A Universal Universe
The following excerpt from The New Universe and the Human Future: How a Shared Cosmology Could Change the World by Nancy Ellen Abrams and Joel R. Primack sets out their very optimistic hopes of unifying humanity through a science-based view of reality.
“What is emerging from modern cosmology is humanity’s first scientifically accurate story of the nature and origin of the universe. Building on the great scientific achievements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—particularly evolution, relativity, and quantum mechanics—the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first have been a golden age of astronomy. In a very real sense, we have discovered the universe.
“The new scientific picture differs from all earlier creation stories not only because it’s based on evidence but also because it’s the first ever created by collaboration among people from different religions, races, and cultures all around the world, each of whose contributions is subject to the same standards of verifiability. The new universe picture excludes no one and sees all humans as equal. It belongs to all of us, not only because we’re all part of it but also because around the world the work to discover it has been largely funded by the public. The fruit of this transnational collaboration could become a unifying, believable picture of the larger reality in which Earth, our lives, and the ideas of all our religions are embedded. . . .
“This revolution is presenting us with an opportunity so rare that it has arisen only twice before—the opportunity to reenvision reality itself at the dawn of a new picture of the universe. Now the big question is, what will our culture do with this knowledge?”