Astronomy

Hey, I like my new header. It goes well with the mod of Dylan Thomas: Do not go gentle into that good night, blog blog against the dying of the light! You see the light from enormous regions of luminous gas clouds, and then as you move above these you see the blackness of deep space intruding with just a few isolated stars around. This is all very mysterious. So, keep on blogging! That’s the ticket. The lights may be going out as we probe deeper into space, but still we keep on blogging against the dying of the light! Blog! Blog! And I might add, GO OBAMA GO!! There’s still time!
Yes, time for me to change the header on a whim!
Header showing Venus in dark blue sky.

Thanks to LiveDreams for this video of the relative sizes of astronomical objects. Mind blowing!!

First, where it’s at: it’s snowing today. We are supposed to be getting about a foot of snow before it’s over sometime tomorrow. I had just finished on Saturday cutting a path in our brushy undergrowth below the house to the paths in the woods. Now I’ll be able to snowshoe there more easily.

Second, where I’m at: I’m at the last chapter of Cosmic Jackpot: Why Our Universe Is Just Right for Life by Paul Davies. At last I found a science book that really takes seriously Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing? and it even reads like a detective thriller.

As Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka says,
In our times such disparate thinkers as Wittgenstein and Heidegger have been struck by its poignancy. As Wittgenstein puts it: “Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is.” He is believed to have experienced at times “a certain feeling of amazement that anything should exist at all,” and Heidegger has developed his metaphysics as the “exfoliation” of the question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?”

I’m with you, Ludwig. That the world is is the mystical. I often have that exact same feeling: a certain feeling of amazement that anything should exist at all.

Here’s what Homer Simpson thinks about the question:

Now for something completely different!
How about a starburst in Starburst Cluster NGC 3603?

This thing is quite close to us, a mere 20,000 light-years away.

For further information see the Astronomy Picture of the Day.