The Copernicus Complex

Our Cosmic Significance in a Universe of Planets and Probabilities

By: Caleb Scharf

Narrated by: Caleb Scharf

Length: 9 hrs and 2 mins

Publisher's summary

The Sunday Times (UK) Best Science Book of 2014
A Publishers Weekly Top 10 Science Book of Fall 2014
An NBC News Top Science and Tech Book of 2014
A Politics & Prose 2014 Staff Pick

In the sixteenth century, Nicolaus Copernicus dared to go against the establishment by proposing that Earth rotates around the Sun. Having demoted Earth from its unique position in the cosmos to one of mediocrity, Copernicus set in motion a revolution in scientific thought. This perspective has influenced our thinking for centuries. However, recent evidence challenges the Copernican Principle, hinting that we do in fact live in a special place, at a special time, as the product of a chain of unlikely events. But can we be significant if the Sun is still just one of a billion trillion stars in the observable universe? And what if our universe is just one of a multitude of others-a single slice of an infinity of parallel realities?

In The Copernicus Complex, the renowned astrophysicist Caleb Scharf takes us on a scientific adventure, from tiny microbes within the Earth to distant exoplanets, probability theory, and beyond, arguing that there is a solution to this contradiction, a third way of viewing our place in the cosmos, if we weigh the evidence properly. As Scharf explains, we do occupy an unusual time in a 14-billion-year-old universe, in a somewhat unusual type of solar system surrounded by an ocean of unimaginable planetary diversity: hot Jupiters with orbits of less than a day, planet-size rocks spinning around dead stars, and a wealth of alien super-Earths. Yet life here is built from the most common chemistry in the universe, and we are a snapshot taken from billions of years of biological evolution. Bringing us to the cutting edge of scientific discovery, Scharf shows how the answers to fundamental questions of existence will come from embracing the peculiarity of our circumstance without denying the Copernican vision.

With characteristic verve, Scharf uses the latest scientific findings to reconsider where we stand in the balance between cosmic significance and mediocrity, order and chaos. Presenting a compelling and bold view of our true status, The Copernicus Complex proposes a way forward in the ultimate quest: determining life's abundance, not just across this universe but across all realities.

©2014 Caleb Scharf (P)2014 Macmillan Audio

Critic reviews

“In The Copernicus Complex, Caleb Scharf beautifully explains the astrophysics and metaphysics at the frontier of the modern search for extraterrestrial life and intelligence. In this panoramic journey that stretches from the teeming microcosm within a single drop of water to the infinitudes of planets that orbit distant stars, Scharf assembles an authoritative and visionary argument that our place in the universe--our world, our lives, our time--may be far more special than most scientists have dared to dream. Read this book to find out how and why humanity could be on the cusp of cosmic significance.” —Lee Billings, author of Five Billion Years of Solitude

“How reasonable is it to think that we are alone in the vast expanses of space? And how significant is life on Earth on the Universal (or multiversal) scale? These are the questions that astrobiologist Caleb Scharf addresses intelligently and comprehensively in his beautifully written The Copernicus Complex. The book offers a grand tour of important findings from astronomy to biology that are relevant to the cosmic and microscopic search for life.” —Mario Livio, Nature

“This lyrical tale describes how we have opened our minds to appreciate our cosmic insignificance as we explore the true wonder of the cosmos, including the fascinating question of whether we are alone in the Universe. Caleb Scharf highlights the newly discovered possibilities for housing life in the cosmos, but--just as important--the new ways we might find out if it is out there. This voyage of discovery demonstrates that scientific progress requires us to transcend the often myopic intuition that evolution has saddled us with, and let nature be our guide.” —Lawrence M. Krauss, Foundation Professor and Director of the Origins Project at Arizona State University, bestselling author of A Universe from Nothing and The Physics of Star Trek

Unusual problem: sound quality is poor

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

Very high scientific quality.

Who would you have cast as narrator instead of Caleb Scharf?

Narration was fine.

Any additional comments?

Sound track has jumps, every few seconds, making it sometimes difficult to understand.

What is known and what me think we know.

An revelation making for a trip through the universe that will allow you to samle the the very strange things that may exist.

We're special but are we significant?

How special are we? We no longer consider ourselves the center of the universe, but we are in a fortuitous place and time for understanding our place in the universe, and complex life can exist at the nexus of order and chaos at least we have one data point.

Most of the current thought about our place in the universe rest on false premises and incorrect conclusions. This book gently takes the listener through the step by step process necessary in order to think about the problem in the most correct way. We generally make two kinds of a error in thinking about the problem 'a priori' and 'a posteriori' errors, before the fact and after the fact. (Did you know that most biographies on Thomas Bayes start off with the statement "he was probably born in 1701", funny stuff and this book will tell you why that kind of thinking is needed to understand our place in the universe).

There our subtle faults in most fine tuning arguments and purely probabilistic arguments for calculating life such as the Drake's Equation (though, I don't think the author used the eponymous equation by name). The author looks at both the telescopic and microscopic data we have, and for example delves into the Prokaryotic (simple single cell) merging into a Eukarotic (complicated single cell, the building block of complex life) and how unusual such an event really is.

This book is full of cool ways of thinking about the problem. I did not realize how unstable our solar system is and how our current epoch or order within our solar system will almost for sure not last for more than 10 million years or so. The planets orbits aren't stable and the three body problem's solution is always robust (sensitive to initial conditions). The architecture we have to observe leads to how we understand, and the better our tools the better are data becomes.

The author is just a good science writer. His books should be read by a larger audience, because he really does explain science that well. The author doesn't answer the question whether or not we are the only complex life in the universe, but he teaches the listener how to think about the problem so as not to make the common errors in thought while thinking about the problem.

Intriguing informative convincing

I love scientific writing that poses so many questions while informing of current and historical theories

Greet insight into our place in the cosmos

Great look by a working astrophysicist into the uniqueness or lack thereof of our solar system and of life on our planet. He concludes that we are probably pretty dang special contravening the prevailing extreme Copernicus assumptions that have held sway for some time in conventional physics.

Speculation abounds endlessly

There were interesting anecdotes here and there, but it re treaded the same titrd ground over and over.

TL;DR: Earth isn't that rare

This book is about the rare Earth hypothesis. TL;DR: Earth isn't that rare, and we don't know if life has formed on other planets, or how often simple life evolves into complex life.

The author overuses flowery language and dumbs down topics, inappropriately avoiding scientific jargon.

The narrator mispronounces "eukaryotic" several dozen times.