Forum / stimulating, vexing, or of no consequnce at all
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strannikovOct 30, 04:55pmI've shared notification with a few Fictionauts among us but thought to share with the entire community.
The University of Hawaii's Institute for Astronomy has posted on its webpage two videos accompanying its 30 Jan 2017 press release concerning discovery of "the Dipole Repeller" and the 10 Aug 2017 press release on "the cosmic velocity web".
The narrations are not overly technical (if I can follow them). The information conveyed in the two videos (links provided below, is my plan) suggests that we and all dear to us are quite close (in cosmographic terms) to being exactly in the middle between the cosmic repelling force and the cosmic attracting force: here I only remind readers of my fondness for the notion of "die Zwischenwelt".
No telling what science satirical conclusions yours truly can derive or extrapolate from these presentations: but anyway, if you can, enjoy or at least permit yourself to be provoked--the one is five minutes long, the other eleven.
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strannikovOct 30, 04:58pm
30 Jan 2017: the Dipole Repeller
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strannikovOct 30, 05:00pm
10 Aug 2017: the Cosmic V(elocity)-Web
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David AckleyNov 02, 04:20pmWords fail, of course. But thanks for putting these up. It is useful to be put in mind of the vastness of things.
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strannikovNov 02, 06:38pm
David: glad to share.
Perhaps one scary thing these presentations allow: the scale has been modeled so well that "the cosmic V-web" begins to look as if it could be surveyed properly by a microscope almost as well as a telescope! (I have an old old single panel cartoon of a microscopist looking down at a slide from which a telescopist is looking up.)
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strannikovNov 07, 04:50pm
As David observed aptly, words do fail when confronting the enormity that envelopes us: but of course, human beings while they live repair to words whether apt or no, confronting enormities or no.
A brief meditation, then, per favore:
if you, dear reader, take a look at the posted video presentations, keep a single sheet or piece of paper handy. When the "profile" shots of the Cosmic V-Web come along, hold your piece of paper near the animation (a large post-it note size might be ideal) so that the paper's thickness is set against the markers for the Milky Way and say to yourself: "Self, my existence and my work as a writer will never be more substantive than this sheet of paper's thickness is in terms of the space and time this animation depicts".
Some might take this as a rebuke to humanity or to literary effort, but I myself am not deterred: yes, our contributions are as scant and flimsy as anyone's, just as ephemeral: fine. Yes, we are constituent to the Universe's own ephemerality: well and good. Whatever our ephemerality and substance consists of, everyone and everything we've ever held dear in terms of baryonic matter will accompany what's left of us in due course right down into the maw of the Shapley Concentration. --and if the Dipole Repeller in due course should follow us in and wend its way down the throat of the Shapley Concentration, I begin to anticipate and imagine other modes of existence altogether on the other side of that ephemeral event.
We learn more and more and know less and less. We seem therefore not yet to have attained to the entropy of curiosity.
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