Edward Harrison (1) (1919–2007)

A few months ago I used the word "dark" in a poem, and brought it into my workshop. I knew it was a risk, there are a number of words that are more or less off limits to 'serious' poets. In fact, there are so many words that are off limits to poets that it's hard to categorize them, or say generally what makes them off limits. For the most part it's overuse - which gives an easiness to the word that belies the harder work a 'serious' poet is supposed to be doing with language. When used show more without a hipster-esque self-conscious irony, these words are unacceptable - we're not allowed to take them seriously. Words like "good" and "bad" and "pretty" and "ugly" - easy and not extremely specific - are these kinds of words. Dark and light, like good and bad, have this doubleness working against them as well: they aren't specific enough to be interesting, and are at the same time poetic cliches. The invested emotional resonance is called up so often that it becomes overly sentimental, a kind of fullness that results in the depletion of meaning. Of course, many many wonderful poets use the word "dark" in any of its variants, in some great poems. So these words can be "saved" to some degree by careful use. I've been thinking a lot about that, that part of the work I'm interested in doing with language is saving, or proving possible, the use of depleted, exhausted words.

I've also been long interested in astrophysics, and the words dark and light clearly have significant importance in discussing the observable universe. It was all of this that came together to interest me in the 1987 work Darkness at Night that poses and then treats historically Olber's paradox: why, in an infinite universe filled with stars, are the night skies dark? If the universe is infinite, shouldn't any line of sight from Earth into the universe eventually be intercepted by a star, making the night sky fully bright?

The book provides, in chronological order, a number of proposed solutions to this riddle, and the corresponding understandings of the universe that inform them. So more than merely answering the question for a contemporary reader with a contemporary understanding of the universe, it lays out in fascinating ways a number of historical ways of viewing the universe and our place within it. Its written with a minimum of technical language and mathematical formulas, so that someone like me with little to no formal scientific training can understand the principles of the models of the universe, and the proposed solutions to cosmic darkness. Of course, as he moves into more contemporary models, the concepts get significantly more complicated and harder to understand.

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Not a bad book by any means, but kind of a frustrating one: I expected a bit more rigor from Harrison, whose *Cosmology* is a very good text. I was less than happy with his coverage of ancient views of the Universe, and found the central theme of the puzzle of the dark night sky swamped a bit by a thumbnail history of astronomy. The book feels padded - I wish he had spent more time with each of the "solutions" to the dark sky riddle and less time on general astronomy - for which there are show more many good books. Finally, the editing (and proofreading) is pretty bad in places. The book winds up feeling a little like a rush job. show less

Says that the universe can't be fully comprehended by humans and that today's model of it is as sure to be superseded as earlier ages' models were. Skates too close to the edge of mysticism and talks about religion too much. Any book whose introduction says that "Much of modern science consists of magic disciplined by a calculus of mythic laws" is not going to get a full reading from me. Some good chapters on space and time. (Am I damning it with faint praise or praising it with faint show more damnation?) show less

A wonderful book. The standard descriptions of the big bang, inflation etc, which most popular science writers are spending too much time on repeating, are very brief here. Instead Harrison goes directly to the big questions about cosmology, alternative cosmogenesis and metaphysics.