Of Time and Space and Other Things by Isaac Asimov

Author:Isaac Asimov [Asimov, Isaac]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: science
ISBN: ISBN: 0-447-33023-3
Publisher: Lancer Books
Published: 1972-03-19T05:00:00+00:00

10. A Galaxy At A Time

Four or five'vears ago there was a small fire at a school two blocks from my house. It wasn't much of a fire, really, producing smoke and damaging some rooms in the base ment, but nothing more. What's more, it was outside school hours so that no lives were in danger.

Nevertheless, as soon as the first piece of fire apparatus was on the scene the audience had begun to gather. Every idiot in town and half the idiots from the various con tiguous towns came racing down to see the fire. They came by auto and by oxcart, on bicycle and on foot. They came with girl friends on their arms, with aged parents on their shoulders, and with infants at the breast.

They parked all the streets solid for miles around and after the first fire engine had come on the scene nothing more could have been added to it except by helicopter.

Apparently this happens every time. At every disaster, big or small, the two-legged ghouls gather and line up shoulder to shoulder and chest to back. They do this, it seems, for two purposes: a) to stare goggle-eyed and slack-jawed at destruction and misery, and b) to prevent the approach of the proper authorities who are attempting to safeguard life and property.

Naturally, I wasn't one of those who rushed to see the fire and I felt very self-righteously noble about it. How ever (since we are all friends), I will confess that this is not necessarily because I am free of the destructive in stinct. It's just that a messy little fire in a basement isn't my idea of destruction; or a good, roaring blaze at the munitions dump, either.

If a star were to blow up, then we might have some thing.

Come to think of it, my instinct for destruction must be well developed after all, or I wouldn't find myself so fascinated by the subject of supernovas, those colossal stellar explosions.

Yet in thinking of them, I have, it turns out, been a piker. Here I've been assuming for years that a supernova was the grandest spectacle the universe had to offer (pro vided you were standing several dozen light-years away) but, thanks to certain 1963 findings, it turns out that a supemova taken by itself is not much more than a two inch firecracker.

This realization arose out of radio astronomy. Since World War 11, astronomers have been picking up micro wave (very short radio-wave) radiation from various parts of the sky, and have found that some of it comes from our own neighborhood. The Sun itself is a radio source and so are Jupiter and Venus.

The radio sources of the Solar System, however, are virtually insignificant. We would never spot them if we weren't right here with them. To pick up radio waves across the vastness of stellar distances we need something better. For instance, one radio source from beyond the Solar System is the Crab Nebula. Even after its radio waves have

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