WHERE IS THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE?
This question is profoundly important, because if we humans are special beings created by God, then we are the center. For thousands of years people intuitively believed they were at the center of God’s universe. As civilization and mathematics advanced some people began to mathematically and scientifically analyze the physical world.
Before the beginning of our modern age Ptolemy was the authority on the system of the universe. He was a Greco-Egyptian scientist, mathematician, astronomer, and astrologer. He defined a system of the universe with a motionless Earth at the center. According to Ptolemy the Sun, Moon, planets, and the stars all revolved around the Earth. Ptolemy’s earth-centered model was necessarily very complicated, because he needed to geometrically show, among other things, how the planets sometimes make backwards loops as seen in the Earth’s sky. He came up with invisible mechanisms such as epicycles in order to explain how the system’s objects interacted. Ptolemy’s geocentric universe dominated scientific thinking for fourteen centuries.
Before the invention of the telescope Ptolemy’s earth-centered model made sense to anyone on the Earth looking up at the Sun, Moon, planets, and stars. The force of gravity was not yet understood. Ptolemy theorized that the Sun, Moon, planets and stars were supported in space by being attached to nesting crystalline spheres, which separately rotated around the Earth. The vast distances to the objects in space had not yet been realized, so scientists didn’t know to make adjustments in size for distance. Using the naked eye the Sun and Moon appear to be the same size but much smaller than the Earth. The Earth appeared to be by far the biggest and most massive object in the universe, so it made sense that all heavenly objects must revolve around it.
Five stars (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn) could be observed wandering amongst the four thousand or so other visible stars. These wandering stars were called planets. The stars were attached to the outermost rotating sphere, which was called the celestial sphere. The universe was perceived as and so assumed to be a freestanding (existing by itself needing nothing else in order to exist) finite system of physical objects. The Earth was the inner most boundary and the celestial sphere was the outer most boundary, which was calculated to be at a distance of 20,000 earth radii.
Ptolemy’s scientific universe system supported the long held religious belief that we humans are special beings located at the center of everything that exists. But then in the fifteenth century a Renaissance mathematician and astronomer named Copernicus challenged the Ptolemaic model. He claimed that the retrograde motions of the planets could be explained much easier by understanding that the Earth was a planet, and all the planets revolved around the sun. For example: as the Earth and Mars orbit the sun, the Earth moves faster, so it catches up to and passes Mars, which causes Mars to appear to change its direction when viewed from the moving Earth. Copernicus showed that with the Sun in the center of the universe system there is no need for epicycles.
The Copernican heliocentric model positioned the Sun at the center of the entire universe. Gravity was still not understood, so the crystalline spheres were retained with the celestial sphere still being the universe’s outer most boundary. At first scientists and religious leaders rejected Copernicus’ theoretical sun-centered system, even though it scientifically worked much better than Ptolemy’s earth-centered system, because the new Copernican system went against long established scientific and religious beliefs and the common sense of the time.
Then in the sixteenth century a physicist, engineer, philosopher, and astronomer named Galileo used his newly invented telescope to find evidence to support the sun-centered system. He saw among other things that Jupiter has its own moons, which proved that everything does not revolve around the Earth, and the Copernican model began to catch on. People had to absorb the perceived fact that humanity does not live at the center of the universe and therefore must not be special creations. People began to question humanity’s religious place in the grand scheme of things.
When Galileo looked up at the night sky through his telescope, he saw that the planets became larger but the stars did not. He realized that the stars were much too far away to show magnification. Galileo proved that the planets are located closer to and orbit the Sun, but the stars are located much further out into space beyond our planetary system. Our known size of the universe became vastly larger.
The telescope continued to lead to the discovery of a more and more vast, complex, and seemingly infinite universe. It became clear that our Sun is the center of our solar system, but it is not the center of the whole universe. Scientists discovered that the stars are actually suns like our own Sun. Our solar system is only one of a vast number of other solar systems. Our Milky Way galaxy is only one of billions of other galaxies. This caused a sea change in human thinking.
