I, and all the complex things around me, exist only because many things were assembled in a very precise way. The 'emergent' properties are not magical. They are really there and eventually they may start re-arranging the environments that generated them. But they don't exist 'in' the bits and pieces that made them; they emerge from the arrangement of those bits and pieces in very precise ways. And that is also true of the emergent entities known as "you" and "me".

David Christian

Categorized in : Way May Pieces

Maps of Time attempts to assemble a coherent and accessible account of origins, a modern creation myth.

David Christian

maps modern creation

...from schools to universities to research institutes, we teach about origins in disconnected fragments. We seem incapable of offering a unified account of how things came to be the way they are.

David Christian

research offering school

She was the love of my life, we spent 57 beautiful, wonderful, loving years together, which I will treasure forever.

David Christian

entertainment

All religions, all indigenous traditions, all origin stories provide a large map of where you are.

David Christian

all-religions map religions you

Living organisms are created by chemistry. We are huge packages of chemicals.

David Christian

created living chemicals chemistry

I remember very vividly, as a child growing up in England, living through the Cuban Missile Crisis. For a few days, the entire biosphere seemed to be on the verge of destruction. And the same weapons are still here, and they're still armed. If we avoid that trap, others are waiting for us.

David Christian

child growing-up waiting remember

Gravity is more powerful where there's more stuff.

David Christian

more where gravity powerful

I believe human beings mark a threshold in the development of the planet, of course, but it is only part of the picture. What Big History can do is show us the nature of our complexity and fragility and the dangers that face us, but it can also show us our power, with collective learning.

David Christian

learning nature power history

I had this feeling that, somehow, we ought to be teaching not just the history of particular nations or particular regions, but the history of humanity.

David Christian

feeling just humanity history

Every kid goes to school full of questions about meaning. You know, 'What's my place in the universe? What does it mean to be a human being? What are human beings?' Existing courses cannot help you answer those questions. They can't even help you ask them.

David Christian

place you universe school

Our goal is to see Big History become a normal part of high school curricula. I'd love to see it being taught in lots of languages. A global course.

David Christian

high-school love history school

When very large stars die, they create temperatures so high that protons begin to fuse in all sorts of exotic combinations, to form all the elements of the periodic table. If, like me, you're wearing a gold ring, it was forged in a supernova explosion.

David Christian

die me you stars

Big History studies the history of everything, offering a way of making sense of our world and our role within it.

David Christian

everything history way world

In literature classes, you don't learn about genes; in physics classes you don't learn about human evolution. So you get a fragmented view of the world. That makes it hard to find meaning in education.

David Christian

view you education world

Modern scientific knowledge appeared piecemeal. Historians wrote about human history; physicists tackled the material world; and biologists studied the world of living organisms. But there were few links between these disciplines, as researchers focused on getting the details right.

David Christian

focused history world knowledge

Humans are remarkable: the first species in almost four billion years of life on earth that dominates the biosphere. This gives us the power, in principle, to build societies in which everyone flourishes. But it also creates great dangers because it is not clear that we really understand how to use our potentially devastating powers.

David Christian

great understand power life

Learning to domesticate the horse was a sort of energy revolution.

David Christian

horse revolution learning energy

I think what I was after was a unifying story that could bring everything together, that could give me a sense of the whole of history.

David Christian

think me together history

We, as extremely complex creatures, desperately need to know this story of how the universe creates complexity and why complexity means vulnerability and fragility.

David Christian

need story know universe

Unfortunately, historians have become so absorbed in detailed research that they have tended to neglect the job of building larger-scale maps of the past.

David Christian

job building research past