THE SOUTHWORTH PLANETARIUM
70 Falmouth Street      Portland, Maine 04103
(207) 780-4249      usm.maine.edu/planet
43.6667° N    70.2667° W  Altitude:  10 feet below sea level Founded
January 1970
2021-2022: XCVI
"Shoot for the stars,but if you happen to miss, shoot for the moon instead."
-Neil Armstrong

THE DAILY ASTRONOMER
Thursday, March 24, 2022
Power

From the dark age of pocket sized tape recorders:

"A cataclysm of unknowable origin introducing breadth, depth, length,
duration, radiance, dimension, expansion, inflation, and atomic cohesion
onto utter nothingness.    Spatial extent and temporal progression
prevailing over the immutable oblivion.  And, miraculously, from the
conspiracy of the fundamental forces fragmenting from the unified whole
somehow there arose out of this Hadean tumult not only vague awareness, but
purposeful earnestness, determination in spite of despair, curiosity in
defiance of peril, and the creative imperative that only in a fortunate few
persists undiminished by the ridicule it attracts, the  reproach it earns,
and the aversion it engenders.

"Never will any astronomical text book ever phrase it in quite that way, my
young, naive, impressionable, often foolish, young friends.   I refer to
you in that manner because I consider it a point of honor to always speak
honestly and I know, in retrospect, that my own behaviors when young were
often foolhardy, generally irrational and predicated on my utter ignorance
of the world and all its works.   If my lectures prove bothersome and
offensive then, by all means, bring your concerns to the Dean's attention.
He'll merely smile faintly at you while thanking you for your concerns.
And, when he is alone, or, at least in the company of his beleaguered
administrative assistant, he will merely rub his eyes under his glasses,
murmur,  "that stupid (censored) has tenure" and then will hastily tend to
matters over which he can at least exercise a modicum of his influence.

"The Dean, your parents, and most assuredly you would most likely prefer
that I teach you the fundamentals of astronomy without what you might
consider lavish ornamentation.   The fact, which some would ignorantly
repudiate, is that my presentations are not nearly lavish enough.   They
are to actual astronomy what the cosmic microwave background is to the
Universe itself, a faint and scarcely perceptible echo.    True, undiluted
astronomy is beyond our scope.  It is the divine, incandescent outburst of
flame  that consumed Semele when she first beheld Zeus in his natural form;
the ether that exhilarated and discombobulated Patheon when he infiltrated
the domain of his father Helios Hyperion.        In this class we are as
tourists gathering around the Stonehenge blue stones long after the
centuries of neglect  wicked away the last vestiges of sorcery and
mysticism from them.  I strive, perhaps in vain, to encapsulate even an
iota of the miracle and majesty of what has transpired before this month
and what shall occur billions, if not trillions of years in the time not
yet experienced.

"Astronomy is now and forever has been about power.  The sheer potency of
that creation that we can never fully understand.    All we can do is
marvel at its magnificence and endeavor to comprehend its mechanisms.
 We don't even fully know what compels us to engage in this contemplation.
    It is all profoundly mysterious and all the more compelling for that.

"So,  the Universe, meaning all time, space, matter, energy and all the
components comprising us and our physical reality, arose billions of years
ago. The cosmologists are now saying 13.8 billion, but you can be well
assured they'll change that value when interpretations of subsequent
observations induce them to modify it.    The notion of a beginning was an
anathema to early 20th century astronomers, most of whom were committed to
the view that the cosmos was literally eternal.  Always in existence.
The advent of the 100 inch Hooker Telescope, the principal instrument at
Mount Wilson Observatory, permitted the gifted observer Edwin Hubble to
both ascertain that some of the bodies once regarded as "nebulae," were
objects outside of our galaxy and that many of them appeared to be receding
rapidly away from our own.   Humans, being conditioned since the
pre-Ptolemaic era to indulge in exaggerated self-importance, initially
assumed that the Milky Way occupied a special center of the Universe and
all external objects moved in accordance to it.   We recall that Earth
occupied such a central position in our own solar system until Copernicus
wrested it away from this undeserved station.          Fortunately, this
delusion of galactic predominance was short lived and astronomers soon came
to realize that the Universe was expanding in all directions.     Moreover,
the recession velocity was proportional to distance, so that the more
distant galaxies were found to move more quickly than those closest to us.
    From these observations arose the concept of a specific beginning.

"We attribute this model, now called the 'Big Bang,' to the Belgian
priest/astronomer Georges Lemaitre. Many astronomers took issue with this
theory merely on secular grounds, for they felt that Dr. Lemaitre was
attempting to impose Biblical sensibilities on the fundamental issue of
reality itself.     He was moving through General Relativity to Genesis.
      These concerns were soon allayed when further observational evidence
corroborated this theory and notion of space-time's inception came to the
fore, where it still remains.

"More's the pity, actually, for this notion is so profound and paradigm
shattering that it should leave us in a state of astounded stupefaction.
 Instead, we tiredly inscribe the facts in our notebooks so on test day we
can dutifully provide the correct responses, receive the credit, and then,
maybe, retain a trace of this class in the mind as nothing more than a
vague and rapidly fading memory....

Professor MacGregor violently pounded the table.

"Do you know what just happened?!"

Yeah, I woke up.

"No, I know you don't know what happened.  What happened was that a small
portion of the primordial energies that have persisted through time just
became audible.      The knock of the hand against table surface, which, at
base, is merely a photon exchange between the ghostly electronic structure
of my hand and that of the table, was the Big Bang made audible.   The
kinetic energy of the hand strike made possible by the consumption of food
stores manufactured fundamentally by plant conversion of sunlight into
nutrients.  That sunlight generated in the roiling infernal core where
hydrogen nuclei fused to form helium and in the process transmuted a minute
portion of its material into the fundamental energy from which had long
since crystallized.    The Big Bang emits minor echoes with every foot fall
in a corridor, every assault of waves against coastal rock forms, every
spasm of lightning and subsequent percussion of thunder.

"Astronomy is not telling you that the Universe formed 13.8 billion years
ago and that the Sun is 93 million miles away and that Jupiter is the
largest world and please remember these facts for your next examination.
  Astronomy is murmuring sibylline incantations so subtle and cryptic that
even a race as intensely alive as humans required thousands of years to
even begin to decipher them through the deeper scrutiny of starlight.
When we shelved the mythologies and cultivated the science we came to the
realization that what was born 13.8 billion years ago was existence,
itself.  A prodigiously powerful, deeply enigmatic inception of a reality
more wondrous and staggeringly fantastic that even we humans for all our
cleverness could have possibly conceived.

"And, mind you, my young friends, that you are all part of it.   Even if
you leave this class with the determination to not waste one more  second
of your all too precious life thinking about any of these ideas, you cannot
ever be divorced from the cosmos that formed the star dust comprising not
only your body, but the intricate lattice work of your mind       Astronomy
is not telling you that you live on the third planet.  Astronomy is telling
you that you are fully, wholly, profoundly and powerfully alive: and
endowed with the elemental vitality that pervades our world.     We were
all born out of star fire....and how privileged we are to be witness to
that great astronomical epiphany.....

"Now, when we seek to.......what's that noise?!   Is someone snoring?!
How gratifying it is to hold such sway over the audience.  Ah, there's the
genius, himself....fast asleep....You, could you do me the kindness of
snapping off that fool's tape recorder?   Thank you kindly.   Fact is, that
over the next fifteen minutes I will be rattling off information that will
appear quite prominently in the mid-term and....."


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