilkinson (San Francisco: Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 2005), 421, arXiv:astro-ph/0101268v1.
31. Hugh Everett, “‘Relative State’ Formulation of Quantum Mechanics,” Review of Modern Physics 29 (1957): 454–62. Bryce DeWitt developed and popularized this thesis in “Quantum Mechanics and Reality,” Physics Today 23, no. 9 (1970): 155–65, and Bryce DeWitt and Neill Graham, eds., The Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973).
32. Vilenkin, “Birth of Inflationary Universes”; Linde, “Eternally Existing”; Andreas Albrecht and Paul J. Steinhardt, “Cosmology for Grand Unified Theories with Radiatively Induced Symmetry Breaking,” Physical Review Letters 48 (1982): 1220–23; Alan H. Guth and Paul J. Steinhardt, “The Inflationary Universe,” Scientific American, May 1984, 116–28.
33. Vilenkin, Many Worlds in One, 86.
34. Alan P. Lightman, “The Accidental Universe: Science’s Crisis of Faith,” Harper’s Magazine, December 22, 2011.
35. Rees, “Cosmology and the Multiverse,” 58.
36. Quoted in Tim Folger, “Science’s Alternative to an Intelligent Creator: The Multiverse Theory” [interview with Andrei Linde], Discover, November 10, 2008.
37. The classic elaborations of these various fine-tunings can be found in Bernard Carr and Martin Rees, “The Antrophic Principle and the Structure of the Physical World,” Nature, April 12, 1979, 605–12; Paul C. W. Davies, The Accidental Universe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); John D. Barrow and Frank Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986); Martin Rees, Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces That Shape the Universe (New York: Basic Books, 2000); John D. Barrow, The Constants of Nature (New York: Pantheon, 2002); and Bernard Carr, “The Anthropic Principle Revisited,” in Universe or Multiverse? ed. Carr, 77–89.
38. Most experimental physicists, by contrast, are happy just to work with the constants they are given—as a common expression puts it, to “shut up and calculate.” See David I. Kaiser, How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival (New York: Norton, 2012), 1–24.
39. “We see that things which lack intelligence, such as natural bodies, act for an end … so as to obtain the best result. Hence it is plain that not fortuitously, but designedly, do they achieve their end. Now whatever lacks intelligence cannot move towards an end, unless it be directed by some being endowed with knowledge and intelligence; as the arrow is shot to its mark by the archer. Therefore some intelligent being exists by whom all natural things are directed to their end; and this being we call God” (Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 5 vols. [Allen, Tex.: Christian Classics, 1981], 1.2.3). An earlier formulation of this argument can be found in Augustine of Hippo, Concerning the City of God Against the Pagans, trans. Henry Bettenson (New York: Penguin, 2003), 11.4.2.
40. David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, ed. Richard H. Popkin, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998), 15 (subsequent references are cited in the text).
41. It is important to note that this God of natural religion is not the God of revealed religion, who is said to be “wholly other” from human beings and totally unknowable. Rather, the creator of natural religion is similar in kind to human beings but different in degree; just like human designers, the designer-God is intelligent, powerful, and benevolent, only more so. Hume half-heartedly represents the “revealed” viewpoint through the confused, fairly useless character of Demea, who claims that “intellect or understanding is not to be ascribed to the Deity, and that our most perfect worship of him consists, not in acts of veneration, reverence, gratitude, or love, but in a certain mysterious self-annihilation or total extinction of all our faculties.” Demea’s critique of natural religion is that “by representing the Deity as so intelligible and comprehensible, and so similar to a human mind, we are guilty of the grossest and most narrow partiality, and make ourselves the model of the whole universe” (ibid., 26–27).
42. This is David Hume’s theory of causality as “constant conjunction,” set forth in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Eric Steinberg, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993).
43. The resonance with the book of Job is striking: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” God asks from out of the whirlwind. “Tell me, if you have understanding. Have the gates of death been revealed to you? Have you comprehended the expanse of the earth? Declare, if you know all this” (Job 38:4, 17–18, New Revised Standard Version [NRSV]).
44. For a careful roundup and scathing critique of such arguments, see Kenneth Surin, Theology and the Problem of Evil (Eugene, Ore.: Wipf and Stock, 1986).
45. William Paley, Natural Theology; or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity. Collected from the Appearances of Nature (London: Faulder, 1802), 1–2, 19.
47. Ibid., 261, 64, 65, 67, 68, 352, 57, 579 (emphasis in original).
49. Quoted in Lightman, “Accidental Universe,” 2 (emphasis added).
50. Paul C. W. Davies, “Universes Galore: Where Will It All End?” in Universe or Multiverse? ed. Carr, 487.
51. Davies, Cosmic Jackpot, 15.
52. Brandon Carter, “Large Number Coincidences and the Anthropic Principle in Cosmology,” in Physical Cosmology and Philosophy, ed. John Leslie and Paul Edwards (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 126.
53. On the distinction between strong and weak arguments, see ibid.; and Ernan Mc-Mullin, “Indifference Principle and Anthropic Principle in Cosmology,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 24 (1993): 359–89. The philosopher Nick Bostrom counts thirty versions of the anthropic argument in all, in Anthropic Bias: Observation Selection Effects in Science and Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 2002). For a deeply critical assessment of the four major strands, see Martin Gardner, “WAP, SAP, PAP, & FAP,” New York Review of Books, May 8, 1986, 22–25, in which Gardner concludes that WAP, SAP, PAP, and FAP amount to so much “CRAP.”
54. William R. Stoeger, S.J., “Are Anthropic Arguments, Involving Multiverses and Beyond, Legitimate?” in Universe or Multiverse? ed. Carr, 446.
55. Susskind, Cosmic Landscape, 7. Susskind is just explaining the SAP in this passage; he is not affirming it.
56. Andrei Linde, “The Inflationary Multiverse,” in Universe or Multiverse? ed. Carr, 129.
57. See, for example, Richard Swinburne, “Argument from the Fine-tuning of the Universe,” in Physical Cosmology and Philosophy, ed. Leslie and Edwards, 154–73.
58. John Polkinghorne, Beyond Science: The Wider Human Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 92.
59. William Lane Craig, “Barrow and Tipler on the Anthropic Principle vs. Divine Design,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 38 (1988): 393. See also William Lane Craig, “Design and the Anthropic Fine-tuning of the Universe,” in God and Design: The Teleological Argument and Modern Science, ed. Neil A. Manson (New York: Routledge, 2003), 155; and Barrow and Tipler, Anthropic Cosmological Principle.
60. Brandon Carter, “Anthropic Principle in Cosmology,” June 27, 2006, in Current Issues in Cosmology, ed. Jean-Claude Pecker and Jayant Narlikar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 174, arXiv:gr-qc/0606117v1. For other theological appropriations of the anthropic principle, see Michael J. Denton, Nature’s Destiny (New York: Free Press, 1998); Robin Collins, “God, Design, and Fine-tuning,” in God Matters: Readings in the Philosophy of Religion, ed. Raymond Martin and Christopher Bernard (New York: Longman, Pearson, 2002), 119–35; Stephen Barr, Modern Physics and Ancient Faith (Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, 2003); Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay W. Richards, The Privileged Planet (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2004); and Hugh Ross, Why the Universe Is the Way It Is (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 2008).
61. Swinburne, “Argument from the Fine-tuning of the Universe,” 165.
62. It is, however, the preferred “answer” among the majority of working physicists, who tend to refuse the question in the first place. See Davies, Cosmic Jackpot, 261.
64. Carroll, From Eternity to Here, 59. Now that the Higgs boson (or a “Higgslike particle”) has been found by the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, “empty” space is also said to be filled with the Higgs field, which gives elementary particles their mass. See ATLAS Collaboration, “Observation of a New Particle in the Search for the Standard Model Higgs Boson with the ATLAS Detector at the LHC,” Physics Letters B 716 (2012): 1–29, http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S037026931200857X (accessed September 11, 2013).
65. High Energy Physics Advisory Panel, “Quantum Universe: The Revolution in 21st Century Particle Physics,” October 22, 2003, http://www.interactions.org/pdf/Quantum_Universe.pdf (accessed May 29, 2013). For two reader-friendly explanations of this calculation, see Barrow, Book of Universes, 291; and Carroll, From Eternity to Here, 20.
66. Quoted in Michael D. Lemonick, “The End,” Time, June 25, 2001; Carroll, From Eternity to Here, 20; Lee Smolin, The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next (New York: First Mariner, 2007), 153.
67. Einstein had introduced lambda in his gravitational equations in order to keep the cosmos static, but he revoked it when Edwin Hubble discovered the universe was expanding (see chap. 5, sec. “Let There Be Light”).
68. Lightman, “Accidental Universe,” 5.
69. This is an overstatement, but only a slight one: “[A]t present, the anthropic upper limit on the vacuum energy is larger than the present mass density, but not many orders of magnitude greater” (Steven Weinberg, “Living in the Multiverse,” in Universe or Multiverse? ed. Carr, 32).
70. Susskind, Cosmic Landscape, 83.
72. “An anthropic explanation of the value of ρv [the energy density of the cosmological constant] makes sense if and only if there is a very large number of big bangs, with different values for v” (Steven Weinberg, “The Cosmological Constant Problems” [lecture given at the Dark Matter 2000 Conference, Marina del Ray, Calif., February 22–24, 2000], arXiv:astro-ph/0005265v1). Weinberg’s paper built on an argument he had set forth more than a decade earlier in “Anthropic Bound on the Cosmological Constant,” Physical Review Letters 59 (1987): 2607–10. According to string theorist Brian Wecht, “[M]any people cite [this earlier] paper … as the first compelling evidence they’d seen about there being some merit to the anthropic principle” (personal communication with the author, August 21, 2012).
73. For the initial unpopularity of these accounts as well as their sudden fame after the discovery of dark energy, see Alex Vilenkin and Jaume Garriga, “Many Worlds in One,” Physical Review D 64 (2001): 1–5. For other accounts of the connection between dark energy and the revival of eternal inflation, see Gribbin, In Search of the Multiverse, 135; Mersini-Houghton, “Thoughts on Defining the Multiverse”; and Greene, Hidden Reality, 7.
74. The foundational paper in this regard is Raphael Bousso and Joseph Polchinski, “Quantization of Four-Form Fluxes and Dynamical Neutralization of the Cosmological Constant,” Journal of High Energy Physics, no. 6 (2000): 1–25. Developments can be found in Leonard Susskind, “The Anthropic Landscape of String Theory,” in Universe or Multiverse, ed. Carr, 247–66, arXiv:hep-th/0302219v1; and Sujay K. Ashok and Michael R. Douglas, “Counting String Vacua,” Journal of High Energy Physics, no. 1 (2004): 1–35. Some theorists have argued that the number of vacua is actually infinite. See Jessie Shelton, Washington Taylor, and Brian Wecht, “Generalized Flux Vacua,” Journal of High Energy Physics, no. 2 (2007): 1–27, arXiv:hep-th/0607015v2.
75. Although most theorists agree that the sources of the modern turn to the multiverse are, on the one hand, developments within cosmology and particle physics and, on the other, philosophical expedience, they disagree as to which came first. Bernard Carr, for example, argues that “these multiverse proposals have not generally been motivated by an attempt to explain the anthropic fine-tunings; most of them have arisen independently out of developments in cosmology and particle physics” (“Introduction and Overview,” in Universe or Multiverse? ed. Carr, 4; compare Sean M. Carroll, “Does This Ontological Commitment Make Me Look Fat?” Discover, June 4, 2012, http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2012/06/04/does-this-ontological-commitment-make-me-look-fat/ [accessed May 29, 2013]). Martin Rees, by contrast, has written that the multiverse hypothesis “was originally just a conjecture, motivated by a wish to explain the apparent fine-tuning in our universe—and incidentally a way to undercut the so-called theological design argument, which said that there was something special about these laws” (“In the Matrix,” Edge, May 19, 2003 [emphasis added]; compare Martin Gardner, Are Universes Thicker Than Blackberries? Discourses on Gödel, Magic Hexagrams, Little Red Riding Hood, and Other Mathematical and Pseudoscientific Topics [New York: Norton, 2003], 6). In the face of this conflict, it is probably safest to say with Davies that the philosophical commitments condition the models in the first place and vice versa: “[A]ll cosmological models are constructed by augmenting the results of observations by some sort of philosophical principle” (“Universes Galore,” 487).
76. Quoted in George Brumfiel, “Outrageous Fortune,” Nature, January 5, 2006, 10.
77. Hawking and Mlodinow, Grand Design, 165.
78. For some of the most dramatic expressions of what I would call “cosmological antitheism,” see Susskind, Cosmic Landscape; Hawking and Mlodinow, Grand Design; and Lawrence Krauss, A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing (New York: Free Press, 2012).
79. Quoted in Folger, “Science’s Alternative.”
80. See, for example, Don N. Page, “Does God So Love the Multiverse?” in Science and Religion in Dialogue, ed. Melville Y. Stewart (Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 1:380–95, arXiv/0801.0246; and Jeffrey A. Zweernick, Who’s Afraid of the Multiverse? (Pasadena, Calif.: Reasons to Believe, 2008).
81. Homer, The Iliad, trans. Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 12.225, and The Odyssey, trans. Richmond Lattimore (New York: Harper, 2007), 13.77.
82. Edward Adams, “Graeco-Roman and Ancient Jewish Cosmology,” in Cosmology and New Testament Theology, ed. Jonathan T. Pennington and Sean M. McDonald (New York: Clark, 2008), 6.
84. David J. Furley, The Greek Cosmologists: The Formation of the Atomic Theory and Its Earliest Critics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 58; Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, trans. R. D. Hicks, vol. 2, Loeb Classical Library 185 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1942), 8.1.48.
85. Adams, “Graeco-Roman and Ancient Jewish Cosmology,” 6.
86. What I am calling “the multiple” is therefore akin to what James calls “the plural.” It is even closer to what Jean-Luc Nancy calls “singular plurality”—an equiprimordiality of the many and the one by virtue of which existents are irreducibly “with” one another. “Multiplicity” signals, furthermore, that this “withness” not only constitutes the multiple but deconstitutes it as well; as Judith Butler has shown in her work on vulnerability, the very relations that compose a self or city or world also threaten to undo it. (It should be said that in her most recent monograph on Israel–Palestine, Butler calls this interdetermination “plurality,” rather than multiplicity.) And, perhaps most noticeably, my use of this term conjures Gilles Deleuze’s understanding of multiplicity not as unmediable difference, but as “the affirmation of unity.” There is an order to multiplicity’s disorder, an irreducible web of relations that distinguishes multiplicity from sheer plurality. See Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000); Mary-Jane Rubenstein, Strange Wonder: The Closure of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 99–131, and “Undone by Each Other: Interrupted Sovereignty in Augustine’s Confessions,” in Polydoxy, ed. Catherine Keller and Laurel Schneider (New York: Routledge, 2010), 105–25; Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York: Verso, 2004), and Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012); and Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 23–24.
87. Quoted in both Pierre Duhem, Medieval Cosmology: Theories of Infinity, Place, Time, Void, and the Plurality of Worlds, trans. Roger Ariew (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 450; and Steven J. Dick, Plurality of Worlds: The Origins of the Extraterrestrial Life Debate from Democritus to Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 28.
1. A Single, Complete Whole
1. Hesiod, Theogony, in Theogony, Works and Days, Theognis, Elegies (New York: Penguin, 1973), 27.
2. The Ionians were “hylozoists,” meaning that they believed “matter as such has the property of life and growth” (David J. Furley, The Greek Cosmologists: The Formation of the Atomic Theory and Its Earliest Critics [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987], 18).
3. “[Thales’s] doctrine was that water (hudor) is the universal primary substance, and that the world is animate and full of divinities” (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, trans. R. D. Hicks, vol. 1, Loeb Classical Library 184 [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1942], 1.1.27).
4. “[Anaximenes] took for his first principle air (aera) or that which is unlimited” (ibid., 2.2.3).
5. “All things are composed of fire, and into fire they are again resolved” (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, trans. R. D. Hicks, vol. 2, Loeb Classical Library 185 [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1942], 9.1.7). Although fire is the first of the four elements for Heraclitus, it is not the underlying substance that his predecessors considered it. In fact, Heraclitus rejects the notion of “substance” beneath change tout court. See Edward Adams, “Graeco-Roman and Ancient Jewish Cosmology,” in Cosmology and New Testament Theology, ed. Jonathan T. Pennington and Sean M. Mc-Donald (New York: Clark, 2008), 10; and Furley, Greek Cosmologists, 34–36.
6. “[Aniximander] laid down as his principle and element that which is unlimited (apeiron) without defining it as air or water or anything else” (Diogenes Laertius, Lives, 1:2.1.1). Aristotle’s rundown of the pre-Socratics is as follows:
Thales, the introducer of this sort of philosophy, said that [the principle of all things] was water … perhaps drawing this supposition from seeing that the nourishment of all creatures is moist…. Anaximenes, however, assumed that air was prior to water … and Diogenes [of Apollonia] thought the same, while Hippasus of Metapontum and Heraclitus of Ephesus thought it was fire. Empedocles thought that there were four elements, adding to those mentioned earth as a fourth…. Anaxagoras of Clazomenae was earlier than he in date but later in his works, and he said that the number of principles was infinite. (The Metaphysics, trans. Hugh Lawson-Tancred [New York: Penguin, 1998], 983b–84a)
7. Diogenes Laertius, Lives, 2:8.2.76. See also Friedrich Solmsen, “Love and Strife in Empedocles’ Cosmology,” Phronesis 10, no. 2 (1965): 109–48.
8. “[Democritus’s] opinions are these. The first principles of the universe are atoms and empty space…. The worlds are unlimited; they come into being and perish…. Further, the atoms are unlimited in size and number, and they are borne along in the whole universe in a vortex, and thereby generate all composite things—fire, water, air, 7. earth; for even these are conglomerations of given atoms” (Diogenes Laertius, Lives, 2:9.7.44). See also Edward Adams, The Stars Will Fall from Heaven: Cosmic Catastrophes in the New Testament and Its World (New York: Clark, 2007), 106–7.
9. According to Aristocles, “The element of all things is fire. … At certain fated times the whole universe will be converted into fire; next, it is again made into an ordered universe. The primal fire (proton pyr) is so to speak a kind of seed, containing the logoi of all things that have become, do become, and will become” (quoted in J. Mansfield, “Provi dence and the Destruction of the Universe in Early Stoic Thought: With Some Remarks on the ‘Mysteries of Philosophy,’” in Studies in Hellenistic Religion, ed. M. J. Vermaseren [Leiden: Brill, 1979], 145).
