A new book acquired by the Thammasat University library should interest students who are researching world history, civilization, philosophy, cosmology, human evolution, economics, biology, astronomy, and biocomplexity. Origin Story: A Big History of Everything is shelved in the General Stacks of the Puey Ungphakorn Library, Rangsit Campus. It is by Professor David Christian, who teaches in the History Department of Macquarie University  in Sydney, Australia.

Professor Christian is director of the Big History Institute. This is a center for studying world history on a very large scale. As its website explains:

The Big History Institute is a global hub for the field of Big History.

• Our innovative educational, research, and outreach initiatives work to advance Big History around the world.
• Big History connects knowledge. Big History tells the story of the universe from the Big Bang to our complex modern societies by drawing on insights from disciplines such as astronomy, physics, biology, archaeology, history, and economics.
• Big History empowers students by showing how different knowledge disciplines are connected, and helps them reflect on the big questions: Why does our universe exist? Where do we come from? What challenges will the future hold for our planet and ourselves?
• Big History enables scholars to pursue research questions across disciplinary boundaries, and offers fascinating possibilities to test new ways of thinking. Big History provides a powerful framework to address complex real-world problems.

Professor Christian earned a Ph.D. in modern history from Oxford University, United Kingdom. At first Professor Christian focused on Russian history, before taking up the subject of the entire world. To develop a study plan for his Big History approach for students aged five to eighteen, he worked with twenty professors from different fields of study.

The course have been popular in several nations, including South Korea. Bill Gates, the principal founder of Microsoft Corporation, has taken an interest in the Big History approach and is funding its distribution to high schools around the world. A free website for the Big History Project (BHP) sponsored by Bill Gates explains that its goal is to deliver

• a big picture look at the world, and helps students develop a framework to organize what they’re learning both in and out of school. After they leave your class, students will have a better understanding of how we got here, where we’re going, and how they fit in. It’s a place that was 13.8 billion years in the making.
• Free, open, and online. All lessons are instantly accessible, evaluated and updated regularly, highly customizable, and free to learners and educators everywhere. More than 1,600 teachers and 80,000 students are teaching and taking the course each year. Here are just a few sample course plans.
• Skills-focused approach. Engaged students learn and retain more. BHP students develop a set of intellectual tools that help them think critically, tie together big ideas, and build informed arguments—and practice these skills across disciplines.

Origin Story: A Big History of Everything uses this approach to discuss subjects astrobiology to behavioral economics in terms of the story of the universe. Some TU students may think that Big Bang is just the name for a South Korean boy band and The Big Bang Theory is an American comedy show on television.

TU students of science know that the Big Bang Theory states that the universe started as a single point and stretched until it had expanded to the size it is now. The name big bang was invented by Professor Fred Hoyle, a British physicist who did not agree that this was the way the universe started. Professor Hoyle felt it was not likely that the universe began all of a sudden, with a bang. Instead, he believed in a different theory.

The TU Library owns books by Fred Hoyle, so students can make up their own minds whether his arguments are convincing. Two of Professor Hoyle’s books are shelved in the Adul Wichiencharoen Room, Pridi Banomyong Library. They were generously donated to the TU Library by Ajarn Adul Wichiencharoen, former rector of Thammasat University. The TU Library also owns a science fiction novel coauthored by Professor Hoyle. It is shelved in the Fiction Stacks of the Pridi Banomyong Library.

Among the conclusions of Origin Story are that the creation of life in the universe required a combination of conditions. Then, over 3 billion years, life evolved from single to multicellular organisms: “So much could have gone wrong,” Professor Christian notes. In an online interview, he explains why he developed a global approach to teaching history:

What we learn is that school is not about meaning; it’s about a whole series of technicalities or fragmentary bits of meaning. At no point does someone try to help you put them all together. Then you go to university and you think, at university at least there will be philosophers. Same thing happens. We all get used to this. We all get locked into this culture of specialization, which is so deeply embedded in education and research. People’s egos are tied up with it. You define yourself as a specialist in this area or another. Students loved this course because of the questions we were asking. And the questions we were asking were those questions: What is your place in the cosmos? What is the cosmos of which you are a part? Are you a large part of it? Are you central? Are you marginal? Is there anything distinctive about humans? Gradually, over the years I’ve come to believe that modern science contains rich answers to a lot of those questions. We can say to students, “These are great questions. We won’t be able to give you perfect answers or complete answers, but we can take you a long way. Modern science can take you a long, long way as you pursue those questions.” That’s what we try to do in the Big History courses.       

Instead of putting together a history about the achievements of noteworthy individuals, Professor Christian preferred a story about many different kinds of objects and how they affected life:

We tell it—this is just a convenience—across eight thresholds of increasing complexity. The first is the Big Bang itself, the creation of the universe. The second is the creation of stars. Once you have stars, already the universe has much more diversity. Stars have structure; galaxies have structure. You now have rich gradients of energy, of density, of gravity, so you’ve got flows of energy that can now build more complex things. Dying stars give you the next threshold, which is creating a universe with all of the elements of the periodic table, so it’s now chemically richer. You can now make new materials. You can make the materials of planets, moons, and asteroids. On some planets, particularly rocky planets, you get an astonishing chemical diversity. The reason is because most of the hydrogen and helium from the inner solar system was driven away by the solar wind. In the inner planets you’re left with an environment that’s remarkably chemically rich, and that’s the environment that eventually gave birth to life on this planet. The odds are increasing that the universe is crawling with life.          

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)