Trying out a new creation myth

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, origins

Dr. David Christian is among a handful of people that founded, and promote, the concept of Big History. Of course, the biggest history available is that of the whole Universe, which has been presented at various angles by none other than Prof. Stephen Hawking via the books A Brief History of Time (1988), The Universe in a Nutshell (2001), The Grand Design (2010, with Leonard Mlodinow), and Brief Answers to the Big Questions (2018, Posthumous). A pretty hard act to follow!

In his book Origin Story, a Big History of Everything, Dr. Christian proposes to replace Genesis and other creation stories with a simplified but comprehensive account of scientific knowledge regarding the Universe, the Earth, and us.

I like his approach. He identifies 8 milestones that he calls Thresholds. One could say they represent successive crystallizations of the flow of energy. One author (I no longer recall who) wrote of "hangups" in the otherwise steady flow of energy from the extreme contrast represented by the Big Bang, to the eventual heat death of the Universe as it reaches maximum possible entropy. For example, stars "hang up" energy by forging hydrogen into helium at a measured rate; also, gravity causes galaxies, galaxy clusters, and superclusters to form and retain their integrity for billions of years, rather than everything falling straight back together. The simplest hangup is the minuscule torque found in a hypothetical universe of just two particles, being attracted by gravity. If either particle has even a trace of sideways momentum, not directly on the line between them, they will miss one another at closest approach, and some sort of orbit will be achieved instead. If they bear an electric charge, they will emit photons as they are accelerated, so that over time, the orbit will shrink until they collide. But the process will take eons longer than if they were to fall directly into one another.

A little under half the book is taken up with the story of the Universe from the Big Bang, and the energy threshold of the Big Bang itself, followed by those represented by the formation of stars, galaxies, molecules, and life, leading up to Threshold 6, Humans. Somehow, the capture of electrons by nucleons to form atoms, which I would think of as a significant threshold, and certainly had a great effect on energy flow in the Universe, is glossed over. Naturally, this would come before molecules. In faithfulness, I must note that the writing in this portion is less than compelling. I went to YouTube to watch some of Dr. Christian's lectures and a TED talk. He is an excellent speaker. It just doesn't show in this portion of the book; there is a lack of passion.

He hits his stride once he begins to discuss agrarian civilizations, which we tend to call just Civilization, as if there were no other. The transition from foraging to farming, which took place over several thousand years, erupting in various places, is quite a crystallization of the human species, from a more fluid state to the settledness of farms and cities. The clear passion shown by the author in this and later portions make for much more agreeable reading. The slog through the earlier portions mostly explains why it took me so long to read this book.

I would call Origin Story a useful first step to making Big History accessible to the bulk of us. There is a long way to go.

A nine by any other name

kw: words, religion, meanings, origins

I have had nearly no contact with monasticism, so it is only recently that I learned to what extent Catholic piety is tied to the old Roman concept of time. In the daily discipline of many monastic orders, there is a round of eight sets of prayers. With their approximate time of day they are

• Vigil – pre-dawn
• Laud – sunrise
• Prime – early morning
• Terce – midmorning
• Sext – noon
• None – midafternoon
• Vesper – early evening
• Compline – sunset or late evening

For a monk, you could say that "prime time" is about the time the rest of us are just getting up. But let us focus on the fourth, fifth and sixth: terce, sext and none. These words, compensating for two millennia of phonetic drift, are from the Latin words for 3, 6 and 9. In Roman Europe, sunrise marked the start of the day, and was "zero hour". A timekeeper would note when the Sun crossed the meridian, that is, when it was due south, and signal noon, or six hours into the day. Sunset was hour twelve, but was also zero hour for the night watches.

In the monastic orders that keep the old way, one or more timekeepers have the job to ring signal bells when these standard hours occur, so the monks can all pray the office of each hour. This is immortalized in a children's song:

Are you sleeping, are you sleeping,
Brother John, Brother John?
Morning bells are ringing, morning bells are ringing:
Ding, ding, dong. Ding ding dong.

In French it is more revealing:

Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques,
Dormez vouz, dormez vouz?
Sonnez les matines, Sonnez les matines!
Din, dan, don. Din, dan, don.

In the third line, the sleeping brother, who is late with his signal, is exhorted to ring the bells! (or else!!) Poor Brother John. The ninth hour of the night, or three AM, it is tough to keep watch for the rising of a certain star that informs him it is time to ring the Vigil bells. Three other astronomical phenomena, sunrise, Noon, and sunset, are at least easier to anticipate.

I haven't learned how they determined, in any accurate way, the other times. An hour glass would only work for part of the year, because in early days, the lengths of the hours were variable, tied to the interval between sunrise and sunset, and for night watches, the opposite interval. Of course, computers can keep accurate track of any time scheme they like, for more modern monks!

Now I turn to the word that started all this investigation: None. This is not the pronoun "none", an Old English word that means "not one" and rhymes with "fun" or "done". Instead, this word rhymes with "phone" or "stone", and originates from Latin "nonus" meaning nine. Sometimes written "nones", it initially referred to the ninth day of some sequence, such as the ninth day of the month, or of a long celebration. Only in the Sixteenth century was it added to the Divine Office as a prayer-time at three PM or thereabouts.

I find it an amusing coincidence that the pronoun "none", meaning "not one", rhymes also with "nun". Thus in spelling "none" (the pronoun) matches "none" (prayer time at the ninth hour), while in pronunciation "none" (the pronoun) rhymes with "nun" (a woman with a religious vocation).