10. Diogenes Laertius is careful to point out that “Plato, who mentions almost all the early philosophers, never once alludes to Democritus, not even where it would be necessary to controvert him,” and that Plato is said to have wanted to burn all of Democritus’s books (Lives, 2:9.7.40). The analysis in this chapter makes clear just how threatening Atomist cosmology was to the singularity and imperishability of the Platonic universe.
11. Plato, Timaeus, in Timaeus and Critias, trans. Desmond Lee (New York: Penguin, 1977), 30a (subsequent references are cited in the text). Although I use the word cosmos (kosmos) more than universe (to pan [literally, “the all”]) in this reading of the Timaeus, Plato uses these terms interchangeably, along with sky/heavens (ouranos). See John Sallis, Chorology: On Beginning in Plato’s “Timaeus,” Studies in Continental Thought (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 53.
12. This is not to say that creation stories did not exist elsewhere. It is common to creation myths of the Near East, India, and the Far East to see a (usually male) “god of order” overcome a (usually female) principle of chaos. That said, these gods tend to come from the chaos in the first place, whereas Timaeus’s demiurge exists outside it. See Richard Clifford, Creation Accounts in the Ancient Near East and in the Bible (Washington, D.C.: Catholic Biblical Association of America, 1994); Mary K. Wakeman, God’s Battle with the Monster (Leiden: Brill, 1973); and Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 175–210.
13. Francis M. Cornford reminds us that this god is not the omnipotent creator of the Abrahamic traditions—at least in their orthodox configurations. This god does not create the material he uses but rather works within the constraints of necessity. As such, he is not omnipotent, nor does Timaeus suggest that he is an object of worship. Moreover, this demiurge has very little personality, suggesting to Cornford that he is not so much a god as a symbol of reason itself, “working for ends that are good. The whole purpose of the Timaeus is to teach men to regard the universe as revealing the operation of such a Reason, not the fortuitous outcome of blind and aimless bodily motions” (Plato’s Cosmology: The “Timaeus” of Plato, trans. Francis MacDonald Cornford, Library of Liberal Arts [New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957], 38; compare 15, 48).
14. Plato, Republic, trans. G. M. A. Grube, ed. C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992), 540a–b.
15. This assurance should be contrasted with a passage in Plato’s Statesman in which the alternating cosmic periods of order and chaos are said to be beyond the control of the god. See Plato, Statesman, ed. Julia Annas and Robin Waterfield, trans. Robin Waterfield, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 269c.
16. Plato, Plato’s Cosmology, 43.
17. Timaeus also refers to his story as an eikos logos, seemingly flouting the mythos–logos distinction on which Critias insists at the beginning of the dialogue. On this puzzling conflation, see T. K. Johansen, Plato’s Natural Philosophy: A Study of the “Timaeus–Critias” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 50–68.
18. In relation to the sudden appearance of a more primordial beginning (khôra) in the middle of the text, Sallis argues that the Timaeus is by necessity “a badly told story, one that violates the very injunction it issues about how to begin” (Chorology, 5).
19. Michel Serres, Genesis, trans. Genevieve James and James Nielson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 112 (ellipses in original), 133.
21. Adams, “Graeco-Roman and Ancient Jewish Cosmology,” 13.
22. Gerhard May, Creatio ex Nihilo: The Doctrine of “Creation out of Nothing” in Early Christian Thought, trans. A. S. Worrall (Edinburgh: Clark, 1994), 4, 15–16; Plato, Plato’s Cosmology, 37.
23. These groups are represented by Philo of Alexandria, Plutarch, and Atticus, respectively. See David Sedley, Creationism and Its Critics in Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 133.
24. Plato, Plato’s Cosmology, 203.
25. Following James Joyce, Catherine Keller has called this particular interdetermination “chaosmos” (Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming [New York: Routledge, 2003], 12).
26. Plato, Plato’s Cosmology, 37.
27. Although I do not engage their landmark studies directly here, my own reading of this part of the Timaeus has been influenced in countless subtle ways by the groundbreaking works of Jacques Derrida, “Khôra,” in On the Name, ed. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), 89–130; and Sallis, Chorology.
28. For Luce Irigaray, excluding the women they rely on is what philosophy, politics, language, and culture do best: women provide the raw materials for the systems that exclude them and can at best be said to be “envelopes” or “receptacles” in which great men became great—their “point of departure” (“Sexual Difference,” in An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993], 5–19, and “Plato’s Hystera,” in Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985], 243–365).
29. In line with Sallis’s critiques of the usual translations of χωρα, I have followed his lead in leaving the term in the (transliterated) Greek, khôra. The difficulty, as he explains it, is that
if, following Cornford and A. E. Taylor, one proposed to translate χωρα as space, then one would have to set about immediately withdrawing from the word much that we cannot but hear in it. For clearly the χωρα is not the isotropic space of post-Cartesian physics. Nor is it even empty space, the void, as discussed in Greek atomism, for this is called το κενου and is in fact discussed as such later in the Timaeus (58b). It would hardly be otherwise if one were to translate χωρα as place … for one would then have conflated the difference between χωρα and τοποζ and would risk assimilating Plato’s chorology to the topology of Aristotle’s Physics. (Chorology, 115)
30. Here I retain Timaeus’s use of the past tense “for convenience,” bearing in mind the strong possibility that the tale is a linear mapping of an eternal process.
31. This view of precosmic forces constitutes a remarkable difference from Aristotle, who assigns different regions of the cosmos to the five elements (fire, water, earth, air, and aether). See Aristotle, On the Heavens (De caelo), trans. J. L. Stocks, in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. Jonathan Barnes, vol. 1 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971); and Friedrich Solmsen, Aristotle’s System of the Physical World: A Comparison with His Predecessors (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1960).
32. Timaeus illustrates this interdependence by proposing we begin with water, “solidifying into stones and earth, and again dissolving and evaporating into wind and air; air by combustion becomes fire, and fire in turn when extinguished and condensed takes the form of air again” (Plato, Timaeus, 49c).
33. This cosmic mixing stands in stark tension with Socrates’s, Critias’s, and presumably Timaeus’s insistence that the perfect city is one in which the various classes are kept totally separate (ibid., 24a).
34. In his primordial scene of unrelated differences, Timaeus describes the realm of the Forms as “admitting no modification and entering no combination” (ibid., 52a). In mixing the world, the demiurge therefore brings into combination that which enters no combination.
35. Serres, Genesis, 112, 33.
36. Plato does not mention the Atomists by name here—or, indeed, in any of his works—but Diogenes Laertius tells us that “Aristoxenus in his Historical Notes affirms that Plato wished to burn all the writings of Democritus that he could collect” (Lives, 2:9.7.40). Whether this story is true or not, it gives voice to the profound antinomy between Platonists and Atomists.
37. Aristotle, On the Heavens, 277b28 (subsequent references are cited in the text).
38. In fact, Aristotle begins to speak of these qualities as if one necessarily entailed the other, resolving to demonstrate “that the heaven as a whole neither came into being nor admits of destruction … but is one and eternal” (ibid., 283b27–28).
39. Aristotle offers two proofs in the De caelo, one based on natural motion and one based on “natural place” (ibid., 278a26–79a6). I treat only the former here, partly because the two proofs are so similar, but mainly because the proof from natural motion is the one to which subsequent thinkers primarily respond. For a very capable account of the argument from natural place, see Dana Miller, “Plutarch’s Argument for a Plurality of Worlds in De defectu oraculorum 424c10–425e7,” Ancient Philosophy 17, no. 2 (1997): 377n.7.
40. Aristotle, Physics, trans. R. P. Hardie and R. K. Gaye, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), 1:255b14–17; Aristotle, On the Heavens, 269a31–35, 308b12–15.
41. “The shape of the heaven is of necessity spherical; for that is the shape most appropriate to its substance and also by nature primary” (Aristotle, On the Heavens, 286b10). By “primary,” Aristotle means that, unlike all other shapes, a sphere is indivisible. He goes on to add the evidence that the heavens must move in the “swiftest” and “shortest” path possible, which is to say in circular paths: “Therefore, if the heaven moves in a circle and moves more swiftly than anything else, it must necessarily be spherical” (ibid., 287a28–29).
42. As Miller points out, “This argument requires that one accept the claim—which Aristotle omits … that given a plurality of center places, bodies within a world will move relative to any center place.” Against this claim, Plutarch argued that the notion of “center” is relative to a particular world, so elements from one world would move only relative to its own center, and there is no obstacle to a plurality of worlds (“Plutarch’s Argument for a Plurality of Worlds,” 380).
43. Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. Lawson-Tancred, 1072a (subsequent references to this translation are cited in the text).
44. Aristotle uses the terms planeton and astron more or less interchangeably.
45. Hugh Lawson-Tancred, introduction to the text of Book Lambda, in Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. Lawson-Tancred, 376.
46. Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. Hugh Tredennick, Loeb Classical Library 271 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961), 1074a–b.
47. Western philosophy would have to wait to hear such an argument until the early fifteenth century, when Nicholas of Cusa held the singularity of God together with a plurality of worlds by means of the Trinity, a singular-plurality. Cusa posited the earth as just another star and stipulated that each star was in motion (see chap. 3, sec. “End Without End”): “The center of the world, therefore, coincides with the circumference. And therefore, the world has no circumference” (On Learned Ignorance, in Selected Spiritual Writings, trans. H. Lawrence Bond, Classics of Western Spirituality [New York: Paulist Press, 1997], 158; see also Steven J. Dick, Plurality of Worlds: The Origins of the Extraterrestrial Life Debate from Democritus to Kant [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982], 40–43).
48. Lawson-Tancred, introduction to the text of Book Lambda in Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. Lawson-Tancred, 376. For one such “compatibilist” attempt, see G. E. R. Lloyd, “Metaphysics Lambda 8,” in Aristotle’s “Metaphysics” Lambda: Symposium Aristotelicum, ed. Michael Frede and David Charles (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 245–73.
49. Serres, Genesis, 133.
50. Aristarchus of Samos had posited a heliocentric model around 320 B.C.E., but his theory, in Adams’s words, “was almost universally rejected” (“Graeco-Roman and Ancient Jewish Cosmology,” 7).
51. Nicolaus Copernicus, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, trans. A. M. Duncan (New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1976), 46–51. On the extent to which Copernicus stops short of the “infinite universe,” see Alexander Koyre, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957), 25.
52. Johannes Kepler, Kepler’s Conversation with Galileo’s Sidereal Messenger, ed. Edward Rosen (New York: Johnson Reprint, 1965), 35–36. See also chap. 4, sec. “From Infinity to Pluralism.”
53. On this development, see Edward R. Harrison, “Newton and the Infinite Universe,” Physics Today 39, no. 2 (1986): 24–32. See also chap. 4, sec. “From Infinity to Pluralism.”
1. Although Democritus seems to have been “one of the most prolific of all ancient authors,” none of his works survives intact. G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven tell us that of the fragments that have been preserved, “nearly all [are] taken from the ethical works” rather than from his cosmological treatises (
The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957], 404). The exceptions are three letters preserved in book 10 of Diogenes Laertius’s
Lives of Eminent Philosophers. For the most part, however, the teachings of the Atomists must be reconstructed by means of treatises written
against them by Aristotle and his followers. As David Furley explains it, the catastrophic loss of every Atomist text was not exactly accidental: “In the era before printing, copies were made very selectively, and the learned world vastly preferred the ‘Closed World’ cosmology of Plato and Aristotle. This was especially so in the centuries when learning was concentrated among Christians, but in Simplicius’ neglect or ignorance of Democritus’ writings we can see clear evidence that the judgment against Atomism was made independently of Christianity” (
The Greek Cosmologists: The Formation of the Atomic Theory and Its Earliest Critics [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987], 116–17; compare 15, 3).
2. Furley tells us that the only pre-Democritean use of the term atomos “is in Sophocles’ Trachiniae 200, where it is used of grass and means ‘unmown’” (Greek Cosmologists, 123). Whereas Leucippus seems to have thought atoms were indivisible because they were too small to be reduced in size, Democritus probably held that an atom’s indivisibility came from its having “no void and no interstices” (Kirk and Raven, Presocratic Philosophers, 408).
3. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, trans. R. D. Hicks, vol. 2, Loeb Classical Library 185 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1942), 9.6.31 (translation altered slightly). Aristotle describes this formation of the cosmic vortex as a “spontaneous” occurrence, happening by “chance” (Physics, trans. R. P. Hardie and R. K. Gaye, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984], 1:196a26).
4. Diogenes Laertius, Lives, 9.6.31.
5. Ibid., 9.6.30. David Furley argues that this hymen (in other contexts the word for “the caul that surrounds the embryo”) is an indication that the Atomist cosmos is not mechanistically but, rather, organically construed: “Cosmogony is the story of a birth, even for an Atomist” (Cosmic Problems: Essays on Greek and Roman Philosophy of Nature [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989], 230).
6. Diogenes Laertius, Lives, 9.6.31–33. It is important to emphasize that it is “the all” that is unlimited, not the cosmos. Furley explains that “no one in classical antiquity believed that the world is infinite. The controversy was not about the existence of a closed world, but about its status: [I]s that all there is, or is there something else too?” (Cosmic Problems, 2, emphasis in original).
7. “Apeirous te einai kosmous” (Diogenes Laertius, Lives, 9.7.44).
8. Kirk and Raven, Presocratic Philosophers, 412. By “the first,” Kirk and Raven mean the first among the Greek philosophers; although the theory of multiple worlds has occasionally been attributed to Anadimander, Anaxagoras, or Anaximenes, the evidence is inconclusive. See James Warren, “Ancient Atomists and the Plurality of Worlds,” Classical Quarterly 54, no. 2 (2004): 354n.2; and Furley, Cosmic Problems, 4, and Greek Cosmologists, 29–30, 70–71. Kirk and Raven do not take into account Atomism’s similarity to pre-Mahayana Buddhist cosmologies, many of which set forth atomic theories of the universe and posit vast quantities of worlds. That having been said, the Buddhist philosopher Akira Sadakata has suggested that there is a “strong possibility that Greek philosophy influenced Indian atomic theories” and that although the Buddhists were most likely “ahead” of the Greeks in terms of elemental theories, the Greeks seem to have been the first to set forth a theory of Atomism (Buddhist Cosmology: Philosophy and Origins [Tokyo: Kosei, 2004], 20–23).
9. “Plato, who mentions almost all the early philosophers, never once alludes to Democritus, not even where it would be necessary to controvert him, obviously because he knew that he would have to match himself against the prince of philosophers, for whom, to be sure, Timon has this meed of praise: ‘Such is the wise Democritus, the guardian of discourse, keen-witted disputant, among the best I ever read’” (Diogenes Laertius, Lives, 9.7.40).
10. For one such reference to Lucretius and Democritus, see Aristotle, On the Heavens (De eaelo), trans. J. L. Stocks, in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971), 1:275b30. On Aristotle’s refutation of the existence of a void, see Furley, Cosmic Problems, 77–90, and Greek Cosmologists, 189–93. On his refutation of the existence of an actual infinity and on that argument’s reception, see Furley, Cosmic Problems, 103–14; and Pierre Duhem, Medieval Cosmology: Theories of Infinity, Place, Time, Void, and the Plurality of Worlds, trans. Roger Ariew (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 3–138.
11. Plato, Timaeus, in Timaeus and Critias, trans. Desmond Lee (New York: Penguin, 1977), 31a; Aristotle, On the Heavens, 280a24–28.
12. Quoted in Furley, Greek Cosmologists, 140.
13. In his highly unsympathetic portrayal of Epicurean philosophy, Cicero’s Cotta suggests that Epicurus’s claim to be self-taught is no surprise: “It is like the owner of a jerry-built house boasting that he has not employed an architect” (Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods, trans. Horace C. P. McGregor [New York: Penguin, 1972], 1.25.72). On the likely teachers of Epicurus, see Furley, Cosmic Problems, 77; and Howard Jones, The Epicurean Tradition (New York: Routledge, 1989), 15–18.
14. David Sedley, Creationism and Its Critics in Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 133, 40.
15. Lucretius, De rerum natura, trans. W. H. D. Rouse, rev. Martin F. Smith, Loeb Classical Library 181 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), 5.186–94.
16. In Letter to Herodotus, Epicurus writes, “There is an infinite number of worlds, some like this world, others unlike it” (quoted in Diogenes Laertius, Lives, 10.45).
17. In the Academica II, Cicero writes that Democritus “claims that there are infinitely many worlds, some of them not only similar to each other but in every respect so utterly alike that there is no difference whatsoever between them, and indeed that there are infinitely many of those, and likewise the people in them” (quoted in Sedley, Creationism and Its Critics, 137, emphasis added in Sedley).
18. Aristotle, On the Heavens, 303a3–b4.
19. According to Leucippus and Democritus, Aristotle tells us, “[T]he primary masses … are infinite in number … and there is an infinity of shapes” (ibid., 303a3–11). Yet this does not seem to be what Democritus actually taught. In Letter to Herodotus, Epicurus wrote, “[T]he atoms … vary indefinitely in their shapes … but the variety of shapes, though indefinitely large, is not absolutely infinite” (quoted in Diogenes Laertius, Lives, 10.42, emphasis added; see also 10.55).
20. Diogenes Laertius, Lives, 10.42–43. For an account of the difference between Democritus and Epicurus on this matter, see Sedley, Creationism and Its Critics, 160–61.
21. Lucretius, De rerum natura, 2.1130. See also Friedrich Solmsen, “Epicurus on the Growth and Decline of the Cosmos,” American Journal of Philology 74, no. 1 (1953): 42–44.
22. Solmsen, “Epicurus on the Growth and Decline of the Cosmos,” 34.
23. On Lucretius’s stance against the Platonists, see Sedley, Creationism and Its Critics, 139–55. On his positions against Aristotle, see Furley, Cosmic Problems, 223–35.
24. Lucretius, De rerum natura, 1.63–79 (translation altered slightly; subsequent references are cited in the text).
25. “Extra processit longe flammantia moenia mundi atque omne immensum peragravit.” Here I am using Furley’s translation of “longe flammantia moenia mundi” (Cosmic Problems, 2).
26. Throughout the text, Lucretius insists that that the “first beginnings” had nothing to do with “design,” show no sign of “intelligence,” and took place without “the help of the gods” (De rerum natura, 1.1021–23, 2.1093, 5.420–22).
27. Lucretius, The Nature of Things, trans. A. E. Stallings (New York: Penguin, 2007), 2.181.
28. Friedrich Solmsen, “Epicurus and Cosmological Heresies,” American Journal of Philology 72, no. 1 (1951): 14.
29. David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, ed. Richard H. Popkin, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998), 59.
