The 1985 BBC series The Day the Universe Changed by John Burke outlined the many ways in which scientific and technological innovations transformed the Western world.
Until
the mass production of books, knowledge was limited to what you
personally experienced in the few miles you could travel. In the new
world of books, and later newspapers and magazines, for the first time
people could share in the experience and knowledge of others. In the
intervening 570 years, we have learned of oceans and continents, our
solar system and galaxy, and the ever expanding and never ending
universe. Little of what we know comes from our own direct and personal
knowledge.
Today, the world of print, however, is being buffeted
by Internet storms and the global economic crisis is on the verge of
scrambling the international economic order. But over the next few
decades these unsettling transformations may seem like minor blips as
physicists and cosmic theorists unlock the hidden mysteries of our
universe.
As
we have been reporting over the past several months, scientists are
probing an infinite universe with infinite galaxies teeming with life
forms similar or different from our own. They are tinkering with
notions of parallel universes in which our universe is just one of many
three dimensional membranes in six or more additional dimensions of
space or other yet incomprehensible dimensions. And they are even
speculating about multiverses — the possibility that the same object
(you and me) exist in separate multiple states.
Their ideas seem
as crazy as the ramblings of Nicolaus Copernicus and Galileo Galilei in
the 16th and 17th century. Should these cosmic theories pan out over
the next several decades, however, we will enter a brave new world in
which cosmic distances are navigated through the tiniest of wormholes.
In such an eventuality, we may turn out to be modern day Neanderthals,
our glittering world a throwback — as pathetically backward and limited
as the five square miles that defined knowledge and reality for people
of the 15th century seems to us.
As we turn the page to a new
decade, we may stand on the cusp of a revolution as epical as the one
Burns argued in his BBC series was wrought nearly six centuries earlier
by the printing press, “When one’s view of the universe changes, the
universe itself effectively changes.”
