Emergent Structure: the First Two Centuries of the First Two Eons

“Early” maps of the cosmos included the 26th dynasty air god Shu supporting the sky goddess Nut above the earth god Geb, Descartes' Voronoi tesselation, William Herschel's star gauging, and Carl Charlier's 1922 plot of the nebulae in NGC, which he intended as observational support for the fractal nature of large scale cosmic structure (about which he was probably wrong, though right about there being more than one level of clustering). Because Shapley, van Maanen, and others were still denying the very existence of external galaxies at the same time that Lundmark and Opik were measuring their distances and masses and Charlier plotting hierarchies, the story of the discovery of very large scale structure (and streaming) in the universe cannot be told in perfectly linear fashion. There are, however, half a dozen or so discrete phases that can be recognized and three underlying themes, (1) expanding horizons, (2) additional levels of structure, and (3) increasing mediocrity of our vantage point.