My friend Joey was asking me what I thought of the space program. Was I for it, or did I think it was a waste of money that could be put to better use here on planet Earth. I told him I was very much for it, but I have to say, I'm not that enthusiastic about all this exploration of the planet Mars.
Curiosity has now been deposited safely on the planet's surface -- certainly no mean accomplish-ment. Imagine: the NASA folk were able to build and direct by remote control a space ship that would travel over 100 million miles and then gently deposit the latest rover on the surface of another planet. Very impressive indeed.
But...for what purpose? To see if they can find more and better evidence that there may have been life on that planet at one time. But I can't see the point in that. If there was any form of life in some distant past, it was certainly in the microbial category. Finding evidence of that is hardly going to answer the question that they keep mentioning in the newscasts these days: are we alone? We already know we are alone in our own solar system, as far as life forms in any way approaching our own go. We have to look way, way beyond our own backyard, so to speak, to find the answer to that big, looming question. And I personally think that is what we should be spending those billions of dollars, and all that scientific know-how, on: developing ways to get beyond our solar system. That and figuring out ways to colonize those foreign bodies within our solar system where humans could possibly live, in a controlled environment, since our own planet is rapidly becoming too crowded.
After all, humans have always moved on when the area where they were became too crowded -- not enough resources to support their numbers -- have always explored what was over that rise, beyond those mountains, across that sea. I feel space exploration is just an extension of that, though it is far more difficult, and expensive, than crossing those mountains or that sea. But I don't think we should be wasting our time trying to figure out if there was some primitive form of life on Mars -- or anywhere else -- once upon a time. What is the place like now? What would it take for humans to be able to land on these places, and spend any time on them?
President Obama's space exploration policy, which he outlined in 2008, includes the statement that he "endorses the goal of sending human missions to the Moon by 2020, as a precursor in an orderly progression to missions to more distant destinations, including Mars." So do I. Let's get on with it.
Showing posts with label science. Show all posts
Showing posts with label science. Show all posts
Monday, August 6, 2012
Monday, June 27, 2011
Life's little mysteries
O.K., here's a physics problem for you. I have a small coffee percolator that my mother bought once when she came to visit and discovered I did not have a coffee pot (this was during the time when Micheal and I were separated, since Micheal was as heavy a coffee drinker as my mother, and when we were together there was always a coffee pot in the house). Anyway, I've kept it over the years, even though I didn't drink coffee, for any visitors who might.
In the past year I have become a coffee drinker, despite the fact that I fear it doesn't really agree with my insides. I discovered it worked better than anything else, including my old standbys, a diet coke and a candy bar, at making me wake up when all I want to do is put my head down and go to sleep. So sometimes I buy coffee at the Dunkin Donuts on the way to work, or sometimes I'll stop at Slates Bakery, around the corner from the library in Hallowell, and get a cup there. And when I'm feeling frugal and can make myself do it, I make a pot at home.
Which takes me to the problem, although it isn't really a problem. More a minor annoyance, and a mystery. I put the five cups of water in the thing, the five tablespoons of coffee in the filter, set it on the stove, turn on the heat...and in a minute or two the whole thing is rattling like we're in the middle of an earthquake. I have to hold onto the handle for about five minutes, until just before it starts perking, or the shaking and rattling will drive me crazy. A short time before it starts perking, it stops shaking.
So why does it do this? I don't remember ever seeing another percolator heating up on top of a stove do this. I've thought, maybe it's that the cold bottom of the pot meets the heated burner, and until the former heats up to match the latter, it shakes. But that still doesn't tell me why. And besides, one puts cold sauce pans onto burners that are initially hotter than they are all the time, and the pans do not shake, rattle and roll. I would very much appreciate an explanation! Thanks.
In the past year I have become a coffee drinker, despite the fact that I fear it doesn't really agree with my insides. I discovered it worked better than anything else, including my old standbys, a diet coke and a candy bar, at making me wake up when all I want to do is put my head down and go to sleep. So sometimes I buy coffee at the Dunkin Donuts on the way to work, or sometimes I'll stop at Slates Bakery, around the corner from the library in Hallowell, and get a cup there. And when I'm feeling frugal and can make myself do it, I make a pot at home.
