"In A Little Grain Of Sand"
Something extremely interesting happened recently that you might not have heard about. Or, if you did hear about it, the impact of this happening may have escaped you. So I wanted to share it with you. But first, let's go back into the past to an event which only recently had renewed repercussions when it popped up in the media.
In Pisa, Italy (that's right, the home of the leaning tower), on February 15, 1564 (over 400 years ago), just three days before the death of Michelangelo, Galileo Galilei was born. There is much that we could say about this great scientist, but we'll narrow our focus here to a couple of specific points. Galileo was one of the first human beings on this planet to see stars and other celestial bodies (like some of the moons of Jupiter) that could not be seen with the naked eye. He was not the first. The telescope, which allowed him to accomplish this feat, was actually first built in Holland in 1609. However, Galileo is the first human being to use this new tool to make some very important discoveries which literally shook the culture of his time.
What Galileo discovered, when viewing the "heavens" through his telescopes, confirmed theories and predictions made by Nicolas Copernicus, who had died over two decades before Galileo was born. This created major problems. Up until that time, the Christian church promoted a view of the universe which placed the earth at its center, with everything else revolving around us. This view came from the astronomer Ptolemy, who lived a hundred years after Jesus. Ptolemy got many of his ideas from Hipparchus, a Greek astronomer born in Nicaea about 190 B.C, who was the first to accurately measure the distance to the moon and who created many of the instruments which would be used for the next 17 centuries in what was known as naked eye astronomy.
This concept of the earth as the center of the universe was very important to the church's presentation of reality and its emphasis upon the importance of humanity as God's creation. So when Copernicus proposed that the earth was not the center of the universe, but was, rather, a small player in a much bigger, and sometimes seemingly disorganized, system, the church took offense. Then along came Galileo who used the telescope to prove much of Copernicus's theories to be true. What's more, Galileo, becoming a master craftsman at creating lenses, and then spreading his telescopes throughout Europe, even had one of his telescopes wind up in the hands of Johan Kepler, a German astronomer who further refined the ideas of Copernicus, to the church's continued consternation.
In 1632, Galileo published "Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems," in Italian. The pope and the church were doubly angered. First, the pope, Urban VIII, took the book personally and felt that Galileo had made him out to be a fool. Secondly, publishing in Italian, rather than Latin, allowed not only the learned, but even the general public to read his work. It was quickly translated into many other languages, including Chinese. This resulted in Galileo being brought before the Inquisition the following year on charges of heresy.
Galileo was forced by the church to recant his views. Some might wonder why he would do this. Perhaps, at the ripe old age of 69 he had thoughts of Bruno, who some 30 years earlier was burned alive at the stake by the inquisition for professing such heresy as the infinity of space and the motion of the earth. Whatever the reason, Galileo recanted and the church's incorrect beliefs continued. Those beliefs were so strong that Harvard, in the year of its founding, 1636, remained firmly committed to Ptolemaic theory.
In 1835, Galileo's "Dialogue" was finally removed from the Roman Catholic Index of prohibited books. Then, in 1965, on a visit to Pisa, Pope Paul VI, spoke highly of Galileo. Finally, just recently, the Catholic Church officially reversed itself upon Galileo, essentially pardoning him, and thereby finally admitting that he was right in the first place and all along. And it only took a little over 360 years.
Now, with that as a perspective, let's take a look at what happened just the other day (give or take a couple of years). The quest for observing the universe took a giant step recently with the placing in orbit of the Hubble Space Telescope (http://www.stsci.edu ). Few know that this telescope was named for Edwin Powell Hubble, of the Palomar Observatory, who helped discover in the 1920's that there were other galaxies in the universe besides our own Milky Way galaxy. During the next 70 years, we discovered that there are literally billions of galaxies, and, furthermore, that on the average, each of those galaxies contains over a billion stars. That's over a billion billion stars similar to our sun.
Buckminster Fuller used to point out that universe is defined as the sum total of humanity's combined experience. Therefore, every time we are able to "see" further into space, our universe expands that distance in all directions, for that becomes a possible part of our experience. So we had arrived at a place in the 1990's where our ability to see into space had increased to something like 11 billion light years. To grasp the gravity of this reality, light travels at 86,282 miles per second. Therefore, in a year it travels 60 seconds * 60 minutes * 24 hours * 365 days * 86,282 miles = 2,722,852,843,200 miles. That's about 2 3/4 trillion miles. Then we have to multiply that by 11 billion, which gives us approximately 29,951,381,275,200,000,000,000. That's about 30 sextillion, or a number that's damn near impossible for most people to comprehend. And that's just in one direction. Think of a sphere with a radius of 11 billion light years. That's beyond huge.
