As if college students didnt already have a hard enough time studying for their final exams, Professor David Christian has made it even harder. Most instructors of History 100 would find it ambitious enough to survey all of recorded history in a single semester. But not Christian. In his survey course at San Diego State University, history begins much earlier. By his reckoning, about 13.7 billion years earlier, going back to the Big Bang.
"Normally," Christian explains, "historians look at the past on the scale of two or three centuries." With his traditional training in Russian history, this was how he began his own career as well. But ultimately, the standard approach to the past wasnt enough for him. "I got fascinated by the question, When is the beginning of history?," Christian says, "and once you start asking that question, you go back and back and back. And eventually I found myself going back to the origins of the universe, because that seemed the only logical point to stop." And so, for the past fifteen years, he has taught a course on Big History, which he describes as "an attempt to look at the past on all possible time scales."
More than an interesting intellectual exercise, Christian contends that Big History helps us find meaning in our lives: "Understanding how you fit into the universe is incredibly important psychologically because it gives you a sense of who you are, of where you are, of what your place is in the scheme of things." In his forthcoming book Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History, Christians emphasis is on putting ourselves in context. In fact, in multiple contexts. As he notes, Big History "enables you to see human history in the context of the history of life on Earth, of the planet, of the solar system, and of the universe."
Stories of Science
"The more I look at the past on these huge scales," Christian says, "the more I am convinced that the differences between science and earlier attempts to look at a complete picture of the universe are not often as great as we think." Consider, for example, Australian aboriginal myths. Embedded in those stories, Christian claims, is information critical to survival, providing a rudimentary form of science: "Stories about kangaroos, or stories about mammoths ... contained a lot of good, hard information that you needed if you were a hunter. So in a sense, those stories were science."
But not all science is equally good. "The huge difference between [the stories of] modern society is that these are stories that get tested globally, whereas in the past, your stories got tested only amongst a small community of people. So, the modern stories have to survive much tougher tests." Compared to earlier stories, Christian maintains that we can accomplish more with the stories of modern science: "I think theyre better stories, and we can do more things with the modern stories. We can make computers, we can make planes."
But the transition from pre-modern to modern science does not come easily. "If you have a story thats been passed down in your tribe for hundreds of years," Christian explains, "suddenly you become aware that there are other people with very different stories. Thats a real shock to the system, and thats happened many times in the last few centuries."
Smaller World, Bigger Science
The robustness of modern science comes from its ability to integrate the best of other accounts. "In a sense," says Christian, "of all these competing stories, the scientific one is the one thats been created to try and blend the best in all of them, and to find something that fits all the knowledge of all different societies. And it turns out, of course, that a story that works in Japan as well as in Australia as well as in North America, in some practical ways has to be a better story."
By Christians account, there was nothing random about when and where modern science took hold: "The world itself was, in the past, broken up into smaller units. Information wasnt exchanged over such large areas. Its no accident that the Scientific Revolution happened in Europe, and it happened just after the point when the whole world was unified for the first time. Because suddenly, you had a huge flood of information coming into Europe, and for European scientists, the problem was to reconcile all these different bodies of information. And I think thats what modern science comes out of. Its an attempt to see what is held in common in all these stories, and to construct a story that unifies all the information from different parts of the world."
And so, modern science marches on, providing an increasingly more comprehensive understanding of the universe and our place in it. In Christians view, "Any scientist, I think, will agree that in a hundred years time, many of the details of the story we tell now may look kind of cute and naive, because well have moved on beyond them. But if you happen to live now," he concludes, "this is the best story going."
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