Dr. Eric Chaisson, the director of Tufts' Wright Center for Science Education and a research professor at the university, was named the winner of the 2007 Walter P. Kistler Book Award for his 2006 book entitled "Epic of Evolution: Seven Ages of the Cosmos."
Chaisson was selected as the fifth recipient of this honor by the Foundation for the Future, a nonprofit organization established by the award's namesake. Each year the winner is selected from a pool of applicants submitted to the foundation's trustees.
He received his award yesterday at a ceremony held at the University of Washington's Seattle campus.
According to the Foundation for the Future's Director of Programs Sesh Velamoor, the award was created "to recognize an author that makes a subject of science comprehensible to the general public and promotes the understanding of science."
The book must also address topics with the potential to impact the future of humanity. "In all cases, the book award is about a subject area that has implications for the very longterm future, not some 10 years, 20 years [or] 50 years, but hundreds of years, even a thousand," Velamoor said.
A large time expanse is certainly a characteristic of Chaisson's book, which covers the entire history of the universe from the Big Bang to the present day.
"It attempts to understand, frankly, who we are and where we came from, from a scientific perspective," said Chaisson, who managed to consolidate this subject into a 400-page book, which he completed in six months.
"Everything was in my head and I was just able to spill it out quickly onto paper. I think that's what makes the book attractive," he said. "There's an element of spontaneity."
The book, a revision of his earlier work entitled "Cosmic Evolution: The Rise of Complexity in Nature," which was published in 2001, caters to the general public rather than the scientific community.
"It's written in English rather than 'mathematicese,'" Chaisson said. "It in many ways tells a story, a very long scientific story."
According to Chaisson, his work draws from a cosmic evolution class at Harvard which he co-created 30 years ago and has continued to teach ever since.
Despite being the end of the story in its current form, Chaisson said that by no means should humanity as it exists now be considered the grand finale of cosmic evolution.
"We are not the pinnacle nor are we the culmination," he said. "We are probably just a species passing across the arrow of time and there's nothing special or terribly unique about us other than the fact that we are the only known life form that can look back and understand where we came from."
Though our existence has been brief, Chaisson believes we have reached a somewhat precarious position for ourselves as well as our planet.
"Civilization is facing some rough roads ... on planet Earth now," he said. "We're becoming very powerful as a species; we have the ability and the machinery to do a lot of damage to the Earth and ourselves."
The situation, however, is not hopeless. Chaisson believes that taking a cosmic- evolutionary perspective would be a step in the right direction for the betterment of humanity.
"There's a sense of ethics and morality built into this science," he said. "Cosmic evolution helps us to identify a sense of ethics, citizenship, big thinking and small acting."
This morality develops from the sense of the commonality and oneness of humanity fostered by looking at existence from the standpoint of the universe. From this perspective, people can see where they came from and that their origins as humans are the same, he said.
"We have to understand that we aren't just citizens of the U.S., or of France, or of Africa. We are citizens of planet Earth," Chaisson said.
Still, he said there has been an unfortunate tendency to create boundaries which create hostility and division.
"Ask any astronaut, from space there are no boundaries for the countries," Chaisson said. "We put those boundaries there."
These powerful implications for the future are the reasons that Chaisson's book was selected for this award, according to Velamoor. "Unless we now begin to think in terms of ethics that govern our behavior as a species on the planet and as planetary citizens, there are considerable risks for us going forward in the future," he said.
Chaisson said that taking this perspective should be an ongoing process. "We have only appeared in the story very, very recently," he said. "We are just probably in the middle of this great story that is yet to be fully written as time unfolds."