But that's nothing but a drop in the bucket compared to what happens next. Someone got the bright idea of taking the Hubble Space Telescope and pointing it at what was generally considered to be "empty space." If we look up in the sky at night when we're away from the city, we notice that there are some parts of the sky which seem to be devoid of stars. So it has been even with the strongest of telescopes. There are just some places where there appears to be nothing, or close to it. So they decided to point Hubble at some of this empty space and see if there might be something there.
Now, just how much empty space are we talking about? Well, to give you a real clear idea, extend your arm as far as you can toward the sky. Now, imagine that you are holding a grain of sand between your thumb and forefinger. They pointed the Hubble telescope toward a piece of empty space that can be obscured by that tiny grain of sand that you are holding at arms length. And guess what they saw? Hidden in that tiny grain of sand of supposedly empty space they found 2,000 - 3,000 galaxies. At our predetermined average of 1 billion stars in a galaxy, they discovered over 2,000,000,000,000,000 (2 quadrillion) stars hidden in a piece of empty space the size of a grain of sand. Take a look for yourself: http://oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/PR/96/01.html .
We have now moved into areas of perception which are practically beyond our current ability to comprehend. How many grains of sand would it take to obscure our entire view of space? And each grain containing over 2 quadrillion suns. "What a piece of work is man," Shakespeare proclaimed. True, or not? Well, for an additional perspective, I'd like to share with you some thoughts from James A. Michener's book, "Space." This scene was not, incidentally, in the television series based upon the book. The character here, Stanley Mott, is a rocket scientist, who, feeling overwhelmed by some of the problems in his life, seeks a bit of solitude, some time to become still and regroup his energies.
"Stanley Mott, striving to attain some sense of what the universe was, sat perfectly still on the bank of the Tennessee River, south of Huntsville, Alabama. Keeping arms and legs motionless, he endeavored to move not even his eyes, for he wished to experience the sensation of a body at complete rest, and at last he achieved this. He was as still as a human being could be; indeed, he might as well be dead except for the inescapable functioning of autonomic systems like breathing and heart beating.
"'I am motionless,' he said to himself at last, and he kept this posture for ten minutes, thinking of nothing. Then his brain insisted, recalling data he had memorized at Cal Tech:
"'But at this moment I'm sitting on a piece of Earth at 34 degrees 30 minutes North, which means I'm spinning west to east at a rate of about 860 miles an hour. At the equator, because of the larger bulge, 1,040. At the same time, my Earth is moving through its orbit around the Sun at 66,661 miles an hour, and my Sun is carrying itself and its planets toward the star Vega at something like 31,000 miles an hour.
"'Our Sun and Vega move around the Galaxy at the blinding speed of 700,000 miles per hour, and the Galaxy itself rotates at 559,350 miles an hour.
"'And that's not all. Our Galaxy moves in relation to all other galaxies as they rush through the universe at a speed of better than 1,000,000 miles an hour.
"'So when I sit here absolutely still I'm moving in six wildly different directions at an accumulated speed of ..... maybe two and a half million miles an hour. So I can never be motionless. I'm traveling always at speeds which are incomprehensible. And it's all happening in real time.'
"He considered these demonstrable facts for some moments, then concluded:
"'And perhaps the universe itself is hurtling toward some undefined destination at a speed which could hardly be stated, perhaps to clear our space for a better universe which will supplant us, while we rush off to some new adventure.'
"When he rose and felt his limbs moving only inches, he thought: 'What a trivial journey we make. Inches under our own power, two and a half million miles with the universe. But ours is the journey that counts. Our slow inching along to understanding and control.' When he headed back to his car, he calculated that he was walking at a rate of perhaps 2.3 miles an hour, hardly worth noting in comparison to the speeds he had been dealing with: 'And yet, for millions of years of our existence, that's about the best we could do. It got us where we are, and that's not trivial.'"
What we could say is that what we do is of little relevance, yet what we accomplish is spectacular. It's all in our perspective. What astounding truth there is that lies in a little grain of sand. This recent discovery is one that further shakes the fundamental foundations of the Christian church, though it only adds to the teachings of the church's original founder. For in a universe so vast and so grand, the very fact that we can consciously participate as a part of that universe, to interact with it, to discover its principles and to turn those principles into creations that ensure the ongoing development of our species, to realize that just as the universe is vast beyond our comprehension and exquisitely expansive, likewise so are we. And that is truly awareness of a spiritual sort.
