(For an excerpt from Origins visit Tom's Web site.)
Tom Yulsman was raised in Brooklyn, but his soul is most at home in the wild landscapes of the Utah desert. Here, camped in the quiet amid red sand and rippled rock, the Milky Way smeared across the night sky, Yulsman has pondered ultimate questions about the Earth, the universe and humanity's meaning within the cosmos.
He imagines the same sorts of questions must have preoccupied the Barrier Creek Indians who visited Utah's Horseshoe Canyon 4,000 years ago, the artists behind a line of huge petroglyphs inscribed into a stone wall, the figures human-like but clearly supernatural beings. Did these ancient ancestors also feel a connection to a world beyond their everyday lives in this place, as Yulsman has?
One thing is certain: humans now know an enormous amount about the universe in which we occupy a tiny space. How the universe came to be and where we fit within it is the story Yulsman unfolds in his book, Origins: The Quest for our Cosmic Roots. Published by the Institute of Physics, the volume will be available in bookstores this spring.Yulsman, co-director of the Center for Environmental Journalism and an associate professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, has been a career science writer. Formerly the editor of Earth magazine, he has written about "every scientific topic under the sun - the AIDS virus, geology, climate, environmental issues," and with each new subject, his interest in the natural world has grown.
"My fascination just kept expanding into bigger and bigger realms of nature," Yulsman recounts, explaining how he went from writing about Earth-based phenomena to studying the cosmos. He began working on Origins in 1996, when astronomy and astrobiology were intimidating fields he knew little about.
Origins is intended for general readers, whom Yulsman seeks to "infect with the same fascination with nature" that drove his research. The book is for "anyone who's ever looked up at the night sky on a clear night and had those thoughts…'Where did this all come from?'" He hopes his book will strike a chord with the kind of readers who bought Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time but found the material difficult. "That includes me," Yulsman acknowledges. He set out to write a book that would grapple with the same subject matter but in a much more accessible manner.
Yulsman's artful prose and narrative style make it easier for the curious layperson to gain an understanding of some of the most complex physical aspects of the universe's emergence and structure. He uses metaphor and analogy to make concepts approachable.
He also peppers the book liberally with fascinating people: scientists at work, immersed in research and debate. Origins' characters are not just planets, galaxies, quarks and neutrons, but mathematicians, physicists, cosmologists, astro-chemists, theoreticians of astronomy, geologists, even meteor hunters, all engaged in an effort to unravel answers to really big questions: "How could the universe have exploded from nothing? What put the dynamite in the Big Bang? How did galaxies come to be? How do solar systems form? And, perhaps most intriguing of all, how did Earth become an oasis of life - one that has produced a species intelligent enough to ask these questions?" Through visits and interviews with scientists engaged in cutting-edge research on these most profound issues, Yulsman shares with readers the amazing things we have learned.
He also reveals that knowledge doesn't descend in a vacuum. "We think that science happens in big NASA press conferences or in scientific journal articles," says Yulsman. Not the case. Rather, it is achieved through conversation, give and take, surprise epiphanies, testing and re-testing of theories. Yulsman tells one story about two scientists he accompanied to the Mauna Kea observatory in Hawaii, engaged in a spirited debate about the Orion Nebula at 3 a.m. atop the volcano's rim. "That's where the real science happens," Yulsman points out -- there, in the exchange of ideas between a couple of guys in fleece jackets, not in sterile labs by science nerds in white coats.
It is this emphasis on the people involved in the quest to figure out the cosmos that sets Origins apart from other titles on similar subject matter, says Yulsman. Most books are written by scientists and tend to deal exclusively with the science, he explains. As a journalist, he is able to tell stories and use anecdotes to bring alive what can often be a very abstract set of ideas.
Yulsman's humanistic emphasis unites the materialism of cosmology with the rare -- perhaps unique -- place of people within the universe. "Why is it that Earth alone has sustained an incredible diversity of life?" Yulsman ponders within Origins' pages. "There aren't many books that put that together with cosmology," he contends, though he sees it as a logical linkage.
"I don't make a distinction,"says Yulsman, between the "environment" and the cosmos, "between Earth systems and these bigger systems Earth is a part of." Studying the universe is an outgrowth of studying the natural environment, in his view.
"My interest in environmental issues is part of my fascination with nature, to help people understand…their impact in this big scheme of the natural world." Ultimately, his mission as a journalist, and his goal with Origins, is to foster that understanding: "You must understand nature if you're going to come to any recognition of your place in it."
"Humans are not just a spark flying up from a campfire" in the cosmic realm, Yulsman has come to believe. After spending six years thinking about the immense scale of things in nature, he says he "realized that that's not an accurate picture."
"In a way," he contends, "biologists -- Darwinians -- have done us a disservice, telling us we're just another branch on the evolutionary tree, no more significant than the e-coli in our guts…It's pretty amazing, actually, what humans have done in understanding this sprawling cosmos. Humans are part and parcel of the biosphere…but they are a pretty darned amazing manifestation of it."
Reflecting on that marvel, Yulsman cites "legendary astrophysicist" Frank Shu, who has suggested that it would be a "tragedy of cosmic proportions" if all memory of Jane Austen, Shakespeare, all the cultural achievements of humankind, were to be lost, were human life to be extinguished.
The new thinking among many scientists, according to Yulsman, is that "the Star Trek vision of the universe may not be right: intelligent manifestations of biospheres may be really rare…In the end there's this humanist perspective that's surprising."
"How is it," Yulsman asks in Origins' preface, "that we humans, unlike any other species, as far as we know," can make the remarkable connections we have?
"Consider this," he continues. "According to cosmologist Joel Primack of the University of California, Santa Cruz, 60 orders of magnitude separate the size of the very tiniest thing that makes sense and the very biggest thing we know about, the universe. It turns out that we humans are more or less mid-way in size between these two extremes. And that is pretty much ideal for intelligence…From our vantage point in the center of the cosmic space scale, and with the intelligence that this may have made possible, we are ideally placed to understand the story of the cosmos and our place in it."
It is that story, by turns beautiful and mind-bending but always astonishing, which Yulsman's Origins tells.
Wendy Worrall Redal is the program coordinator for the CEJ and editor of Connections.
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