Big, Old, Deep, Far

"My own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose." - J.B.S. Haldane

I used to like to lay on my back on the lawn after dark, just looking up at the stars. I loved the dizzy feeling I got when I did that. If I used a little imagination, I could make myself feel like I was floating in a field of pinhole lights that stretched on forever. It gave me butterflies. Before I had any idea what these lights were, I was awestruck by them.

I remember the first time I learned that those stars in the sky are actually suns, like our own sun but much further away. Some of them were huge, thousands of times larger than ours. I wondered if they had planets around them, and maybe life. I thought of all the diverse shapes life could take, even on our tiny blue planet, and imagined how many more kinds were possible...out there, in the cosmic black.

But how big was it, really? I learned that you could travel for millions or even billions of years at the speed of light and still not reach the end of all those stars.

Suddenly my reality got alot bigger and my importance in it got alot smaller.

I found out that some of the suns were slowly dying, while others were just being "born" from the gas and dust of previous stars. Our star is probably a "third generation" sun, which means that there were two suns in its place before it, each living its long sunny life and dying, returning it's elements to space, only to reform into another sun. Kind of like a super-colossal organ donation scheme. I wonder if life ever lived on a lonely planet orbiting our "grandfather" sun.

I also learned that all of the elements in our planet except hydrogen; all of our iron and carbon and gold and uranium and silicon and oxygen...all of it was made inside previous stars as they died. That was a very big thought.

Our universe, according to the best current estimates, is right about 13.73 billion years old, plus or minus 120 million years. Our sun dates back about 4.57 billion years, and the Earth and our other planets formed from it's "leftovers" about 4.54 billion years ago.

All of these things fill me up to the very top with wonder. It is, as Mr. Haldane implies, very difficult for the human mind to grasp numbers that big, distances that long, and time that far back. We are simple people, designed for prairies and savannahs and communal village life and rearing children, not prying secrets from millions of light years worth of cold space.

And yet, that is exactly what we do.

The very same problem-solving abilities that allowed our ancestors to develop spears and start fires now coaxes us to ponder such things as Quantum Mechanics, Super-Strings, Dark Matter, and 11-Dimensional Space-Time.

Take a look at the image at the top of this post. This is a composite of 342 separate images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope's "Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2". This is called the "Deep Field" image because it was taken with the camera aimed at one of the blackest and emptiest portions of our sky, and therefore reveals objects that are enormously far away. Just about every one of the 3,000 objects in this image is a galaxy, each containing hundreds of millions of suns. Some of these galaxies, red shifted and blazing, are riding on the ragged edge of the universe itself.

If an image like this didn't fill me with wonder, I think I would worry.

Some of the most brilliant minds ever to be born on this small planet of ours have worked to answer these, the biggest of questions. Aristotle. Newton. Kepler. Einstein. Schrödinger. Bohr. Hoyle. Penrose. Hubble. Tyson. Hawking. We have learned so much from them but still have so much more to learn. Every answer raises bigger questions. But that doesn't stop them from answering.

And it sure doesn't stop me from wondering.