Which takes me to the problem, although it isn't really a problem. More a minor annoyance, and a mystery. I put the five cups of water in the thing, the five tablespoons of coffee in the filter, set it on the stove, turn on the heat...and in a minute or two the whole thing is rattling like we're in the middle of an earthquake. I have to hold onto the handle for about five minutes, until just before it starts perking, or the shaking and rattling will drive me crazy. A short time before it starts perking, it stops shaking.
So why does it do this? I don't remember ever seeing another percolator heating up on top of a stove do this. I've thought, maybe it's that the cold bottom of the pot meets the heated burner, and until the former heats up to match the latter, it shakes. But that still doesn't tell me why. And besides, one puts cold sauce pans onto burners that are initially hotter than they are all the time, and the pans do not shake, rattle and roll. I would very much appreciate an explanation! Thanks.
Monday, March 14, 2011
On the other hand...
In my last posting I was urging people who hadn't read it to read Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. However, I do have to mention some of the bad news the book conveys. It seems especially relevant given last Friday's earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Coming on the heals of the earthquakes in Haiti and Chili last year, as well as the eruptions of two of Indonesia's active volcanoes (Mount Karangetang erupted again a few hours after the earthquake/tsunami in Japan)...well, there's just no question that the earth beneath our feet is in turmoil. And we can't do a damn thing about it.
There are two unsettling scenarios Bryson discusses in his book. The one has to do with the "hot spot" located beneath Yellowstone National Park. That hot spot is what produces all those spouting geysers and bubbling mud cauldrons that so fascinate visitors. Alas, what it basically is is a volcano, waiting to erupt big time. In fact, it's considered a supervolcano, because the magma chamber deep below the surface is huge, about 45 miles across, or pretty much the size of the park. The park, in other words, visited by thousands of people every year, is the caldera of an active volcano.
There are other "superplumes" on earth -- about thirty -- but the one beneath Yellowstone is the only one that does not lie below the sea (a number of volcanically active, and inhabited, islands -- Hawaii, Iceland, the Azores, the Canary Islands -- do sit atop such superplumes). So when it blows, which it has done about every 600,000 years, it affects a huge area of land. And that land now has lots of people living on it, unlike 630,000 years ago, which is yes, the last time it erupted. In other words, Yellowstone is overdue.
Which makes me want to get there for a visit as fast as I can, before it goes. But which also calls into question my insistence that people who live in dangerous places should just get the heck out of there (see Note of Feb. 1, 2009). For it would seem that there is no safe place. Those ranchers out there in Wyoming and Montana, I'm sure they figure they live in a pretty safe place. Brutal winters, but no hurricanes, no drowning sea coast, no earthquakes, no volcanoes.
And even if you live nowhere near Yellowstone National Park, you could be adversely affected by an eruption as far away as eastern Nebraska. That's where the fossilized remains of a whole slew of animals were found in what is now called Ashfall Fossil Beds State Park. They were buried under ten feet of ash, and had died from breathing in air full of ash. The ash fall from the last eruption covered nearly the whole of the United States west of the Mississippi. And there's no telling how long the volcanic winter from such an eruption would last. This is not a pretty picture.
So what are ya gonna do? You realize you have to "Don't worry, be happy," as the old song put it, because there is nothing you can do to prevent Yellowstone from blowing up...or a meteorite from hitting the earth, another unpleasant possibility Bryson investigates in his book. After all, meteorites have been plowing into the earth for millions of years; why shouldn't it happen again? But now the earth is full of people, and the impact of a meteorite the size of the one that hit what is now Manson, Iowa, about 75,000 years ago, would be devastating for a thousand miles in all directions. Bryson's description of "devastating" -- provided to him by geologists -- is pretty darn scary. Which starts me on another train of thought. Maybe we really need to be pumping money into space exploration, so that we can find some places for the human race to spread out, in case this little globe of ours becomes just plumb uninhabitable.
There are two unsettling scenarios Bryson discusses in his book. The one has to do with the "hot spot" located beneath Yellowstone National Park. That hot spot is what produces all those spouting geysers and bubbling mud cauldrons that so fascinate visitors. Alas, what it basically is is a volcano, waiting to erupt big time. In fact, it's considered a supervolcano, because the magma chamber deep below the surface is huge, about 45 miles across, or pretty much the size of the park. The park, in other words, visited by thousands of people every year, is the caldera of an active volcano.
