How are we to understand the beauty of the universe? We are surrounded by beauty. What brought it into being? Where does the intricacy of a dragonfly or a lilac come from?
Let’s consider the birth and development of galaxies. Even a century ago we knew only about one galaxy in the entire universe: our own Milky Way. Over the course of the twentieth century we discovered nearly a hundred billion galaxies. Each of these contains several billion stars. What does this mean for understanding our place amidst such vastness?
We are only now entering into an ongoing reflection regarding the origin of galaxies. Scientists have made several crucial discoveries. When the universe was almost half a million years old, it was like a vast cumulus cloud billowing out. We can imagine a scenario where this cloud, composed of both luminous and dark matter, just keeps expanding forever, but in the actual universe this cloud instead broke into numerous, smaller clouds. Each of these clouds pulled itself out of the cosmic expansion of the universe and collapsed into a single galaxy or a cluster of galaxies. Thus each jelled and remained the same size while the distances between the clouds continued to increase. As a result, each cloud could start on its own unique journey.
We can see here something of the nature of creativity in the universe. To enter its own creative development, a dynamic system will sometimes pull itself away from its larger enveloping network. As long as a system is tightly held within a larger system, it is dominated. But as it becomes free its intrinsic potentialities come forth and are amplified so that something new can enter into existence.
A further insight into the creativity of the universe follows from this question: What caused the fracture of the initial cloud into all these smaller clouds? For the power that breaks up this cloud is the power that sets the universe in a new direction. This power is responsible, in a primordial sense, for the advent of the galaxies.
Scientists have discovered that a series of waves passing through the universe were responsible for fragmenting the initial cloud. And the origin of these waves? This is the biggest surprise. These waves had their origin in the birth of the universe itself. In the initial flaring forth the universe was pervaded with waves. These waves, which are fluctuations in the density of matter, grew as the universe expanded. Eventually they broke the universe apart so that galaxies might form.1
We know now that the galaxies emerged from the primordial vibrations in the birth of the universe. These vibrations in matter certainly had a special power of creativity. Perhaps we can regard them as a kind of music, a “music of the spheres.”
Pythagoras, who laid the foundations for mathematical science twenty-six centuries ago, would certainly be delighted, for his intellectual heirs have discovered that the billions of galaxies were formed by a cosmic music that moved the universe into the next phase of its journey.
How can we orient ourselves within this cosmic music, amidst the vast structures of the universe?
Each culture has had its own particular understanding of the universe, enabling its members to orient themselves with respect to space and time. One of the most fundamental orientations for humans concerns the center of things. Again and again, we have asked ourselves, where is the heart of the universe?
Each culture has its own answer regarding the center. Some locate it on a special mountain such as Mount Kailasa in Tibet or Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa. Others designate a particular city, such as Jerusalem, Rome, or Mecca in the West, and Beijing, Varanasi, or Jogjakarta in Asia. Such cities become places of religious pilgrimage or seats of political power.
We can easily appreciate how significant such cities are for humans. To be related to the center is to receive a special value. For instance, citizens of the city at the center of the world enjoy a status not readily extended to someone from the periphery. And certainly any laws or decrees issuing from the center carry a special authority.
The five-hundred-year enterprise of modern Western science has also been concerned with identifying the center of the universe, and this effort has led to a series of “de-centerings.” We have learned that our former ideas concerning the center were not the full story. Perhaps the most famous contribution to de-centering the human world was when we discovered that the Earth was not the unmoving center of things, but was rather in motion around the Sun. This was first conjectured by Aristarchus in the third century BCE on the island of Samos in Greece, and later was independently discovered in Europe by Copernicus in 1543. Within a few centuries, our ongoing investigation led to the realization that although the Sun, indeed, was the center of the solar system, it was not the center of the universe. In 1918 Harlow Shapley provided evidence indicating that the Sun was moving in a great ellipse around the center of the Milky Way galaxy. This de-centering process was carried still further when Edwin Hubble and others, in the 1920s, discovered that the Milky Way was not the central galaxy of the universe. Rather, our Milky Way is just one galaxy in a universe filled with galaxies.
When scientists discovered that the observable universe contains a hundred billion galaxies, they were stunned. For scientists and nonscientists alike, absorbing the significance of living within such a vast, evolving universe is an ongoing challenge.
A surprising development in the second half of the twentieth century has led to an entirely new understanding of center. This understanding goes against common sense and is a challenge to absorb fully. For what we have come to realize is that there is not one center, but millions. Each supercluster of galaxies is at the very center of the expansion of the universe. We live in a multicentered universe and are only now awakening to this new discovery.
