I have meditated and written this book in some unusual places, on travels to every continent save one, in the intermissions of my unscholarly duties as provost of a great university that has long understood itself to have a global responsibility. Because my professional role now makes me think in very concrete terms about shaping institutions to serve a more democratically understood humankind, it was doubly important to explore and tell this story, not just for readers, but also so that I can do my own job better.
Overture
The night sky changes every night yet never seems to change, as the seasons bring the same stars in the same constellations on the same day of the year An American soldier posted in Anbar, age after age. The sky defines the calendar, for the stars never fail. For many thousands of years, until the smoke and light of human fires and human ingenuity began to plunder the night of its glory, the order and regularity of the stars surveyed and guided civilized life below.
Mathematical abilities
The anomalies of the night offered hints. The planets (the word comes from the Greek for “wanderers”) followed paths just unpredictable enough to challenge the mathematical abilities of generations, until Copernicus found a simpler model. It was easier to believe that the planets were the chariots of gods—for gods were notoriously whimsical and footloose—than to study the ancient mathematical models. Watchers below easily gave religious readings to other occasional anomalies of the night. Comets, shooting stars, the shimmer of the aurora borealis—all were safer to ascribe to divinity than to a blind material order. For us, the silence and darkness are beautiful, the stars a beautiful adornment; for the ancients, the night was terrifying and familiar and mysteriously well ordered.
Sitting beneath these stars and thinking in these ways, civilized humankind went about its business without grasping what evidence the skies bore against its habitual ways of thinking. Unable to measure the vast distances that separated the heavenly bodies patent before their eyes, they took the dimensions of this planet—or, rather, of Eurasia and northern Africa—as the measure of space. Incapable of grasping the evidence of the skies as a sign of the great age of the world and the long revolutions that bring us our flickering moment of consciousness, they measured time by the span of human memory and the stories of a few dozen generations.
