In his 1977 book The First Three Minutes, big-bang physicist Steven Weinberg famously concluded: “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.”
Cosmology
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Universe in a box
According to legend, Christ appeared to the medieval mystic Julian of Norwich and showed her a little thing the size of a hazelnut that he placed in her hand. “What is it?” she asked. He answered, “It is all that is made.”
Webb Space Telescope image of galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 • NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI
The big questions are still out there
Last week’s column mentioned in passing the medieval European liberal-arts curriculum, required of every university student who sought a bachelor’s degree.
Photo by Dukas Lu (CC BY-NC 2.0)
A new finale for ‘Creation’
Two centuries have elapsed since Joseph Haydn composed his magnificent The Creation oratorio. In all that time, no other musician has given us a better evocation of how the universe began.
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In search of universe’s point
Nobel prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg is perhaps best known to the general public as author of a scrappy remark near the end of his 1977 best-selling book, “The First Three Minutes.” He wrote: “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.”
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The new cosmology in tragedy’s wake
All human thought and action is guided by a cosmology, a collectively accepted story for where the world came from and how it works.
The famed Hooker telescope at Mount Wilson Observatory • Photo by Doc Searls (CC BY 2.0)
Our age? It’s now an educated guess
How old is the universe? The amazing thing is not the answer — approximately 15 billion years — but the fact that there is an answer.
Map of the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation developed with the data provided by the COBE satellite • NASA (Public Domain)
Fact is, science is skepticism
Astonishing fact Number 1: The universe began billions of years ago in an explosion from an infinitely small, infinitely hot seed of energy. The Big Bang.
Cedar waxwing • Photo by Patrice Bouchard on Unsplash
Making some sense of cosmic complexity
It was one of those unexpected encounters that brighten a day: a leafless winterberry tree covered with cedar waxwings busily gobbling the scarlet fruit.
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The joy of life after the Big Bang
“In the beginning, there was not coldness and darkness: there was the fire,” wrote the Jesuit mystic, Teilhard de Chardin, in his The Mass on the World. He added: “The flame has lit up the whole world from within…from the inmost core of the tiniest atom to the mighty sweep of the most universal laws of being.”