His guests, Joel Primack and Nancy Ellen Abrams, were co authors of a book called 'The View From the Center of the Universe' which posits humans as special beings made up of stardust and theorizes on the nature of extraterrestials.
This is actually a topic of some interest to me, so in spite of my loathing Mr. McLaughlin, I decided to settle in. As I pondered the hosts almost 'Trumpesque' combover it began to dawn on me that his questions were less about the book than about his own detachment from reality.
At one point the discussion veered into talk of evolution and he asked the guests if they were in agreement with Stephen Jay Gould about something, and also if they knew what Gould thought of their work. Mr Primacks response included informing the host that Mr. Gould is no longer with us. In fact, Steven Jay Gould died in 2002. McLaughlin went on to ask about another scientist ( I can't recall his name ) only to find out that this one too was no longer with us.
I wanted to find the exact quote, but the entire exchange has been edited out of the transcript available at McLaughlin's website, presumably because it is quite embarassing.
The guests themselves were somewhat surreal. Below is an excerpt from the Introduction to their book;
As a society, we have been exploiting the powers of a universe to whose existe0nce we are blind. Now we finally have the opportunity to end this alienation: the modern science of cosmology is discovering the universal reality in which we are all immersed. Cosmology is a branch of astronomy and astrophysics that studies the origin and nature of the universe, and it is in the midst of a scientific revolution that is establishing its lasting foundations. What is emerging is humanity's first picture of the universe as a whole that might actually be true. There have been countless myths of the origin of the universe, but this is the first one that no storyteller made up - we are all witnesses on the edges of our seats...... Most of us have grown up thinking that there is no basis for our feeling central or even important to the cosmos. B ut with the new evidence it turns out that this perspective is nothing but a prejudice. There is no geographic center to an expanding universe, but we are central in several unexpected ways that derive directly from physics and cosmology รข€“ for example, we are in the center of all possible sizes in the universe, we are made of the rarest material, and we are living at the midpoint of time for both the universe and the earth. These and other forms of centrality have each been a scientific discovery, not an anthropocentric way of reading the data. Prescientific people always saw themselves at the center of the world, whatever their world was. They were wrong on the details, but they were right on a deep level: the human instinct to experience ourselves as central reflects something real about the universe, something independent of our viewpoint. |
McLaughlin seemed oblivious to the significance of the authors' fundamental point - that humans can be proved scientifically to be at the some objective 'center' of the universe, and that this has profound implications for society - and his questions mostly dealt with trivial facts like how many times a dolphin's heart beats in its lifetime. Primack and Abrams used what little opportunity they had to speak to observe that humans are uniquely central to the scheme of the universe, and that if there is any other itelligent life out there, it will be close in size to us since we - as organisms - are the optimum size for intelligent life.
... more to come...
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