Saturday, January 22, 2005
Seeing stars
Funding is being cut for the Hubble telescope. No repairs will be made. Shortly, it will fall to earth. The White House has been instrumental in this, according to reports. One wonders why?
Dark-sinister conspiracy time (and no, I don't even have pictures of Bush family members making two-fingers-as-horns Satanic signs to back me up here). One of the more awkward aspects of astronomy for Biblical literalists is the size of the darned universe. Even our little local galaxy, the Milky Way, is 'some 30,000 light years across' (encyclopedia.com, reference below). And therefore, even if the farthest rims are travelling AT the speed of light, away from us, their light would have had to be emitted 15,000 years ago. Which is awkward, really, if you want to believe the universe was created about 5,000 years ago.
It's one thing to scoff at dinosaur bones, and imagine that these fossils were put there as part of some G*d's great scenery. It's quite another to imagine a universe entirely set up as a Potemkin village, whose vital machinery is there to maintain an erroneous appearance. (Perhaps the warning in our cars' wing mirrors is from divine inspiration: things are closer than they appear.)
With religious fanatics ascendant, it makes sense to shoo away something that persistently puts in front of the public beautiful images that come labelled with their distance as measured in light years. (210,000 light years in the example cited below, for example)
Sad, sad. Sad (1): that we'll miss Hubble's beautiful imagery. Sad (2): that so many people refuse to see the beauty of the universe in which we live.
[ www.encyclopedia.com/html/section/MilkyWay_SizeandShapeoftheMilkyWay.asp ;
http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/releases/2005/04/image/a ]
Dark-sinister conspiracy time (and no, I don't even have pictures of Bush family members making two-fingers-as-horns Satanic signs to back me up here). One of the more awkward aspects of astronomy for Biblical literalists is the size of the darned universe. Even our little local galaxy, the Milky Way, is 'some 30,000 light years across' (encyclopedia.com, reference below). And therefore, even if the farthest rims are travelling AT the speed of light, away from us, their light would have had to be emitted 15,000 years ago. Which is awkward, really, if you want to believe the universe was created about 5,000 years ago.
It's one thing to scoff at dinosaur bones, and imagine that these fossils were put there as part of some G*d's great scenery. It's quite another to imagine a universe entirely set up as a Potemkin village, whose vital machinery is there to maintain an erroneous appearance. (Perhaps the warning in our cars' wing mirrors is from divine inspiration: things are closer than they appear.)
With religious fanatics ascendant, it makes sense to shoo away something that persistently puts in front of the public beautiful images that come labelled with their distance as measured in light years. (210,000 light years in the example cited below, for example)
Sad, sad. Sad (1): that we'll miss Hubble's beautiful imagery. Sad (2): that so many people refuse to see the beauty of the universe in which we live.
[ www.encyclopedia.com/html/section/MilkyWay_SizeandShapeoftheMilkyWay.asp ;
http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/releases/2005/04/image/a ]
|| Unknown, 2:53 PM
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:-))
A little awkward.
Perhaps the universe has some short-cut routing through a worm hole?
But yes, the visions from Hubble have been wonderful indeed, and will be missed.