  "The Center is Everywhere" is a sculpture by Josiah McElheny, currently
(through October 14, 2012) on exhibit at the Institute of Contemporary Art,
Boston. The sculpture is based on data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
(SDSS), using hundreds of glass crystals and lamps suspended from brass rods to
represent the three-dimensional structure mapped by the SDSS through one of its
2000+ spectroscopic plugplates. This article describes the scientific ideas
behind this sculpture, emphasizing the principle of the statistical homogeneity
of cosmic structure in the presence of local complexity. The title of the
sculpture is inspired by the work of the French revolutionary Louis Auguste
Blanqui, whose 1872 book "Eternity Through The Stars: An Astronomical
Hypothesis" was the first to raise the spectre of the infinite replicas
expected in an infinite, statistically homogeneous universe. Puzzles of
infinities, probabilities, and replicas continue to haunt modern fiction and
contemporary discussions of inflationary cosmology.
