By Katie Mack
Hawking Chair in Cosmology and Science Communication
Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
I want to make you dizzy
I want to make you look up into the sky and comprehend, maybe for the first time, the darkness that lies beyond the evanescent wisp of the atmosphere, the endless depths of the cosmos, a desolation by degrees
I want the Earth to turn beneath you and knock your balance off, carry you eastward at a thousand miles an hour, into the light, and the dark, and the light again. I want you to watch the Earth rising you up to meet the rays of the morning sun
I want the sky to stop you dead in your tracks on your walk home tonight, because you happened to glance up and among all the shining pinpricks you recognized one as of the light of an alien world
I want you to taste the iron in your blood and see its likeness in the rust-red sands on the long dry dunes of Mars, born of the same nebular dust that coalesced random flotsam of stellar debris into rocks, oceans, your own beating heart
I want to reach into your consciousness and cast it outward, beyond the light of other suns, to expand it like the universe, not encroaching on some envelope of emptiness, but growing larger, unfolding inside itself
I want you to see your world from four billion miles away, a tiny glint of blue in the sharp white light of an ordinary star in the darkness. I want you to try to make out the boundaries of your nation from that vantage point, and fail
I want you to feel it, in your bones, in your breath, when two black holes colliding a billion light years away sends a tremor through spacetime that makes every cell in your body stretch, and strain
I want to make you nurse nostalgia for the stars long dead, the ones that fused your carbon nuclei and the ones whose last thermonuclear death throes outshined the entire galaxy to send a single photon into your eye
I want you to live forward but see backward, farther and deeper into the past, because in a relativistic universe you don’t have any other choice. I want the stale billion-year-old starlight of a distant galaxy to be your reward
I want to utterly disorient you and let you navigate back by the stars. I want you to lose yourself, and find it again, not just here, but everywhere, in everything
I want you to believe that the universe is a vast, random, uncaring place, in which our species, our world, has absolutely no significance. And I want you to believe that the only response is to make our own beauty and meaning and to share it while we can
I want to make you wonder what is out there. What dreams may come in waves of radiation across the breadth of an endless expanse. What we may know, given time, and what splendors might never, ever reach us
I want to make it mean something to you. That you are in the cosmos. That you are of the cosmos. That you are born from stardust and to stardust you will return. That you are a way for the universe to be in awe of itself.
Credit: Craig Kochel
Raymond B. Winter State Park, Pennsylvania
July 1, 2022
Photos
On July 12, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope released a series of high-resolution images capturing some of the first stars in the universe. These spectacular photos–taken a million miles away from the Earth–mark a new era of astronomy as we gaze more deeply into the universe than ever before. For more information on Webb, see here.
Webb's First Deep Field; NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI
“Cosmic Cliffs” in the Carina Nebula; NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI
Have you seen “Quantum” used in diverse contexts and wondered what it really means? Can we glean wisdom from science?
The Big Bang Theory has revolutionized our understanding of how life emerged through 14 billion years of cosmic development. Quantum Theory provides radical new insights into how our physical reality is created every single moment. This exciting new course explores science without math and helps us appreciate the significance of these insights and their relevance to our lives.
Could the challenges we’re facing at this time be feedback from the universe that a new vision of the human is needed, one that includes all people, cultivates a just world, and resonates with the dynamics of the universe and the Earth community? How are we to make sense of the seismic shift in the nature of the human presence on the planet?
“Fire, Earth, Water, Air: The Poetic Universe”
September 15-29, 2022
3x1 hour online sessions
5:30 pm - 6:45 pm EST
Online, 1 Edmund Rice Drive, Southport, QLD Australia, Australia
“The Big History of Consciousness”
With Carl Johan Calleman
International Big History Association
July 16, 2022
Watch the recording here.
On July 1st, students in Environmental Science at the Phillips Academy Andover Summer Session participated in a Cosmic Walk tracing the 13.8 billion year story of the universe. Read more about the Cosmic Walk here.
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