Cosmology, physics, and science in general figure centrally in “Big History”
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.8069
As reported in a 7 September New York Times Sunday magazine feature , information-technology multibillionaire Bill Gates is both bankrolling and leading an education-reform campaign that promotes historian David Christian’s “Big History” courses. Big History challenges traditional curricula. It also merits attention from anyone who thinks that science and technology need more integration across the curriculum, that C. P. Snow raised enduringly important questions in 1959 with his lecture “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution ,” or that Edward O. Wilson raised similarly important questions in his Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (Knopf, 1998).
Christian first taught Big History in 1989. In 2011 his 18-minute TED talk—accessed online more than 4.2 million times—opened with a topic vividly illustrating the deep involvement of physics in Big History: entropy. He emphasized a central question: How is our “global system of stupendous complexity” possible in “a universe ruled by the second law of thermodynamics”? The answer seems to be, he said, that the universe in fact can create complexity, “but with great difficulty.” He went on to explain that complexity evolves in stages and added, “We refer in Big History to these moments as threshold moments.” He asserted that humans need to understand how the universe creates complexity despite the second law.
That idea took his TED talk to a discussion of the Big Bang—the first of the eight thresholds listed in his paradigm. All of his thresholds integrally involve science and, in the later ones, technology. The first five telegraph cosmology, physics, and other sciences in their very titles:
- 1. The Big Bang
- 2. Stars Light Up
- 3. New Chemical Elements
- 4. Earth and the Solar System
- 5. Life on Earth
In structuring a history course, those thresholds call to mind the subtitle of Wilson’s Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. The Times magazine feature quotes Christian emphasizing “the underlying unity of modern knowledge.” In 1991, in a scholarly article introducing Big History, Christian emphasized the unity in a way that today can call to mind the meaning of the word consilience: the linking together of disparate principles. Concerning the place of his first threshold in his wider scheme, he wrote
According to modern Big Bang cosmology, the universe itself has a history, with a clear and identifiable beginning. . . . We can say nothing of what happened before this time; indeed time itself was created in the Big Bang. So this time scale is different from others. If there is an absolute framework for the study of the past, this is it. If the past can be studied whole, this is the scale within which to do it.
Later in that article he noted that Big History can be seen “as an appropriate response to the intellectual apartheid between ‘the two cultures’of science and the humanities that C. P. Snow discussed.” Snow had famously observed that scientists have “the future in their bones.” Christian’s article proposed that Big History could widen the field of history to include consideration of the future:
What drives the long-term trends? What drives the machinery of growth in the very long term? How fast can that machine go, and at what point is it likely to stall? By raising questions of this sort, big history may make it possible to end the ancient historians’ taboo on discussion of the future as well as the past. That taboo made sense, but only as long as historians refused to discuss trends large enough to yield significant hints about the future. These examples should indicate some of the ways in which large-scale history can make it easier to pose fundamental questions that cannot be tackled at smaller scale.
Big History has received media coverage before—for example, in a Times piece 12 years ago and in a 2012 Boston Globe education article . In 2013 it was the subject of a TV series and a textbook , and Christian appeared in a seven-minute interview with Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert (who asked him why he hadn’t undertaken something ambitious). The Teaching Company offers, among its electronically accessed “Great Courses,” Christian’s “Big History: The Big Bang, Life on Earth, and the Rise of Humanity .” A TED page reports that Big History has been taught not only in the US but in Australia, Korea, China, the Netherlands, and Scotland. The recent Times magazine feature reports that for admissions applications, the University of California system is now accepting Big History as a substitute for world history, which is taken by three-quarters of all high school students.
In the Colbert interview, Christian seemed enjoy the humor and the ribbing while managing to convey earnestly why he thinks Big History matters. As he had put it 22 years earlier in that scholarly article, he believes that historians “have neglected the larger questions of meaning, significance, and wholeness that can alone give some point to the details. If history is to reestablish its centrality as a discussion about what it means to be human, it must renew the interest in the large scale.”
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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.