[whataretheysaying] Mary Madigan: More things in heaven and earth..

[Email subscription to blog articles]

Posted by Mary Madigan:
More things in heaven and earth..
http://whataretheysaying.powerblogs.com/posts/1173637857.shtml


   Are we [1]a bit of pollution?

     Smootâs and Perlmutterâs work is part of a revolution that has
     forced their colleagues to confront a universe wholly unlike any
     they have ever known, one that is made of only 4 percent of the
     kind of matter we have always assumed it to be â the material that
     makes up you and me and this magazine and all the planets and stars
     in our galaxy and in all 125 billion galaxies beyond. The rest â 96
     percent of the universe â is ... who knows?

     âDark,â cosmologists call it, in what could go down in history as
     the ultimate semantic surrender. This is not âdarkâ as in distant
     or invisible. This is âdarkâ as in unknown for now, and possibly
     forever.

     If so, such a development would presumably not be without
     philosophical consequences of the civilization-altering variety.
     Cosmologists often refer to this possibility as âthe ultimate
     Copernican revolutionâ: not only are we not at the center of
     anything; weâre not even made of the same stuff as most of the rest
     of everything. âWeâre just a bit of pollution,â Lawrence M. Krauss,
     a theorist at Case Western Reserve, said not long ago at a public
     panel on cosmology in Chicago. âIf you got rid of us, and all the
     stars and all the galaxies and all the planets and all the aliens
     and everybody, then the universe would be largely the same. Weâre
     completely irrelevant.â

     All well and good. Science is full of homo sapiens-humbling
     insights. But the trade-off for these lessons in insignificance has
     always been that at least now we would have a deeper â simpler â
     understanding of the universe. That the more we could observe, the
     more we would know. But what about the less we could observe? What
     happens to new knowledge then? Itâs a question cosmologists have
     been asking themselves lately, and it might well be a question
     weâll all be asking ourselves soon, because if theyâre right, then
     the time has come to rethink a fundamental assumption: When we look
     up at the night sky, weâre seeing the universe.

     Not so. Not even close.

   If this is true, the environmentalists were wrong again - mankind is
   not the great defiler of Gaia - we're not even a bug on her nose.

   ..and Stephen Hawking was right. There's a [2]big frontier out there,
   bigger than we knew.

References

   1. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/11/magazine/11dark.t.html?_r=1&ref=magazine&oref=slogin
   2. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15970232/