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....."
To subscribe or unsubscribe from the Daily Astronomer: