Louisville Process Theology Network

Joel Primack & Nancy Abrams on Interconnectedness

Jul 02, 2009

From Page 281 of ?“The View from the Center of the Universe: Discovering Our Extraordinary Place in the Universe?” by Joel Primack and Nancy Abrams.



?“When we come to understand that we are central to the universe, ?‘we?’ can mean humanity, all intelligent life, the Galaxy, even luminous matter. ?‘I?’m human?’ can mean ?‘I stand here midway between the largest and the smallest things in the universe.

I can trace my lineage back fourteen billion years through generations of stars. My atoms were created in the stars, blown out in stellar winds or massive explosions, and soared for millions of years through space to become part of a newly forming solar system --- my solar system. And back before those creator stars, there was time when the particles that, at this very moment, make up my body and brain were mixing in an amorphous cloud of dark matter and quarks.

Intimately woven into me are billions of bits of information that had to be encoded and tested and preserved to create me. Billions of years of cosmic evolution have produced me.

Every one of us is connected mathematically, physically, cosmically?…. How exactly are we connected? It?’s not visually obvious. We look down at our bodies and we see a finite package of living organs, sealed neatly in skin, and because we look that way, we assume we objectively are that way.

The skin is a sacred organ of our culture because we allow it to define us cosmically. We assume that it is a wall dividing us from the rest of the universe, and it is a cosmic absolute?…

But, we lose our preciousness and ignore it in each other when we lose our conscious connection with the enormity of time embodied in each of us. For practical purposes of special orientation and movement we need the boundary of skin, but we don?’t have to assume that therefore our earthbound working sense of limitation and location reflects ?‘ultimate reality.?’

We can enhance the sense of ourselves, as we have been successfully doing with our other senses, by means of a scientific cosmology through which we can see how the expanding universe really works and how astoundingly special our place is in it.?”