by LEWIS L. LAPHAM
Stephan’s Quintet is a visual grouping of five galaxies of which four form the first compact galaxy group ever discovered. The group, visible in the constellation Pegasus, was discovered by Édouard Stephan in 1877 at the Marseille Observatory. PHOTO/NASA/ESA/the Hubble SM4 ERO Team/BBC TEXT/Wikipedia
Discovering the infinite universe.
Evolution has arranged that we take pleasure in understanding—those who understand are more likely to survive.
—Carl Sagan
I’m sorry I know so little; I’m sorry we all know so little. But that’s kind of the fun, isn’t it?
—Vera Rubin
A probable contender for a Nobel Prize at the age of eighty-one, Vera Rubin had been asked if she was troubled by the near-infinite expanse of human ignorance. The question was not gratuitous. Rubin’s eminence as an astronomer rested on her finding in the universe five, maybe ten times the mass of energy dreamed of in the cosmologies of Albert Einstein and Max Planck. Not only was the universe more infinite than previously imagined, but the newly discovered bulk of it was composed of dark matter destined to remain unknowable because not formed of the same atomic fairy dust as all things animal, mineral, and vegetable, celestial and terrestrial, to which mankind gives the names of nature ceaselessly creating itself.
To Rubin’s examiners, the discovery of a never-to-be-seen abyss was news unfit for man, machine, or beast. Was the dear lady not aghast? She was not. To the contrary. She stands in awe of her unknowing as if in Xanadu before the stately pleasure dome of Kubla Khan, where runs the sacred river Alph through caverns measureless to man, down to a sunless sea. Isn’t that kind of the fun, the looking into the vast darkness ripe with wonders that will never cease? The limitless expanse of human ignorance Rubin sees as the fortunate provocation that rouses out the love of learning, kindles the signal fires of the imagination. We have no other light with which to see and maybe to recognize ourselves as human.
The pleasure in the undertaking is the impassioned will to understand that embarks Darwin on his voyage to the Galápagos, prompts Shakespeare to write the plays, and in this issue of Lapham’s Quarterly urges the searchers for signs of life to venture into the morass of history, wander the roads of science, religion, and philosophy—Marie Curie sifting pitchblende in a Parisian storage shed, Seneca mapping a field of stars, Claude Lévi-Strauss collecting native myths in Brazil. At no matter what degree of latitude or longitude, the excitement is the act of discovery. Not the numbering and storing of the dots, but rather the connecting of the dots in what Leibniz conceived as a “preestablished harmony,” the suddenly seen things that were always there, allowing Simone Weil, twentieth-century philosopher, to regard “the entire universe” as “a great metaphor.”
Which is how it appeared to Alexander von Humboldt, nineteenth-century natural scientist and visionary explorer, who recognized planet Earth as one great living organism “animated and moved by inward forces.” His voluminous notes and observations (of trees and toads and ocean currents, of glaciers, birds, and ecosystems) preview by 150 years the sight of earth from space in 1968 awakening the nations of the earth to the state of environmental consciousness that supports the hope for the survival of human civilization.
Humboldt was a Prussian aristocrat educated as a young man in Jena and Weimar by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who directed his reading and lines of laboratory experiment. At the age of twenty-nine in 1799, accomplished as a botanist and zoologist, equipped with a knowledge of geology, history, and astronomy, Humboldt set forth on a five-year exploration of the Americas. Armed with reference books and intent upon perceiving “the connections between the physical and the intellectual worlds,” he brought with him “precise instruments” (barometer, hydrometer, artificial horizon) to measure, among other things, the variable intensity of magnetic forces, “the periodical oscillations of the aerial oceans,” the blueness of the sky. In the jungles and mountains of New Granada and Peru, the investigation’s mules were burdened with “forty-two boxes containing an herbal of six thousand equinoctial plants, seeds, shells, and insects, and geological specimens” gathered from the banks of the Amazon and on the ascent of Chimborazo, the volcano then regarded as the highest mountain in the world.
Lapham’s Quarterly for more