30. Lucretius, Nature of Things, 1.968–69. This illustration can be traced back to a fourth-century Pythagorean named Archytas, whom Simplicius records as having asked, “If I were at the edge of the world, as it might be in the region of the fixed stars, could I stretch out my hand or a stick into the outer region or not?” (quoted in Furley, Cosmic Problems, 7). It also relies on Epicurus’s argument in Letter to Herodotus: “Again, the sum of things is infinite. For what is finite has an extremity, and the extremity of anything is discerned only by comparison with something else. Now the sum of things is not discerned by comparison with anything else: hence, since it has no extremity, it has no limit; and, since it has no limit, it must be unlimited or infinite” (quoted in Diogenes Laertius, Lives, 10.41–42).
31. On the distinction between “world” and “universe,” see Furley, Cosmic Problems, 2.
32. For Arthur O. Lovejoy, the “principle of plenitude” extends to “deductions from the assumption that no genuine potentiality of being can remain unfulfilled, that the extent and abundance of the creation must be as great as the possibility of existence and commensurate with the productive capacity of a ‘perfect’ and inexhaustible Source, and that the world is the better, the more things it contains” (The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976], 52).
33. “Probably a crab would be filled with a sense of personal outrage if it could hear us class it without ado or apology as a crustacean, and thus dispose of it. ‘I am no such thing,’ it would say, ‘I am MYSELF, MYSELF alone’” (William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience [New York: Penguin, 1982], 9).
35. Genesis 1:2 reads, “The earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.” Catherine Keller calls on this verse to reconfigure our understanding of the Trinity, in Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (New York: Routledge, 2003), 229–38. Genesis 2:5–7a reads, “[N]o plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet spring up—for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no one to till the ground; but a stream would rise from the earth, and water the whole face of the ground—then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground” (NRSV).
36. Gerhard May, Creatio ex Nihilo: The Doctrine of “Creation out of Nothing” in Early Christian Thought, trans. A. S. Worrall (Edinburgh: Clark, 1994).
37. For a critical analysis of this logic, see Keller, Face of the Deep, 43–64; Whitney Bauman, “Creatio ex Nihilo, Terra Nullius, and the Erasure of Presence,” in Ecospirit: Religions and Philosophies for the Earth, ed. Laurel Kearns and Catherine Keller (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 353–72; and Mary-Jane Rubenstein, “Cosmic Singularities: On the Nothing and the Sovereign,” Journal of the American Association of Religion 80, no. 2 (2012): 485–517, and “Myth and Modern Physics: On the Power of Nothing,” in Creation Options: Rethinking Initial Creation, ed. Thomas Oord and Richard Livingston (New York: Routledge, forthcoming).
38. Quoted in Diogenes Laertius, Lives, 10.39.
39. Edward Adams, “Graeco-Roman and Ancient Jewish Cosmology,” in Cosmology and New Testament Theology, ed. Jonathan T. Pennington and Sean M. McDonald (New York: Clark, 2008), 11.
40. Diogenes Laertius, Lives, 9.31, 9.44, 10.90.
41. Furley, Greek Cosmologists, 141–42; Michel Serres, The Birth of Physics, trans. Jack Hawkes (Manchester, Eng.: Clinamen Press, 2000), 6.
42. Serres, Birth of Physics, 30.
43. Democritus, “Fragment 164,” quoted in Furley, Greek Cosmologists, 142.
44. Serres, Birth of Physics, 31.
47. Serres, Birth of Physics, 6.
53. For differing interpretations on the role of divinity in Lucretius, see William S. Anderson, “Discontinuity in Lucretian Symbolism,” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 91 (1960): 1–29; Elizabeth Asmis, “Lucretius’ Venus and Stoic Zeus,” Hermes 110 (1982): 458–70; and Bonnie A. Catto, “Venus and Natura in Lucretius’ De rerum natura 1.1–23 and 2.167–74,” Classical Journal 84 (1989): 97–104. My thanks to Tushar Irani and Alex Ray for having suggested these sources.
54. This distinction was ridiculed by Epicurus’s numerous rivals, including Cicero’s Balbus (the Stoic), who suggests that gods who do not govern the cosmos might as well not exist. See Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods, 2.17.44.
55. Quoted in Warren, “Ancient Atomists and the Plurality of Worlds,” 357. See also Walter Charleton, Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charltoniana: Or a Fabrick of Science Natural Upon the Hypothesis of Atoms (London: Tho. Newcomb for Thomas Heath, 1654), 9.
56. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York: Verso, 2004), 19–49, and Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), 17–39.
57. J. M. Ross, “Introduction,” in Cicero: The Nature of the Gods (New York: Penguin, 1972), 41.
58. “Outside of the world is diffused the infinite void, which is incorporeal” (Diogenes Laertius, Lives, 7.140).
59. Michael Lapidge, “Stoic Cosmology,” in The Stoics, ed. J. M. Rist (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 177.
60. Diogenes Laertius, Lives, 7:140 (emphasis added).
62. A fragment from Zeno reads: “The universe (to pan) will be totally destroyed. Everything which burns [something], having [what] it burns, shall burn up the whole of it. The sun is fire—shall it not, then, burn up what it has?” (quoted in J. Mansfield, “Providence and the Destruction of the Universe in Early Stoic Thought: With Some Remarks on the ‘Mysteries of Philosophy,’” in Studies in Hellenistic Religion, ed. M. J. Vermaseren [Leiden: Brill, 1979], 148).
63. For an account of the history of interpretation of these cycles, see Richard Parry, “Empedocles,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2005), http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/empedocles/ (accessed May 31, 2013). See also Friedrich Solmsen, “Love and Strife in Empedocles’ Cosmology,” Phronesis 10, no. 2 (1965): 109–48.
64. Helge Kragh, “Ancient Greek–Roman Cosmology: Infinite, Eternal, Finite, Cyclic, and Multiple Universes,” Journal of Cosmology 9 (2010): 2172–78.
65. Chief among these treatises is Plutarch’s De Stoicorum repugnantiis. See Ricardo Salles, “Chrysippus on Conflagration and the Indestructibility of the Cosmos,” in God and Cosmos in Stoicism, ed. Ricardo Salles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 118–34.
66. Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods, 2.46.118.
67. One passing but tantalizing reference can be found in Seneca’s Ad Marciam: De consolatione. See Seneca, To Marcia on Consolation, in Seneca: Moral Essays, trans. John W. Basore, Loeb Classical Library 254 (New York: Putnam, 1932), 2–97. On other cosmic catastrophes in Seneca’s work, see Edward Adams, The Stars Will Fall from Heaven: Cosmic Catastrophes in the New Testament and Its World (New York: Clark, 2007), 122.
68. Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), 135, 57, 136. As Eliade points out, the phrase “empire without end” comes from Jupiter’s promise in Virgil’s Aeneid.
70. Diogenes Laertius, Lives, 7.139.
72. Ross, “Introduction,” 42.
73. Lapidge, “Stoic Cosmology,” 163.
74. Diogenes Laertius, Lives, 7.134.
75. Lapidge, “Stoic Cosmology,” 164.
76. Hans Frederich August von Anim, ed., Zeno et Zenonis discipuli: Exemplar anastatice iteratum, vol. 1 of Stoicorum veterum fragmenta (Leipzig: Teubneri, 1921), 1.125–29 (hereafter SVF I). See also Lapidge, “Stoic Cosmology,” 166.
77. Hans Frederich August von Anim, ed., Chryssipi fragmenta logica et physica, vol. 2 of Stoicorum veterum fragmenta (Leipzig: Teubneri, 1903), 2.622 (hereafter SVF II). See also Pheme Perkins, “On the Origin of the World: A Gnostic Physics,” Vigiliae Christianae 34, no. 1 (1980): 38.
78. Anim, SVF II, 2.1071. See also Mansfield, “Providence,” 181.
79. Lapidge, “Stoic Cosmology,” 164.
80. David E. Hahm, The Origins of Stoic Cosmology (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1977), 31–33. An excerpt from Chrysippus’s Physics in Plutarch reads: “The change of fire is as follows: it is changed through air into water. And from this, when earth has settled down, air is evaporated. Then, when the air has been thinned, the aether is poured around in a circle” (quoted in ibid., 31).
81. Quoted in Adams, “Graeco-Roman and Ancient Jewish Cosmology,” 10. On the scope of the relationship between Heraclitus and the Stoics, see Adams, Stars Will Fall, 105–6; and Lapidge, “Stoic Cosmology,” 162–63, 80–81.
82. Hahm, Origins of Stoic Cosmology, 31.
83. Alexander of Aphrodisias accounts for this indeterminacy by saying that fire itself contains both archai, which he calls “god” and “matter,” respectively (quoted in ibid., 33).
84. Jean-Baptiste Gourinat, “The Stoics on Matter and Prime Matter: ‘Coporealism’ and the Imprint of Plato’s Timaeus,” in God and Cosmos in Stoicism, ed. Ricardo Salles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 68 (emphasis added).
85. Michel Serres, Genesis, trans. Genevieve James and James Nielson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 112.
86. Gourinat, “Stoics on Matter and Prime Matter,” 68.
87. Diogenes Laertius, Lives, 7.139.
89. Adams, “Graeco-Roman and Ancient Jewish Cosmology,” 16.
90. Diogenes Laertius, Lives, 7.147.
91. This quotation is from a fragment not included in the SVF. See Mansfield, “Providence,” 148; compare Anim, SVF II, 2.593; and Lapidge, “Stoic Cosmology,” 181.
92. This moment of destruction and renewal is traditionally called the “Great Year.” See Anim, SVF II, 2.625; Lapidge, “Stoic Cosmology,” 181; Mansfield, “Providence,” 145; Henri-Charles Puech, “Gnosis and Time,” in Man and Time: Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks, ed. Joseph Campbell and R. F. Hull (New York: Pantheon, 1958), 41; and Eliade, Myth of the Eternal Return, 87. Plato discusses the Great Year briefly in the Timaeus (39d) but imagines that the destruction and renewal will take place within parts of the cosmos (cities, for example) rather than happening to the cosmos itself.
93. Anim, SVF II, 2.604–5; Lapidge, “Stoic Cosmology,” 181.
94. Of this process, Diogenes Laertius simply says, “[The cosmos] is first dried up completely and then made watery.” Plutarch explains in a bit more depth that “when ekpyrosis takes place, [Chrysippus] says that the universe is totally alive and is a living being, but thereafter, as it is quenched and becomes concentrated, it turns into water and earth and all things substantial” (Anim, SVF II, 2.589, 2.605; see also Lapidge, “Stoic Cosmology,” 183).
95. “No resolution of this patent contradiction seems ever to have been proposed,” says Lapidge, “nor can I propose one” (“Stoic Cosmology,” 181).
96. Mansfield, “Providence,” 160.
97. Adams, “Graeco-Roman and Ancient Jewish Cosmology,” 17.
98. Sedley, Creationism and Its Critics, 208; Adams, Stars Will Fall, 119.
99. Anim, SVF I, 1.109, and SVF II, 2.625–26; Hahm, Origins of Stoic Cosmology, 185.
100. Anim, SVF II, 2.624.
101. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Vintage, 1967), “Birth of Tragedy,” para. 3.
102. Alexander Nehemas, “The Eternal Recurrence,” in Nietzsche, ed. John Richardson and Brian Leiter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 119. Although Nietzsche never gives a satisfying physical proof of the eternal return, Sean Carroll argues that Henri Poincaré does. In 1890, Poincaré posited his “recurrence theorem,” according to which any system will eventually return to its original configuration if one waits long enough. As Carroll explains, the recurrence time for a “typical macroscopic-sized object” is 101,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 seconds (by comparison, he reminds us, the universe is only 1018 seconds old). So, Carroll concludes, “Nietzsche’s Demon isn’t wrong; it’s just thinking long-term” (From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time [New York: Dutton, 2010], 206).
103. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Vintage, 1974), para. 341.
104. “A new will I teach men: to will this way which man has walked blindly, and to affirm it!” (Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufman [New York: Penguin, 1978], 32).
105. Mansfield, “Providence,” 132.
106. Anim, SVF II, 2.975.
107. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1989), 1.13; Nehemas, “Eternal Recurrence,” 128.
108. Nehemas, “Eternal Recurrence,” 123.
109. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 323.
110. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 46.
112. Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, Meditations, trans. Maxwell Staniforth (New York: Penguin, 1964), 7.9.
113. Origen, De principiis, in The Ante-Nicene Fathers: Translations of the Writings of the Fathers Down to A.D. 325, ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (Buffalo, N.Y.: Christian Literature, 1885), 3.5.3.
114. Ibid., 3.5.1, 3.5.3. For similar passages, see Isaiah 66:22 and 51:6, not to mention Revelation 21, which is said to fulfill the Isaianic promise. But these later chapters, which compose “second Isaiah,” are a fairly late set of writings with respect to the rest of the Hebrew Bible; they were written either during or after the Babylonian Exile. And so the idea of a new heaven and a new earth is, as it were, new. In fact, the oldest biblical sources seem to teach that creation will endure forever, even “forever and ever” (Psalm 148:6), promising that because “[God] has established the world, it shall never be moved” (Psalm 93:1). According to Adams, “[T]he conviction that creation will perish and wear out (esp. Ps 102:25–27 and Isa. 51:6) [therefore] represents a development of and departure from this cosmological tradition.” This departure seems to stop short of a full-fledged proto-Stoicism insofar as it is unclear “whether Isaiah 65:17–25 envisions the destruction and recreation of the world or a non-destructive renewal of the cosmos” (Stars Will Fall, 50).
115. Origen, De principiis, 3.5.3.
117. Ibid., preface.4, 2.2.5.
121. Ibid., 3.5.3. As Mark Worthing has observed, “[W]hat is not entirely clear is whether Origen intends the creatio ex nihilo to apply to the creation of this present cycle or to the very first of the sequence” (“Christian Theism and the Idea of an Oscillating Universe,” in God, Life, and the Cosmos: Christian and Islamic Perspectives [Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2002], 293).
122. Origen, De principiis, 2.1.3.
123. In fact, the theory was condemned in 553 at the second Council of Constantinople. On the sources and misunderstandings of the “Origenist controversy,” see Augustine of Hippo, Arianism and Other Heresies, ed. Roland J. Teske, vol. 1 of The Works of St. Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century, ed. John E. Rotelle (Hyde Park, N.Y.: New City Press, 1995), 86–93.
124. Augustine of Hippo, Concerning the City of God Against the Pagans, trans. Henry Bettenson (New York: Penguin, 2003), 12.10–12.
127. Plato, Timaeus, 39d.
128. Augustine of Hippo, Concerning the City of God, 12.14.
130. Seneca, To Marcia on Consolation, 26.6.
131. “A quo ludibrio prorsus inmortalem animam, etiam cum sapientiam pereperit, liberare non possunt” (Augustine of Hippo, Concerning the City of God, 12.14).
132. Ibid., 12.21. I refer the reader to the full passage in Latin; the rhythm and force of it is lost in translation. See Augustine of Hippo, The City of God, vol. 4, trans. Philip Levine, Loeb Classical Library 414 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966).
133. “Quis haec audiat? Quis credit? Quis ferat?” (Augustine of Hippo, City of God, 12.21, my translation).
134. “Ut quo modo valeo dicam quod volo” (ibid., 12.21), translation from Augustine of Hippo, Concerning the City of God, 12.21 (emphasis added).
135. Augustine of Hippo, Concerning the City of God, 11.22.
137. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, trans. Owen Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 2.4.9, 1.20.31.
138. Augustine of Hippo, Concerning the City of God, 12.21.
139. Ibid., 12.14. The original reads: “[S]ine cessation ad falsam beatitudinem et ad veram miseriam sine cessation redeuntem” (Augustine of Hippo, City of God, 12.14).
140. Augustine of Hippo, Concerning the City of God, 1.23.
142. Origen foresaw and avoided this pitfall (De principiis, 2.3.4–5), but Augustine seems not to have taken notice. The question of Christ’s singularity in the face of the possibility of many worlds will be debated vigorously in the seventeenth century (see chap. 4, sec. “From Infinity to Pluralism”).
143. Augustine of Hippo, Concerning the City of God, 12.4.
147. This notion of an “oscillating universe” gained some popularity in the mid-i930s, resurged in the mid-1960s, and has found a new set of twenty-first-century advocates—all among theorists who have sought to escape the notion of an absolute cosmic beginning (see chap. 5, sees. “Let There Be Light” and “Other Answers”).
148. The observational data confirming the overwhelming likelihood that we inhabit a “flat” universe were released in 2003, following the 2001 mission of the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) satellite.
149. Arthur Eddington, “The Arrow of Time, Entropy, and the Expansion of the Universe,” in The Concepts of Space and Time, ed. Milic Capec (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1976), 466 (emphasis added).
151. Arthur Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935), 86. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Eddington’s preferred solution to Einstein’s equations produced an early formulation of the big bang hypothesis known as the “Eddington–Lemaitre model.”
152. Norman Martin, “The Song That Doesn’t End” (1988); lyrics changed slightly by Shari Lewis in the television series for children Lamb Chop’s Play-Along (PBS).
153. Poggio Bracciolini rediscovered Lucretius’s De rerum natura in 1417. Concerning both this discovery and the readiness of early-fifteenth-century Europe to re-receive it, see Jones, Epicurean Tradition, 142–50. For a not quite accurate but broadly compelling treatment of Bracciolini’s discovery and its influence on the modern world more broadly, see Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (New York: Norton, 2011). For a helpful, if overstated, correction, see Jim Hinch, “Why Stephen Greenblatt Is Wrong—and Why It Matters,” Los Angeles Review of Books, December 1, 2012.
154. Velleius begins his short and poorly argued address by lambasting Plato’s “artisan deity” as well as “that old hag of a fortune-teller, the Pronoia of the Stoics,” and this point remains the only one he makes throughout his speech: that the world is not the contrivance of a deity. He offers no details of how the world did come into being (atoms, void, clinamen, vortex, etc.); all he says is that the gods had nothing to do with it. See Cicero, De natura deorum. Academia, trans. H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library 268 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), 1.8.18.
155. Jones, Epicurean Tradition, 102.
156. Augustine, Epistle 118, quoted in ibid., 94.
3. Navigating the Infinite
1. “Videtur quod non sit unus mundus tantum, sed plures” (Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 5 vols. [Allen, Tex.: Christian Classics, 1981], 1.47.3 (subsequent references are cited in the text).
2. Charles Homer Haskings, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971); Fernand Van Steenberghen, Aristotle in the West: The Origins of Latin Aristotelianism (Louvain, Belgium: Nauwelaerts, 1970).
