And when you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.
Nietzsche
Posts tagged astronomy.
That’d be a pretty good social leveller, come to think of it. So there, James Murdoch. You might well walk around thinking, “Ooh, hooray for me, I’m the chairman and CEO of News Corporation Europe and Asia, not to mention chairman of SKY Italia and STAR TV, the non- executive chairman of British Sky Broadcasting, and a non-executive director of GlaxoSmith-Kline”, but at the end of the day you’re just one of 900 trillion insignificant molecules in an all-encompassing turdiverse. And your glasses are rubbish.
Anyway, the astronomers who made the discovery about Andromeda deserve our awe and respect, because their everyday job consists of dealing with concepts so intense and overwhelming that it’s a wonder their skulls don’t implode through sheer vertigo. Generally speaking, it’s best not to contemplate the full scope of the universe on a day-to-day basis because it makes a mockery of basic chores. It’s Tuesday night and the rubbish van comes first thing Wednesday morning, so you really ought to put the bin bags out, but hey – if our sun were the size of a grain of sand, the stars in our galaxy would fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool, and if our entire galaxy were a grain of sand, the galaxies in our universe would fill several Olympic-sized swimming pools. You and your bin bags. Pfff!
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How can I flip channels and enjoy Midsomer Murders once I’ve been reminded of the crushing futility of everything? I can’t even get worked up about the murders in that kind of mood. Yeah, kill him. And her. And them. Sod it. It’s all just atoms in an unfathomable vortex.
Charlie Brooker
The Guardian, Sunday 6 September 2009
{ “Contemplating the scale of the universe makes a mockery of household chores” }
Every. Damned. Day.
But unlike Charlie Brooker — who seems bothered by being so awed by it all that he can’t take out the garbage — this is my favorite thing. This is why I have garbage jenga and don’t give a fuck. This is what makes it all bearable and worthwhile.
And yet, for some things, totally unbearable. The things that deserve to be jenga’d like garbage in the face of all this… and yet are not, because they’ve been made important by organizations whose CEOs don’t read enough science news. Pretentious things. The worst things.
Wright’s Celestial Map of the Universe, 1742
aka
A synopsis of the universe, or, the visible world epitomiz’d / by Thomas Wright of Durham.
{ this }, pieced together.
Also, if you want the ultra-high-res version that might crash/stall your shit (it’s 10k px tall, lossless jpg), that’s { here. } YW.
Pas notre lune.
.jpg)
The Andromeda Galaxy (M31) and its two satellites, M32 and NGC 205, sketched by Jeff Corder using a 6-inch reflector at 30x, July 7, 1973.
David J. Eicher library
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Life drawing.
I’m sure many avid astro fans out there are used to seeing pretty pictures of galaxies. You know the type. They’re usually coloured, dynamic and absolutely gorgeous. We have a few of these (usually) Hubble pictures on the wall in the office. I see them reblogged around on tumblr all the time because they are just so striking and can make you feel giddy. But these images are sometimes art over science, with arbitrary false colours, touch-ups and the like. Those galaxies are awesome in their own right, but they’re not what I work with.
Instead I’m dealing with images of distant galaxies. Not exactly Hubble Deep Field, but light from these galaxies can be millions and often billions of years old. Here’s an example of real data I’m working with from the HerMES collaboration (from the public data-set) taken with the Herschel Space Telescope. These are far-infrared images, rather than Hubble’s near-infrared/optical pictures, so the light that Herschel sees is invisible to humans.
As you can see, there are no colours! This is standard. We work with images black-on-white rather than how space really looks, with colour-on-black, as the data files these pictures are stored in represent no light at a pixel as zero and increase the number with brightness. The file-viewer I’m using here, Aladin, rescales the image to get the full grey-scale range.
So here’s some fun statistics. This box is 1.74 square degrees, representing a tiny 0.004% of the sky. In this box, at this resolution and at this wavelength there are roughly a thousand galaxies that we can pick out against the background noise with confidence (5-sigma certainty). There are loads of them hiding in the background, though. These galaxies are only a few pixels large on the image and the vast majority will never have an official name or pretty posters of them on tumblr because they’re just so distant and hard to image. So go ahead, pick one as your own and name it! You might as well!
