Caleb Scharf - The Copernicus Complex: Our Cosmic Significance in a Universe of Planets and Probabilities

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CONTENTS

PROLOGUE: FROM MICROCOSM TO COSMOS

It all begins with a single drop of water.

* * *

With one eye scrunched shut, the drapery tradesman and budding scientist Antony van Leeuwenhoek stares intently through the tiny lens he has fashioned from a piece of soda-lime glass. On the other side of this shiny bead is a quivering sample of lake water, scooped up during an outing the previous day around the city of Delft in the Netherlands. As he adjusts the instrument and lets his eye relax and focus, van Leeuwenhoek suddenly finds himself falling headlong into a new world, a swarming metropolis of alien design.

Within the previously invisible universe of this single speck of water are arrays of beautifully coiled spirals, animated blobs, and bell-shaped creatures with skinny tails, wiggling, gyrating, and swimming busily with absolutely no regard for his right to be peering in at them. Its a shocking vision: van Leeuwenhoek is not just a human, he is a cosmically huge giant observing another world contained within his own. And if this one drop can be home to its own universe, then what about another, and another, and all the drops of water on Earth?

* * *

The year is 1674, a time sandwiched between some of the most profound changes in Western science and thought. A little more than a century earlier the Polish scientist and polymath Nicolaus Copernicus had published De revolutionibus orbium coelestium On the revolutions of the celestial spheres. In this book Copernicus had put forth his completed heliocentric model of the universe, shifting the Earth from the center of the cosmos to a secondary place, spinning and orbiting around the Suna demotion that would reshape our species scientific history.

In the intervening decades the Italian Galileo Galilei had built his telescopes and seen the moons of Jupiter and phases of Venus, convincing him that Copernicus was righta heretical view at the time, one that cost him dearly when it attracted the scrutiny of the Roman Inquisition. His contemporary, the German Johannes Kepler, went even further by stating that the orbits of the planets, including the Earth, traced not perfect circles but rather eccentric ellipses, unsettling any conception of a rational universe. And in a little over ten years time from when we find van Leeuwenhoek gazing through his lens, the great English scientist Isaac Newton will publish his monumental Principia , laying out the laws of gravitation and mechanics that will, unwittingly, make the arrangement of our solar system and of the universe at large a thing of austere beauty, untended by any guiding hand but physics and mathematics. It is by any standards an extraordinary time in human history.

* * *

Antony van Leeuwenhoek was born into this rapidly transforming world in 1632 in Delft. His early life was relatively ordinary. He never received much education beyond the basics. As a young man he quickly established himself as a tradesman dealing successfully in linens and woolens. He was also a relentlessly interested and curious person, once describing himself as craving after knowledge, a characteristic that would result in a voluminous legacy of observations and writings about his greatest passion, the microcosm.

Sometime in the year 1665 van Leeuwenhoek came across the great work Micrographia , by the English scientist Robert Hooke. Micrographia was a phenomenon: the first major publication of the fledgling Royal Society in England, the first best-selling science book, and a cornucopia of the most fabulously detailed illustrations of the magnified textures of everything from insects to minerals, bird feathers, and plant life. It was an atlas of the world seen through a new set of eyes, those of the microscope.

This novel technical art of magnifying objects using a series of lenses had begun not long before, in the late 1500s. The compound microscope enabled the sharp-eyed and sharp-minded Hooke to make his beautiful drawings of all these incredible things that were sitting right under everyones nose. But even Hookes best microscopes achieved magnification factors of only ten times to perhaps fifty times. What might be lying even deeper beneath? For van Leeuwenhoek the mystery was impossible to resist, and so he took it upon himself to learn to build the optics necessary to catch his own glimpse of this unexplored realm.

Exactly how van Leeuwenhoek made his microscopes remains a little unclear to this day. He was incredibly secretive and a bit dramatic about it all, beavering away behind closed doors at his home. But from instruments he bequeathed to the Royal Society, and from the accounts of people who visited, we do know that his principal trick was to fashion tiny, perfect beads of glassprobably by pulling molten glass fibers and fusing their ends together. Then he mounted these spherical lenses, with focal lengths of barely a couple of millimeters, in small brass plates with screwlike arms that would position a sample right by the lens. By holding the plate across his eye, van Leeuwenhoek could gain some astonishing magnifications, possibly as high as five hundred times in the very best cases.

Figure 1: An illustration of the van Leeuwenhoek microscope. Samples could be placed on the tip of an adjustable metal probe just in front of the opening in a plate that holds the glass lens. Bringing it up to the eye completes the optical system.

He also didnt just make a single microscope, or even a few. In a remarkably modern burst of innovation, he made well over two hundred. In fact, it appears he made a microscope for pretty much every subject he wanted to studya customized job each time. And thus it was a few years later, on a September day in 1674, that the tradesman could be found putting a fateful drop of water in front of a lens in its purpose-built viewing platform.

* * *

Van Leeuwenhoeks innate gift for fashioning optics took him not to outer space but to a microscopic cosmos, on what was perhaps an equally shocking journey. Within these drops of water he discovered unknown types of living organisms, hidden away from prying humans by simply being too small to see with the naked eye. He also quickly realized that if these minute life-forms could be in a drop of lake water, they could be anywhere, and he extended his investigations to other realms.

These included the fascinating, but rarely appreciated, nooks and crannies of the human mouth and the sticky mix of saliva and plaque gumming up our teeth. Putting these samples under his lens, van Leeuwenhoek found even more diversity: dozens, hundreds, thousands of even smaller animalcules swimming about in their rather repulsive oceans. These varied and active organisms offered the first human glimpses of bacteria, the single-celled living things that we today know represent the majority of life on the planet, outdoing everything else by sheer number and diversity, just as they have done for the past 3 to 4 billion years.