Does the Universe....

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SoulTax

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and all its beauty ever make you emotional?

Now I am not talking about sobbing like a teenage girl that just got her heart broken for the first time.

I watch some of the "How the universe works" kind of shows and find myself welling up. Especially any distant photos of Hubble, or my favourite, the "We are all stardust" type of episode. I look at these amazing pictures, and open myself up to try to encompass all of the information at the same time.

The fact that billions of years ago a multitude of stars died in violent explosions that scattered their dust everywhere. I think about how those stars died, and the processes that go on in them. I think about the immense distances that we are talking about. The slow process of gravity pulling those bits of dust together and the boundless amount of time that we are talking about.

I try to encompass all of this information into one coherent idea in my mind, and then look at something as simple as the bracelet that I have worn for the last 10 years of my life, and think that every single atom inside of it was once created inside a star or stars.

I find myself feeling overwhelmed at how small and insignificant we are in comparison to the size of the universe and all that goes on inside of it. Yet I feel enormous at the same time because I know that I am made of particles that were cooked up inside many stars, billions of light years apart.

The beauty of it all, just moves me in a way that is hard to describe. Anyone else experience something similar?
 
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Yep. It's a unique sense of awe when you try and contemplate the universe, the stars, the planets, and our small place in all of it. The size and distance always gets me...

There's a cool excerpt from the first Dark Tower book that gives an interesting perspective.

"The greatest mystery the universe offers is not life but size. Size encompasses life, and the Tower encompasses size. The child, who is most at home with wonder, says: Daddy, what is above the sky? And the father says: The darkness of space. The child: What is beyond space? The father: The galaxy. The child: Beyond the galaxy? The father: Another galaxy. The child: Beyond the other galaxies? The father: No one knows.

"You see? Size defeats us. For the fish, the lake in which he lives is the universe. What does the fish think when he is jerked up by the mouth through the silver limits of existence and into a new universe where the air drowns him and the light is blue madness? Where huge bipeds with no gills stuff it into a suffocating box and cover it with wet weeds to die?

"Or one might take the tip of the pencil and magnify it. One reaches the point where a stunning realization strikes home: The pencil tip is not solid; it is composed of atoms which whirl and revolve like a trillion demon planets. What seems solid to us is actually only a loose net held together by gravity. Viewed at their actual size, the distances between these atoms might become league, gulfs, aeons. The atoms themselves are composed of nuclei and revolving protons and electrons. One may step down further to subatomic particles. And then to what? Tachyons? Nothing? Of course not. Everything in the universe denies nothing; to suggest an ending is the one absurdity.

"If you fell outward to the limit of the universe, would you find a board fence and signs reading DEAD END? No. You might find something hard and rounded, as the chick must see the egg from the inside. And if you should peck through the shell (or find a door), what great and torrential light might shine through your opening at the end of space? Might you look through and discover our entire universe is but part of one atom on a blade of grass? Might you be forced to think that by burning a twig you incinerate an eternity of eternities? That existence rises not to one infinite but to an infinity of them?

"Perhaps you saw what place our universe plays in the scheme of things - as no more than an atom in a blade of grass. Could it be that everything we can perceive, from the microscopic virus to the distant Horsehead Nebula, is contained in one blade of grass that may have existed for only a single season in an alien time-flow? What if that blade should be cut off by a scythe? When it begins to die, would the rot seep into our universe and our own lives, turning everthing yellow and brown and desiccated? Perhaps it's already begun to happen. We say the world has moved on; maybe we really mean that it has begun to dry up.

"Think how small such a concept of things make us, gunslinger! If a God watches over it all, does He actually mete out justice for such a race of gnats? Does His eye see the sparrow fall when the sparrow is less than a speck of hydrogen floating disconnected in the depth of space? And if He does see... what must the nature of such a God be? Where does He live? How is it possible to live beyond infinity?

"Imagine the sand of the Mohaine Desert, which you crossed to find me, and imagine a trillion universes - not worlds but universes - encapsulated in each grain of that desert; and within each universe an infinity of others. We tower over these universes from our pitiful grass vantage point; with one swing of your boot you may knock a billion billion worlds flying off into darkness, a chain never to be completed.

"Size, gunslinger... size."
Click to expand...
 
It is an insatiable yearning. To live forever. To learn more. To go there and see it. There really are no words. Was actually just watching a video on superclusters of galaxies forming filaments, and I couldn't help but be struck by how it resembles a brain.

Our entire planet and life as we know it could be trillions of strings in a single neuron in the brain of the universe. Quite moving, actually.

[video=youtube;74IsySs3RGU]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74IsySs3RGU[/video]
 
you have just realised how small your world was and how little you know about your surroundings on a grande scale. The beauty you find in the universe is the mystery and the scientist in you wants to understand how and why
 
RiaX said:
you have just realised how small your world was and how little you know about your surroundings on a grande scale. The beauty you find in the universe is the mystery and the scientist in you wants to understand how and why
Click to expand...

I wrote it as though I have just realised all of this, but that is because the feeling is just as strong today as the day that I first realised it over a decade ago. I just wanted to put it into words and find out if anyone else actually experiences it on an emotional level.
 
Ya its curiosity sir that feeling will never go away, even if you find the answers you looking for there will always be something left to discover and that emotion will come back.

All scientists have it. Thats why some dedicate their lives to finding those answers, some of these scientists could be multi millionaires but they stay poor financially and rich in knowledge.
 
Our ego is hardwired to know the unknown. Our feeling of conscious agency seeks to control the uncontrollable. We yearn to believe that our existence is causally significant. Yet the predictability of our daily grind and our eventual demise provides a sobering counterpoint.

It conjures kind of a mixed feeling for me. I'm not sure that I'd describe it as beauty more than novelty and mystery. Reminds me of the final scene in Blade Runner.
 
SoulTax said:
and all its beauty ever make you emotional?

Now I am not talking about sobbing like a teenage girl that just got her heart broken for the first time.

I watch some of the "How the universe works" kind of shows and find myself welling up. Especially any distant photos of Hubble, or my favourite, the "We are all stardust" type of episode. I look at these amazing pictures, and open myself up to try to encompass all of the information at the same time.

The fact that billions of years ago a multitude of stars died in violent explosions that scattered their dust everywhere. I think about how those stars died, and the processes that go on in them. I think about the immense distances that we are talking about. The slow process of gravity pulling those bits of dust together and the boundless amount of time that we are talking about.

I try to encompass all of this information into one coherent idea in my mind, and then look at something as simple as the bracelet that I have worn for the last 10 years of my life, and think that every single atom inside of it was once created inside a star or stars.

I find myself feeling overwhelmed at how small and insignificant we are in comparison to the size of the universe and all that goes on inside of it. Yet I feel enormous at the same time because I know that I am made of particles that were cooked up inside many stars, billions of light years apart.

The beauty of it all, just moves me in a way that is hard to describe. Anyone else experience something similar?
Click to expand...

Here, you'll like this site .. http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy.html
 
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