Image: Engraving from Flammarion’s 1888 ‘L’atmosphère: météorologie populaire’. Originally black-and-white.
Is Earth the center of the Universe? In all directions, at great distances, the universe looks younger, more uniform, and less evolved. Does that mean Earth must be the center?
— from ‘Ask Ethan: Is Earth the center of the Universe?’ by Ethan Siegel, on BigThink.com
Luckily for the people of Earth, our governments have launched various high-tech space telescopes and space probes over the past several decades, and the pictures we’re getting back suggest that Earth is the center of the universe, and every galaxy and nebula and black hole is moving away from us at an increasing speed. Or more accurately, the pictures suggest that to certain people. Mostly, to astronomers.
It doesn’t matter where the astronomers and their devices bother to look, they see basically the same thing. Every celestial object outside our solar system is apparently trying to get as far away from Earth as possible, as quickly as possible.
I don’t blame them. I often feel the same way.
From Mr. Siegel’s article on BigThink.com:
When we look out at the Universe, especially at greater and greater distances, we see that it’s more uniform, smaller, denser, hotter, and less evolved the farther away we look. We also see that this remains true regardless of what direction we look in; it’s as though we’re in the latest, oldest, most evolved part, and everyplace else is younger. Does this necessarily mean that Earth is the center? It’s a common thought to have, but it turns out there’s another, much more well-accepted explanation: Big Bang cosmology.
The same thing happens to me when I go out to a bar, to listen to one of our local rock bands. Everyone seems much younger than me. Even the people who I know are older than me, look younger.
Turns out, this feeling of being the oldest person the room comes from Big Bang cosmology.
There was a time, not so long ago, when people looked out at the cosmos and saw something completely different.
I’m not talking about the days before Copernicus, when most everyone believed the stars and Sun and Moon were attached to the inside of gigantic spheres that slowly rotated around the Earth. That was downright silly.
But much more recently — like, around the time Albert Einstein was writing his Theory of Relativity — most people understood that the cosmos consisted of nearby stars and some more distant objects called ‘nebulae’ that could possibly be distant galaxies… and that all these celestial objects had probably always been there, just hanging around in the universe, minding their own business.
But Einstein threw a monkey wrench into that idea, by pointing out that there’s such a thing as gravity. If everything was just hanging there in space, gravity would eventually cause the universe to collapse into a big clump of celestial matter. And since that obviously hadn’t happened, we needed a good reason why not. Enter, the Big Bang cosmology, which explains that everything had exploded from a central point and sailed off at great speed into this or that corner of the universe. (Which doesn’t actually have corners; it’s a figure of speech.)
The question is, does that mean Earth is the central point… the place where the Big Bang happened? Because, like I said, it seems that everything the astronomers can see is hightailing it away from Earth.
And the further away objects are, the younger they look. That could mean, “less evolved”… but it could also mean “more attractive.”
That’s also a problem with going on blind dates. The more attractive a person seems, the less evolved they are. Generally speaking.
For the sake of argument, I’m going to assume that, yes, Earth is, in fact, the center of the universe. That’s my perception, and as a wise person once said, perception is reality.
I’m even going to go a step further, and suggest that I am, myself, the center of the universe. Everywhere I look, in all directions, and at great distances, the people look younger, more uniform, and less evolved. And they all seem to be moving away from me, at increasing speeds.
I’ve tried bathing more frequently, and using a 24-hour mouthwash, but it doesn’t seem to make any difference.
The theory about an expanding universe arising from a Big Bang has some relationship to the ‘red shift’ that astronomers observe when they look at distant stars and galaxies and then run their observations through a spectrometer. Celestial objects show more ‘red shift’ the farther away they are.
Once again, this theory of the universe has become very personal. When I observe the people around me, I also notice a ‘red shift’, by which I mean, people becoming Republicans as they get older and farther away.
Most of the people closest to me have not undergone a red shift yet. But they probably will, soon enough.