3. Aristotle, On the Heavens (De caelo), trans. J. L. Stocks, in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971), 1:276b12–17. See also chap. 1, sec. “Reflecting Singularity.”
4. Aristotle, On the Heavens, 276b21.
6. Steven J. Dick, Plurality of Worlds: The Origins of the Extraterrestrial Life Debate from Democritus to Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 26.
8. The first neo-Aristotelian to engage this question seems to have been the astronomer-philosopher Michael Scot (1175–1232), who sought to reaffirm Aristotle’s stance against the plurality of worlds. Michael considers the position of “those who maintain that God, who is omnipotent, could and can still create, in addition to this world, another world, or several other worlds, or even an infinity of worlds,” and he even concedes that God could, in fact, create other worlds. But he insists that God does not do so because “nature cannot withstand it” (Super auctorem spherae, 2.146, quoted in Pierre Duhem, Medieval Cosmology: Theories of Infinity, Place, Time, Void, and the Plurality of Worlds, trans. Roger Ariew [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985], 443). To support this position, Michael appeals not to the theory of natural motion, but to Aristotle’s insistence that there is no such thing as a void (Physics, trans. R. P. Hardie and R. K. Gaye, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984], 1:213a12–17b28). After all, if there is no extracosmic space, then there is no place for any other worlds, let alone any stuff with which to make more of them. Following Michael’s lead, William of Auvergne (1180/90–1249) will conclude that although God cannot create more than one universe, “this impossibility is not a defect in God, nor a defect issuing from God, rather it is a defect on the part of the world, which cannot exist in multiples” (De universo, 16.100b, quoted in Duhem, Medieval Cosmology, 444). In this manner, these authors likened the creator-God to Plato’s demiurge, who must work within the constraints of his materials. God’s power is limitless in itself but limited with respect to creation. Therefore, even an omnipotent God can create only one world. This solution to the threat of multiple worlds will clearly not work for Thomas Aquinas, whose God can create the stuff of other worlds ex nihilo and who must therefore find a different argument against the plurality of worlds.
9. Compare Aristotle, On the Heavens, 278a26.
10. “Quaecumque autem a Deo sunt, ordinem habent ad invicem et ad ipsum Deum” (Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, 1.47.3),
11. Thomas refers to the specific order of creation in Article 2 of the same question. “In natural things,” he argues, “species seem to be arranged in degrees; as the mixed things are more perfect than the elements, and plants than minerals, and animals than plants, and men than other animals; and in each of these one species is more perfect than the other” (Summa theologiae, 1.47.2). For accounts of the historical evolution of this cosmic hierarchy, see Ernst Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, trans. Mario Domandi (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1964), 9; and Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976).
12. Of course, Augustine refuted the Stoics’ temporal infinity, whereas Thomas is concerned with the Atomists’ more spatial infinity. See chap. 2, notes 123–46.
13. Aristotle, Metaphysics, in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. Barnes, 2:1074a. See also chap. 1, sec. “Reflecting Singularity.”
14. “The first effect of unity is equality; and then comes multiplicity; and therefore from the Father, to Whom, according to Augustine, is appropriated unity, the Son proceeds… and then from Him the creature proceeds” (Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, 1.47.2).
15. This overvaluation of unity over difference in Aquinas has been the source of feminist and Eastern Orthodox critiques alike, which seek to retrieve a more radically relational God beneath the Thomistic insistence on oneness. See Catherine La Cugna, God for Us: The Trinity and Chrisitan Life (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991); Laurel Schneider, Beyond Monotheism: A Theology of Multiplicity (New York: Routledge, 2008); and John Zizioulas, Being as Communion (Crestwood, N.Y.: SVS Press, 1985).
16. Thomas Aquinas, Exposition of Aristotle’s Treatise “On the Heavens” (Unpublished), trans. R. F. Larcher and Pierre H. Conway (Columbus, Ohio: College of St. Mary of the Springs, 1963), chap. 195.
17. Duhem, Medieval Cosmology, 450; Dick, Plurality of Worlds, 28.
18. Dana Miller, “Plutarch’s Argument for a Plurality of Worlds in De defectu oraculorum 424c10–425e7,” Ancient Philosophy 17, no. 2 (1997): 375–76.
19. Duhem, Medieval Cosmology, 4.
20. The first Scholastic to adopt this strategy was Giles of Rome (1243–1316), who like Thomas Aquinas adhered to the Aristotelian teaching that “this world contains the entirety of its matter” (Aristotle, On the Heavens, 278a26). Because there is no matter from which another world might be formed, Giles insisted that the creation of another world would be impossible “by natural means,” while granting that such a thing could be possible “by divine power” (Quodlibet domini, quoted in Duhem, Medieval Cosmology, 454). John Buridan (1300–1358) deployed a similar tactic in relation to Aristotle’s infamous proof from natural motion, arguing that although earth indeed moves “naturally” down and fire moves “naturally” up, God could theoretically compose a different world out of different substances, with different sorts of motion. Or, Buridan imagined, God could “sidestep” the order of nature by orienting the elements of another world to its center alone rather than to ours (Quaestiones super libros caelo et mundo magistri, quoted in Duhem, Medieval Cosmology, 467). God might even go so far as to destroy a world if he wished it—even though celestial bodies are by nature incorruptible. In any of these cases, however, divine intervention would interrupt what Buridan held to be the order of the universe; God would be replacing natural causes with “voluntary and free” ones (quoted in Dick, Plurality of Worlds, 29). This voluntarist line arguably finds its culmination in Albert of Saxony (ca. 1316–1390), who reaffirmed each of Aristotle’s arguments concerning the oneness of the cosmos, only to conclude with a divine exception. One can almost see him glancing over his shoulder as he wrote that, “following Aristotle’s doctrine, we conclude that the existence of several… worlds is impossible naturally,” only to add, “it is no less true that God could create many worlds, since He is omnipotent” (In libros de caelo et mundo, quoted in Duhem, Medieval Cosmology, 470).
21. This argument was set forth by Godfrey of Fontaines (1250–1306?) and William of Ware (d. 1306?). See Duhem, Medieval Cosmology, 458; and Dick, Plurality of Worlds, 28.
22. Anticipating one element of Newton’s law of gravitation (that is, its reliance on distance), Godfrey of Fontaines wrote that “the earth of each world tends exclusively toward the center of the world it belongs to; it has no inclination driving it toward the center of another world” (quoted in Duhem, Medieval Cosmology, 460). In his commentary on Aristotle’s Physics, Simplicius (490–560) had made a similar claim, arguing that the movement of heavy bodies depends on their distance from one another. Averroës (1126–1198) refuted this position in his own commentary, arguing that the motion of bodies is absolute rather than relative. According to Duhem, Averroës was the “more faithful interpreter” of Aristotle (Medieval Cosmology, 442); indeed, in the hands of authors such as Godfrey, Simplicius’s interpretation on this matter ended up unsettling part of the foundation of Aristotelian cosmology.
23. Quoted in Duhem, Medieval Cosmology, 452.
24. Quoted in Dick, Plurality of Worlds, 37. Oresme employed a similar strategy when he set forth arguments for the movement of the earth rather than the heavens, only to conclude with a characteristic “nevertheless” and that the earth must be at rest. See Norris S. Hetherington, “Introduction: A New Physics and a New Cosmology” [introduction to part 4], in Cosmology: Historical, Literary, Philosophical, Religious, and Scientific Perspectives, ed. Norris S. Hetherington (New York: Garland, 1993), 231–33. For Oresme’s concentric hypothesis, see Edward Grant, A History of Natural Philosophy: From the Ancient World to the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 228.
25. Dick, Plurality of Worlds, 37.
26. Cassirer, Individual and the Cosmos, 25.
27. On this connection, see Regine Kather, “‘The Earth Is a Noble Star’: Arguments for the Relativity of Motion in the Cosmology of Nicholaus Cusanus and Their Transformation in Einstein’s Theory of Relativity,” in Cusanus: The Legacy of Learned Ignorance, ed. Peter J. Casarella (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2006), 226–50.
28. Nicholas of Cusa, On Learned Ignorance, in Nicholas of Cusa: Selected Spiritual Writings, trans. H. Lawrence Bond (New York: Paulist Press, 1997), 2.12.163–64 (subsequent references are cited in the text).
29. Alexander Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957), 7–22; Cassirer, Individual and the Cosmos, 7–45. For more qualified evaluations of this claim, see Duhem, Medieval Cosmology, 505–9; Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983), 503–10; and Elizabeth Brient, “Transitions to a Modern Cosmology: Meister Eckhart and Nicholas of Cusa on the Intensive Infinite,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 37, no. 4 (1999): 575–600. For an argument that claims Cusa remained more or less entirely Aristotelian, see Rhys W. Roark, “Nicholas Cusanus, Linear Perspective, and the Finite Cosmos,” Viator 41, no. 1 (2010): 315–66.
30. Albert Einstein, “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies” (1905), Fourmilab Switzerland, http://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/specrel/www/ (accessed June 3, 2013). On the similarities and differences between Cusa’s and Einstein’s relativities, see Kather, “‘Earth Is a Noble Star.’” For a very clear introduction to the principles of special relativity, see Brian Greene, The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory (New York: Norton, 1999), 23–52.
31. Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe, 7.
32. Lucretius, The Nature of Things, trans. A. E. Stallings (New York: Penguin, 2007), 1.980. See also Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), 135.
33. On the mechanics and significance of this rediscovery, see Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (New York: Norton, 2011).
34. Dick, Plurality of Worlds, 42; the same point is made in Blumenberg, Legitimacy of the Modern Age, 511.
35. Thomas Aquinas, Disputationes, quoted in Tyrone Lai, “Nicholas of Cusa and the Finite Universe,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 11, no. 2 (1973): 163.
36. “The universe cannot be negatively infinite, although it is boundless and thus privatively infinite, and in this respect neither finite nor infinite” (Nicholas of Cusa, On Learned Ignorance, 2.1.97).
37. Brient, “Transitions to a Modern Cosmology,” 592.
38. “Deus est sphaera infinita, cuius centrum est ubique, circumferentia nusquam.” This sentence can be traced back to the pseudo-Hermetic Book of 24 Philosophers. For an exhaustive history, see Karsten Harries, “The Infinite Sphere: Comments on the History of a Metaphor,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 13, no. 1 (1975): 5–15.
39. Brient, “Transitions to a Modern Cosmology,” 579.
40. See Tzinacán’s ecstatic vision from prison in Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Writing of the God”:
And at that… there occurred union with the deity, union with the universe (I do not know whether there is a difference between those two words).… I saw a wheel of enormous height, which was not before my eyes, or behind them, or to the sides, but everywhere at once. This Wheel was made of water, but also fire, and although I could see its boundaries, it was infinite. It was made of all things that shall be, that are, and that have been, all intertwined, and I was one of the strands within that all-encompassing fabric, and Pedro de Alvarado, who had tortured me, was another. In it were the causes and the effects, and the mere sight of that Wheel enabled me to understand all things, without end. (Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley [New York: Penguin, 1998], 253)
I am grateful to Marcelo Gleiser for calling my attention to this passage.
41. Brient, “Transitions to a Modern Cosmology,” 592.
42. Cassirer, Individual and the Cosmos, 28.
43. For Catherine Keller, Cusa’s tireless avoidance of pantheism is another means by which he continuously “complicates any notion of divine unity—whether of the classical theism of the divine One over and above the manifold world, or of an identification of that Unity with the Universe” (“The Cloud of the Impossible” [manuscript], chap. 3).
44. Nicholas of Cusa, On the Vision of God, in Nicholas of Cusa, trans. Bond, 13.53.
45. In this vein, Cusa writes that “the heavenly bodies are all particular, worldly parts of a single universe [partes particulares mundiales unius universi]” (quoted in Blumenberg, Legitimacy of the Modern Age, 516).
46. William James, A Pluralistic Universe (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 325. See also introduction, sec. “The One and the Many.”
47. Cassirer, Individual and the Cosmos, 37.
48. Jasper Hopkins, Nicholas of Cusa’s Debate with John Wenck: A Translation and an Appraisal of “De ignota litteratura” and “Apologia doctae ignorantiae” (Minneapolis: Banning, 1981).
49. Quoted in Blumenberg, Legitimacy of the Modern Age, 494–509.
50. Quoted in ibid., 514.
51. On the relationship between these distinct parts of the Cusan corpus, see Mary-Jane Rubenstein, “End Without End: Cosmology and Infinity in Nicholas of Cusa,” in The Trials of Desire: A Festschrift for Denys A. Turner, ed. Eric Bugyis and David Newheiser (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, forthcoming).
52. Nicholas of Cusa, De venatione sapientiae, vol. 12 of Nicolai de Cusa: Opera omnia, ed. Ernest Hoffman and Raymond Klibansky (Leipzig: Felix Meiner, 1932). For a careful commentary on this work, see Clyde Lee Miller, Reading Cusanus: Metaphor and Dialectic in a Conjectural Universe (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2003), chap. 6.
53. Nicholas of Cusa, Directio speculantis seu de li non aliud, vol. 13 of Nicolai de Cusa: Opera omnia, and De possest, vol. 11 of Nicolai de Cusa: Opera omnia.
54. As explained and quoted in Matthieu Herman van der Meer, “World Without End: Nicholas of Cusa’s View of Time and Eternity,” in Christian Humanism, ed. Alasdair A. Macdonald, R. W. M. von Martels, and Jan R. Veenstra Zweder (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 328.
55. Nicholas of Cusa, De venatione sapientiae, 38.109.17–23, quoted in ibid., 330.
56. Nicholas of Cusa, De venatione sapientiae 28.83.6–13, cited in ibid., 329.
57. Nicholas of Cusa, De ludo globi/The Game of Spheres, ed. Pauline Moffitt Watts (New York: Abaris Books, 1986), 63.
58. Arthur O. Lovejoy, quoted in Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe, 31.
59. Ingrid D. Rowland, Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/Heretic (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), 240.
60. Antonio Calcagno, Giordano Bruno and the Logic of Coincidence: Unity and Multiplicity in the Philosophical Thought of Giordano Bruno, Renaissance and Baroque Studies and Texts 23 (New York: Peter Lang, 1998), 29.
61. Giordano Bruno, On the Infinite Universe and Worlds, in Giordano Bruno: His Life and Thought with Annotated Translation of His Work “On the Infinite Universe and Worlds,” ed. Dorothea Singer (New York: Schuman, 1950), 280.
62. Giordano Bruno, The Ash Wednesday Supper, trans. Edward A. Gosselin and Lawrence S. Lerner, Renaissance Society of America Reprint Texts 4 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 86, 95.
64. Aristotle, On the Heavens, 271b26. See also Miguel A. Granada, “Aristotle, Copernicus, Bruno: Centrality, the Principle of Movement, and the Extension of the Universe,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 35 (2004): 92; and chap. 1, sec. “Reflecting Singularity.”
65. The encyclopedia, A Prognostication Everlasting, had long been edited and published by Thomas’s father, Leonard Digges. In 1576, Thomas issued a new version of the encyclopedia, adding a number of appendixes. They included the translation of Copernicus in the section “Perfit Description of the Caelestiall Orbes According to the Most Aunciente Doctrine of the Pythagoreans, Latelye Revived by Copernicus and by Geometricall Demonstrations Approved.” See Hilary Gatti, “Giordano Bruno’s Copernican Diagrams,” Filozofski Vestnik 25, no. 2 (2004): 25–50.
66. Nicolaus Copernicus, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, trans. A. M. Duncan (New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1976), 1.8.
67. Bruno, Ash Wednesday Supper, 86.
69. Lucretius, De rerum natura, trans. W. H. D. Rouse, rev. Martin Ferguson Smith, Loeb Classical Library 181 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), 1.73.4. See also chap. 2, sec. “Accident and Infinity.”
70. Bruno, On the Infinite Universe, 256.
71. “Nor is it necessary that these hypotheses should be true, nor indeed even probable, but it is sufficient if they merely produce calculations which agree with the observations” (Andreas Osiander, preface to Copernicus, On the Revolutions, 22).
72. Bruno, Ash Wednesday Supper, 137.
73. Gatti, “Giordano Bruno’s Copernican Diagrams,” 25.
74. According to Bruno, the void is not a vacuum, but the “spirit,” “air,” or “ether” between and within things. Bruno insists that this is the way Lucretius and Epicurus understood the void, too:
[T]he ancients like ourselves regarded the Void as that in which a body may have its being, that which has containing power and contains atoms and bodies. Aristotle is alone in defining the void as that which is nothing, within which is nothing and which can be nothing but nothing. Giving to the Void a name and meaning accepted by none else, he raises castles in the air, and destroys his own Void, but not the Void discussed by all others who have used the term. (On the Infinite Universe, 274, translation altered slightly)
75. Ibid., 273 (translation altered slightly), 240.
76. Giordano Bruno, Cause, Principle, and Unity, trans. Richard J. Blackwell, in Cause, Principle, and Unity and Essays on Magic, ed. Richard J. Blackwell and Robert de Lucca, Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 89 (spelling Americanized).
77. Bruno, On the Infinite Universe, 239.
78. Among these explanations, see, in particular, Miguel A. Granada, “L’infinité de l’univers et la conception du Système Solaire chez Giordano Bruno,” Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 82 (1998): 243–75.
79. Bruno, Cause, Principle, and Unity, 91, 44, 10.
80. Jorge Luis Borges, “The Aleph,” in Collected Fictions, 281.
81. Bruno, On the Infinite Universe, 307.
83. Miguel A. Granada, “Kepler and Bruno on the Infinity of the Universe and of Solar Systems,” Journal for the History of Astronomy 39 (2008): 470.
84. Bruno, On the Infinite Universe, 328.
85. Bruno, Ash Wednesday Supper, 155–56.
86. Ibid., 267 (translation altered slightly).
87. Miguel Granada, personal correspondence to the author, July 26, 2011.
88. Bruno, On the Infinite Universe, 267 (translation altered slightly), 239.
90. Bruno, Cause, Principle, and Unity, 91. In the later Articuli adversos mathematicos, Bruno calls the universe an infinite sphere, attributing to it the infinite power and motion that Cusa reserved for God-in-the-universe. See Granada, “Aristotle, Copernicus, Bruno,” 110.
91. We might note that in De docta ignorantia, Christ performs the function that the posse fieri will perform in Cusa’s last works. For an extended treatment of Cusan Christology, see Bernard McGinn, “Maximum Contractum et Absolutum: The Motive for the Incarnation in Nicholas of Cusanus and His Predecessors,” in Nicholas of Cusa and His Age: Intellect and Spirituality: Essays Dedicated to the Memory of F. Edward Cranz, Thomas P. McTighe, and Charles Trinkaus, ed. Thomas Izbicki and Christopher M. Bellitto, Studies in the History of Christian Traditions 105 (Boston: Brill, 2002), 149–74.