Thanks for reading, and of course, a big hello to you new people. My ask box is always open :)
(PS, for those interested, this is part of the Lockman-SWIRE field in Herschel’s SPIRE instrument’s 250µm band. It’s part of the Herschel Multi-tiered Extragalactic Survey’s (HerMES) first data-release (DR1), released earlier this month. It and other fields can be found here. Read more about HerMES here.)
Cosmism ›
see also: { Is God an Alien Mathematician? }
HUGO DE GARIS: I defined these two terms rather succinctly in the { kurzweilai.net essay } so I’ll just quote those definitions here. Deism is “the belief that there is a ‘deity’ i.e. a creator of the universe, a grand designer, a cosmic architect, that conceived and built our universe.” Cosmism is the “ideology in favor of humanity building artilects this century (despite the risk that advanced artilects may decide to wipe out humanity as a pest).”
I think de Garis ignores a crucial point: there had to be an origin universe, a beginning somewhere. If we assume that artilects created the universe/s, then we must also assume there had to be an original ‘artilect.’ Who made the artilect? This goes unexplained.
…Also why the assumption that future AI will destroy us like ants? If they are indeed more complex than us (and possibly sentient), then I think they would have a more complicated reason to kill us all than irritation.
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OS:
The assumption about being destroyed by our creations is not necessarily de Garis’s so much as his [somewhat satirical?] response to a wide-spread fear that we see reflected/purveyed in { pop culture }.
For a Cosmist, it’s not really an issue — partially because we don’t buy into the whole Armageddon-by-cyborg-menace thing and partially because, upon comprehending the big picture of the Universe (even at the scale we know it now: from the quantum to the intergalactic cosmos or perhaps the multi-verse), it’s hard to care so much about Humans as they are in this moment. We’re open to changing the human, to becoming trans- and eventually post-human, even if it means this race as we know it ceases to exist. [Maybe that sounds scary & needs explaining, but it’s not something I want to go further into right now.]
To the point about the “artilect” — in some sense, yes, it’s unexplained. However, that term means to refer to a conscious something that would eventually come about, either from us or from another “IGUS” (information gathering and utilizing systems — Murray Gell-Mann). An artilect and the “first creator” (“God”) could be totally different, especially if the first creator was not so much an entity as a set of conditions (/laws).
Besides that, I disagree that “there had to be a beginning”. In so far as we’re able to understand, yes it seems that way, but a series of infinite loops is also possible — even if that thought gives us a very large headache. We don’t know about that (yet?).
That considered, it’s likely that de Garis is ignoring all that purposely, for the sake of entertaining/introducing a new thought without engaging in a (at this point) useless conversation about a genesis.
I was just going to add this, but see it was already done so above. In my own words:
Most people assume there has to be a beginning because of our immediate experiences with cause and effect. Although evidence points to an event like the ‘big bang’ which led to the structures we now know as the universe, we aren’t certain of it yet, and even if we are, there could have been something unimaginable before space-time, or there could simply be more space-time before the big bang (a la Hawking’s big-crunch concept). Well I don’t remember if it’s his concept, but that’s where I last read about it.
I kind of enjoy the mindfuck of no beginning. Just sayin.
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Yes, good addition!
Also the { Big Bounce }: (you have to lol at those names)
a theoretical scientific model of the formation of the known universe. It is implied by the cyclic model or oscillatory universe interpretation of the Big Bang where the first cosmological event was the result of the collapse of a previous universe.
Hawking does not consider the Big Crunch to be very plausible. He and other scholars of the community more so invest in the theory that galaxies will drift so far away from each other their light can no longer be seen. Consequently, all hydrogen will eventually be used up within stars, and the universe will grow dark and no such cycle will take place. Galaxies are continuing to move further away from each other with increasing speed, so this is the logical conclusion many of the scientific community have reached.
I choose to believe there is a continuing cycle however, even if the scope is far greater than we can comprehend. Because of the movement of galaxies, a universal beginning is appropriate. Due to the cyclical nature of all things on Earth and in space, it would also be appropriate there may be a grander cycle at hand even if all light dwindles and returns to darkness; matter and energy can change from one into the other after all, so there may be hope in that fact. We may truly be a universe within universe, created by artilects or within an unseen cycle that begins anew in darkness. It is my theory that perhaps galaxies do not drift apart because of dark energy but because they are drawn to something else beyond our knowledge. In any case, I think what is most important is that we keep observing and hypothesizing, and perhaps artilects will create and embody universes after all. Thanks for the read, OS.