There are other "superplumes" on earth -- about thirty -- but the one beneath Yellowstone is the only one that does not lie below the sea (a number of volcanically active, and inhabited, islands -- Hawaii, Iceland, the Azores, the Canary Islands -- do sit atop such superplumes). So when it blows, which it has done about every 600,000 years, it affects a huge area of land. And that land now has lots of people living on it, unlike 630,000 years ago, which is yes, the last time it erupted. In other words, Yellowstone is overdue.
Which makes me want to get there for a visit as fast as I can, before it goes. But which also calls into question my insistence that people who live in dangerous places should just get the heck out of there (see Note of Feb. 1, 2009). For it would seem that there is no safe place. Those ranchers out there in Wyoming and Montana, I'm sure they figure they live in a pretty safe place. Brutal winters, but no hurricanes, no drowning sea coast, no earthquakes, no volcanoes.
And even if you live nowhere near Yellowstone National Park, you could be adversely affected by an eruption as far away as eastern Nebraska. That's where the fossilized remains of a whole slew of animals were found in what is now called Ashfall Fossil Beds State Park. They were buried under ten feet of ash, and had died from breathing in air full of ash. The ash fall from the last eruption covered nearly the whole of the United States west of the Mississippi. And there's no telling how long the volcanic winter from such an eruption would last. This is not a pretty picture.
So what are ya gonna do? You realize you have to "Don't worry, be happy," as the old song put it, because there is nothing you can do to prevent Yellowstone from blowing up...or a meteorite from hitting the earth, another unpleasant possibility Bryson investigates in his book. After all, meteorites have been plowing into the earth for millions of years; why shouldn't it happen again? But now the earth is full of people, and the impact of a meteorite the size of the one that hit what is now Manson, Iowa, about 75,000 years ago, would be devastating for a thousand miles in all directions. Bryson's description of "devastating" -- provided to him by geologists -- is pretty darn scary. Which starts me on another train of thought. Maybe we really need to be pumping money into space exploration, so that we can find some places for the human race to spread out, in case this little globe of ours becomes just plumb uninhabitable.
Sunday, March 13, 2011
As Merlin would say...
All my life I have been a lover of the arts. I am at my happiest looking at art, listening to all kinds of music, watching a ballet or other forms of dance, attending the opera, or a good play. And of course I'm a writer and a librarian, a lover of language, books.
But I have long been fascinated by science as well. I often have a hard time understanding scientific concepts, but I still find them fascinating. For example, in my college physics class I could not wrap my mind around the idea that "for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction." My physics teacher used the example of a brick wall -- you lean against a brick wall, bringing the pressure of your weight against it, and at the same time it is pressing back, to the same degree. "Come on," I said, "It's not doing anything! It's just standing there!"
What all this has to do with is the book I am currently reading and enjoying enormously: Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. As with most books I finally get around to reading, most other people have long since read it (this one was published in 2003). Nonetheless, if you haven't read it I can recommend it if you're in the mood to refresh your knowledge about this or that aspect of the physical universe, from the cosmically large, to the infinitesimally small, as well as to learn one or two (or 15 or 20) completely new things, all while being entertained by Bryson's cheerfully wry way of writing.
While I've been amazed many times over by what I've been learning, or reminded of, I think the most mind-boggling has to do with the world of the teeny tiny, of particle physics. It's on a par with the concept of "deep time" that I found so challenging when reading a book on dinosaurs not long ago (See Note of Nov. 20, 2010). And by the way, Bryson also touches on those incomprehensibly long stretches of time, in his sections on fossils and evolution.
Of course we all learned about atoms in grade school: the teeny tiny particles that make up all matter, and consist of a positively-charged nucleus surrounded by swirling, negatively-charged electrons. (Apparently that image, created in 1904 by a Japanese physicist who was more or less guessing, is "completely wrong, but durable just the same.")* We learned it, but did we really grasp the significance? I can't see the individual atoms that go to make up this penny I'm looking at, but since it's very old (pre-1984) it is made up of about 28,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000 atoms of copper. Clinging to each other, to form a thing. And all of those atoms have smaller parts. The nucleus of an atom, for example, is "only one millionth of a billionth of the full volume of the atom."* How do I think about that?