92. Blumenberg, Legitimacy of the Modern Age, 569.
94. Ibid., 564–65; Miguel A. Granada, “Mersenne’s Critique of Giordano Bruno’s Conception of the Relation Between God and the Universe: A Reappraisal,” Perspectives on Science 18, no. 1 (2010): 32, 40, and “Kepler and Bruno,” 471.
95. Bruno, On the Infinite Universe, 265.
96. Granada, “Mersenne’s Critique,” 37.
97. Ibid., 39. As Granada points out, this is the orthodox distinction between potentia absoluta and potentia ordinata. Of course, Mersenne’s God does act “necessarily and infinitely, but he does it on the interior level of the derivation of the Son” (ibid., 40, emphasis in original). For Bruno, by contrast, there is no “interior level” of divinity, no distinction between the “immanent” and “economic” Trinity.
98. Bruno, On the Infinite Universe, 260 (translation of first quote altered slightly).
99. Ibid., 246 (emphasis added).
100. Bruno, Cause, Principle, and Unity, 72 (subsequent references are cited in the text).
101. Aristotle, The Metaphysics, trans. Hugh Lawson-Tancred (New York: Penguin, 1998), 986a (emphasis added).
102. Grace Jantzen, Becoming Divine: Towards a Feminist Philosophy of Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 267.
103. Bruno, On the Infinite Universe, 229 (translation altered slightly).
104. As Calcagno points out, this passage must be read in light of the words that precede it: “I hate the mob, I loathe the vulgar herd.” Especially if we read it alongside a similar statement in Bruno’s Ash Wednesday Supper (“The mob… never contributes anything valuable and worthy. Things of perfection and worth are always to be found among the few” [100]), we can see Bruno’s denigration of the “multitude” not to be an argument “against multiplicity itself, but against the uncritical mentality of the masses or, to use Nietzsche’s language, ‘the herd’” (Calcagno, Giordano Bruno, 162).
105. For alternative interpretations, see Calcagno, Giordano Bruno, 95–109; and Kevin Decker, “The Open System and Its Enemies: Bruno, the Idea of Infinity, and Speculation in Early Modern Philosophy of Science,” Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 74, no. 4 (2000): 610.
106. Rowland, Giordano Bruno, 10, 274.
107. Maurice A. Finocchiaro, “Philosophy Versus Religion and Science Versus Religion: The Trials of Bruno and Galileo,” in Giordano Bruno: Philosopher of the Renaissance, ed. Hilary Gatti (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2002), 56.
108. Bruno, Cause, Principle, and Unity, 90.
1. Alexander Koyré,
From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957), 66–139; Steven J. Dick,
Plurality of Worlds: The Origins of the Extraterrestrial Life Debate from Democritus to Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Michael J. Crowe,
The Extraterrestrial Life Debate, 1750–1900: The Idea of a Plurality of Worlds from Kant to Lowell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 3–37; Karl S. Guthrie,
The Last Frontier: Imagining Other Worlds, from the Copernican Revolution to Modern Science Fiction, trans. Helen Atkins (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990), 43–198.
2. As early as 1601, Nicholas Hill of the Northumberland Circle (a group that the duke convened that included John Donne, Christopher Marlowe, and Walter Raleigh, among others) published Philosophia epicurea, which offers a rich description of the inhabitants of other planetary bodies. See Hugh Trevor-Roper, “Nicholas Hill, the English Atomist,” in Catholics, Anglicans, and Puritans: Seventeenth Century Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 1–39.
3. Galileo Galilei, Sidereus Nuncius, or, A Sidereal Message, trans. William R. Shea (Sagamore Beach, Mass.: Science History, 2009).
4. As Crowe defines “pluralism” in this context, it is “the doctrine that the earth is but one of the inhabited planets of our solar system and the stars are suns surrounded by planets.” Along this definition, he explains, “Copernicus, Kepler, [Tycho] Brahe, and Galileo cannot be called pluralists” (Extraterrestrial Life Debate, 10), even though their work reignited the pluralist project in the seventeenth century.
5. Guthrie, Last Frontier, 60.
6. Galileo Galilei, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems: Ptolemaic and Copernican, trans. Stillman Drake, foreword by Albert Einstein (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967). In addition to asserting the mobility of the earth, Galileo was charged with believing that there was water on the moon and that there were other worlds with human inhabitants, neither of which was a position he held. Nevertheless, Tomasso Campanella would defend these “Galilean” principles on scriptural and scientific grounds alike in Defense of Galileo (1622). See Guthrie, Last Frontier, 140–41.
7. Quoted in Maurice A. Finocchiaro, “Philosophy Versus Religion and Science Versus Religion: The Trials of Bruno and Galileo,” in Giordano Bruno: Philosopher of the Renaissance, ed. Hilary Gatti (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2002), 74.
8. It is a good bet that Galileo did not say this insofar as the first source to suggest he did was published in 1757. See Guiseppe Marco Antonio Baretti, The Italian Library, electronic reproduction (Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale, 2003), 52.
9. Robert Kargon, “Thomas Hariot, the Northumberland Circle, and Early Atomism in England,” Journal of the History of Ideas 27, no. 1 (1966): 128–36.
10. An English translation of the Syntagma can be found in The Selected Works of Pierre Gassendi, trans. Craig B. Brush (New York: Johnson Reprint, 1972), 279–434.
12. Dick, Plurality of Worlds, 55; Guthrie, Last Frontier, 172.
13. Dick, Plurality of Worlds, 59, 150.
14. Guthrie, Last Frontier, 172–74.
15. The natural philosopher and Anglican bishop John Wilkins made this distinction in Proposition 2 of Discovery of a World in the Moone (1638) in order to clarify what it was he was affirming when he affirmed a plurality of worlds:
The term World may be taken in a double sense, more generally for the whole Universe, as it implies in it the elementary and aethereall bodies, the starres and the earth. Secondly, more particularly for an inferior World consisting of elements [like the Moon]… so that in the first sense I yeeld, that there is but one world, which is all that the arguments do prove; but understand it in the second sense, and so I affirm there may be more. (quoted in John D. Barrow, The Infinite Book: A Short Guide to the Boundless, Timeless, and Endless [New York: Vintage, 2005], 301n.9)
16. Nicholas of Cusa, On Learned Ignorance, in Nicholas of Cusa: Selected Spiritual Writings, trans. H. Lawrence Bond (New York: Paulist Press, 1997), 2.12.172. See also chap. 3, sec. “End Without End.”
17. Finocchiaro, “Philosophy Versus Religion,” 66.
18. Augustine of Hippo, Concerning the City of God Against the Pagans, trans. Henry Bettenson (New York: Penguin, 2003), 16.9. A century earlier Lactantius (ca. 240–320) had also ruled out the possibility of “antipodeans,” largely by ridiculing the notion that there might be “men whose footsteps are higher than their heads,” vegetables that “grow downwards,” and a heaven that lies below the earth (“The Divine Institutes,” in The Ante-Nicene Fathers: Translations of the Writings of the Fathers Down to A.D. 325, ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson [Edinburgh: Clark, 1911], 7:bk. 3, chap. 24, Internet Sacred Text Archive, http://sacred-texts.com/chr/ecf/007/0070075.htm [accessed June 4, 2013]).
19. On the scope of this debate, see Rudolph Simek, Heaven and Earth in the Middle Ages: The Physical World Before Columbus (Woodbridge, Eng.: Boydell & Brewer, 1996), 48–55.
21. Campanella’s argument is loosely paraphrased from Guthrie, Last Frontier, 139. Similar comparisons between “antipodeans” and extraterrestrials were made by Edmund Spencer, Johannes Kepler, Henry More, Pierre Borel, and Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle. The last compares his journey through different worlds with a journey across the globe, encountering increasingly strange, barbaric, and exotic races of “men” along the way—from “the English” to “the Iriquois” to “the women of Jesso” to “the Tartars” and “the beautiful Circassians.” Later, he puts earthlings in the position not of Europeans, but of Native Americans, who “were so ignorant that they hadn’t the slightest suspicion anyone could make roads across such vast seas.” Someday, Fontenelle imagines, there will likely be “communication between the earth and the moon,” but most earthlings are too unimaginative to foresee it (Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds, trans. H. A. Hargreaves [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990], 21, 34).
22. John Locke suggested in 1689 that humans are in all likelihood “one of the lowest of all intellectual beings” (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding: Complete and Unabridged [Milwaukee: WLC Books, 2009], 4.3.23). By contrast, Christiaan Huygens imagined in 1698 that all rational beings throughout the universe are likely to display the same “mixture of good with bad, of wise with fools, of war with peace” as earthlings do (Cosmotheoros: Or, Conjectures Concerning the Planetary Worlds, and Their Inhabitants, electronic reproduction [Glasgow: Robert Urie, 1762], 33).
23. Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle imagined that the closer a planet was to the earth, the more humanlike its inhabitants would be, in “But One Little Family of the Universe,” trans. Aphra Behn, in The Book of the Cosmos: Imagining the Universe from Heraclitus to Hawking, ed. Dennis Richard Danielson (Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus, 2000), 216.
24. Nicholas Hill thought that there were pygmies on the moon and giants on the sun; Christian Wolff calculated that the average height of Jupiterians was 13819/1440 feet. See Guthrie, Last Frontier, 77; and Crowe, Extraterrestrial Life Debate, 30. Assuming that there would be astronomers on other planets, Huygens reasoned that in order to make use of their “tubes and engines,” the extraterrestrials would have to be “larger than, or at least equal to, ourselves, especially in Jupiter and Saturn, which are so vastly bigger than the planet which we inhabit” (Cosmotheoros, 61).
25. A stark difference in opinion on this question can be seen between Fontenelle, who wrote that “men” on other planets were not men at all (Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds, 6), and Huygens, who believed that they were just like earthlings (Cosmotheoros, 60–65).
26. This set of questions was opened only seven years after the publication of Nicolaus Copernicus’s De revolutionibus, when the Lutheran theologian Philip Melanchthon (1497–1560) used them to demonstrate the heretical nature of heliocentrism. In Initia doctrina physicae (1550), Melanchthon argued that if there were more than one world, Christ would have to die more than once, contrary to St. Paul’s assurances. In response to this argument, Pierre Borel (1620–1671) countered in a 1657 treatise that “though we should certainly know, that those men in the stares have need of salvation, God hath so many means and wayes, to us unknown, for to save them… that we need not inform our selves about these things, but believe them in faith” (A New Treatise Proving a Multiplicity of Worlds: That the Planets Are Regions Inhabited, and the Earth a Star, and That It Is out of the Center of the World in the Third Heaven, and Turns Round Before the Sun Which Is Fixed. And Other Most Rare and Curious Things, trans. D. Sashott [London: John Streater, 1658], 34.139–40). Another resolution is posited by Henry More (1614–1687), whose Divine Dialogues (1668) reasoned that God could save extraterrestrials by revealing to them what he had done on the earth—just as God had saved Americans by revealing the good news from overseas (Divine Dialogues Containing Disquisitions Concerning the Attributes and Providence of God, 3 vols. [Glasgow: Robert Foulis, 1743], 3:420–21). Thomas Paine (1737–1809), by contrast, accepted Melanchthon’s argument in order to turn it against him:
[A]re we to suppose that every world in the boundless creation, had an Eve, an apple, a serpent, and a Redeemer? In this case, the person who is irreverently called the Son of God, and sometimes God himself, would have nothing else to do, than to travel from world to world, in an endless succession of death, with scarcely a momentary interval of life.… Such is the strange construction of the Christian system of faith, that every evidence the heavens afford to man, either directly contradicts it or renders it absurd. (The Age of Reason: Being an Investigation of True and Fabulous Theology, electronic reproduction [Farmington Hills, Mich.: Cengage Gale, 2009], 48)
27. This question finds a parodic formulation in Gottfried Leibniz’s
New Essays on Human Understanding (written 1704, published 1765), cited in Crowe,
Extraterrestrial Life Debate, 29.
28. John Donne, “An Anatomie of the World,” in The Poems of John Donne: Edited from the Old Editions and Numerous Manuscripts with Introductions and Commentary, ed. Herbert J. C. Grierson, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912), 1:237.
29. Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (New York: Penguin, 1966), nos. 202 and 42, pp. 95, 38. For the original French, see Blaise Pascal, Pensées (Paris: Bookking International, 1995), nos. 206–7, p. 85.
30. Although Somnium was written in 1609, it was not published until 1634, four years after Kepler’s death. A recent English translation can be found in Johannes Kepler, Kepler’s Somnium: The Dream, or Posthumous Works on Lunar Astronomy, trans. Edward Rosen, with commentary (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 2003).
31. Johannes Kepler, Kepler’s Conversation with Galileo’s Sidereal Messenger, trans. Edward Rosen, with introduction and notes (New York: Johnson Reprint, 1965), 11, 37, and De stella nova (1606), quoted in Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe, 46–47.
32. Kepler, De stella nova, quoted in Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe, 47.
34. As Kepler writes in Conversation with the Sidereal Messenger (1610), “[T]his system of planets, on one of which we humans dwell, is located in the very bosom of the world, around the heart of the universe, that is, the sun.… [Therefore,] we humans live on the globe which by right belongs to the primary rational creature, the noblest of the (corporeal) creatures” (Kepler’s Conversation with Galileo’s Sidereal Messenger, 43).
36. Galileo had similarly said that even if there were an “infinite space superior to the fixed stars,” it would be “imperceptible to us” and therefore not worth wondering about (Dialogue, quoted in Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe, 72). In a number of letters, Galileo acknowledged that he had no idea whether the universe was finite or infinite, preferring to “defer” in such matters to “the higher disciplines” (“Letter to Ingoli,” quoted in Kevin Decker, “The Open System and Its Enemies: Bruno, the Idea of Infinity, and Speculation in Early Modern Philosophy of Science,” Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 74, no. 4 [2000]: 616).
37. Quoted in Miguel A. Granada, “Kepler and Bruno on the Infinity of the Universe and of Solar Systems,” Journal for the History of Astronomy 39 (2008): 479.
38. Kepler, Kepler’s Conversation with Galileo’s Sidereal Messenger, 36–37 (emphasis added).
39. Guthrie, Last Frontier, 99.
40. Crowe, Extraterrestrial Life Debate, 12.
41. Johannes Kepler, Mysterium Cosmographicum: The Secret of the Universe, trans. A. M. Duncan (New York: Abaris Books, 1981), 93.
42. Steven J. Dick, “Plurality of Worlds,” in Cosmology: Historical, Literary, Philosophical, Religious, and Scientific Perspectives, ed. Norris S. Hetherington (New York: Garland, 1993), 522.
43. Borel makes this point repeatedly throughout his treatise, arguing, for example, that “it seems requisite, that the object be the measure of the power; but this world not being infinite as God is, there must needs be an infinity of them” (New Treatise Proving a Multiplicity of Worlds, 39.163). Apart from Walter Charleton, the most notable exception of this era was Gerhard de Vries (1648–1705), who advocated a retrenchment of medieval cosmology and theology in the face of such rampant pluralism. See Dick, Plurality of Worlds, 120–21.
44. Walter Charleton, Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charltoniana: Or a Fabrick of Science Natural Upon the Hypothesis of Atoms (London: Tho. Newcomb for Thomas Heath, 1654), 14.
48. Kepler, Kepler’s Conversation with Galileo’s Sidereal Messenger, 44.
49. Henry More, Pierre Borel, and Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle are the most commonly cited names in this regard, but intellectual historians have uncovered scores of others. See Peter Harrison, “The Influence of Cartesian Cosmology in England,” in Descartes’ Natural Philosophy, ed. Stephen Gaukroger, John Schuster, and John Sutton, Routledge Studies in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 2000), 168–92; and Dick, Plurality of Worlds, 106–41.
50. The popularity of this book, which Guthrie calls the “astronomical best-seller of the Age of Enlightenment,” seems to have been undiminished by its having been placed on the Catholic Church’s Index of Prohibited Books: “By the time of the author’s death in 1757, thirty-three French editions had already appeared; several English and German translations went through a number of editions” (Last Frontier, 227–28).
51. Fontenelle, Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds, 4.
52. On the relationship between Fontenelle’s and Huygens’s books, see Guthrie, Last Frontier, 239–44.
53. Huygens, Cosmotheoros, 115.
55. In response to Pierre Chanut, who wrote on behalf of Queen Christina of Sweden to express Her Majesty’s concern that Cartesianism might involve believing in other, more intelligent beings, Descartes stated that “I always leave undecided questions of this kind rather than denying or affirming anything” (quoted in Crowe, Extraterrestrial Life Debate, 16). That said, he assured the queen that if there were “men” on other planets, nothing would prevent God from redeeming even an infinite number of kinds of them.
56. “I dare not call [the world] infinite as I perceive that God is greater than the world, not in respect to His extension… but in regard to his position” (René Descartes, “Letter to Henry More,” quoted in Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe, 90).
57. René Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, ed. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 2.22.
58. René Descartes to Marin Mersenne, October 8, 1629, quoted in Michael Sean Mahoney, introduction to René Descartes, Le monde, ou Traité de la lumière, trans. Michael Sean Mahoney, Janus Library (New York: Abaris Books, 1979), viii. See also chap. 3, sec. “End Without End.”
59. Steven J. Dick, Life on Other Worlds: The 20th-Century Extraterrestrial Life Debate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 12.
60. “God has so wondrously established these laws [of nature] that… the laws are sufficient to make the parts of that chaos untangle themselves and arrange themselves in such right order that they will have the form of a most perfect world” (Descartes, Le monde, 55.)
61. Descartes to Mersenne, December 18, 1629, quoted in Mahoney, introduction to ibid., x.
62. Descartes to Mersenne, November 1633, quoted in Mahoney, introduction to ibid., xii.
64. Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, 1.26.
65. Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe, 85–88.
66. Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, 1.27.
67. René Descartes to Henry More, February 5, 1649, quoted in Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe, 86.
68. Descartes, Le monde, 49 (subsequent references are cited in the text).
69. Paul J. Steinhardt and Neil Turok, Endless Universe: Beyond the Big Bang—Rewriting Cosmic History (New York: Broadway Books, 2008), 226.
70. Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, 2.10.
76. In his published work, Descartes attempts to temper his heliocentrism by saying that “the earth is at rest in its own heaven, but nonetheless it is carried along by it” (ibid., 3.26.)
