The Human Touch [antikvár]

Prospectus You look up at the stars on a calm, clear night, and you're awed by the tranquil vastness of it all. You turn to a book on cosmology and you find it impossible to take in how much vaster still the universe is than you could ever guess even from that visible skyful of sparkling darkness. And then, when you think about it quietly, you can't help being struck by something even more surprising: what a muddle it all is. Nothing's quite straight, nothing's quite circular - it's like an old cottage, built without a plumb line or a spirit level. Stars and galaxies are splashed about all anyhow. Some things are heating up, some things are cooling down. There are things exploding, there are things crashing into other things. And everything is inextricably mixed up with everything else, as if the cottage were lived in by some crazy old eccentric. Has anyone ever seen a universe like it? Well, no, because this is the first of its many idiosyncrasies: its uniqueness. There aren't any other universes to compare it with - not ones that anyone has ever seen, at any rate. Of almost everything else there is more than one example of the same kind of thing, so that we can make comparisons and judge how things stand. Of universes we have just the one, so we don't know whether this is the way you'd expect a universe to be. I can't help feeling, though, that if someone had asked me before the universe began how it would turn out, I should have guessed something a bit less like an old curiosity shop and a bit more like a formal French garden - an orderly arrangement of straight avenues, circular walks, and geometrically shaped trees and hedges. Our own particular speck of this universe, the planet we live on, is as irregular as everything else. A sphere, which seems a neat enough idea - but a sphere that isn't exactly spherical, wobbling a little on its axis, spinning not quite regularly. With a surface as rumpled as an unmade bed, splashed with seas and lakes as haphazard as the spills