For instance, our Milky Way galaxy is one of a several dozen galaxies revolving around each other. This system as a whole is moving around the Virgo Cluster of galaxies. There are also other groups revolving about the Virgo Cluster, and this entire system is called the Virgo Supercluster. We can picture this as something like planets swirling about a central star, where the planets are the individual galaxy clusters and the central star is the massive Virgo Cluster. What we have learned is that this Virgo Supercluster is at the very center of the cosmic expansion.
What is striking and counterintuitive is that the other superclusters throughout the universe are also at the center of the cosmic expansion. To visualize this, picture the universe as a loaf of raisin bread rising, where each raisin is a supercluster of galaxies. As the loaf grows larger, and we imagine ourselves on one of the raisins, we would see all the other raisins moving away from us. We would also conclude that we were not moving because we would not be moving through the bread. It would not matter which raisin we chose. Such is the nature of the large-scale universe. In terms of the expansion, each supercluster is stationary, while all the other superclusters are expanding away from it.
This staggering new perspective is causing a massive shift in our understanding of how we imagine our own place, our home. We realize now that we dwell in one center in a universe that is composed of millions of such centers. While this is difficult to comprehend, we are learning, nonetheless, to orient ourselves with wonder and awe in the midst of these immensities.
What is the nature of our center? Is it a good place? A safe place? Such questions press into our awareness no matter where we live on Earth. But what if we ask the questions not of our neighborhoods, or of our nation or our planet, but rather of the Milky Way galaxy?
The most powerful feature of our galaxy is its spiral structure. When scientists first detected the spiral arms they concluded that they were formed of matter and that they were spinning about the center of the galaxy. But this proved to be a mistaken theory. By correcting their mistake scientists learned one of the most astonishing features of creativity in the universe.
An arm of the Milky Way is not a static structure. It is rather an effect of huge gravitational waves, called density waves, that are pulsing through the Milky Way. In every spiral galaxy, the density waves cause the collapse of gas clouds into massive stars that burn brilliantly for a million years and then explode or die out. As this happens the wave passes farther on and ignites the formation of a new set of stars, giving the overall impression of something like a spinning pinwheel.
This spiral structure of a galaxy enables it to continue creating stars. It is in this sense always new, always capable of fresh, creative action. Thus, by virtue of their architecture, spiral galaxies are the birthing galaxies in the universe.
Elliptical galaxies, which have roughly the shape of an egg, do not have this creative capacity. Most of the stars that exist in an elliptical galaxy are doomed to die out without being replaced. Ellipticals lack the architectural form necessary for creating new stars.
The fascinating discovery is that the creativity of the universe is not evenly distributed but is concentrated in particular places. At the level of galaxies, creativity is concentrated in the spirals. But within a spiral galaxy there are particular places where creativity is more intense than in other places. And within these places there are particular regions where the intensity reaches its maximum. To find oneself in the midst of a nested domain of creativity is to move into the depths of creativity itself. To be outside the locus of creativity would be a kind of exile.
We awaken to existence and discover ourselves in the inner circles of creativity. Held by the embrace of a spiral galaxy, we enter into a multilayered and seemingly infinite fecundity.
The galaxies themselves come forth amidst immense creativity. The dynamics of the universe ignite creativity in new forms whenever possible. This occurs through processes that can be described as mutual evocation.
One galaxy that makes this drama clear is a satellite to the Milky Way called the Large Magellanic Cloud, or LMC for short. Though our knowledge of its history is far from settled, some astronomers speculate that LMC began as a spiral galaxy, but some cataclysm took place billions of years ago and its spiral structure was destroyed. Perhaps this occurred in a head-on collision with another galaxy. Or perhaps LMC passed by a larger galaxy whose gravitational attraction was too much to bear and tore its large-scale structure apart. Whatever the trauma was, it led to a collapse of its ability to create stars. Thus was LMC stripped of the promise it had when it came forth as a young galaxy. LMC was abandoned. It drifted about, each star’s death just another step toward the final darkness that now awaited it.
But then something happened. After billions of years, LMC was drawn into a gravitational relationship with our Milky Way galaxy. LMC began a new orbit that would lead to a new destiny. In a gravitational relationship each member is changed by the interaction. The gravitational tidal force issuing from the Milky Way penetrated into the system of stars that formed LMC, and the structure of this smaller galaxy began to change. A regeneration of LMC was occurring in the presence of the Milky Way.
And then an awakening occurred. A burst of star-making activity appeared in one of the dormant regions of LMC. For billions of years LMC had drifted about, barren and dying. Now, suddenly, its potentiality was ignited through this interaction and new stars were evoked into being in all their brilliance.