77. Descartes’s ideas were partially revived and reconceived in the nineteenth-century “vortex theory of matter.” With the exception of Peter Guthrie Tait and Balfourt Stewart’s The Unseen Universe (1875), however, this theory did not offer a cosmology, much less a cosmogony. See Helge Kragh, Higher Speculations: Grand Theories and Failed Revolutions in Physics and Cosmology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 35–57.
78. In this equation, F is the force of gravity, g is the gravitational constant (9.9 m/s2), M is the mass of one body, m is the mass of the other, and r is the distance between them.
79. Richard S. Westfall, “Newtonian Cosmology,” in Cosmology, ed. Hetherington, 273.
80. In the Principia, Newton writes, “I do not define time, space, place, and motion, as are well known to all,” before going on to do so anyway. “Absolute, true, and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature flows equibly without regard to anything external,” he explains and similarly says, “Absolute space, in its own nature, without regard to anything external, remains always similar and unmovable” (The Principia, trans. Andrew Motte, Great Minds Series [Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1995], 13). An early articulation of the difference between space and matter can be found in the “De gravitatione,” an essay most likely written at some point between 1664 and 1668. See Isaac Newton, “De gravitatione et aequipondio fluidorum,” in Unpublished Scientific Papers of Isaac Newton, ed. A. Rupert Hall and Marie Boas Hall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), 89–156, esp. 142–43, 148.
81. Gottfried Leibniz, “Third Letter” (February 25, 1716), in G. W. Leibniz and Samuel Clarke, Correspondence, ed. Roger Ariew (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000), 14.
82. “Revolution in Science: New Theory of the Universe, Newtonian Ideas Overthrown,” Times (London), November 17, 1919.
83. Newtonian physics works well at the level of bouncing balls and even solar systems, but it is far less reliable at the level of large-scale structures such as galaxies, which require the use of general relativity.
84. At the very end of the Principia, Newton confesses to this difficulty:
Hitherto we have explained the phaenomena of the heavens and of our sea by the power of gravity, but have not yet assigned the cause of this power. This is certain, that it must proceed from a cause that penetrates to the very centres of the sun and planets, without suffering the least diminution of its force.… But hitherto I have not been able to discover the cause of those properties of gravity from phaenomena, and I frame no hypotheses; for whatever is not deduced from the phaenomena is to be called an hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy. (442–43)
This qualification notwithstanding, both Leibniz and Huygens accused Newton of introducing an “occult force” into the universe: a force through which objects can operate on other objects without coming into contact with them. For a colorful treatment of this debate, see Edward Dolnick, The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World (New York: Harper Perennial, 2012), 305. Even years later, in the Bentley correspondence, Newton is careful to correct the misattribution to him of what Einstein would call “spooky action at a distance”: “You sometimes speak of Gravity as essential and inherent to matter,” he writes toward the end of his second letter. “Pray do not ascribe that notion to me; for the cause of gravity is what I do not pretend to know, and therefore would take more time to consider of it” (Isaac Newton, Four Letters from Sir Isaac Newton to Doctor Bentley, Containing Some Arguments in Proof of a Deity [London: Dodsley, 1756], 20).
85. Edward R. Harrison, “Newton and the Infinite Universe,” Physics Today 39, no. 2 (1986): 27.
86. Newton, Four Letters, 1 (capitalization regularized in this and all subsequent quotations from the letters). In the later Opticks (1704), Newton will integrate a Gassendi-style atomism into his theory of light, writing that “it seems probable to me that God in the beginning formed matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, movable particles” (quoted in Marcelo Gleiser, The Dancing Universe: From Creation Myths to the Big Bang [Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England/Dartmouth College Press, 2005], 143).
87. Newton, Four Letters, 3–4.
90. This was not always Newton’s view; in his early, anti-Cartesian “De gravitatione,” he affirms a finite cosmos suspended in an infinite void. See Newton, “De gravitatione et aequipondio fluidorum”; and Harrison, “Newton and the Infinite Universe.”
91. Newton, Four Letters, 2–3.
92. Quoted in Harrison, “Newton and the Infinite Universe,” 28.
93. Newton, Four Letters, 15.
94. Leibniz, “First Letter” (December 1715), in Leibniz and Clarke, Correspondence, 4.
95. Newton, Four Letters, 24.
97. Richard Bentley, “The Folly of Atheism and (What Is Now Called) Deism, Even with Respect to the Present Life,” in The Works of Richard Bentley, ed. Alexander Dyce (London: Francis McPherson, 1838), 3:1–26; Thomas Wright, An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe (1750): A Fascimile Reprint Together with the First Publication of “A Theory of the Universe” (1734), introduction and transcription by Michael A. Hoskin (New York: American Elsevier, 1971), in which Wright glosses the phrase “a finite view of infinity” (174); Johann Lambert, Cosmologische Briefe über die Einrichtung des Weltbaues (Augsburg: Kletts Wittib, 1761), translated as Cosmological Letters on the Arrangement of the World-Edifice, trans. Stanley L. Jaki (New York: Science History, 1976). The possibility of many worlds was also briefly entertained in Ruggero Giuseppe Boscovich, Theoria philosophiae naturalis (1758), translated as A Theory of Natural Philosophy, Put Forward by Roger Joseph Boscovich (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1966).
98. Immanuel Kant, Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels (Berlin: Aufbau, 1995), frontispiece, translation (altered slightly) from Immanuel Kant, Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, trans. W. Hastie (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969).
99. Milton Munitz, “Introduction,” in Kant, Universal Natural History, trans. Hastie, xiii.
100. Crowe, Extraterrestrial Life Debate, 58. On the similarities and differences between Kant and Lambert, see Stanley L. Jaki, introduction to Lambert, Cosmological Letters, 17–18.
101. Munitz, “Introduction,” vii.
102. The first description is from Michel Serres, The Birth of Physics, trans. Jack Hawkes (Manchester, Eng.: Clinamen Press, 2000), 36; the second, from Peter Coles, “Key Themes and Major Figures,” in The Routledge Companion to the New Cosmology, ed. Peter Coles (New York: Routledge, 2001), 225.
103. For a roundup of the little secondary material there is on the Natural History, see—in addition to other sources cited in this chapter, especially Serres, Birth of Physics; and Peter D. Fenves, A Peculiar Fate: Metaphysics and World History in Kant (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991)—Martin Schönfeld, “The Phoenix of Nature: Kant and the Big Bounce,” Collapse 5 (2009): 361–76.
104. Stanley Jaki, introduction to Immanuel Kant, Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, trans. Stanley L. Jaki (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1981), 8, 5, 12, 8. Although there is nothing objectionable about Jaki’s effort to correct a perhaps facile philosophical reception of this work, it is a bit jarring to find this argument laid out in the introduction to his own translation of it. Jaki’s dismissive, often angry framing does not dispose the reader to think highly of what follows, which is perhaps part of the reason the book is out of print. In fact, there remains no standard English translation of the Universal Natural History: Hastie’s translation is incomplete; Jaki’s is out of print; Johnson’s is printed by a very small publishing house; and Cambridge University Press has not yet delivered the edition it has long promised.
105. Schönfeld, “Phoenix of Nature,” 364–65; Fenves, Peculiar Fate, 21; Crowe, Extraterrestrial Life Debate, 53.
106. Kant, Universal Natural History, trans. Jaki, 81; “Solche Einsichten scheinen sehr weit die Kräfte der menschlichen Vernunft zu überschreiten” (Allgemeine Naturgeschichte, 39). Subsequent references are cited in the text, with the page numbers of the Jaki translation followed by the page numbers of the German text. I have also consulted Hastie’s translation and provide notes when using his language.
107. As Serres puts it, the Natural History “opens with the principles of mechanics in the manner of the atomists, it cites Epicurus, while apologizing for this reference to an atheist.… Kant never abandoned Lucretius, he thought, perhaps, of leaving him behind in the introduction, but he remains… when all is said and done, an Epicurean” (Birth of Physics, 36). Or, in the words of Fenves, Kant is “compulsively drawn” to Lucretius (Peculiar Fate, 28).
108. Lucretius, De rerum natura, trans. W. H. D. Rouse, rev. Martin F. Smith, Loeb Classical Library 181 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), 2.216–17; Serres, Birth of Physics, 5.
109. Lucretius, De rerum natura, 2.220. See also chap. 2, sec. “Accident and Infinity.”
110. Newton, Four Letters, 34.
111. Kant, Natural History, trans. Hastie, 73; Allgemeine Naturgeschichte, 86.
112. Lucretius, De rerum natura, 1.63–79, 1.73–74.
114. Although Kant’s most famous refutations of the classical arguments for the existence of God can be found in Critique of Pure Reason (1787), his first refutation of the teleological and cosmological proofs can be found in his essay “Der einzig möglich Beweisgrund zu einer Demonstration des Daseyns Gottes” (1763). For a translation, see Immanuel Kant, “The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God,” in Theoretical Philosophy, 1755–1770, ed. David Walford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 107–201.
115. “Es ist ein Gott eben deswegen, weil die Natur auch selbst in Chaos nicht anders als regelmäβig und ordentlich verfahren kann” (emphasis removed).
116. Lucretius, De rerum natura, 5.193–95.
117. Kant, Universal Natural History, trans. Hastie, 139; Allgemeine Naturgeschichte, 145.
118. Hugyens states, “I must be of the same opinion with all the philosophers of our age, that the sun is of the same nature with the fixed stars” (Cosmotheoros, 113–14).
119. Wright had, however, speculated that there might be other systems of stars beyond the Milky Way, even an “endless immensity” of them—a prospect that seems to have caught Kant’s imagination (quoted in John D. Barrow, The Book of Universes: Exploring the Limits of the Cosmos [New York: Norton, 2011], 27).
120. According to Steven Weinberg, the “apparent position” of the relatively fast-moving Barnard’s star “shifts in one year by an angle of 0.0029 degrees” (The First Three Minutes [New York: Basic Books, 1977], 12).
121. Lambert writes that “the satellites belong to the planets, these to the sun, the sun to its system, and this to the system of the whole Milky Way. Farther our eyes do not reach and I leave it undecided whether the Milky Way visible to us still belongs to uncounted other and forms with these a whole system” (Cosmological Letters, 111; see also 88). G. J. Whitrow finds one passing reference to the possibility that nebulae might be “Milky Ways” in a 1657 lecture by Christopher Wren, in “Kant and the Extragalactic Nebulae,” Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society 8 (1967): 55.
122. Quoted in Agnes M. Clerke, A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1908), 23.
123. Whitrow, “Kant and the Extragalactic Nebulae,” 53.
124. Quoted in ibid. According to Weinberg, the “hazy patch” in Andromeda was first mentioned in writing by Abdurrahman al-Sufiin 964 C.E., who “described it as ‘a little cloud’” (First Three Minutes, 17).
125. It would take astronomers two and a half centuries to agree. Edwin Hubble’s discoveries notwithstanding, the vastness of Kant’s vision would not be matched among scientists until 1995, when the Hubble Deep Field Telescope was trained on an “empty” patch of sky for ten days. Astonishingly, each of the smudges of light in the resulting composite photograph is itself a galaxy, which astronomers now tell us can contain anywhere between 10 million and 100 trillion stars.
126. “Finds Spiral Nebulae Are Stellar Systems,” New York Times, November 23, 1924.
127. Kant’s cosmic hierarchy was restored to infinity in Edmund Fournier d’Albe’s Two New Worlds (1907), which imagined the universe as an endless series of “clusters of clusters of clusters… ad infinitum.” This idea was quickly refined and expanded by Carl Charlier and then by Franz Selety. See Barrow, Book of Universes, 87–89.
128. This strange conclusion, impossible for a Descartes or a Leibniz (or an Einstein), is the result of Kant’s Newtonian notion of absolute space.
129. Kant, Universal Natural History, trans. Hastie, 148; Allgemeine Naturgeschichte, 153.
5. Bangs, Bubbles, and Branes
1. Pierre Simon Laplace, Exposition du système du monde (Paris: Bachelier, 1835), 28–33, translated as The System of the World, trans. J. Pond, 2 vols. (London: Phillips, 1809). Although Kant’s and
Laplace’s cosmogonies are often mentioned in the same breath (along with Emanuel Swedenborg’s), the nineteenth century saw them as markedly different. According to Agnes M. Clerke, Laplace’s primitive nebula was a coherent mass. It rotated as a whole; it divided only under considerable strain; its separated parts had individual unity.… Kant’s elemental matter, on the contrary, was a loose aggregate of independent particles, each pursuing its way, disturbed, indeed, by its neighbours, but essentially isolated from them. They were, in short, genuine Lucretian atoms, intended to stand for the irreducible minima of Nature. (Modern Cosmogonies [London: Adam and Charles Black, 1905], 28)
2. Laplace does say that solar systems (not galaxies) are formed out of these nebular rotations, but he also writes that “it is… probable, that those nebulae, without distinct stars, are groups of stars seen from a distance, and which, if approached, would present appearances similar to the milky way [sic].” He then goes on to indulge in a brief Kantian reflection on what seems to be an “infinite number of nebulae,” confessing that “the imagination, lost in the immensity of the universe, will have difficulty to conceive its bounds” (Laplace, System of the World, 2:369–70).
3. Agnes M. Clerke, The System of the Stars, 2nd ed. (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1905), 281. On the state and categories of nebular astronomy at the end of the nineteenth century, see 242–81.
4. Ibid., 349. When one is reading turn-of-the century accounts of the nebulae, it almost seems as though the authors do not want to know that there are other galaxies, even though they have a great deal of the evidence of such galaxies before them. For example, in the same chapter of System of the Stars that declares it ridiculous to consider the nebulae to be akin to galaxies, Clerke writes that “just as the Milky Way might be described as a great compound cluster made up of innumerable subordinate clusters, so the greater Magellanic Cloud seems to be a gigantic nebula combining into some kind of systematic unity multitudes of separate nebula” (351).
5. Edgar Allan Poe’s very strange, multiply prescient Eureka (1848) argues that “we have no reason to suppose the Milky Way really more extensive than the least of these ‘nebulae’” (Eureka, ed. Stuart Levine and Susan F. Levine [Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2004], 73). The two other significant exceptions are Edmund Fornier d’Albe, whose Two New Worlds (1907) sets forth a kind of unbound Kantianism, suggesting that the universe might have a hierarchical structure that stretches infinitely outward; and Franz Selety, who argues for an infinite, centerless universe. See John D. Barrow, The Book of Universes: Exploring the Limits of the Cosmos (New York: Norton, 2011), 87, 90.
6. “Finds Spiral Nebulae Are Stellar Systems,” New York Times, November 23, 1924.
8. “Ten years ago,” Annie Dillard wrote in 1999,
I read that there were two galaxies for everyone alive. Lately, since we loosed the Hubble space telescope, we have revised our figures. There are maybe nine galaxies for each of us—eighty billion galaxies. Each galaxy harbors at least one hundred billion suns. In our galaxy, the Milky Way, there are four hundred billion suns—give or take 50 percent—or sixty-nine suns for each person alive. The Hubble shows, said an early report, that the stars are “not 12 but 13 billion years old.” Two galaxies, nine galaxies… one hundred billion suns, four hundred billion suns… twelve billion years, thirteen billion years.… These astronomers are nickel-and-diming us to death. (For the Time Being [New York: Knopf, 1999], 71)
9. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985).
10. The resulting “Hubble’s Law” (V = H0 l) states that the velocity of receding galaxies is proportional to their distance from the point of observation; that is, the farther galaxies are, the faster they are flying away from us. See Alan H. Guth, “The Inflationary Universe,” in Cosmology: Historical, Literary, Philosophical, Religious, and Scientific Perspectives, ed. Norris S. Hetherington (New York: Garland, 1993), 413.
11. Woody Allen, dir., Annie Hall (United Artists, 1977).
12. The story that broke the news in London after observational confirmation of general relativity bore the headline “Revolution in Science: New Theory of the Universe, Newtonian Ideas Overthrown,” Times (London), November 17, 1919. The American counterpart read, “lights all askew in the heavens; Men of Science More or Less Agog over Results of Eclipse Observations. einstein theory triumphs. Stars Not Where They Seemed or Were Calculated to Be, but Nobody Need Worry,” New York Times, November 10, 1919.
13. For Leibniz’s debate with Newton (through Samuel Clark), see chap. 4, sec. “An Immeasurable Abyss.”
14. Albert Einstein, “Cosmological Considerations on the General Theory of Relativity (1917),” in Cosmological Constants: Papers in Modern Cosmology, ed. Jeremy Bernstein and Gerald Feinberg (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 16–26. Einstein was influenced in this regard by the astronomers Hugo Seeliger (1849–1924) and Carl von Neumann (1832–1925), who had argued at the end of the nineteenth century that Newton’s equations required a (nontheological) repulsive force in order to function cosmologically. See John D. Norton, “The Cosmological Woes of Newtonian Gravitation Theory,” in The Expanding Worlds of General Relativity, ed. Hubert Goenner, Jürgen Renn, Jim Ritter, and Tilman Sauer (Boston: Center for Einstein Studies, 1999), 271–322.
15. Quoted in Dan Hooper, Dark Cosmos: In Search of Our Universe’s Missing Mass and Energy (New York: HarperCollins/Smithsonian Books, 2006), 143. For the next sixty years, the cosmological constant became, in the words of Robert P. Kirshner, “theoretical poison ivy.” It was just assumed that lambda had a value of 0. It was not until the late 1990s that two independent research teams began detecting a lambda value that was not 0; in other words, Einstein may have thrown out the cosmological constant too soon. Dark energy might be that constant. See Robert P. Kirshner, The Extravagant Universe: Exploding Stars, Dark Energy, and the Accelerating Cosmos (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), xi, 215–21. See also introduction, sec. “The Rise of the Dark Lord,” and chap. 5, sec. “And the Darkness Has Overcome It.” Of course, some theorists did think that Einstein had abandoned lambda too soon; in particular, both Georges Lemaître and Arthur Eddington continued to figure the term in their calculations, and although Einstein doubted that such an endeavor would be successful, he reportedly said to Lemaître, “[T]out de même… si vous parveniez à démonstrer que la constante cosmologique n’est pas nulle, ce serait important” (Nevertheless… if you were able to show that the cosmological constant isn’t zero, that would be important) (quoted in Georges Lemaître, “Rencontre avec A. Einstein,” Revue des questions scientifiques 129 [1958]: 131). In the late 1980s and the 1990s, a few brave physicists—most notably Steven Weinberg, George Efstathiou, Michael Turner, and Lawrence Krauss—suggested reintroducing the term. See Steven Weinberg, “Anthropic Bound on the Cosmological Constant,” Physical Review Letters 59 (1987): 2607–10; Brian Greene, The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos (New York: Knopf, 2011), 92, 146; and Lawrence Krauss, A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing (New York: Free Press, 2012), 56.