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OS:
Thanks for adding this! Great to have some dialogue.
& That reminds me; apparently the dark matter theory may be on the way out, according to some recent research from Chile: { Serious Blow to Dark Matter Theories? }
Also, I Googled around a bit, but could you provide a source for Stephen Hawking recalling the Big Crunch idea? Curious to learn more about that.
Your mother was a galaxy
and you were born a pearl.
Olena Shmahalo, 2012
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Created for { Messages of Hope } at SVA.
{ Science gave me hope. }
See the precursor:
Your father was a space rock;
you were born a cosmonaut.
at { OlenaShmahalo.com }
AMNH Live
2012 Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate: Faster Than the Speed of Light
Streaming Live: Tuesday, March 20 7:30 pm
INVEST IN THE UNIVERSE
Astronomical is a set of twelve 506-page volumes representing a scale model of our solar system from the Sun to Pluto. The width of each page represents one million kilometres. The set is an open edition with each set printed for each buyer. Order Astronomical here (£100 + shipping). Watch the video →
(via itsfullofstars)
All images taken from Spacesuits: The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum Collection, by Amanda Young, photographs by Mark Avino
(via itsfullofstars)
HOLY SHIT. { Bjork }’s new website.
It’s all javascript, & any instance of the 3D landscape can be viewed as an image… how the? Fuck, that’s beautiful.
Besides that, the concept for her new album ( Biophilia ) is incredibly smart not only in terms of subject matter, but also as an answer to the lack of music purchases in the digital age — it’s a total work of art.
Björk describes the project as a “multi-media project encompassing music, apps, internet, installations and live shows,”
{ Consequence of Sound }
Björk has collaborated with artists, designers, scientists, instrument makers, writers and software developers to create an extraordinary multimedia exploration of the universe and its physical forces, processes and structures – of which music is a part. Each in-app experience is inspired by and explores the relationships between musical structures and natural phenomena, from the atomic to the cosmic. You can use Biophilia to make and learn about music, to find out about natural phenomena, or to just enjoy Björk’s music.
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Biophilia was created by Björk in collaboration with interactive artist and app developer Scott Snibbe, and Björk’s longtime design collaborators M/M (Paris). Crystalline (one of the in-app purchase tracks) was created by Björk in collaboration with Luc Barthelet, developer of The Sims; TouchPress, creator of The Elements app; and M/M (Paris).
Biophilia: The tracks and apps
Interactive versions of tracks from the Biophilia album are gradually being released as in-app purchases in the Biophilia iPhone and iPad app (iTunes link).
MOON
The song: With the backing of a harp and choir, this melancholy song uses lunar cycles as a metaphor for rebirth.
The app: Designed to teach ideas about musical cycles, users can adjust the phases of some miniature moons to alter the sequence of the song.
THUNDERBOLT
The song: Mid-tempo, with a bass line of arpeggios created by discharging a Tesla coil.
The app: An instrument - by changing the shape of sparks of electricity, users can change the speed and pitch range of the arpeggios.
CRYSTALLINE
The song: The most accessible song on the album, accompanied by the “relentless” metallic rhythm of the gameleste - a new instrument that built the sounds of a gamelan into a celesta.
The app: Users travel through confined, narrow tunnels in the verse before travelling into a more open space during the chorus.
COSMOGONY
The song: Björk turns to the history of science, singing majestically about the idea of celestial spheres to the backing of a brass band.
The app: The master app to navigate through the whole suite. The other apps appear as constellations in space.
DARK MATTER
The song: Full of nonsense words, half sung, half whispered, to mirror the enigmatic nature of its subject matter.
The app: A “Simon says” game to learn musical scales, still in development.
HOLLOW
The song: A sinister song about the chain of heredity, which builds to an unyielding thumping rhythm. The time signature is based on sequences of prime numbers.
The app: An animation of DNA replication, based on molecular modelling and X-ray crystallography experiments, with the evolving strands forming Björk’s face.
MUTUAL CORE
The song: The most explicitly scientific. For example, Björk sings: “As fast as your finger nails grow/the Atlantic ridge drifts.”
The app: A visualisation inspired by tectonic plates, to help users understand the song’s chords.{ New Scientist }
