Marcelo Gleiser - The Dancing Universe: From Creation Myths to the Big Bang

This book surveys the quest for understanding our origins and our place in this vast, mysterious Universe. For as long as history has been recorded humankind has asked the most fundamental question that can be asked, that of the origin of all things. As far as we know, every culture, past and present, has addressed this issue, arriving at various answers. From creation myths of prescientific cultures to modern cosmological theories, the question as to why there is something rather than nothing has inspired mythmakers and scientists, the religious and the atheist.

As we retrace the steps of this vast undertaking, we marvel at the manifold ways by which the human imagination has explained the mystery of creation. Beautiful metaphors and rich symbolism cross the boundaries between science and religion, expressing a true universality of human thought. This same universality, however, points to certain limitations of our imagination. The problem is that the sensorial perceptions and thought processes that we use to make sense of the world are bound by a polarized view of reality based on opposites such as day-night, cold-hot, female-male, matter-spirit, etc.; thus they can offer only a few logical ways to deal with what transcends this polarization, the Absolute from which all comes, be it conceived as God, a mythic cosmic egg, or the laws of physics.

Although scientific and religious approaches to the question of the origin of the Universe have very little in common, certain ideas are bound to reappear, even if draped in completely different clothes. Thus, I begin with an analysis of creation myths of various cultures and close with a parallel discussion of modern scientific ideas concerning the origin of the Universe. By classifying creation myths and cosmological theories according to how they answer this question, I hope to make clear both their overlapping points and their marked differences.

In between, we will examine how our understanding of nature and the Universe as a whole evolved hand-in-hand with the development of physics, from its origins with the pre-Socratic philosophers of ancient Greece, all the way to the discovery of quantum mechanics and relativity during the first three decades of the twentieth century, the cornerstones of modern cosmological theories.