Tag: astronomy

“My God, it’s full of stars”

As far as I know, none of history’s greatest philosopher-poets had their best insights while holding a soiled cat litter tray. But there I was, in the garden after midnight, seeking truth and a clean gravel-filled receptacle for Mr. Biggington. The valley was cool and quiet. I looked up from the decking to see a bright canopy of stars. I gazed upward in hope of a straggling Perseid meteor. None came.

As insights go it was more a way of looking. Consider that concepts we use to categorise what we see lead us to take those things for granted. So when I see a thousand pinpoints of white-blue light that are billions of years old, I think “stars” and continue cleaning out the litter tray.… Continue reading...

Thinking about nothing in particular

I’ve always been interested in the question, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ I remember walking to school trying to imagine nothing: no planets, stars, or galaxies. (I’d seen these in an astronomy book and was inconsolable when the same book told me that the sun would one day engulf Earth). All I could think of was blackness, but I realised there would be no colour black so I imagined total blankness in white. Then I realised there would be no white either. Totally flummoxed, I gave up.

Perhaps the hardest thing to realise is there would be no observer. Every now and then, that question returns. I now think the question itself is part of the problem. We’re clearly confused about what ‘nothing’ is.… Continue reading...

Supermoon

Looking at the moon through a pair of binoculars, you really get a sense of how round and big it is. And yet how small when you see its craters silhouetted against undiluted darkness and realise how large a portion of the surface each one covers. Then there are the seas: great ash coloured bruises. All this seems obvious. I’ve just described the moon — nothing special here, you’ve seen it a thousand times — but think how obscure this really is: a speck of dust orbiting a speck of dust orbiting one of 300 billion stars in at least 100 billion galaxies. Viewed from anywhere else in the universe, it is essentially another dark patch of sky… but luminous to us. … Continue reading...