The 2001 Paul Klopsteg Memorial Lecture: Cosmology: Man’s place in the universe (a deconstruction)

V.

Trimble

, , (). In case you wondered, in the interim, I have also published about 400 papers, book chapters, reviews, and such and given about 500 talks on other subjects, or at least with other titles, if the Universe may be supposed to include everything.

There is a precedent for this in the form of an old European, Rabbinic story, of which the intermediate advice is to take the goat into the house.

M. J.

Rees

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B. J.

Carr

and

M. J.

Rees

, “,” , (), and portions (but only portions) of J. D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler.

The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Oxford University Press, New York, 1986).

Within living memory, one could show the obscuring power of small amounts of particulate matter graphically by blowing cigarette smoke into the beam of the projector. Not a smoker myself, I always bummed a cigarette to do this. The last few times I tried, no one was prepared to admit they owned cigarettes. And the law now forbids such doings. Chalk dust from clapping erasers is not an adequate substitute.

That box of slides mentioned in the Introduction is now wood rather than metal and contains about 75 images, many of which are my own perfectly awful drawings of the insides of stars, but also astronomical images, landforms (including the orange grove in San Bernardino, where plate motion has put a kink in all the rows of trees; the site is now fields of waving condos), numbers, and text. I have simply left out here some lines from the talk that are incomprehensible without the images.

M. J. Rees, Just Six Numbers (Basic Books, City, 2001), is at one end of this set of integers. The listings in the Particle Data Book are at the other.

The “more physics” point of view is described by S. W. Weinberge in Dreams of a Final Theory (Pantheon, City, 1993). The “multiverse” concept appears in M. J. Rees, Before the Beginning (Addison Wesley, New York, 1997). The Feynman thought is from a lunchtime conversation (at the Caltech cafeteria, properly called Chandler Hall—nobody knows who Chandler was—improperly called the Greasy, of which it is much less these days than it used to be) at which the author was present, some time in the 1970s. A. H. Guth, The Inflationary Universe (Jonathan Cape, City, 1996) gives some indication of how inflation feeds into multiple universes, as does A. Linde, “The future of the universe,” in The Origin and Evolution of the Universe, edited by B. Zuckerman and M. A. Malkan (Jones and Bartlett, City, 1996), p. 127. Finally, and returning whence we came, to convergent evolution and the potential for finding ourselves on other planets; see S. Conway-Morris, The Crucible of Creation: The Burgess Shale and the Rise of Animals (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998).