Is Harmony at the Heart of Things?
In the age-old quest for evidence of a harmonious universe, astronomers and others have gone to unusual lengths.
On January 1, 1801, the first night of a new century, the renowned Sicilian astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi turned his telescope toward a point in the sky between Mars and Jupiter. The faint object he found, exactly where his calculations had predicted, was the first asteroid ever identified. He named it Ceres, after the Roman goddess and protector of his native island. A year later, a German astronomer sighted a second asteroid, which he called Pallas. Its slow but perceptible drift against the background fieldof distant stars was a dead giveaway that it, too, was a relatively nearby celestial body orbiting the sun. By 1890 astronomers had identified more than 300 asteroids, ranging in size from the giant Ceres, some 500 miles in diamter, to much smaller chunks of rock. Today, with the Hubble space telescope in place, we can track millions of them, all floating in a wide belt between 200 million and 400 million miles from the sun--an unnerving vision at a time when most scientists have come to agree that it was the impact of a single errant asteroid that did in the dinosaurs. What if, we ask ourselves, another asteroid comes hurtling toward Earth?
But the human experience with asteroids so far has much more to tell us about harmony than about apocalypse. One of the more interesting things about asteroids is the unusual way nature has arrayed them in space, and one of the more interesting things about human beings is revealed by our insistent search for an explanation of this arrangement. It is a search strongly rooted in our ancient intuited sense that all things in nature operate rhythmically. Taken to the extreme (which is where I fully intend to carry it), this universal rhythm-seeking reveals nothing less than humanity´s age-old attempt to penetrate the mind of God. But let´s start with the asteroids.