Hidden Heart of the Cosmos: Humanity and the New Story Revised edition by Swimme Brian Thomas;

Author:Swimme, Brian Thomas; [Неизв.]
Format: epub
Publisher: Catholic Foreign Mission Society of America, Inc.

As an illustration, we can return to our discussion of Andromeda Galaxy. Every night throughout all the millions of years of human existence, new photons of light have arrived from Andromeda. But it was not until we had painstakingly developed all the necessary tools, including telescopes and mathematics, but more generally all the arts and languages and conceptual capacities of modern Homo sapiens, that we could recognize the information these light particles carried. The story of Andromeda and its five hundred billion stars and its circling spiral structure has been present to Earth all along. And no one ever had to journey to Andromeda to learn its story. Rather, humans had to develop the sensitivities and capabilities necessary to awaken to the story that has been here throughout humanity's entire existence.

We scientists tend to use phrases that speak of our ability to “reach deep into space.” We speak of our invention of instruments that “probe the farthest regions of the universe.“ These are certainly valid expressions, but they can also give the mistaken impression that we actually “reach out” in some literal sense. There is no reaching out. Rather, we reach into our immediate experience.

We reach into our experience of a small segment of the universe, and we find there photons with wondrous stories from the farthest regions of the universe. All the books on the distant galaxies, all the volumes and journal articles on the large-scale structure of the universe, all the tomes on the dynamics of neutron stars, all the photographs of the brilliant nebulae, all the studies of super red giants are, strictly speaking, explications of the stories that exist in each cubic centimeter of the universe. These stories have been there for all of human history, but not until recently have we been able to read them. Optical telescopes, infrared detectors, x-ray diffractometers, spectroscopic devices—all such instruments of modern astronomy are designed to decipher the news of the universe contained in each segment of it.

The discovery of the birthplace of the cosmos, then, is the discovery of the story that has been with us for millions of years. It showered us from all directions as we wandered the African savannas and built our mud abodes along the Nile. Our own generation is simply the one to emerge at the time when human consciousness has become subtle enough and complex enough to awaken to what the universe has been telling us from the beginning. If it is true that the discovery of the universe's birthplace is the work of a few spectacular geniuses, it is also true that the discovery is the work of the entire human venture. Every genius, even the greatest, comes out of and works within an understanding that has been developing over a hundred millennia. The deepening of mind necessary to hear the story of the universe required the complexification of consciousness coming from all two million years of the human journey since our discovery of tools.

We are the space the universe created in which to tell its stories.

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