Science
Friday, December 05, 2003
No Words to Describe It.
Although I majored in religious studies in College, I found that the most spiritually inspiring class was Astronomy 101: Stars, Galaxies and Cosmology. Each class was a slide show of the most beautiful photography available to the human race, and each picture dared us to believe that such massive and beautiful things could exist.
Possibly the best-known astronomer in America was Carl Sagan. He crafted words which brought the universe down to the earth for anyone to understand. Through him, the vast complexity of the heavens seemed at once awesome and intimate. His sensitivity to the beauty of the universe had a very spiritual quality. It moved him in his soul, and he was able to make it move others the same way.
In the film Contact, based on Sagan’s novel of the same name, Jodie Foster’s lead character is able to go out and meet the universe on humanity’s behalf. There is a moment in which we watch her as her watery eyes gaze into the stars, and she exclaims in a shocked breath, “Some celestial event… no… no words to describe it!... Poetry!... They should have sent a poet! So beautiful!... beautiful!.... I had no idea!”
Until now, I have found only one artist whose portrayal of the stars—indeed, with no words to describe them—adequately reflects the wonder of Carl Sagan’s vision. His work is so astounding that it makes me wonder: perhaps they should have sent a painter.
Greg Martin depicts planets colliding with one another, stars peeking out from behind the worlds, and nebulas erupting with color. He confronts you with the beauty of a world’s destruction, and seems to stop time at sudden moments of light in the ageless darkness of the universe.
Both Carl Sagan and Greg Martin have been able to see the human spirit reflected in the sky. Each burst of light is at once the brief span of a human life, and all the timeless potential with which it is endowed.
Wednesday, November 26, 2003
Depends on Your Point of View
What if you could see all the world’s sunsets and all the world’s sunrises—all at the same time? Such a thing is possible, if you travel to the moon on May 4, 2004. On that day, the earth will eclipse the sun, and the only sunlight reaching the moon will pass through the keyhole of the earth’s atmosphere. The air will scatter the blue light down to the earth, but the red light will make its way back into space, and, from an earthly point of view, will dye the moon with the color of blood.
But from the perspective of someone on the moon, our planet will have a red and gold ring of hope around it, which, for just a moment, will let you see all the world’s sunsets on the west side of the earth, and all the world’s sunrises on the east. You could consider yourself united with millions of lonely poets and happy lovers on earth, finding a home for their heart in that sight.
No one has yet photographed this event from the moon. We can only gaze up and wonder what someone there might see if they were gazing back at us.
Science • Way of Life • Optimism • (53) Trackbacks • Permalink
Wednesday, November 12, 2003
Where is Your Home?
My home is a floating speck of dust. If you concentrate closely on this photograph, you’ll see it roughly in the center of a golden beam of light—just a pale blue dot. I live on that dot.
I am obviously very small… smaller than you might think. Small enough, if you can believe it, that billions of creatures just like me all live here on this same little dot—with plenty of space left over!
All this extra space is just crawling with other kinds of life, too; and most of them even smaller than we are! In fact, life seems to appear everywhere here. Every moment, we breathe in hundreds of life forms even smaller to us than this dot is to you.
But the problem is that even though my home is so small, it seems really big to most of my fellow creatures. They fight all the time over who controls different parts of this place… and all this fighting means that we don’t share things. Hundreds of millions of us have to go hungry even though there’s plenty of food, or get sick even though there’s plenty of medicine.
Some say that much of this little dot is going to be more or less unusable in just a few of our short life-spans. They point out, quite rightly, that we’re all stuck here. Together. And the thought of that just terrifies them.
But to me, it’s just that terror which causes all these problems. Our dot is not a cage, it’s a home, and the people who live here are a family. If more of us could see this picture of our home like you do, as a small point of light, perhaps more of us would start to think of it as just one place—one home, each and every pixel of it belonging to all of us at once.
It is our tiny, priceless jewel in the mist.
Monday, November 10, 2003
The Color of the Wind
We see color in the wind just as we see meaning in our lives.
Wind, as we usually experience it, has no color of its own—it simply reveals to us the color of whatever passes through it, whether that be your face or mine, blowing sand or leaves, springtime clouds or sheets of rain.
In the same way, a life’s value comes from the thoughts, actions and spiritual qualities which we allow to pass through it. “True loss,” it has been said, “is for him whose days have been spent in utter ignorance of his self.”
But the air itself can be bright as well. The whole sky shines with the scattered light of the sun. If it is seen over long distances, as in the Grand Canyon, the mass of air will make distant red stones appear blue. In fact, any molecules in the universe have a color of their own as long as they move light around, each one in its own way.
My mind shivers with awe to consider that even the wind has a color, that if you look deeply enough even into the blackest corner of the night sky, you will find the brilliance of billions of galaxies, as well as all the stars, worlds, and peoples that must inhabit them.
Perhaps, behind all the darkness of our small and mortal lives, there is a mysterious brightness, an inherent beauty like that of the sky, which all souls, whether good or bad, must ultimately reflect.
Science • Way of Life • Optimism • (37) Trackbacks • Permalink
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