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The cosmos cycles on...

Saswato Das, contributor


In the Grilandus Inventum, a beautifully-preserved handwritten Italian book from 1506-07 currently on display at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York, there is a figure of a man surrounded by zodiacal signs. In his left hand, he holds an armillary sphere, a celestial sphere with the Earth at the center of the universe, in accord with pre-Copernican astronomy. Lines from the zodiacal signs connect to Zodiac Man's body parts. The lesson is clear: man is governed by the cosmos.

The medieval manuscript depicting Zodiac Man is part of the Visions of the Cosmos exhibit, the Rubin's examination of the ways in which humans have conceived of their place in the universe over the centuries.

Since antiquity, humans have pondered the meaning of the universe, crafting creation myths and cosmologies to explain the heavens: the seasonal change of the night sky, the movements of the planets, the beauty of the Milky Way. That the planets and constellations are somehow responsible for earthly affairs was a common theme to the cosmologies of many cultures.

Visions of the Cosmos also depicts Hindu, Jain and Buddhist worldviews through carefully selected works including 18th century Tibetan Buddhist scrolls, loose leaf Jain manuscripts from the 16th century, black stone Hindu statues from the 11th and 12th centuries.

Among the highlights are three small miniature watercolor paintings from the Pahari school of Indian art. They depict the fantastic Hindu myth of the gods and demons churning the ocean of milk at the dawn of time to produce amrita, the nectar which confers immortality. The gods and demons use the cosmic snake Vasuki as the churning rope and Mount Meru as the churning stick.

Another beauty on exhibit is a 16th century cloth representation of Adhaidvipa, an island continent with Mount Meru as its center, which forms the basis of Jain cosmic geography.

Looking through the exhibition, one is reminded that many of the concepts in modern astrophysics are not that new, at least in the broadest sense. Buddhists, for example, believed that at least a billion different world systems existed - a nice parallel to modern views of a multiverse.

Also embedded in ancient eastern cosmologies was the concept of eternal, cyclical change - systems would rise, end, and begin anew over periods of cosmic time (kalpa in Sanskrit)--not unlike modern cosmological theories like the ekpyrotic universe.

crab_hubble.jpgThe curators have included images from modern cosmology to contrast ancient eastern worldviews to our current scientific understanding of the universe. It's a wise move. Who can say that the Crab Nebula, captured in glorious detail by the Hubble Space Telescope, or the star-forming regions in Orion's sword, imaged by terrestrial telescopes, do not rival some of the early depictions of the cosmos? Who is not struck by the backlit WMAP image of the nascent universe, just 380,000 years after the Big Bang, showing our cosmic horizon?

For the student of science and its history, one of the exhibition's high points will surely be the Renaissance books on display in the section that traces the evolution of modern cosmology from medieval times. There is an edition of Galileo's Siderius Nuncius (The Starry Messenger), published in Venice exactly 400 years ago this year. Galileo had turned his telescope to the heavens in the fall of 1609. What he would see - and document first in Siderius Nuncius - would turn medieval astronomy on its head and anger the Catholic Church.

Galileo first observed the moon, and saw that its surface was scarred with craters, mountains and valleys, unlike the perfectly spherical image of heavenly bodies endorsed by Aristotelian and Church dogma. In a nice touch, the curators have the edition on display open to the page where Galileo depicts the shadows of the craters on the moon.

There are also editions of Nicolas Copernicus's 1543 work on heliocentrism, De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres), which inspired Galileo and Kepler, and, for contrast, French theologian Pierre d'Ailly's work on geocentrism and theology (Concordantia Astronomiae cum Theologia) from the previous century.

And in a nice reminder of how long it takes sometimes takes for our technology to catch up and prove by observation what some have imagined, there is an edition of Thomas Wright's An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe, published in London in 1750. It contains Wright's assertion "that round every star then we may justly conjecture a similar System of Bodies, governed by the same Laws and Principles with this our solar one, though to us at the Earth for very good Reasons invisible".

Solar systems around other stars are finally becoming visible. Last week, at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Washington DC, results from NASA's Kepler space telescope were announced. Among the discoveries were new exoplanets and planetary systems surrounding nearby Sun-like stars.

This remarkable exhibition of the evolution of astronomical knowledge underscores the fact that scientific confirmation of our theories is often a patient pursuit, hard wrought from the heavens.

Visions of the Cosmos: From the Milky Ocean to the Evolving Universe is on exhibit through 10 May 2010 at the Rubin Museum of Art, 150 West 17th Street, New York, NY 10011

Photos: Rubin exhibit, Steven Williams, Rubin Museum of Art
Crab Nebula: NASA/ESA/ASU/J.Hester & A.Loll

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