{Crab Nebula as seen by the Hubble telescope: Credit: NASA, ESA, J. Hester and A. Loll}
A break from social figuring-- which is important at our scale, but can be eclipsing of bigger (and smaller) pictures...
I was listening to the radio last night on a quick trip to the video store and the subject was The Big Bang. I love when something like that shakes and flips your whole mind into wonder at the crazy world that we nonchalantly live inside. A very centrally agreed-upon concept, cosmologically, is that the universe that we know started from a single dense dense dense (I'm so scientific) point. Instantaneously, at one moment, there was an enormous explosion. You all know this, but just think of it! Look around at the wild diversity of objects and materials and communication and and and (ad infinitum) imagine that it all advanced from a SINGLE moment-- all energy contained within that one blast, and now we see energy transferred in endless ways, making and breaking and being remade to become the planet and solar system and galaxy and universe that we call "home." That we can call anything by any name is ridiculously miraculous.
posted by gala @ 11:49 AM
3 Comments:
oh, YES. after i watched "the elegant universe" on pbs a couple of years ago i walked around in a super string theory haze for two months. it was the only thing i would talk about. but it proves, beyond anything else (to me), everything is the product of science and whimsy. i mean really you can't beat that.
in my view, the science and whimsy are crafted and directed and cared-for by a wild and mysterious author, which brings me into a sort of adoration as well; but that takes us into theological territory...
in any case, if we agree on the astounding nature of it all, we're in good stride!
astounding indeed!
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