Cosmology

Have you ever seen the Hubble Deep Field photographs? Pretty amazing. A lot of scientists feel awkward about gushing in public—when I first ran across these photos it was in a ho-hum sidebar in Natural History Magazine about 10 years ago. Just another day on the Hubble. Then I realized that every dot of light in the photo was a not a star but a GALAXY! Big Wow Factor. Too bad more astronomers aren’t out of the closet like Carl Sagan was. It must be hard keeping your emotions in check when discussing the science behind these photos. There is a cool video you can watch about this:



(thanks Omi)

All cosmologists now agree on the Big Bang Theory. It is so much in line with what religions want to believe that a few years ago the Vatican convened a council of astrophysicists to discuss it. They loved the concept of everything being created in a moment of pure energy but the pope tried to tell the scientists that although it was OK to talk about the Big Bang he really didn’t like talk about a beginning-of-time singularity. It would be questioning God to say that time began with the big bang because if there was no time, how could God have existed? Oh well, they haven’t had a good fight on their hands about cosmology since Galileo. They loved the old Aristotelian system which had the stars on the outermost of a series of glass shells enveloping the Earth—that left plenty of room outside the last shell for heaven. Ancient India really invented the modern theory about 2500 years ago—the Cosmic Egg of the Universe (brahmanda) started from a single point (bindu) and grew, just as we think now. A singularity, the beginning of time, is a bindu and until recently astrophysicists thought that the big bang was the expansion of all matter and energy now called the Universe from such a point. The big discussion 20 years ago was whether or not the expanding universe was going to come to the end of its rope and start collapsing again someday. Now they have included quantum mechanics in the equations and have decided that possibly this is the wrong model—that maybe space is in fact curved like an egg and that the singularity is not a unidimensional point but a place on a curved sphere—the cosmic egg. Modern Buddhists know their astrophysics and have easily merged their beliefs with western science. Karma is defined as the sum of all energies and momentums of all particles throughout their histories and changes from mass to energy and back going right back to the Big Bang. The atoms in your body, your Karma, were of course once in stars and galaxies and supernovas before swirling into the orbit of the sun and becoming you. Buddhism (the philosphy, not the later added-on magic of prayer wheels and idols and such) is a complete cosmology using non-western terms. It fits amazingly well with modern western theories. Where did they get all that? Or do we all, as humans, tend to think along the same lines and maybe even the extraordinarily complicated math that leads to the Big Bang Theory is a sort of subconscious wish-fulfillment. Even the need to know all this can be construed as somewhat compulsive—humans have evolved the strong need to put things into categories, to figure out how things work. We are addicted to information. I think it is fine to work on theories of the universe; it sure is amazing for us little guys to read about and try to get our heads around. But we should all save time once in a while to contemplate Deep Space just for the sheer mind-blowing amazement.


(Here is another link to the site of the guy who made the video explaining more of the science behind the photo: http://www.deepastronomy.com/hubble-deep-field.html)