The incredible vastness of the universe in which we live is beautiful beyond description. It should give us all pause when weighing the "important" events in our everyday lives against the exquisite background in which we live. Contemplating this expanded reality in which we find ourselves, could very well bring us closer together, through the realization that we might be better off if we don't segregate ourselves into unique aloneness. Through discoveries such as this, the inhabitants of this planet are being brought together into an awareness of the unity which we share with one another as inhabitants of this magnificent planet. It is therefore time to rethink the procedures and the structures and the systems which we have relied upon for centuries, all of those systems which got us to where we are, and then to ask ourselves if it is not time for some major changes in our focus and in our direction.
Here in TANSTAAFL City, we are dedicated to revealing new perspectives which might well lead us to new procedures and beliefs and systems that will greatly enhance life as we know it. We are here looking for answers. We were designed to be curious. For too long, the results of that curiosity have been systematically stifled, as in the case of Galileo. Many of our most outspoken "leaders" today speak of paradigm shifts, radical changes in consciousness, yet the paradigms which many profess are often very simple and elementary. TANSTAAFLites see paradigm shifts as earth shaking.
It was either C.P. Snow or Alfred North Whitehead who said that "all major changes in civilization essentially all but destroy the cultures in which they are instituted." We would further point out that if those changes are stifled, that the culture in question withers away just the same. So we cast our vote for expansive growth and change.
For these thoughts, I thank Norma Jean Thompson formerly of the Albuquerque "Alibi," for first making me aware of the Hubble grain of sand. To Isaac Asimov, I'm always indebted for the vast collection of knowledge which he compiled during his lifetime, specifically his marvelous, "Asimov's Biographical Encyclopedia of Science & Technology." To Bucky Fuller for instilling the desire for discovery and the constant belief in the ultimate goodness of humanity. To James Michener for being able to place exciting concepts in an enjoyable context. And, of course, to all of the people throughout our species' existence, who have wondered and who have persevered in following the inner leading to wherever that wonder will take them.
Something extremely interesting happened recently that you might not have heard about. Or, if you did hear about it, the impact of this happening may have escaped you. So I wanted to share it with you. But first, let's go back into the past to an event which only recently had renewed repercussions when it popped up in the media.
In Pisa, Italy (that's right, the home of the leaning tower), on February 15, 1564 (over 400 years ago), just three days before the death of Michelangelo, Galileo Galilei was born. There is much that we could say about this great scientist, but we'll narrow our focus here to a couple of specific points. Galileo was one of the first human beings on this planet to see stars and other celestial bodies (like some of the moons of Jupiter) that could not be seen with the naked eye. He was not the first. The telescope, which allowed him to accomplish this feat, was actually first built in Holland in 1609. However, Galileo is the first human being to use this new tool to make some very important discoveries which literally shook the culture of his time.
What Galileo discovered, when viewing the "heavens" through his telescopes, confirmed theories and predictions made by Nicolas Copernicus, who had died over two decades before Galileo was born. This created major problems. Up until that time, the Christian church promoted a view of the universe which placed the earth at its center, with everything else revolving around us. This view came from the astronomer Ptolemy, who lived a hundred years after Jesus. Ptolemy got many of his ideas from Hipparchus, a Greek astronomer born in Nicaea about 190 B.C, who was the first to accurately measure the distance to the moon and who created many of the instruments which would be used for the next 17 centuries in what was known as naked eye astronomy.
This concept of the earth as the center of the universe was very important to the church's presentation of reality and its emphasis upon the importance of humanity as God's creation. So when Copernicus proposed that the earth was not the center of the universe, but was, rather, a small player in a much bigger, and sometimes seemingly disorganized, system, the church took offense. Then along came Galileo who used the telescope to prove much of Copernicus's theories to be true. What's more, Galileo, becoming a master craftsman at creating lenses, and then spreading his telescopes throughout Europe, even had one of his telescopes wind up in the hands of Johan Kepler, a German astronomer who further refined the ideas of Copernicus, to the church's continued consternation.
