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One of Walt Whitman's
best-known poems is this one:
When I heard the learn'd
astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause
in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself In the mystical moist
night-air, and from time to time.
Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.
I imagine that many
people reading those lines tell themselves, exultantly, "How true! Science
just sucks all the beauty out of everything, reducing it all to numbers and
tables and measurements! Why bother learning all that junk when I can just
go out and look at the stars?"
That is a very convenient point of view since it makes it not only unnecessary,
but downright aesthetically wrong, to try to follow all that hard stuff in
science. Instead, you can just take a look at the night sky, get a quick
beauty fix, and go off to a nightclub.
The trouble is that Whitman is talking through his hat, but the poor soul
didn't know any better.
I don't deny that the night sky is beautiful, and I have in my time spread
out on a hillside for hours looking at the stars and being awed by their
beauty (and receiving bug-bites whose marks took weeks to go away).
But what I see - those quiet, twinkling points of light - is not all the
beauty there is. Should I stare lovingly at a single leaf and willingly
remain ignorant of the forest? Should I be satisfied to watch the sun glinting
off a single pebble and scorn any knowledge of a beach?
Those bright spots in the sky that we call planets are worlds. There are
worlds with thick atmospheres of carbon dioxide and sulfuric acid; worlds
of red-hot liquid with hurricanes that could gulp down the whole earth; dead
worlds with quiet pock-marks of craters; worlds with volcanoes puffing plumes
of dust into airlessness; worlds with pink and desolate deserts - each with
a weird and unearthly beauty that boils down to a mere speck of light if
we just gaze at the night sky.
Those other bright spots, which are stars rather than planets, are actually
suns. Some of them are of incomparable grandeur, each glowing with the light
of a thousand suns like ours; some of them are merely red-hot coals doling
out their energy stingily. Some of them are compact bodies as massive as
our sun, but with all that mass squeezed into a ball smaller than the earth.
Some are more compact still, with the mass of the sun squeezed down into
the volume of a small asteroid. And some are more compact still, with their
mass shrinking down to a volume of zero, the site of which is marked by an
intense gravitational field that swallows up everything and gives back nothing;
with matter spiraling into that bottomless hole and giving out a wild
death-scream of X-rays.
There are stars that pulsate endlessly in a great cosmic breathing; and others
that, having consumed their fuel, expand and redden until they swallow up
their planets, if they have any (and someday, billions of years from now,
our sun will expand and the earth will crisp and sere and vaporize into a
gas of iron and rock with no sign of the life it once bore). And some stars
explode in a vast cataclysm whose ferocious blast of cosmic rays, hurrying
outward at nearly the speed of light reaching across thousands of light years
to touch the earth and supply some of the driving force of evolution through
mutations.
Those paltry few stars we see as we look up in perfect silence (some 2,500
no more on even the darkest and clearest night) are joined by a vast horde
we don't see, up to as many as three hundred billion-300,000,000,000 - to
form an enormous pinwheel in space. This pinwheel, the Milky Way galaxy,
stretches so widely that it takes light, moving at 186,282 miles each second,
a hundred thousand years to cross it from end to end; and it rotates about
its center in a vast and stately turn that takes two hundred million years
to complete-and the sun and the earth and we ourselves all make that turn.
Beyond our Milky Way galaxy are others, a score or so of them bound to our
own in a cluster of galaxies, most of them small, with no more than a few
billion stars in each; but with one at least, the Andromeda galaxy, twice
as large as our own.
Beyond our own cluster, other galaxies and other clusters exist; some clusters
made up of thousands of galaxies. They stretch outward and outward as far
as our best telescopes can see, with no visible sign of an end -perhaps a
hundred billion of them in all.
And in more and more of those galaxies we are becoming aware of violence
at the centers - of great explosions and outpourings of radiation, marking
the death of perhaps millions of stars. Even at the center of our own galaxy
there is incredible violence masked from our own solar system far in the
outskirts by enormous clouds of.dust and gas that lie between us and the
heaving center.
Some galactic centers are so bright that they can be seen from distances
of billions of light-years, distances from which the galaxies themselves
cannot be seen and only the bright starlike centers of ravening energy show
up-as quasars. Some of these have been detected from more than ten billion
light-years away.
All these galaxies are hurrying outward from each other in a vast universal
expansion that began fifteen billion years ago, when all the matter in the
universe was in a tiny sphere that exploded in the hugest conceivable shatter
to form the galaxies.
The universe may expand forever or the day may come when the expansion slows
and turns back into a contraction to re-form the tiny sphere and begin the
game all over again so that the whole universe is exhaling and in-haling
in breaths that are perhaps a trillion years long.
And all of this vision- far beyond the scale of human imaginings -was made
possible by the works of hundreds of "learn'd" astronomers. All of it; all
of it was discovered after the death of Whitman in 1892, and most of it in
the past twenty-five years, so that the poor poet never knew what a stultified
and limited beauty he observed when he 'look'd up in perfect silence at the
stars-"
Nor can we know or imagine now the limitless beauty yet to be revealed in
the future - by science.
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