The other day I blogged that the Hubble photo was a glimpse into the suburbs of the universe. Of course this isn’t true at all. In fact we live on the edge of the universe. Every moment, as the universe keeps expanding, we get further and futher away from the Big Bang. So any photograph that sees 12 billion years into the past is actually looking towards the centre of the universe, or downtown.
In 1964, the echoes of the bigbang were discovered. The entire universe is bathed in cosmic background radiation which is essentially the sound of the Big Bang cooking everything up. If we look far enough back we see nothing but smooth energy. The above photo is a representation of this, except that it gives the impression that the cosmic background radiation is OUTSIDE of us, as if we live in a fishbowl universe, floating around. In reality our universe is more like a balloon, being inflated. We are on the outside of the balloon getting further and further away from everything. So the background radiation is in our past, in the direction from which we have come.
In other words, welcome to the suburbs folks.
More from the deep dark suburbs of the universe…
A massive cluster of yellowish galaxies, seemingly caught in a red and blue spider web of eerily distorted background galaxies, makes for a spellbinding picture from the new Advanced Camera for Surveys aboard NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. To make this unprecedented image of the cosmos, Hubble peered straight through the center of one of the most massive galaxy clusters known, called Abell 1689. The gravity of the cluster’s trillion stars � plus dark matter � acts as a 2-million-light-year-wide “lens” in space. This “gravitational lens” bends and magnifies the light of the galaxies located far behind it. Some of the faintest objects in the picture are probably over 13 billion light-years away (redshift value 6).
Though gravitational lensing has been studied previously by Hubble and ground-based telescopes, this phenomenon has never been seen before in such detail. The ACS picture reveals 10 times more arcs than would be seen by a ground-based telescope. The ACS is 5 times more sensitive and provides pictures that are twice as sharp as the previous work-horse Hubble cameras. So it can see the very faintest arcs with greater clarity. The picture presents an immense jigsaw puzzle for Hubble astronomers to spend months untangling. Interspersed with the foreground cluster are thousands of galaxies, which are lensed images of the galaxies in the background universe. Detailed analysis of the images promises to shed light on galaxy evolution, the curvature of space, and the mystery of dark matter. The picture is an exquisite demonstration of Albert Einstein’s prediction that gravity warps space and distorts beams of light.
From hubblesite.org
A new image from the Hubble Space Telescope is an example of ‘painting with light’. Astronomers use the separated colours produced by oxygen and hydrogen to investigate star-forming processes in the nebula NGC 2080. The colours explain much about the nature of such nebulae.
–from the European Space Agency
Ideas, on CBC Radio is running a five part series on Simone Weil. It features one episode on her life and then four on her political and mystical thought.
Weil was a French Jew who became a Christian mystic and died in 1943. She was an anarchist, and her writings were championed by the likes of Andre Gide, Albert Camus, T.S. Eliot, George Grant and Czeslaw Milosz. She wrote on affliction, suffering, sanctity, theology and philospophy. She identified with the working class, and styled herself as a slave.
On sanctity she wrote:
Today it is not nearly enough merely to be a saint, but we must have the saintliness demanded by the present moment, a new saintliness, itself also without precedent� . A new type of sanctity � is almost equivalent to a new revelation of the universe and of human destiny� . More genius is needed [to invent it] than was needed by Archimedes to invent mechanics and physics. A new saintliness is a still more marvellous invention.
Many people argued for her sainthood after she died, but she died having never been baptized and so this was impossible. Not everyone held this opinion of her however, and some commentators have questioned the portryal of her as a saint
She exhibited a few blemishes but perhaps the most damning was a streak of anti-Semitism that resulted in her thinking being regarded paradoxically by some writers. For instance in this great biographical sketch in New Criterion, Jillian Becker writes:
Let us consider this. Here was a well-provided-for, well-educated young woman who freely chose to regard herself as a slave and to starve herself to death while war raged, hungry children helplessly wasted away in the streets of the Warsaw ghetto, the living skeletons of actual slaves dropped into the dust at Bergen-Belsen, and human bodies were consumed night and day in the ovens of Auschwitz-Birkenau. The young woman in question was a thinker and writer respected even in her own time by intellectuals and leaders of opinion, but she said nothing about these atrocities. She let herself die in 1943 when millions of her fellow Jews were being murdered in the name of the �final solution of the Jewish question,� and she who claimed to feel a deep sympathy with the afflicted and even a longing to bear their suffering for them protested only against being classed as one of them. If Fiedler is right that Simone Weil epitomizes the moral ideals of our time, then we are morally adrift in an era of darkness.
More on Simone Weil later.