The Grand Contraption: The World as Myth, Number and Chance , David Park , Princeton U. Press, Princeton, NJ, 2005. $29.95 (331 pp.). ISBN 0-691-12133-8
Early conceptions of the universe were vitalistic, mythological, and teleological: Nature was filled with spirits, gods, demons, and purposes. However, starting in about 1600 AD, the universe was understood to have mathematical order and law-governed behavior. Astronomers began seeing the world as a mechanical contrivance, like clockwork, a metaphor used as early as the mid-14th century by French philosopher Nicole Oresme. In the 20th century, physicists moved away from the mechanical metaphor toward a quantum universe where chance events are essential but which is no less law-governed than the old universe.
David Park, a professor emeritus of physics at Williams College in Massachusetts and author of The How and the Why: An Essay on the Origins and Development of Physical Theory (Princeton U. Press, 1988), has now written The Grand Contraption: The World as Myth, Number and Chance. It is an impressive piece of scholarship that must have taken many years of study. People have always wondered about the skies and sought to understand the changes of nature. How did the world come into existence—if it did? What does it consist of, and how will it end? Although philosophically minded people have always asked such questions, their answers have changed considerably throughout the 4000 years surveyed in Park’s book. For a very long period, religion and mythology were parts of cosmological thinking, aspects that Park pays much attention to. Naturalistic, if not yet scientific, attempts to understand the world started with the Ionian natural philosophers during the pre-Socratic period—the beginning of the so-called Greek miracle that ushered in the era of science. But the miracle did not last, as Park illustrates with references to such early Christian thinkers as Lucius Caecilius Firmianus Lactantius and Cosmas Indicopleustes, who had nothing but scorn for the ridiculous, heathen claim that Earth was round.
Yet Christianity was not in general antiscientific. When scientific activity took off during the Renaissance, it was largely as a religious project, and the religious dimension continued to dominate science throughout the scientific revolution, from Nicolaus Copernicus to Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Although modern science developed in Europe, cosmological thought can be found in all cultures and often in sophisticated forms. Park’s story is essentially a history of cosmology in Europe and the Near East. He has almost nothing to say about cosmology in India and China. The neglect of China is especially regrettable, as the great empire was scientifically and technologically more advanced than Europe during most of the period from about 300 AD to the early 16th century.
The Grand Contraption is well documented and massively informative, yet written in an unpretentious style that makes it easy to read. I found the first half of the book, which covers the period up to the late Middle Ages, to be particularly interesting because it deals with subjects that cannot be easily found in other similar works. For example, Park describes in fascinating detail the early Middle Ages, an epoch that historians of science usually consider a dull and uninteresting period. The chapters dealing with the period from the early 15th century to the mid 19th century, from Nicholas of Cusa to Charles Darwin, are more conventional and relatively less detailed. Strangely, the book ends at the early 20th century, and Park has little to say about the stormy developments in cosmology that started with Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity and Edwin Hubble’s observations of receding nebulae.
I noticed only a few errors or questionable interpretations; let me mention three. Nicolaus Steno, the innovative geologist and anatomist, is wrongly characterized as a Danish prelate, although he later became ordained as a Catholic priest. Alexander Friedmann’s paper on the dynamic solutions of Einstein’s cosmological field equations dates from 1922, not 1921. And Park states that Ptolemy probably conceived his heavenly spheres to be mathematical devices rather than real entities. This may be the impression that the Almagest leaves, but historians of astronomy now believe that Ptolemy did think of the spheres as real, as evidenced in his later work, the Planetary Hypotheses, which Park fails to mention.
All the same, The Grand Contraption is a masterful presentation of the long timelines in the history of cosmology. It is a remarkable book on the development of the worldview from chaos to cosmos, and from the most ancient cultures to modern time.