Technology continues to advance. Telescopes, microscopes, and particle smashers continue to become more powerful, and scientists keep discovering more objects further out in space and more objects further into sub-atomic space. Scientists can’t find any fixed boundaries to universe, so they can’t define a physical center. Science now teaches that we humans live in a minor solar system on an insignificant planet lost somewhere in infinite space.
Today we like to believe science has come a long way since Ptolemy, and we now understand the universe and humanity’s place in it. Over the past few centuries the modern system of the universe has removed the Earth from the center, replaced the crystalline spheres with the force of gravity, become vastly larger and more complex, and eliminated fixed boundaries. But despite these structural changes, the modern system is still fundamentally the same universe as the ancient system. Both are perceived by scientists as and assumed to be freestanding physical universes existing in independent in space and time.
When we look around and interact in our object world, it is common sense that the objects we see and interact with exist separate and independent from us. But, we have learned from the past that our common sense often deceives us, because the scientific evidence actually shows that the universe does not exist freestanding by itself in space and time.
The scientific evidence actually shows that both the ancient and modern systems of the universe are wrong.
It is a known scientific fact that we humans do not directly see our physical reality. We do not look out across volumetric space and actually see or otherwise sense objects. We receive information from objects in the form of electromagnetic signals (light), and then we each transform the information into a solid three-dimensional reality on our mind’s viewing screen. Our senses of sight, hearing, smell, touch, and taste are all electrical processes that provide input to generating our seemingly solid reality in our mind. A modern scientific analogy would be a virtual reality. When our minds are embedded in a virtual world, we think the virtual world is a solid freestanding universe, but it is not. We cannot distinguish a virtual world from our real physical world.
The universe based on human consciousness is not a new or radical idea. Religious people pray to God through their consciousness. All of the world’s major religions have always claimed the universe is based on human consciousness. During the nineteenth century, philosophers and scientists debated whether the universe exists freestanding by itself in space and time or whether it is exists based on human consciousness. Some scientists understood that we form the universe in our minds through our sensory apparatus. These scientists understood that we couldn’t actually know the universe outside our mind.
It is a scientific fact that space and time cannot be shown to exist outside the mind, and it is a scientific fact that physical objects cannot exist except in space and time, therefore the physical object universe cannot exist separate from the human mind. So some scientists thought it was a mistake to adopt a universe model separated from human consciousness, but never the less the larger scientific community assumed the universe is so vast and complex that it could not possibly be based on the supposedly insignificant human mind.
This has proved to be a wrong assumption. Scientists again mistakenly relied on the common sense of the time.
Science has now discovered that the human brain is the most complex thing in the universe. New measurements of a human brain’s memory capacity increase previous estimates by a factor of 10 to at least a petabyte, which is in the same ballpark as the World Wide Web. This is equivalent to twenty million four-drawer filing cabinets, and this is just what we understand today. The brain’s capacity is very likely much higher still, because scientists are just starting to understand a small part of it. Total human memory capacity is based on the population of the earth, which is over seven billion human brains all working together to form human reality. Humanity’s memory capacity is at a minimum equivalent to seven billion World Wide Webs. This does not even consider the brain’s processing powers or the amazing power of the human mind, of which scientists admittedly know very little.
As telescopes continue to become more powerful astronomers are continuing to find more and more outer space with more and more objects. And as microscopes and particle colliders continue to become more powerful physicists are continuing to find smaller and smaller particles in inner space. This has proved to be a never-ending process. The ongoing process of scientific discovery has proved that the universe has no boundaries big or small. There is no outer boundary or smallest foundation particle, so the universe is not a standalone physical system. To the contrary modern science has shown that the universe operates just as we would expect a human connected physical reality would operate. A universe based on human consciousness would be an unlimited physical system without boundaries, big or small. Its known size and complexity would depend on human intelligence and imagination.
Both ancient scientists and modern scientists have misinterpreted the universe. The earth is not the center, and humanity is not lost in space and time. The universe is centered on our consciousness and not where we physically live, so it has never mattered where the earth is located.
We humans are the center of our universe, so anything is possible. We just have to believe.