In 1632, Galileo published "Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems," in Italian. The pope and the church were doubly angered. First, the pope, Urban VIII, took the book personally and felt that Galileo had made him out to be a fool. Secondly, publishing in Italian, rather than Latin, allowed not only the learned, but even the general public to read his work. It was quickly translated into many other languages, including Chinese. This resulted in Galileo being brought before the Inquisition the following year on charges of heresy.
Galileo was forced by the church to recant his views. Some might wonder why he would do this. Perhaps, at the ripe old age of 69 he had thoughts of Bruno, who some 30 years earlier was burned alive at the stake by the inquisition for professing such heresy as the infinity of space and the motion of the earth. Whatever the reason, Galileo recanted and the church's incorrect beliefs continued. Those beliefs were so strong that Harvard, in the year of its founding, 1636, remained firmly committed to Ptolemaic theory.
In 1835, Galileo's "Dialogue" was finally removed from the Roman Catholic Index of prohibited books. Then, in 1965, on a visit to Pisa, Pope Paul VI, spoke highly of Galileo. Finally, just recently, the Catholic Church officially reversed itself upon Galileo, essentially pardoning him, and thereby finally admitting that he was right in the first place and all along. And it only took a little over 360 years.
Now, with that as a perspective, let's take a look at what happened just the other day (give or take a couple of years). The quest for observing the universe took a giant step recently with the placing in orbit of the Hubble Space Telescope (http://www.stsci.edu ). Few know that this telescope was named for Edwin Powell Hubble, of the Palomar Observatory, who helped discover in the 1920's that there were other galaxies in the universe besides our own Milky Way galaxy. During the next 70 years, we discovered that there are literally billions of galaxies, and, furthermore, that on the average, each of those galaxies contains over a billion stars. That's over a billion billion stars similar to our sun.
Buckminster Fuller used to point out that universe is defined as the sum total of humanity's combined experience. Therefore, every time we are able to "see" further into space, our universe expands that distance in all directions, for that becomes a possible part of our experience. So we had arrived at a place in the 1990's where our ability to see into space had increased to something like 11 billion light years. To grasp the gravity of this reality, light travels at 86,282 miles per second. Therefore, in a year it travels 60 seconds * 60 minutes * 24 hours * 365 days * 86,282 miles = 2,722,852,843,200 miles. That's about 2 3/4 trillion miles. Then we have to multiply that by 11 billion, which gives us approximately 29,951,381,275,200,000,000,000. That's about 30 sextillion, or a number that's damn near impossible for most people to comprehend. And that's just in one direction. Think of a sphere with a radius of 11 billion light years. That's beyond huge.
But that's nothing but a drop in the bucket compared to what happens next. Someone got the bright idea of taking the Hubble Space Telescope and pointing it at what was generally considered to be "empty space." If we look up in the sky at night when we're away from the city, we notice that there are some parts of the sky which seem to be devoid of stars. So it has been even with the strongest of telescopes. There are just some places where there appears to be nothing, or close to it. So they decided to point Hubble at some of this empty space and see if there might be something there.
Now, just how much empty space are we talking about? Well, to give you a real clear idea, extend your arm as far as you can toward the sky. Now, imagine that you are holding a grain of sand between your thumb and forefinger. They pointed the Hubble telescope toward a piece of empty space that can be obscured by that tiny grain of sand that you are holding at arms length. And guess what they saw? Hidden in that tiny grain of sand of supposedly empty space they found 2,000 - 3,000 galaxies. At our predetermined average of 1 billion stars in a galaxy, they discovered over 2,000,000,000,000,000 (2 quadrillion) stars hidden in a piece of empty space the size of a grain of sand. Take a look for yourself: http://oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/PR/96/01.html .
We have now moved into areas of perception which are practically beyond our current ability to comprehend. How many grains of sand would it take to obscure our entire view of space? And each grain containing over 2 quadrillion suns. "What a piece of work is man," Shakespeare proclaimed. True, or not? Well, for an additional perspective, I'd like to share with you some thoughts from James A. Michener's book, "Space." This scene was not, incidentally, in the television series based upon the book. The character here, Stanley Mott, is a rocket scientist, who, feeling overwhelmed by some of the problems in his life, seeks a bit of solitude, some time to become still and regroup his energies.
"Stanley Mott, striving to attain some sense of what the universe was, sat perfectly still on the bank of the Tennessee River, south of Huntsville, Alabama. Keeping arms and legs motionless, he endeavored to move not even his eyes, for he wished to experience the sensation of a body at complete rest, and at last he achieved this. He was as still as a human being could be; indeed, he might as well be dead except for the inescapable functioning of autonomic systems like breathing and heart beating.
