GALAXIES LIKE GRAINS OF SAND--GREAT GRAPHICS GIVE US A BIT OF PERSPECTIVE

Every so often I come across a presentation that makes something I had a vague idea about crystal clear. I invite you to dive into this great piece by Brian Resnick and Javier Xarracina on Vox. It's partly about dark matter, but it uses a series of beautifully done graphics to give us a sense of where the Earth fits into the big picture of the sun, the Milky Way and the hundreds of billions of galaxies in the known universe, all of which are dwarfed in turn by dark matter and dark energy.

 Looking up at the Milky Way--our home galaxy

Credit: Free photos from Pixabay

Please give it a click! You won't be sorry.

And to get a totally different view of the history and immensity of the cosmos, check out this new video zoom out of the depths of the Hubble Legacy Field.

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Thanks to British author Brian Aldiss for the striking phrase "galaxies like grains of sand." That was the title of the American edition of a collection of some of his short stories, published in the UK under the title The Canopy of Time. 

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                                                           Empires of Illusion

A quirky, but striking piece of public art, leavened with a twist of Central European humor, marks a downtown street corner in the Slovakian capital city of Bratislava.

One comes across it suddenly, a life-sized bronze figure in a hard hat or helmet, head resting on hands, partly emerged from a man-hole in the middle of the sidewalk.  A peeper peeking under womens’ skirts?   A political satire on working life in this former Communist land, reflecting the old bargain that “we’ll pretend to work and you’ll pretend to pay us?  A modern philosophical reference to Plato’s Cave?  A playful reminder of the largely invisible underworld of pipes, sewers, power lines and workers it takes to sustain civilization?  Perhaps just an artistic prank designed to add a distinctive flavor and draw tourism to this newly-independent, lesser-known half of the former Czechoslovak state?

Or is it, as I’m now thinking, a larger comment about the world of illusion in which we all live, and our only partly-successful efforts to pull ourselves out of individual or collective states of unconsciousness into the clear light of day or reason?  Nearby Vienna, only a few miles up-river, after-all, was Freud’s hometown.

Often it takes a piece of absurdist art like this—or a view of staggeringly absurd political theatre like Communism in its dotage or Washington in its current debt-limit manifestation—to stop people in their tracks and cause them to reflect on where we are and what we have become. 

Like the statue in the sidewalk, we’re in constant danger of being ignored, trampled or even swept away in the crowded rush of unfolding events and ever more manipulated images surrounding us.  But look more closely at his pose and what he might have to say to us.  A thoughtful, even faraway look and the curve of a curious smile animate his face.  His left forefinger is slightly raised, as if to draw attention to a point or object he wants to discuss that has just come to mind. 

This is definitely not Rodin’s Thinker, fully emerged, naked, alone and lost in profound thought on his rock, but perhaps an equally recognizable human reference.  The anonymous individual, only partly visible or realized, taking time out to reflect, think, and most notably, engage in an ongoing dialogue both with unseen colleagues and with those of us willing to stop and listen.

Les Adler

for the institute