Or about the idea of "all but massless neutrinos" that zoom out from the sun and bombard the earth constantly (about 10,000 trillion trillion of them a second!), most of them passing right through you, me, and the planet itself? There are these things passing through me constantly, that have some mass, even if they are "all but massless?" This is like the approximately one trillion bacteria grazing on my skin, "about a hundred thousand of them on every square centimeter of skin,"* feasting on my dry skin cells, as well as the oils my body exudes. You have to assume at some point someone has looked at a square centimeter of skin and seen -- with what kind of amazing instrument? -- all those thousands of bacteria doing their thing.
Which takes me to such statements as: "'Given an adequate supply of nutrients, a single bacterial cell can generate 280,000 billion individuals in a single day,' says biochemist Christian de Duve."* In the same period, a human cell is doing good to divide once. My goodness, can anyone doubt that bacteria will inherit the earth? Especially since they can live anywhere, in virtually any kind of environment, while we delicate-flower humans are confined to a tiny area that supplies what we need for survival.
So fascinating, learning this stuff. It brings to mind a quote from one of my all-time favorite books: The Once and Future King, by T.H. White:
"The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting." You bet.
*Bryson, Bill. A Short History of Nearly Everything. New York: Broadway Books, 2003.
But I have long been fascinated by science as well. I often have a hard time understanding scientific concepts, but I still find them fascinating. For example, in my college physics class I could not wrap my mind around the idea that "for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction." My physics teacher used the example of a brick wall -- you lean against a brick wall, bringing the pressure of your weight against it, and at the same time it is pressing back, to the same degree. "Come on," I said, "It's not doing anything! It's just standing there!"
What all this has to do with is the book I am currently reading and enjoying enormously: Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. As with most books I finally get around to reading, most other people have long since read it (this one was published in 2003). Nonetheless, if you haven't read it I can recommend it if you're in the mood to refresh your knowledge about this or that aspect of the physical universe, from the cosmically large, to the infinitesimally small, as well as to learn one or two (or 15 or 20) completely new things, all while being entertained by Bryson's cheerfully wry way of writing.
While I've been amazed many times over by what I've been learning, or reminded of, I think the most mind-boggling has to do with the world of the teeny tiny, of particle physics. It's on a par with the concept of "deep time" that I found so challenging when reading a book on dinosaurs not long ago (See Note of Nov. 20, 2010). And by the way, Bryson also touches on those incomprehensibly long stretches of time, in his sections on fossils and evolution.
Of course we all learned about atoms in grade school: the teeny tiny particles that make up all matter, and consist of a positively-charged nucleus surrounded by swirling, negatively-charged electrons. (Apparently that image, created in 1904 by a Japanese physicist who was more or less guessing, is "completely wrong, but durable just the same.")* We learned it, but did we really grasp the significance? I can't see the individual atoms that go to make up this penny I'm looking at, but since it's very old (pre-1984) it is made up of about 28,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000 atoms of copper. Clinging to each other, to form a thing. And all of those atoms have smaller parts. The nucleus of an atom, for example, is "only one millionth of a billionth of the full volume of the atom."* How do I think about that?
Or about the idea of "all but massless neutrinos" that zoom out from the sun and bombard the earth constantly (about 10,000 trillion trillion of them a second!), most of them passing right through you, me, and the planet itself? There are these things passing through me constantly, that have some mass, even if they are "all but massless?" This is like the approximately one trillion bacteria grazing on my skin, "about a hundred thousand of them on every square centimeter of skin,"* feasting on my dry skin cells, as well as the oils my body exudes. You have to assume at some point someone has looked at a square centimeter of skin and seen -- with what kind of amazing instrument? -- all those thousands of bacteria doing their thing.
Which takes me to such statements as: "'Given an adequate supply of nutrients, a single bacterial cell can generate 280,000 billion individuals in a single day,' says biochemist Christian de Duve."* In the same period, a human cell is doing good to divide once. My goodness, can anyone doubt that bacteria will inherit the earth? Especially since they can live anywhere, in virtually any kind of environment, while we delicate-flower humans are confined to a tiny area that supplies what we need for survival.
So fascinating, learning this stuff. It brings to mind a quote from one of my all-time favorite books: The Once and Future King, by T.H. White:
"The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting." You bet.
*Bryson, Bill. A Short History of Nearly Everything. New York: Broadway Books, 2003.
