Contemporary Cosmology

MAN AND His UNIVERSE--John Langdon-Davies--Harper ($5). Author Langdon-Davies' thesis: that the religious views of the man-in-the- street are largely formed by the "over-belief" (contemporary scientific attitude toward the universe) of his day. In Man and His Universe he gives "not exactly a history of science but a history of the human imagination as science has affected it and allowed it to grow." He takes no stock in the much-touted conflict between science and religion: "There is no such thing: there is only a conflict between two religious outlooks and two ideas of God. . . . However, since theology is always conservative and science always revolutionary, clashes have been not infrequent." From Aristotle to Einstein he traces man's changing beliefs about the cosmos. In the last quarter-century, says Author Langdon-Davies, science's cosmology has changed as much as the difference between Newton and the Middle Ages. But science is always a jump ahead of popular belief. "Not only in the minds of ordinary people, but also in the minds of those who write books explaining science to them, the thoughts of 1900 are too often still uppermost." Many people, still swayed by the outworn materialistic dogmas of the 19th Century, are not aware that science, far from imagining it has successfully plotted the universe, has in fact discarded all rigid cosmic theories, is apparently becoming as mystic as Blake saw it. "Relativity," the modem catchword, is understood (except as a catchword) by only a few; but its everyday influence is felt increasingly everywhere. It is becoming part of the age's "overbelief." ''Thus it comes about, fantastic though it may sound, that men lie with their neighbor's wives denuded of the last shred of a guilty conscience because observations of Mercury's perihelion enabled Einstein to alter our ideas about space-time." Among the positive benefits which modern science has backhandedly conferred, one, thinks Author Langdon-Davies, is the cessation of a belief in immortality. "The truth is that desire for immortality is not a natural desire in the least; it is the artificial by-product of a certain picture of the universe; a habit like smoking, drug taking or gambling which grows on one. but had to be consciously stimulated at first. . . . Far from being the natural instinct of a healthy mind, the desire for immortality is the symptom of a disease; of the worst of all diseases, that of unhappiness coming from starved ways of living." But no cosmic or human pessimist is Author Langdon-Davies. He believes we are only beginning to try to understand the almost limitless possibilities of life. "Are we imprisoned sparks of life in a dead universe? Or are we only half-alive in a universe the intensity of whose life we are at present too comatose to realize to the full? . . . Whether or not the universe has a purpose, life most certainly has." The Author. John Langdon-Davies, 33, has curly light hair, an engaging smile. Born in South Africa, he lived there till he was seven, then went to England. He married a fellow-student at Oxford, has two sons. He is a member of the Labor Party, thinks men should dress more beautifully. He has frequently visited this country to lecture on U. S. and English institutions. Says he: "Perhaps the best definition of the modern man is one who never uses the word 'love' either in or out of a woman's presence." Other books: A Short History of Women, The New Age of Faith.

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