"'I am motionless,' he said to himself at last, and he kept this posture for ten minutes, thinking of nothing. Then his brain insisted, recalling data he had memorized at Cal Tech:
"'But at this moment I'm sitting on a piece of Earth at 34 degrees 30 minutes North, which means I'm spinning west to east at a rate of about 860 miles an hour. At the equator, because of the larger bulge, 1,040. At the same time, my Earth is moving through its orbit around the Sun at 66,661 miles an hour, and my Sun is carrying itself and its planets toward the star Vega at something like 31,000 miles an hour.
"'Our Sun and Vega move around the Galaxy at the blinding speed of 700,000 miles per hour, and the Galaxy itself rotates at 559,350 miles an hour.
"'And that's not all. Our Galaxy moves in relation to all other galaxies as they rush through the universe at a speed of better than 1,000,000 miles an hour.
"'So when I sit here absolutely still I'm moving in six wildly different directions at an accumulated speed of ..... maybe two and a half million miles an hour. So I can never be motionless. I'm traveling always at speeds which are incomprehensible. And it's all happening in real time.'
"He considered these demonstrable facts for some moments, then concluded:
"'And perhaps the universe itself is hurtling toward some undefined destination at a speed which could hardly be stated, perhaps to clear our space for a better universe which will supplant us, while we rush off to some new adventure.'
"When he rose and felt his limbs moving only inches, he thought: 'What a trivial journey we make. Inches under our own power, two and a half million miles with the universe. But ours is the journey that counts. Our slow inching along to understanding and control.' When he headed back to his car, he calculated that he was walking at a rate of perhaps 2.3 miles an hour, hardly worth noting in comparison to the speeds he had been dealing with: 'And yet, for millions of years of our existence, that's about the best we could do. It got us where we are, and that's not trivial.'"
What we could say is that what we do is of little relevance, yet what we accomplish is spectacular. It's all in our perspective. What astounding truth there is that lies in a little grain of sand. This recent discovery is one that further shakes the fundamental foundations of the Christian church, though it only adds to the teachings of the church's original founder. For in a universe so vast and so grand, the very fact that we can consciously participate as a part of that universe, to interact with it, to discover its principles and to turn those principles into creations that ensure the ongoing development of our species, to realize that just as the universe is vast beyond our comprehension and exquisitely expansive, likewise so are we. And that is truly awareness of a spiritual sort.
The incredible vastness of the universe in which we live is beautiful beyond description. It should give us all pause when weighing the "important" events in our everyday lives against the exquisite background in which we live. Contemplating this expanded reality in which we find ourselves, could very well bring us closer together, through the realization that we might be better off if we don't segregate ourselves into unique aloneness. Through discoveries such as this, the inhabitants of this planet are being brought together into an awareness of the unity which we share with one another as inhabitants of this magnificent planet. It is therefore time to rethink the procedures and the structures and the systems which we have relied upon for centuries, all of those systems which got us to where we are, and then to ask ourselves if it is not time for some major changes in our focus and in our direction.
Here in TANSTAAFL City, we are dedicated to revealing new perspectives which might well lead us to new procedures and beliefs and systems that will greatly enhance life as we know it. We are here looking for answers. We were designed to be curious. For too long, the results of that curiosity have been systematically stifled, as in the case of Galileo. Many of our most outspoken "leaders" today speak of paradigm shifts, radical changes in consciousness, yet the paradigms which many profess are often very simple and elementary. TANSTAAFLites see paradigm shifts as earth shaking.
It was either C.P. Snow or Alfred North Whitehead who said that "all major changes in civilization essentially all but destroy the cultures in which they are instituted." We would further point out that if those changes are stifled, that the culture in question withers away just the same. So we cast our vote for expansive growth and change.
For these thoughts, I thank Norma Jean Thompson formerly of the Albuquerque "Alibi," for first making me aware of the Hubble grain of sand. To Isaac Asimov, I'm always indebted for the vast collection of knowledge which he compiled during his lifetime, specifically his marvelous, "Asimov's Biographical Encyclopedia of Science & Technology." To Bucky Fuller for instilling the desire for discovery and the constant belief in the ultimate goodness of humanity. To James Michener for being able to place exciting concepts in an enjoyable context. And, of course, to all of the people throughout our species' existence, who have wondered and who have persevered in following the inner leading to wherever that wonder will take them.