16. Quoted in André Deprit, “Monsignor Georges Lemaître,” in The Big Bang and Georges Lemaître, ed. André L. Berger (New York: Springer, 1984), 370. The way Lemaître himself phrases Einstein’s comment to him is: “[A]près quelques remarkques techniques favorables, il conclut en disant que du point de vue physicque cela lui paraissait tout à fait abominable” (“Rencontre avec A. Einstein,” 129). Six years later, at a conference in California, Einstein “declared Lemaître’s theory to be ‘the most beautiful and satisfactory explanation of creation to which I have ever listened’” (quoted in Greene, Hidden Reality, 12). Lemaître’s findings were initially published as Georges Lemaître, “Un univers homogène de masse constante et de rayon croissant rendant compte de la vitesse radiale des nébuleuses extragalactique,” Annales de la Société scientifique de Bruxelles 47 (1927): 49–59.
17. Alexander Friedmann, “Über die Krümmung des Raumes,” Zeitschrift für Physik 10 (1922): 377–86.
18. Georges Lemaître, “The Expanding Universe,” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 91 (1931): 490–501. Both Lemaître’s and Friedmann’s calculations formed the basis for George Gamow and Ralph Alpher’s “alpha-beta-gamma” theory of 1948, the first articulation of what would become over the next few decades the “standard model” of big bang cosmology. See Ralph Alpher, Hans Bethe, and George Gamow, “The Origin of Chemical Elements,” Physical Review 73 (1948): 803–4. Bethe actually had nothing to do with the writing of this paper; Gamow added his name so that the list of authors sounded like the first three letters of the Greek alphabet. Gamow apparently also tried to convince Robert Herman, who had collaborated with him and Alpher for a number of years, to change his name to Delter. See Helge Kragh, “Big Bang Cosmology,” in Cosmology, ed. Hetherington, 378.
19. Clerke, System of the Stars, 349.
20. Stephen Weinberg, The First Three Minutes (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 4.
21. According to Paul Davies, “As we pass back to progressively earlier epochs of the fireball phase… we reach a moment when all distances in the universe have shrunk to zero. The density of matter, and the curvature of spacetime, become infinite. At this point the theory of relativity, and indeed the whole of physics, ceases to apply. Such a pathological circumstance is called a singularity” (“Spacetime Singularities in Cosmology,” in The Study of Time, ed. J. T. Fraser [New York: Springer, 1978], 78).
22. Although physicists clamored throughout the mid-twentieth century to find alternatives, Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose demonstrated in the 1970s that the singularity is inescapable (“The Singularities of Gravitational Collapse and Cosmology,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London A 314, no. 1519 [1970]: 529–48), and as Hawking explains it, “nowadays nearly everyone assumes the universe started with a big bang singularity” (A Brief History of Time: The Updated and Expanded Tenth Anniversary Edition [New York: Bantam, 1998], 53). Hawking then changed his mind, rounding out the edge of space and time by appealing to quantum mechanics rather than general relativity to describe the earliest state of the universe. See Stephen Hawking and George F. R. Ellis, “Space-Time Singularities,” in The Large-Scale Structure of Space-Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 256–98; and James Hartle and Stephen Hawking, “Wave Function of the Universe,” Physical Review D 28 (1983): 2960–75. But even now he claims that the universe was born “out of nothing” (Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design [New York: Bantam, 2010], 8).
23. See, in particular, Ted Peters, “Cosmos as Creation,” in Cosmos as Creation: Theology and Science in Consonance, ed. Ted Peters (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1989), 45–113; Paul Copan and William Lane Craig, Creation out of Nothing: A Biblical, Philosophical, and Scientific Exploration (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2004); John Polkinghorne, The Faith of a Physicist: Reflections of a Bottom-Up Thinker (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996); and William Lane Craig, “Philosophical and Scientific Pointers to Creation ex Nihilo,” in Contemporary Perspectives on Religious Epistemology, ed. R. Douglas Geivett and Brendan Sweetman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 185–200; “The Ultimate Question of Origins: God and the Beginning of the Universe,” Astrophysics and Space Science 269–70 (1999): 723–40; and The Kalam Cosmological Argument (New York: Harper & Row, 1979).
24. Pius XII, “Modern Science and the Existence of God,” Catholic Mind 49 (1952): 190 (emphasis added).
25. On the connections between Christian creation theology and big bang cosmology, see Mary-Jane Rubenstein, “Cosmic Singularities: On the Nothing and the Sovereign,” Journal of the American Association of Religion 80, no. 2 (2012): 485–517.
26. Gerhard May, Creatio ex nihilo: The Doctrine of “Creation out of Nothing” in Early Christian Thought, trans. A. S. Worrall (Edinburgh: Clark, 1994); Catherine Keller, Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (New York: Routledge, 2003), chaps. 1 and 2; Thomas Oord and Richard Livingston, eds., Creation Options: Rethinking Initial Creation (New York: Routledge, forthcoming); David D. Burrell, Carlo Cogliati, Janet M. Soskice, and William R. Stoeger, eds., Creation and the God of Abraham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
27. Robert Jastrow, God and the Astronomers (New York: Norton, 1978), 116; Peters, “Cosmos as Creation,” 79. See also Fred Hoyle, The Nature of the Universe (New York: Mentor, 1950).
28. Fred Hoyle, Astronomy Today (London: Heinemann, 1975), 165.
29. Fred Hoyle, “A New Model for the Expanding Universe,” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 108 (1948): 372–82; Herman Bondi and Thomas Gold, “The Steady State Theory of the Expanding Universe,” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 108 (1948): 252–70. For a full treatment of the rise and fall of this model, see Helge Kragh, “Steady State Theory,” in Cosmology, ed. Hetherington, 391–403.
30. Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson received the Nobel Prize in Physics for this discovery in 1978. For an account of the CMB’s effect on the discipline of cosmology, see “Unendings,” sec. “On the Genealogy of Cosmology.” A highly technical summary of these astronomers’ findings can be found in A. A. Penzias and R. W. Wilson, “A Measurement of Excess Antenna Temperature at 4080 Mc/S,” Astrophysical Journal 142 (1965): 419–21. For more narrative and less equation-heavy descriptions of the rather dramatic circumstances surrounding this discovery, see Kirshner, Extravagant Universe, 248–49; and George Gamow, The Creation of the Universe, rev. ed. (New York: Mentor, 1957), 44–76.
31. This temperature would have been approximately 3,000 Kelvin. See Gamow, Creation of the Universe, 64.
32. Jastrow, God and the Astronomers, 116.
33. This idea is technically not “biblical” at all; rather, it is the product of centuries of (primarily Christian) theological development. For a lengthier treatment of the relationship between big bang cosmology and the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, see Rubenstein, “Cosmic Singularities,” and “Myth and Modern Physics: On the Power of Nothing,” in Creation Options, ed. Oord and Livingston.
34. In the twentieth-century West at least, the idea of an oscillating universe traces back to Friedmann’s 1923 solutions of Einstein’s gravitational equations. If there is enough matter in the universe, gravity will pull the cosmos back into a “big crunch.” Friedman did consider the idea that a collapsed universe might then cycle back into life. See Barrow, Book of Universes, 63. For the revival of this idea in the 1960s and 1970s, see R. H. Dicke, P. J. E. Peebles, P. G. Roll, and D. T. Wilkinson, “Cosmic Black-Body Radiation,” Physical Review Letters 98 (1965): 414–19; P. J. E. Peebles and David T. Wilkinson, “The Primeval Fireball,” Scientific American, June 1967, 28–37; Charles Misner, Kip Thorne, and John Archibald Wheeler, “Beyond the End of Time,” in Gravitation, ed. Charles Misner, Kip Thorne, and John Archibald Wheeler (San Francisco: Freeman, 1970), 1196–217; and C. M. Patton and John Archibald Wheeler, “Is Physics Legislated by Cosmogony?” in Quantum Gravity: An Oxford Symposium, ed. C. J. Isham, Roger Penrose, and Dennis W. Sciama (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 538–605.
35. John Gribbin, “Oscillating Universe Bounces Back,” Nature, January 1, 1976, 15. Considering the persistent pairing of the ex nihilo and absolute singularity, it is perhaps no surprise that the oscillating model’s efforts to avoid the former also unsettled the latter, producing a “singularity” that is not one, but rather one of many, each of which creates a world.
36. Quoted in Barrow, Book of Universes, 63.
37. Perhaps the most enthusiastic of these theorists was Carl Sagan, who traveled all the way to India to explain the oscillating universe on his television show Cosmos. Footage of women braiding flowers into their hair, men bathing cows, and lotus flowers floating peacefully on water—all in 1979—purportedly illustrates the wisdom of “the Ancient Hindus,” who knew all along that the cosmos was cyclical. Walking through temples he does not name, Sagan explains, “The Hindu religion is the only one of the world’s great faiths dedicated to the idea that the cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed infinite, number of deaths and rebirths. It is the only religion in which the time scales correspond… to those of modern scientific cosmology. Of course,” Sagan points out, this correspondence is “no doubt by accident” (“The Edge of Forever,” Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, episode 10 [Cosmos Studios, 1980]).
38. Weinberg, First Three Minutes, 153. For his more technical refutation of the oscillating model, see Steven Weinberg, Gravitation and Cosmology (New York: Wiley, 1972).
39. Richard Tolman offered this critique in the same set of papers that explored the cyclical idea: Relativity, Thermodynamics, and Cosmology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934). It was then more definitively set out by Herman Zanstra in “On the Pulsating or Expanding Universe and Its Thermodynamical Aspect,” Proceedings of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences, Series B 60 (1957): 286–307.
40. Brian Greene concludes, “[E]ven in Tolman’s cyclical framework, the universe would have a beginning” (The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality [New York: Vintage, 2005], 406).
41. According to Weinberg, the temperature at this first instant after the bang (t = 0.0108 second) would have been 100,000 million degrees Kelvin, with the universe in “nearly perfect thermal equilibrium” (First Three Minutes, 5, 102). It is interesting to note that thermal equilibrium is equivalent to maximum entropy, or disorder, which physicists also call “chaos.” See John Gribbin, In Search of the Multiverse (London: Allen Lane, 2009), 90; and Alex Vilenkin, Many Worlds in One: The Search for Other Universes (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006), 25.
42. This would mean that the dark energy’s equation of state would be w = −1, and dark energy would be the “cosmological constant.” For the most recent data on the energy density of lambda, see Miao Li, Xiao-Dong Li, and Xin Zhang, “Comparison of Dark Energy Models: A Perspective from the Latest Observational Data,” Science China: Physics, Mechanics, & Astronomy 53, no. 9 (2010): 1631–45.
43. Einstein’s law of special relativity (1905) states that nothing can travel faster than light through space. But there is no upper limit on the speed of space itself.
44. Kirshner, Extravagant Universe, 258.
45. Sean M. Carroll, From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time (New York: Dutton, 2010), 62.
46. “This is the way the world ends / This is the way the world ends / This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang, but a whimper” (T. S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men,” in Collected Poems: 1909–1962 [New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1991], 82, emphasis in original).
47. Robert Caldwell and Paul J. Steinhardt, “Quintessence,” Physics World, November 1, 2000, 31–38; Paul J. Steinhardt and Neil Turok, Endless Universe: Beyond the Big Bang—Rewriting Cosmic History (New York: Broadway Books, 2008), 45.
48. Robert Caldwell, Marc Kamionkowski, and Nevin N. Weinberg, “Phantom Energy and Cosmic Doomsday,” Physical Review Letters 91 (2003): 1–4, arXiv:astro-ph/0302506v1; Ron Cowen, “Embracing the Dark Side: Looking Back on a Decade of Cosmic Acceleration,” Science News, February 2, 2008.
49. This new consideration was due in large part to Weinberg’s paper “Anthropic Bound on the Cosmological Constant.”
50. Dark matter was first discovered in the early 1950s by Vera Rubin, who realized that galaxies seemed to be spinning too quickly to stay in orbit. She suggested that galaxies must therefore be more massive than we think they are; there must be some invisible substance weighing them down and preventing them from spinning into oblivion. Although dark matter does not reflect light or interact with electricity or magnetism, it can be indirectly detected by the way its gravitational pull bends light from distant galaxies. In fact, a “filament” of dark energy seems to have been discovered recently using the Subaru Telescope in Mauna Kea, Hawai’i. See Jörg P. Dietrich, Norbert Werner, Douglas Clowe, Alexis Finoguenov, Tom Kitching, Lance Miller, and Aurora Simionescu, “A Filament of Dark Matter Between Two Clusters of Galaxies,” Nature, July 4, 2012, http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature11224.html (accessed June 6, 2013). For an introduction to dark matter geared to nonspecialists, see Lawrence Krauss, Quintessence: The Mystery of Missing Mass in the Universe, rev. ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2000); and Hooper, Dark Cosmos.
52. As Rüdiger Vaas rather colorfully puts it, “If you imagine the universe as a cosmic cappuccino, the coffee stands for dark energy, the milk for dark matter, both of which we know almost nothing about; only the powdered chocolate would be what we are familiar with, namely ordinary matter made of protons, neutrons, electrons, et. cetera” (“Dark Energy and Life’s Ultimate Future,” in The Future of Life and the Future of Our Civilization, ed. Vladimir Burdyuzha [Dordrecht: Springer, 2006], 233, http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00003271/).
53. Quoted in Richard Panek, “Out There,” New York Times, March 11, 2007.
54. Marcelo Gleiser, A Tear at the Edge of Creation: A Radical New Vision for Life in an Imperfect Universe (New York: Free Press, 2010), 128.
55. Quoted in Panek, “Out There.”
56. Quoted in Dennis Overbye, “Dark, Perhaps Forever,” New York Times, June 3, 2008.
57. Lawrence Krauss and Robert J. Scherrer, “The End of Cosmology?” Scientific American, March 2008, 51; compare Krauss, Universe from Nothing, 109–18.
58. Their conclusion is not that, by analogy, there might be some major cosmic truth that is inaccessible to us, but that “we may be living in the only epoch in the history of the universe when scientists can achieve an accurate understanding of the true nature of the universe” (Krauss and Scherrer, “End of Cosmology?” 47).
59. Michael D. Lemonick, “The End,” Time, June 25, 2001.
60. Kirshner, Extravagant Universe, 258.
61. Greene, Fabric of the Cosmos, 301.
62. In “Runaway Universe,” NOVA, PBS, November 11, 2000.
63. Seth Shostak, “The Lugubrious Universe,” Huffington Post, November 26, 2010 (emphasis in original).
64. Vilenkin, Many Worlds in One, 93. Andrei Linde similarly states: “One can draw some optimism from knowing that even if our civilization dies, there will be other places in the universe where life will emerge again and again, in all its possible forms” (“The Self-Reproducing Inflationary Universe,” Scientific American, November 1994, 55).
65. Alan H. Guth, “Inflationary Universe: A Possible Solution to the Horizon and Flatness Problems,” Physical Review D 23 (1981): 347–56. For an introduction friendly to nonspecialists, see Guth, “Inflationary Universe.”
66. Greene, Fabric of the Cosmos, 272.
67. Weinberg, First Three Minutes, 8.
68. Steinhardt and Turok, Endless Universe, 52.
69. Greene, Hidden Reality, 24.
70. The density parameter of the universe is expressed as Ω tot = ρtot/ρc, “where ρtot is the average total mass density of the universe and ρc = 3H2/8πG is the critical density, the density that would make the universe spatially flat.” A broadly cited measurement is that “the present value of Ωtot is equal to one within a few percent 
” (Alan H. Guth, “Eternal Inflation and Its Implications,” Journal of Physics A: Mathematical and Theoretical 40 [2007]: 6813, arXiv:hep-th/0702178). See also Max Tegmark, Michael A. Strauss, Michael R. Blanton, Kevork Abazajian, Scott Dodelson, Havard Sandvik, Xiaomin Wang, et al., “Cosmological Parameters from SDSS and WMAP,” Physical Review D 69 (2004): 1–26.
71. Greene, Fabric of the Cosmos, 291; Martin A. Bucher and David N. Spergel, “Inflation in a Low-Density Universe,” Scientific American, January 1999, 64.
72. Andrei Linde, “The Inflationary Multiverse,” in Universe or Multiverse? ed. Bernard Carr (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 127.
74. In a balletic ceremony marking a medical school graduation, the doctor-to-be intones, “Mihi a docto doctore / Domandatur causem et rationem quare / Opium facit dormire / A quoi respondeo / Quia est in eo / Virtus dormitiva / Cujus est natura / Sensus assoupire” (roughly translated: “The learned doctor asks me for the cause and the reason that opium puts people to sleep, to which I respond, ‘It is because of a dormitive property, whose nature is to make the senses drowsy’”). The chorus then replies, “Bene, bene, bene, bene respondere!” (Molière, Le malade imaginaire, in Théatre Complet de Molière, ed. Robert Jouanny [Paris: Éditions Garnier Frères, 1956], 1636–730).
75. Bucher and Spergel, “Inflation in a Low-Density Universe,” 64.
76. Inflation also addresses and resolves the “monopole problem.” See Guth, “Eternal Inflation and Its Implications,” 6813; and Barrow, Book of Universes, 197.
77. Guth, “Inflationary Universe: A Possible Solution.”
78. Hawking and Mlodinow, Grand Design, 129. Some theorists call inflationary energy a kind of super dark energy, as do Carroll, From Eternity to Here; and Gribbin, In Search of the Multiverse. Others are a bit more conservative; when asked about the relationship between inflationary and dark energies, Michael Turner told a geophysicistjournalist that thanks to their vastly different strengths, “it seems unlikely that they’re related,” but then he added, “which is a good reason to pursue that idea” (quoted in Eric Hand, “The Test of Inflation,” Nature, April 16, 2009, 821).
79. Hawking and Mlodinow, Grand Design, 129.
80. Sounding remarkably like Kant, Greene explains that
[a]t the close of inflation in our bubble universe, regions with slightly more energy… exerted a slightly stronger gravitational pull, attracting more particles from their surroundings and thus growing larger. The larger aggregate, in turn, exerted an even stronger gravitational pull, thus attracting yet more matter and growing larger still. In time, this snowball effect resulted in the formation of clumps of matter and energy that, over billions of years, evolved into galaxies and the stars within them. (Hidden Reality, 60–61)
81. Max Tegmark, “Parallel Universes,” Scientific American, May 2003, 41–51, and “The Multiverse Hierarchy,” in Universe or Multiverse? ed. Carr, 99–125.
