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As big (small) as it gets

This is a survey of galaxies spanning billions and billions of light years. There's a lot of them. You can see strands and groupings of galaxies in filament like structures - the dark band across the center is our own galaxy's light blotted out, since it's so bright.

This is our Universe, and our entire galaxy is but a tiny dot in a great matrix of galaxies. But these galaxies and great strands of galaxies had a precursor, which was a mere ripple in the energy of the Big Bang. The Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation:
This is two sides of the same image. The red represents slightly warmer, and the blue represents slightly cooler, but these colors are arbitrary. What this actual image shows is the difference in radiation frequency soon after the Big Bang, and it was the colder areas that formed the first galaxies of massive clouds of hydrogen, and soon after the first stars, which led to the others and ultimately our existence. This difference in frequency led to the pattern of galaxies shown above.

What will really twist your mind is this image of the CMBR is from when the entire Universe was damn small. And if you extrapolate back to when the entire Universe was smaller still, it becomes microscopic, atomic, subatomic, smaller than an electron. And thus this difference in frequency stems from the start when the whole of our reality was smaller than a Quark.

We come from this subatomic moment - the very parts that make us up were there. We are the Universe, man, and are as big and as small as we want to see it.

5 comments:

l.e.s.ter said...

Redshift's lament! That's some amazing stuff...

Blue Collared Snob said...

I love science, I wish I had been more nerdy in school and maybe not lived in Kentucky School System.

Redshirt said...

Science is the best. I think you could build a religion on it - I mean, this stuff is way more mind blowing than any God or Bible tale. And it's real, in as much as anything is real. Which is not much at all.

So maybe not. Too much ambiguity.

Blue Collared Snob said...

Well they can't really turn science into a religion because the name Scientology is already taken and what could you call it, Sciencatholicism? Where would we all go on Sunday to compare clothes? Besides you know how humans can be, some would start saying their science is the only true science. Biology is so much more correct than Physics.

Redshirt said...

Church of the Universe. Universaltarians.

You could still meet in a cool space - perhaps a temple dedicated to science - and talk about what certain science means for you and me, and perhaps how we could live our lives based on these teachings.

For instance - did you know 60% of heart attacks occur in the morning? Thus, a lesson would be: take it easy till noon.

You could all meet, as a "Church", on nature walks or museum tours or any other sciency type field trip. It would be great, and everyone could still gossip about everyone, or politic for Church positions, or any of the other petty shit folks love so much.