Saturday, January 05, 2008

The Cosmic Web

A grain of sand includes the universe - S.T. Coleridge
To see the world in a grain of sand - William Blake
The whole creation is made of hooks and eyes, of bitumen, of sticking plaster ... it coheres in a perfect ball - Emerson
The universe is not composed of newts only; it has its Newtons - Harry Emerson
The universe can best be pictured as consisting of pure thought, the thought of what for want of a better word we must describe as a mathematical thinker - Sir James Jeans
The sum total of all sums total is eternal (Summarum summa est aeternum) - Lucretius
But how can finite grasp Infinity? - Dryden
The Universe - mutation - Marcus Aurelius

There is that great unknown beyond us - the Universe. Compelling, infinite, unknowable, tempting us to try to understand its boundless complexities, its mathematical improbability, its mysterious presence, and us inside it, wondering, endlessly wondering, in awe of its immensity its monstrous, threatening potentialities for visiting us in ways beyond our reckoning, our trust in Nature to defend us.

Our microcosm of the universe, our Milky Way Galaxy is beyond our grasp of feeble knowledge and imagination. We search there for a counter-universe to reflect our own, unwilling to believe that we represent on this singular earth a true anomaly of Nature. There would be no balance to our uniqueness, we and all the creatures who fellow us on this planet. We search in hopes that we may discover creatures whose minds are more developed than ours, with a far greater understanding of the imponderables that perplex us.

They would, by definition, have to be far more advanced in knowledge, intelligence and capability than us to be able to detect and reach us, to understand the form in which we exist, to be able to communicate with us, and to impart to us whatever information they, in their greater wisdom, might deem us capable of ingesting. And then, would they turn from us in disgust, realizing what we have attained to and what we have wasted?

Might such creatures exist? Our own great scientific minds hypothesize endlessly about the nature of the universe, the possibilities of other life forms, and our place in the greater scheme of nature's mechanistic design. They have high hopes that their powerful new telescopes still in development may help in unravelling the "cosmic web". What cosmic web? Why, the numberless invisible threads of "dark matter" that comprise the very universe, and that holds it together.

You must have known that. In enquiring, the purpose is only, it is understood, to determine that others know this. We trust in the enquiring and brilliant minds of astrophysicists, designing new technologies and experiments bringing us ever closer to understanding the nature of the universe, and nature's plans for our existence within that great dark body of shifting, swirling, renewing, recombining matter. Does an ant obey a command from a human?

We've accepted the Big Bang, and after having worried endlessly the problem over whether we're continuing to expand, or, contrarily, drawing in inexorably, we now realize that neither is quite so; instead all the elements of the universe, ourselves included, are held together by the gravitational pull of mysterious dark matter. The very stuff of which we are cosmically constructed is that dark matter; we and the stars are one.

Radio waves will assist astrophysicists in looking back in time to arrive at a realistic point of view, a picture if one wills it so, of the pre-universe, before the violent paroxysm of energy that birthed the stars and the planets. The elements have gradually, slowly evolved over aeons from a universe abundant with neutral hydrogen, to a transitory phase which ionized hydrogen. Ask me if I fully comprehend that little tidbit.

And, as these absorbed scientists delve ever more deeply into the arcane science of matter and the universe they will measure and map the motions of a billion, billion stars in our galaxy alone, before moving on to more ambitious identifications of the vast, deep and dark unknown. "We will, for the first time, be able to reunite the long-dispersed stars from ancient accretion events, completely dissecting the Milky Way and laying bare its history", writes Rodrigo Ibata of Strasbourg's Observatoire Astronomique.

(On the way to these startling new discoveries beyond our grasp to even begin to imagine, radio telescopes will most certainly pick up vestiges, mere whispers at first, then gradually louder and more frequent messages floating about in time and space. Fragments of conversations, music truly of the spheres, even the very thoughts that our fevered minds and dream-states engender.)

"We will then be able to directly determine to what extent the galaxy was built from dwarf galaxies that fell in through the local cosmic web." Evidently there is a missing mass of energy, that should be present, but appears to be absent. The absent portion is believed to be secreted in a "web of warm-hot intergalactic medium". No, honestly.

"Finding the missing baryons and thereby producing a complete inventory of possibly the only detectable component of the energy-mass budget of the universe is crucial to validate or invalidate our standard cosmological model", claims lead author Fabrizio Nicastro of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

See, I told you so...!

The universe is full of magical things, patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper - Eden Phillpotts

The universe, as far as we can observe it, is a wonderful and immense engine; its extent, its order, its beauty, its cruelty make it alike impressive. If we dramatize its life and conceive its spirit, we are filled with wonder, terror and amusement, so magnificent is that spirit, so prolific, inexorable, grammatical and dull - George Santayana

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posted by Pieface @ Saturday, January 05, 2008

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