The danger of viewing the cosmos as a mirror that shows us ourselves

Looking out at the cosmos

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As a science writer, I spend a lot of time worrying about how to make my words simultaneously accurate and accessible. Most of the time, that’s things like correctly explaining the concept of space-time – the idea that space and time are a single, joint phenomenon – without using any equations.

In the work of cosmology, there is also the element of awe. All my training teaches me to try to awe my audience. Look at the cosmos in all its glory! But the political pressures I face also teach me that I need to explain why looking at the cosmos in all its glory is practically useful. Suddenly, I feel responsible for making the case that it’s valuable to humanity to know things about the cosmos.

There are many ways into this. For example, we often hear that we are carbon-based life forms. Carbon exists in the cosmos because compact balls of hydrogen heated up and became dense enough for nuclear fusion to begin. Which is to say, stars formed, and carbon is a by-product of a star. “The cosmos is within us. We are made of star stuff,” the astronomer Carl Sagan famously said.

There is a kind of risk of looking at the cosmos through ourselves, though. Queen Victoria’s poet laureate Alfred Tennyson noticed this early on while he was an undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge. While there, Tennyson composed a bitingly satirical poem, making fun of another student, A Character, which begins:

With a half-glance upon the sky
At night he said, ‘The wanderings
Of this most intricate infinite Universe
Teach me the nothingness of things.’

On my first careless read, I thought this was a nice entry point to the cosmos, this most intricate infinite universe, which teaches us how small and fleeting we are. At first, I didn’t notice “With a half-glance”, which suggests the looker is doing so carelessly.

I only realised the direction the poem was going in when I got a few more lines in:

He spake of beauty: that the dull
Saw no divinity in grass,
Life in dead stones, or spirit in air;

As I read these three lines, I found myself nodding: yes, yes. I have crossed paths with people who talk about beauty but have no sense of style and only see our planetary home as something to pillage, rather than a wonder to honour.

Then the poem takes a turn:

Then looking as ’twere in a glass,
He smooth’d his chin and sleek’d his hair,
And said the earth was beautiful.

Here Tennyson acerbically attacks his subject as completely vain, treating the cosmos like its meaning is entirely as a looking glass for himself. In the process of saying the world is beautiful, he really means himself.

I should have seen it coming. He only gave the universe “a half-glance” but then claims to know so much about it. I first read this part of the poem in The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, science, and the crisis of belief by Richard Holmes, a biography of Tennyson’s early years. In the margins next to it, I made a note: scientists and glory. In my notebook I continued: Astronomers as cosmic narcissists. What happens when we ask the cosmos to make us great?

These thoughts emerged from my experience as a scientist who is constantly under pressure to prove that my contributions are not just valuable but also noteworthy. Scientists are always in sales mode, selling to grant funders, to politicians setting the budget, to the public wondering why they should bother looking at the cosmos in all its glory while they are facing serious personal and political crises.

In a system that trains us to extract value for ourselves from the cosmos, we forget that its beauty can be its own justification. That the sense of connection it generates between us might be enough. The man in the poem takes a half-glance and insists that the universe teaches us the nothingness of things. But when we look more fully, we see that the universe is plentiful and so complex that studying it is a multi-generational effort, one where we work together to understand something bigger than ourselves.