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SusanofO -> RE: The Hubble Deep Field: The Most Important Image Ever Taken (9/10/2006 9:54:19 AM)
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ORIGINAL: SusanofO
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ORIGINAL: Rule
Quite.
Since the discovery of quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle of Heisenberg physics knows that the universe is not deterministic. In the humanities people have known that for a lot longer.
The non-deterministic nature of the universe as well as free will as evidenced by the ability to choose, imply spirituality.
* I like to think so, too, Rule (not that I want to argue, particuarly, with anyone who doesn't, just in case they think I am implying that by agreeing. I read a quote by Einstein one time, that he stated at the end of his life if he wished he'd chosen another occupation and he said: "I should have bene a plumber, instead". And we could get into that cat chasing its tail thing, but I do know that's not where you are going with this, because I "get" what you are saying (really). I think maybe even before quantum mechanics and the Heisenberg principle came along, spirituality may have been intuited by some people (Not that I can irrefutably prove it - or that you were impying I might be able to do that). I particularly liked your free-will choice of the word imply.
Is the Heisenberg principle that one that states the velocity and energy of an atomic particle cannot be measured with precision? And quantum mechanics the ares of study within physics of particles of matter and how they intereact with eachother? I read last week in TIME magazine, in an article aboout how the stars were "born", that huge portions of the universe are comprised of what is known to some physicists as: anti-matter and "black holes"(the majority of what many top-notch scientists can intuit from studying them, partly from viewing some of the Hubble telescope pictures. And the Keck tlelescopes in Hawaii.
[:)]
It was an interesting article, I thought. The head-line stated: "Let there be Light: 400,00 years after the Big Bang, the Cosmos went black. Here's what happened next:.Illuminating a Dark Age - how the universe grew from a murky soup to twinkling galaxies".
"When the Dark ages began, the cosmos was a formless sea of particles; by the time it ended, just a couple hundred million years later, the universe was alight with young stars gathering into nascent galaxies. It was during the dark ages that the checmical elements we know so well - carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and most of the rest - were first forged out of a primordial hydrogen and heelium. And it was during this time that the great structures of the modern universe - superclusters of thousands of galaxies strecthing across millions of light years - began to assemble. So far, however, even the mightitest telescopes haven'tbeen able to penetrate that murky era.
"We have a photo album of the universe -but its missing pages - as though you had pictures of a childas an infant ,ans then as a teenager - with nothing in-bewtween" says, Avi Loeb, a theroretical astropysicist at Harvard University. The full answer may have to wait for a new generation of telescopes, expected to come in line within the next decade. In astronomy, size matters, especially for far away objects. The bigger the telescope, the more of a distant galaxies light it can gather - just as a swimming pool carries more rain than a bucket...."meanwhile, astronomers have been able to put together a plausible scenario of what must have happened during the Dark Ages".
The first of those hints come from the universe-wide flash of light that followed nearly half a million years after the Big Bang. Before that flash ocurred, according to the widely accepted "standard model" of cosmology, our entire cosmos had swelled from a space smaller thanan atom to something 100 billion miles across. It was a seething maelstrom of matter so hot that subatomic particles trying to form into ato,s would hav ebeen blasted apart instantly and so dense that light couldn't have travelled more than a short distance before being absorbed. If you could somehow live long enough in such conditions, you would see nothing but bright light in all directions.
But as the universe expanded, it finally cooled down long enough to allow atoms to form and light to shine out across open space. The accidental discovery of that lightf back in the 1960's convinced astronomers that the Big Bang was a real event, not just a theoretical construct"...and the artulce oges on to say how an increasingly sophisticated series of instruments..."have laid bare the structure of the 400,000 year-old cosmos - only a few hundred-thousandths of its present age - in surprising detail (this was the baby picture Loeb referred to). "At that point the universe was a very simple place... you ca summarize the initial conditions on a sinlge sheet of paper. Some regions were a tuny but deeper than average, and some a little more sparse, Most of the stuff in it - thyen and stull today- was the mysterious dark matter that nobody has yet identified,, largely beacuse it doesn't produce ligth of any sprt. The rest was mostly oxygen, with a little bit of helium mixed in. So far, the universe hadn't done anything."
The First Stars
"At the start of the Dark Ages, there were no galaxies, no stars, no planets. Even if there had been, we wouldn't have been able to spot them. That's because hydrogen-gas clouds are nearly opaque to visible light;no ordinary telescope would have been able to see what hapened afterward. Yet somehow the matter that started as a sea of individual atoms managed to ransform itself into a seas of something more. So back in the 1990s, Loeb began lobbying theroists to make ma major push to deduce the first computer simlulations how the fuurst stars formed. The plan was to re-create the young universe digitally, plug in equations for the rlevant physics and see what may have happened".
"At first, the simulations agree, gravity was the only force at work. Regions of higher density drew matter to them, becoming denser still-a pattern preserved to this day in the distribution of galaxies....
Anyway - I won't reprint the entire article here (there's a bit more, below). But - is said that astronomers believed the first galaxies looked like, and what scientsts are doing to be able to really see more, and that they have tantalizing clues as to why the universe came to gether and how - more than they had before.
It says, "in the 1930s Albert Einstein realized a star could act as a lens, distorting and amplifying the light from somethig behind it. In practice, he said, it was probably so rare that we will never see it. Einstein was wrong. So -called gravitational lenses have become a major factor in modern astronomy. They have revealed, among other things, the existence of tiny planets around stars thousands of light-years away, and xreated weird optical effects, inclusding mutliple images of faraway quasars. If you look at a massive cluster of galaxies, it is figured, you might see amplified images of more ditant galaxies - too faint to see otherwise. So a year ago", a scientist called Ellis "started aiming the Keck tlelxscope at galactic clusters, and, along with Stark (another scientist)he identified six candidate objects as "more distant galaxies". To make certain these were truly far away, the pair has come back (twice) fora more intensive look.
"We want to be able to be absolutely sure we arent' kidding ourselves before we claim we've actually found them"...ti their delight, both Stark and Ellis are able to confrim that at least three of the faint galaxies do seem to lie hundreds of millins of light years closer to the Big Bang-than anything they've seen before...we're now very confident and very excited. If we've found this many in such a tiny area of the sky, there could be enough of those small galaxies to supply a substantial fraction of the energy that reionized the universe. I'm confident that we have an im porttant result"
"If anything, that's an undersatement. The first galaxies to emerge from the black hole of the early universe can't be studied in detail until telescopic technology makes another great leap. But Ellis and Stark may hav egotten a glimpse-and given thoerists the first hard evidence-of that unimaginably distant time when the comos left infancy behind, and entered the formative childhood that led, eventually, to our sun, and the tuny blue planet that encircles it".
I know it's not about the Hubble Telescope pictures, but is it about picures of the cosmos, and I thought some might enjoy reading part of the article.
*I apologize for all the typos. Typing isn't a strong suit of mine - and the edit function timed out before I had a chance correct the first draft, visible in my post immediately above.
[:)]
- Susan
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