82. For efforts to demonstrate universal finitude, see M. Lachieze-ray and Jean-Pierre Luminet, “Cosmic Topology,” Physics Reports 254 (1995): 135–214, arXiv:gr-qc/9605010 (updated version); Jean-Pierre Luminet, Glenn D. Starkman, and Jeffrey R. Weeks, “Is Space Finite?” Scientific American, April 1999, 90–97; and John D. Barrow and Janna Levin, “The Copernican Principle in Compact Spacetimes,” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 346 (2003): 615–18, arXiv:gr-qc/0304038v1. For popular introductions to the problem of cosmic infinity, see John D. Barrow, The Infinite Book: A Short Guide to the Boundless, Timeless, and Endless (New York: Vintage, 2005); and Janna Levin, How the Universe Got Its Spots: Diary of a Finite Time in a Finite Space (New York: Anchor, 2003). This work notwithstanding, Greene has written that “although observations leave the finite-versus-infinite issue undecided, I’ve found that when pressed, physicists and cosmologists tend to favor the proposition that the universe is infinite” (Hidden Reality, 26).
83. “Cosmologists assume that our universe, with an almost uniform distribution of matter and initial density fluctuations of one part in 100,000, is a fairly typical one (at least among those that contain observers)” (Tegmark, “Parallel Universes,” 42).
84. Greene, Hidden Reality, 27.
85. See, for example, ibid., 10; and Tegmark, “Parallel Universes,” 41.
87. Foundational papers include Paul J. Steinhardt, “Natural Inflation,” in The Very Early Universe, ed. Gary W. Gibbons, Stephen W. Hawking, and S. T. C. Siklos (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 251–66; Alexander Vilenkin, “The Birth of Inflationary Universes,” Physical Review D 27 (1983): 2848–55; and Andrei Linde, “Eternally Existing Self-Reproducing Chaotic Inflationary Universe,” Physics Letters B 175 (1986): 395–400.
88. See a very helpful mapping in Guth, “Eternal Inflation and Its Implications.”
89. Vilenkin, Many Worlds in One, 180. See also Alexander Vilenkin, “Creation of Universes from Nothing,” Physics Letters B 117 (1982): 25–28.
90. Rubenstein, “Cosmic Singularities,” 505–7.
91. Vilenkin, Many Worlds in One, 179.
92. Ibid., 183. Edward P. Tryon’s resulting paper was published as “Is the Universe a Vacuum Fluctuation?” Nature, December 14, 1973, 396–97.
93. The question of whether inflationary cosmology begins with a singularity or not is a fairly vexed one. Linde says that “it is not necessary to assume that the universe as a whole was created at some initial moment t = 0.… [T]he whole process can be considered as an infinite chain reaction which has no end and which may have no beginning” (“Eternally Existing,” 398; compare Linde, “Self-Reproducing Inflationary Universe,” 54). In 2003, however, Arvind Borde, Alan Guth, and Alexander Vilenkin published a highly influential paper arguing that inflationary models cannot be “past eternal”; that is, they must always produce a singularity at the beginning. This is what is known as the “BVG Theorem” (“Inflationary Spacetimes Are Incomplete in Past Directions,” Physical Review Letters 90 [2003]: 1–4). As far as Guth in particular is concerned, this means that “some new physics… would be needed to describe the past boundary of the inflating region” (“Eternal Inflation and Its Implications,” 6823). But not everybody agrees that the singularity is inescapable; for a counterargument, see Anthony Aguirre and Steven Gratton, “Steady State Eternal Inflation,” Physical Review D 65 (2002): 1–6.
94. Vilenkin, Many Worlds in One, 82. See also Greene, Hidden Reality, 277.
95. As Linde has put it, “[F]rom this perspective, inflation is not part of the big bang theory… the big bang is a part of the inflationary model” (“Self-Reproducing Inflationary Universe,” 55).
96. This host includes Paul Steinhardt, Andreas Albrecht, Alex Vilenkin, and Andrei Linde, among others. There have been efforts to secure noneternal versions of inflation, but very few physicists seem to find them convincing. See Paul J. Steinhardt, “The Inflation Debate,” Scientific American, April 2011, 42.
97. For an explanation and diagram of this process, see Guth, “Eternal Inflation and Its Implications,” 6815–16.
98. Linde, “Self-Reproducing Inflationary Universe,” 54.
99. Guth, “Eternal Inflation and Its Implications,” 6816.
100. Joshua Knobe, Ken D. Olum, and Alexander Vilenkin, “Philosophical Implications of Inflationary Cosmology,” British Journal for the Philosopy of Science 57, no. 1 (2006): 50; Tegmark, “Parallel Universes,” 44; Greene, Hidden Reality, 57.
101. Gribbin, In Search of the Multiverse, 132.
102. Specifically, it is dark energy that will decay as the universe ages, so that gravity will eventually collapse the bubble universe in a “big crunch” (Vilenkin, Many Worlds in One, 198).
103. Kate Becker, “When Worlds Collide,” fq(x) News, August 1, 2008.
104. Stephen Feeney, Matthew C. Johnson, Daniel J. Mortlock, and Hiranya V. Peiris, “First Observational Tests of Eternal Inflation: Analysis Methods and WMAP 7-Year Results,” Physical Review D 84 (2011): 1–36; Jason Palmer, “‘Multiverse’ Theory Suggested by Microwave Background,” BBC News: Science and Environment, August 3, 2011, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14372387 (accessed June 6, 2013); Lisa Zyga, “Scientists Find First Evidence That Many Universes Exist,” December 17, 2010, Phys.org, http://phys.org/news/2010-12-scientists-evidence-universes.html (accessed June 6, 2013).
105. Brian Greene presents a remarkably cogent explanation of special relativity in The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory (New York: Norton, 1999), 23–52.
106. Greene, Hidden Reality, 68.
108. Vilenkin, Many Worlds in One, 91.
109. Hawking, Brief History of Time, 9; Hawking and Mlodinow, Grand Design, 51. For a more technical critique of the “instability” of pre–big bang scenarios, including inflationary and cyclic cosmologies, see Stephen Hawking, “Cosmology from the Top Down,” in Universe or Multiverse? ed. Carr, 91–98.
110. Jaume Garriga and Alexander Vilenkin, “Many Worlds in One,” Physical Review D 64 (2001): 1–5; Gribbin, In Search of the Multiverse, 135; Laura Mersini-Houghton, “Thoughts on Defining the Multiverse,” April 27, 2008, available only through arXiv/0804.4280; Greene, Hidden Reality, 7.
111. Lucretius, De rerum natura, trans. W. H. D. Rouse, rev. Martin Ferguson Smith, Loeb Classical Library 181 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), 2.1090–91.
112. Andrei Linde, “Inflation in Supergravity and String Theory: Brief History of the Multiverse,” March 21, 2012, text at http://www.ctc.cam.ac.uk/stephen70/talks/swh70_linde.pdf; video at http://sms.cam.ac.uk/media/1228717 (accessed June 6, 2013). Linde refers primarily to a paper by Raphael Bousso and Joseph Polchinski, “Quantization of Four-Form Fluxes and Dynamical Neutralization of the Cosmological Constant,” Journal of High Energy Physics, no. 6 (2000): 1–25.
113. William Connolly, “The Evangelical–Capitalist Resonance Machine,” Political Theology 33, no. 6 (2005): 869–86.
114. For a basic introduction to string theory, see Greene, Elegant Universe, 135–230. For a historical account of its emergence, see Helge Kragh, Higher Speculations: Grand Theories and Failed Revolutions in Physics and Cosmology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 291–315.
115. Kragh, Higher Speculations, 266–67.
116. Some important early papers include Bousso and Polchinski, “Quantization of Four-Form Fluxes”; Raphael Bousso and Joseph Polchinski, “The String Theory Landscape,” Scientific American, September 2004, 78–87; and Steven B. Giddings, Shamit Kachru, and Joseph Polchinski, “Hierarchies from Fluxes in String Compactifications,” Physical Review D 66 (2002): 1–6, arXiv:hep-th/0105097. As Bousso and Polchinksi explain vacuum energy, it is calculated by adding up the energy of “fluxes, branes and the curvature itself of the curled-up dimensions” (“String Theory Landscape,” 81).
117. The first papers that produced these numbers are Bousso and Polchinski, “Quantization of Four-Form Fluxes”; and Sujay K. Ashok and Michael R. Douglas, “Counting String Vacua,” Journal of High Energy Physics, no. 1 (2004): 1–35.
118. Some string theorists argue that if “nongeometric” compactifications are taken into account, the number of possible vacua becomes infinite. This view, of course, poses a problem for any claim that universes must necessarily repeat. See Jessie Shelton, Washington Taylor, and Brian Wecht, “Generalized Flux Vacua,” Journal of High Energy Physics, no. 2 (2007): 1–27, arXiv:hep-th/0607015v2; and Brian Wecht, “Lectures on Nongeometric Flux Compactifications,” August 29, 2007, available only through arXiv:hep-th/0708.3984v1.
119. Guth, “Eternal Inflation and Its Implications,” 6819.
120. Leonard Susskind, “The Anthropic Landscape of String Theory,” in Universe or Multiverse? ed. Carr, 247–66, arXiv:hep-th/0302219v1.
121. Leonard Susskind, The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design (Boston: Back Bay Books, 2006), 109.
122. Steven Weinberg, “Living in the Multiverse,” in Universe or Multiverse? ed. Carr, 37–38; Stephen Hawking and Thomas Hertog, “Populating the Landscape: A Top-Down Approach,” Physical Review D 73 (2006): 1–9.
At present it seems absolutely improbable that all domains contained in our exponentially large universe are of the same type. On the contrary, all types of mini-universes in which inflation is possible should be produced during the expansion of the universe, and it is unreasonable to expect that our domain is the only possible one or the best one. From this point of view, an enormously large number of possible types of compactification which exist e.g. in the theories of superstrings should be considered not as a difficulty but as a virtue of these theories, since it increases the probability of the existence of mini-universes in which life of our type may appear. (“Eternally Existing,” 399)
124. Guth, “Eternal Inflation and Its Implications,” 6819; Bousso and Polchinski, “String Theory Landscape,” 46; Linde, “Inflation in Supergravity and String Theory”; Susskind, “Anthropic Landscape of String Theory,” 257.
125. Vilenkin, Many Worlds in One, 91.
126. Brian Wecht has dramatized this problem with unparalleled humor in “Controversies in Modern Theoretical Particle Physics” (paper presented at the Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism, New York City, April 22, 2012, slide 10).
127. Greene, Hidden Reality, 313.
129. Susskind, Cosmic Landscape, 21.
130. Steinhardt, “Inflation Debate,” 40.
131. Ibid. For the most recent data from the Planck datellite, see P. A. R. Ade, N. Aghanim, C. Armitage-Caplan, M. Arnaud, M. Ashdown, F. Atrio-Barandela, J. Aumont, et al., “Planck 2013 Results: Overview of Products and Scientific Results,” March 20, 2013, available only through arXiv:1303.5062.
132. Quoted in Nathan Schneider, “The Multiverse Problem,” Seed Magazine, April 14, 2009; Paul J. Steinhardt and Neil Turok, “The Cyclic Model Simplified,” New Astronomy Reviews 49, no. 206 (2005): 44.
133. Steinhardt, “Inflation Debate,” 42.
134. Steinhardt and Turok, Endless Universe, 222.
137. Having learned of this connection from a colleague in classics, Steinhardt and Turok do not cite many ancient sources or secondary material in relation to ekpyrosis. The one exception is Cicero, whose De natura deorum they provide as evidence of the doctrine (ibid., 171), but without recognizing (or at least without acknowledging) the passage’s half-hearted and ironic tone (see chap. 2, sec. “Fire and the Phoenix”).
138. Justin Khoury, Burt A. Ovrut, Paul J. Steinhardt, and Neil Turok, “Ekpyrotic Universe: Colliding Branes and the Origin of the Hot Big Bang,” Physical Review D 64 (2001): 1–24; Paul J. Steinhardt and Neil Turok, “Cosmic Evolution in a Cyclic Universe,” Physical Review D 65 (2002): 1–20; Steinhardt and Turok, “Cyclic Model Simplified”; Evgeny I. Buchbinder, Justin Khoury, and Burt A. Ovrut, “New Ekpyrotic Cosmology,” Physical Review D 76 (2007): 1–18.
139. Jean-Luc Lehners and Paul J. Steinhardt, “Dark Energy and the Return of the Phoenix Universe,” Physical Review D 79 (2009): 1–5, arXiv:hep-th/0812.3388, and “Dynamical Selection of the Primordial Density Fluctuation Amplitude,” Physical Review Letters 106 (2011): 1–4, arXiv:hep-th/1008.4567v1.
140. Steinhardt and Turok, Endless Universe, 139.
142. Steinhardt and Turok, Endless Universe, 169–70.
143. Greene, Hidden Reality, 123.
144. Steinhardt and Turok, Endless Universe, 165; compare Lehners and Steinhardt, “Dark Energy and the Return of the Phoenix Universe,” which imagines “the sudden quantum creation from nothing of a positive- and negative-tension orbifold plane pair with random, but smooth, initial conditions” (4).
145. Steinhardt and Turok, Endless Universe, 223.
147. Ibid., 67 (emphasis added).
150. Greene, Hidden Reality, 207–8.
151. Gribbin, In Search of the Multiverse, 160.
152. Ibid., 165. Although Lisa Randall and Raman Sundrum are suspicious of the term multiverse, they have explored the possibility of numerous branes in an extradimensional “bulk.” See Lisa Randall, Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), 60–62. The groundbreaking and highly technical paper on which this model relies is Lisa Randall and Raman Sundrum, “Large Mass Hierarchy from a Small Extra Dimension,” Physical Review Letters 83 (1999): 3370–73.
153. Quoted in Hand, “Test of Inflation,” 822. See also Renata Kallosh, Jin U. Kang, Andrei Linde, and Viatscheslav Mukhanov, “The New Ekpyrotic Ghost,” Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics 2008 (2008): 1–23, arXiv:0712.2040.
154. Quoted in Michio Kaku, Parallel Worlds: A Journey Through Creation, Higher Dimensions, and the Future of the Cosmos (New York: Doubleday, 2004), 224. Kaku’s book offers a chatty account of the exchange between Linde and Steinhardt. Hawking issues a similar critique of all pre–big bang scenarios in “Cosmology from the Top Down.”
155. Lehners and Steinhardt, “Dark Energy and the Return of the Phoenix Universe.”
157. Lehners and Steinhardt, “Dark Energy and the Return of the Phoenix Universe.”
158. Kragh, Higher Speculations, 207 (emphasis added).
159. Lauris Baum and Paul Frampton, “Turnaround in Cyclic Cosmology,” Physical Review Letters 98 (2007): 1–4.
160. Its equation of state, in other words, would be less than −1. See Caldwell, Kamionkowski, and Weinberg, “Phantom Energy and Cosmic Doomsday.” See also Tolman, Relativity, Thermodynamics, and Cosmology; Zanstra, “On the Pulsating or Expanding Universe”; Greene, Fabric of the Cosmos, 406; Weinberg, First Three Minutes, 5, 102; Gribbin, In Search of the Multiverse, 90; Vilenkin, Many Worlds in One, 25; Miao et al., “Comparison of Dark Energy Models”; Kirshner, Extravagant Universe, 258; and Carroll, From Eternity to Here, 62
161. Paul Frampton, Did Time Begin? Will Time End? Maybe the Big Bang Never Occurred (Singapore: World Scientific, 2009), 96.
164. Lauris Baum, Paul Frampton, and Shinya Matsuzaki, “Constraints on Deflation from the Equation of State of Dark Energy,” Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics 2008 (2008): 7, arXiv/0801.4420v2.
165. Baum and Frampton, “Turnaround in Cyclic Cosmology.”
166. Paul H. Frampton, “Cyclic Universe and Infinite Past,” Modern Physics Letters A 22 (2007): 2587–92, arXiv/0705.2730v2.
167. Baum and Frampton, “Turnaround in Cyclic Cosmology.”
168. For an “insider’s” perspective on loop quantum gravity, see Lee Smolin, Three Roads to Quantum Gravity (New York: Basic Books, 2001); and Martin Bojowald, Once Before Time: A Whole Story of the Universe (New York: Vintage, 2010). For an “outsider’s” perspective, see Kragh, Higher Speculations, 316–20.
169. Bojowald, Once Before Time, 84–89, 11. See also chap. 1, sec. “So Let Us Begin Again…”
170. Bojowald, Once Before Time, 114, 24, 49.
171. Kragh, Higher Speculations, 210.
172. Bojowald, Once Before Time, 111.
173. Cristiano Germani, Nicolás Grandi, and Alex Kehagias, “The Cosmological Slingshot Scenario: A Stringy Proposal for the Early Time Cosmology,” AIP Conference Proceedings 1031 (2007): 19–21, arXiv.org/abs/0805.2073. For an introduction geared to nonspecialists, see Brian Clegg, Before the Big Bang: The Prehistory of Our Universe (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2009), 218–25.
174. Germani, Grandi, and Kehagias, “Cosmological Slingshot Scenario.”
175. Roger Penrose, Cycles of Time: An Extraordinary New View of the Universe (New York: Knopf, 2011), 66, 172–73.
176. Maurizio Gasperini and Gabriele Veneziano, “Pre–Big Bang in String Cosmology,” Astroparticle Physics 1 (1993): 317–39, and “The Pre–Big Bang Scenario in String Cosmology,” Physics Reports 373 (2003): 1–212, arXiv/0207130v1; Gabriele Veneziano, “The Myth of the Beginning of Time,” Scientific American, April 2004, 54–59, 62–65; Penrose, Cycles of Time, 172.
177. Penrose, Cycles of Time, 147.
179. V. G. Gurzadyan and Roger Penrose, “Concentric Circles in WMAP Data May Provide Evidence of Violent Pre–Big Bang Activity,” November 16, 2010, available only through arXiv/1011.3706v1.
180. For such arguments, see I. K. Wehus and H. K. Eriksen, “A Search for Concentric Circles in the 7-Year WMAP Temperature Sky Maps,” Astrophysical Journal Letters 733 (2011): 1–6, arXiv:astro-ph/1012.1268v1; and Adam Moss, Douglas Scott, and James P. Zibin, “No Evidence for Anomalously Low Variance Circles on the Sky,” Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics 2011 (2011): 1–7, arXiv:astro-ph/1012.1305v3.
181. Quoted in Dennis Overbye, “Rings in Sky Leave Alternate Visions of Universes,” New York Times, December 13, 2010.