Saturday, November 20, 2010
Former masters of the earth
I have been trying to plough my way through Dinosaur Odyssey: Fossil Threads in the Web of Life, by Scott D. Sampson. I am as fascinated by dinosaurs as any 10-year-old boy, but while the book is certainly interesting, and informative, it is also pretty heavy going, at least partly because of all the mind-numbing words like ornitho-mimosaurs, hadrosaurs, ceratopsids, not to mention all the proper scientific names of particular species -- Deinonychus, Tenontosaurus, Coelophysis. I never realized there were so many.
There are a number of concepts I've had a hard time wrapping my mind around, the biggest being that of "deep time." The (approximately) 4.54 billion years the earth has been around, that's an example of deep time. The "160 million-year tenure of dinosaurs," that's deep time. We're not talking a hundred years, not a thousand years, or even ten thousand years -- the approximate length of time human society for which we have plentiful evidence has been around -- we're not even talking about 4.4 million years, which is about how old the oldest humanoid (not human) remains thus far found have been. The last of the dinosaurs died out about 65 million years ago (that's 10,000 x 10 x 65), and this was at the end of their "160 million-year tenure." How can I possibly think intelligently about that kind of time span? And how can self-destructive humans ever hope to compete with that record for longevity?
Of course, they weren't all the same dinosaur species during that 160-million-year stretch. Just as in the more recent past, species came and went, evolved and died out, due to one cause or another. I never thought about that, but living creatures are certainly going to change, evolve, over that long a time span.
Another idea I have trouble with is that the birds of today are the descendents of a certain group of dinosaurs (interestingly, not the flying kind, like pterosaurs, but "small, carnivorous dinosaurs [that] found a way to be-come airborne," and that "managed to eke through the extinction bottleneck that brought an end to the Mesozoic." Admittedly, if you sit and watch a bunch of birds, you can spy very predatory and rapacious be-havior, but that's the closest to anything dinosaur-like that you can easily detect. But at least I'm glad to learn that no one is claiming that birds are the descendents of T-Rex.
One very interesting and highly plausible idea Sampson has introduced me to is that the weird horns/stiff neck "ruffles"/rooster-like crests/and other adornments many dinosaurs sported were less likely to have served as weapons, as originally thought -- many would have been very ineffectual weapons, because of their locations -- or even to assist in getting at or eating food, than to have served as attraction mechanisms for the opposite sex. After all, that's the purpose served by any number of oddities in the animal kingdom today. The elaborate spread of the peacock tail, the brighter coloration of the male of many bird species, the antlers of the deer, the red bottom of female baboons...all of these serve a primary function of attracting the opposite sex. I like to think of a female triceratops spotting a nearby male and thinking, "My, look at the frill on that big guy. I'd like him to be the father of my children."
Only, of course, not really thinking it, but intuiting it. Enabling the reproduction dance to go on, and evolution to continue on its ponderous but ineluctable way.
There are a number of concepts I've had a hard time wrapping my mind around, the biggest being that of "deep time." The (approximately) 4.54 billion years the earth has been around, that's an example of deep time. The "160 million-year tenure of dinosaurs," that's deep time. We're not talking a hundred years, not a thousand years, or even ten thousand years -- the approximate length of time human society for which we have plentiful evidence has been around -- we're not even talking about 4.4 million years, which is about how old the oldest humanoid (not human) remains thus far found have been. The last of the dinosaurs died out about 65 million years ago (that's 10,000 x 10 x 65), and this was at the end of their "160 million-year tenure." How can I possibly think intelligently about that kind of time span? And how can self-destructive humans ever hope to compete with that record for longevity?
Of course, they weren't all the same dinosaur species during that 160-million-year stretch. Just as in the more recent past, species came and went, evolved and died out, due to one cause or another. I never thought about that, but living creatures are certainly going to change, evolve, over that long a time span.
Another idea I have trouble with is that the birds of today are the descendents of a certain group of dinosaurs (interestingly, not the flying kind, like pterosaurs, but "small, carnivorous dinosaurs [that] found a way to be-come airborne," and that "managed to eke through the extinction bottleneck that brought an end to the Mesozoic." Admittedly, if you sit and watch a bunch of birds, you can spy very predatory and rapacious be-havior, but that's the closest to anything dinosaur-like that you can easily detect. But at least I'm glad to learn that no one is claiming that birds are the descendents of T-Rex.
