"Man cannot be taught any thing contrary to nature. However he acts, he must act by nature's laws; howsoever he thinks, he must think by nature's laws." -- Robert Bage, Hermsprong
"See we not plainly that obedience of creatures unto the law of Nature is the stay of the whole world?" -- Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity
You are the center of the universe!
Now -- you clever reader, you -- you suspect that I am being hyperbolic, and I am, somewhat. I'd like to consider, with you and not against you, the following proposition:
'Center' is a concept of value, not space, when applied to areas beyond physical containment and comprehension, and all statements related to centrality demonstrate a superiority to the space and area. In other words:
In our maps, we place "You Are Here" at the center. Behind every newscaster on television, the map of the earth or the nation has the home nation or region in the center. This is not due to any denial of the absolute, but an assertion of use over any other consideration. When we turn into astronomers and look at smudges of milk in the sky, see them resolve into stars, and call them galaxies, we map from us. The Milky Way is in the "local group" in the same way that astrophysics is a "modern" science: the adjective, once we examine it, resolves into "us, the people speaking."
I do not want to merely play semantic games, though. I am not going to argue that because we humans look at the universe we're the ones at the center, as that judgment is arising from us, is ours, but rather that the judgment has little meaning without us.
If we posit space expanding or elastic, and if we argue the "end of the universe" at a particular point, then we are still left with a heck of a task in saying what the "middle" of it is. Not to put too fine a point on it, but what is "it" when there is a "nothing?" Isn't a true nothing imperceptible in all ways except mathematical?
Suppose you were with Arthur Dent at the restaurant at the end of the universe. What would you see? You cannot see nothing. You cannot hear nothing, taste nothing, weigh nothing, send a probe into nothing. Since nothing isn't even space or energy, it isn't there. "There" and "then" are meaningless at a nothing, because a true nothing has no actions or sequences (and hence no time). The "end" or "edge" of the universe would, quite literally, not exist except mathematically. (By the way, Douglas Adams was dealing with the death of the universe, not the edge.)
If we were to admit even the slightest logical positivism in here, we'd be reduced to gibbering. What can we affirm? What can we test with external systems?
We have built elaborately on our perceptions of energy, light, and atomic particles, and we have a monument of theory and practice. However, when we begin speaking of edges of infinities, shapes to infinities, we start getting into so many layers of our own subjective coding that we cannot hope to be positive. (Is the universe a sphere or a disk or a doughnut-like torus? Is it reflecting? Is the universe two-dimensional information actually on the edge of space? When we extrapolate these shapes from our perceptions, we're counting on a whole lot of things being right.)
I promised not to argue from semantics or two semantics, but language is implicit in the questions. Once we get to dimensions we cannot experience (Abbot's Flatland suggested, as a practical matter, creatures can only know things with their own dimensions), we're going from pure concept outward. This means that we have to rely upon existing inference, and that means we employ the tokens already in our minds, and those tokens are words.
There is no center to the universe.
To know where the universe is centered requires measurement against limits. If such a thing is possible with confirmation by an outside system for verification (i.e. not based solely upon mathematic extrapolations), then there is still no ability to know how many dimensions need measurement. In other words, if you can run from east to west across the whole universe, and then north to south, and then from up to down, and you can then plot three dimensions, and you can say that the movement of the borders is at a particular rate, then you still don't know if you've captured the necessary or extant dimensions. If old Parminedes was right and "time and motion both are illusions," then I don't even want to talk about how hard it is.
Because the center cannot ever be fixed, it simply cannot ever be. It is like the middle moment in the history of time.
You said "center," so you're it.
I'm critiquing our cosmologies by a very severe standard. By my level of skepticism almost no system of enquiry can stand. If we want knowledge that we can confirm without assumptions built on our subjective perception and social contract, if we want pure language to avoid corruption of question and answer, then we end up with few questions and fewer answers.
In one of my earliest diaries, I wrote about Odo Marquard's notion of "tribunalization" of man. His was a moral critique, but he implicated science directly. Specifically, philosophy (and science cannot get away from it; no matter how much it denounces its older sister as ugly, she's still there with the baby photos) sought to purify itself of the morass of metaphysics and assumption. Mathematics sought to get rid of the reliance on human language as it discovered paradoxes like "The set of all sets" that implied a problem with the conceptual framework of math itself. Marquard felt this long march was part of a fear of expertise that arose when the experts failed to fix the moral problems of modern life.
In other words, the standard I've upheld -- the awareness that we intervene in all our questions, interrupt all the answers, leads us navel gaze, dislike what we find and then crusade against navels. As the awareness that meaning in words is an arbitrary agreement and a social coding led to some deciding that there was no fixed meaning and therefore that free play and revolutionary detournement was an intellectually honest act, the realization never meant progress or remedy.
The truth is that we are at the center of the universe in a very particular way. The Earth is the center of the universe because it is observing the universe, and there is justice in a wise neo-humanism. I do not say "secular humanism," incidentally, because secularism is not political or communally human. When we know the burdens we place on our enquiries and the glories we inaudibly claim every time we ask a question, we can perhaps. . . perhaps be honest, at least for a little while.