Central questions

Neil deGrasse Tyson's "Delusions of Centrality" [12/02-1/03] comes close to saying what I would put this way: Because everything in the observable universe began expanding from the same point, wherever one happens to be is, for all practical purposes, the center of everything. What to us appears to be a faint proto-galaxy near the edge of the universe is, to its inhabitants, the center of their own expanding and uniformly distributed universe. It is as correct for each of us to say "I am at the center of everything" as it is to say there is no center. One is entitled to feel as important or as humbled as one's temperament dictates.

Robin C. Chapman Virginia Beach, Virginia

I take exception to Neil Tyson's version of the history of science. He accepts the pandemic presumption that Earth's centrality in the Ptolemaic system implied our specialness. On the contrary, for medieval writers "central" implied "low," and the very center was the very lowest. That's why Dante placed Hell dead center in his universe. That's why Pico said we Earth-dwellers inhabit "the excrementary and filthy parts of the lower world."

Copernicus's removal of the Earth from that cosmic pit was not a demotion but a promotion. Galileo thus exulted that, in the new cosmology, Earth was no longer "the sump where the universe's frith and ephemera collect" but was now free to join "the dance of the stars."

Dennis Danielson University of British Columbia Vancouver, Canada

NEIL DEGRASSE Tyson REPLIES: Mr. Danielson implies that I and my 6,000 astrophysicist colleagues around the world are all deluded. Perhaps so. But not without good cause. If the center of the universe were indeed a cosmic slag heap and not a special place, why did everybody get so upset when they learned it might not be occupied by Earth? Why was Copernicus afraid to publish his heliocentric system? Why was Galileo subjected to the Holy Inquisition? The psychology of human behavior argues differently from the phantasmagoria of Dante and Pico.

Natural History's e-mail address is nhmag@amnh.org.