One very interesting and highly plausible idea Sampson has introduced me to is that the weird horns/stiff neck "ruffles"/rooster-like crests/and other adornments many dinosaurs sported were less likely to have served as weapons, as originally thought -- many would have been very ineffectual weapons, because of their locations -- or even to assist in getting at or eating food, than to have served as attraction mechanisms for the opposite sex. After all, that's the purpose served by any number of oddities in the animal kingdom today. The elaborate spread of the peacock tail, the brighter coloration of the male of many bird species, the antlers of the deer, the red bottom of female baboons...all of these serve a primary function of attracting the opposite sex. I like to think of a female triceratops spotting a nearby male and thinking, "My, look at the frill on that big guy. I'd like him to be the father of my children."
Only, of course, not really thinking it, but intuiting it. Enabling the reproduction dance to go on, and evolution to continue on its ponderous but ineluctable way.
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
Let there be light
The other night I watched a PBS program on telescopes, with a large part of it featuring the Hubble Telescope, and the wonders of the universe that it has revealed. It was pointed out that astrophysicists have discovered, thanks to telescopes, that there's a huge amount of what they call "dark matter" out in space; indeed, they believe about 23% of the universe is made up of dark matter, another 73% something they call dark energy, 3.6% intergalactic gas, while only .4% is "ordinary matter" (stars, planets, galaxies).*
And here's the thought that occurred to me as I was listening to all this. Maybe the dark matter and the dark energy are the body of God. Maybe the universe is God, with all the planets and stars and galaxies sort of appendages to that body. Maybe originally, just as it says in the Christian Bible, there was only a dark universe, that is, God, eternal and everywhere, but without form or light. And the Consciousness, the Intelligence that was God got bored, felt like making something happen, decided to try a little experiment, said (or thought) "Let there be light," and there was a Big Bang, and a jillion particles were hurled outward on a long, long journey, during which they coalesced, became stars, planets, galaxies. And God watched, with interest, what was happening, watched the evolution of worlds, of species on those worlds, of cultures among those species. He didn't necessarily take care of any of these results of his experiment -- he let them play themselves out, "naturally," according to the laws that had been set in motion with his first action. But they were all a part of Him.
I could almost accept this idea of God. I have not been able to accept the all-knowing, all-loving God I was brought up to believe in -- have seen too much evidence of an uncaring universe at work -- but such a scenario as I have described would cover the evidence that our sciences have found for evolution, and for the formation of the "ordinary matter" of the universe, while also explaining the sense of God, the ancient sense that there is a God, that all peoples of this world, at least, have had. And it would account for all that mysterious dark matter and dark energy out there!
It's a thought.
*Craig, Matthew and Sara Schultz. Invisible Galaxies: The Story of Dark Matter. The Universe in the Classroom, No. 7, Summer 2007. http://www.astrosociety.org/education/publications/tnl/72/darkmatter.html
And here's the thought that occurred to me as I was listening to all this. Maybe the dark matter and the dark energy are the body of God. Maybe the universe is God, with all the planets and stars and galaxies sort of appendages to that body. Maybe originally, just as it says in the Christian Bible, there was only a dark universe, that is, God, eternal and everywhere, but without form or light. And the Consciousness, the Intelligence that was God got bored, felt like making something happen, decided to try a little experiment, said (or thought) "Let there be light," and there was a Big Bang, and a jillion particles were hurled outward on a long, long journey, during which they coalesced, became stars, planets, galaxies. And God watched, with interest, what was happening, watched the evolution of worlds, of species on those worlds, of cultures among those species. He didn't necessarily take care of any of these results of his experiment -- he let them play themselves out, "naturally," according to the laws that had been set in motion with his first action. But they were all a part of Him.
I could almost accept this idea of God. I have not been able to accept the all-knowing, all-loving God I was brought up to believe in -- have seen too much evidence of an uncaring universe at work -- but such a scenario as I have described would cover the evidence that our sciences have found for evolution, and for the formation of the "ordinary matter" of the universe, while also explaining the sense of God, the ancient sense that there is a God, that all peoples of this world, at least, have had. And it would account for all that mysterious dark matter and dark energy out there!
It's a thought.
*Craig, Matthew and Sara Schultz. Invisible Galaxies: The Story of Dark Matter. The Universe in the Classroom, No. 7, Summer 2007. http://www.astrosociety.org/education/publications/tnl/72/darkmatter.html
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)