The newly released images from the recently deployed James Webb telescope gives one pause to think about the nature of the cosmos.
Notice that I didn’t state ”The Universe” because that is a loaded concept implying “one of”, as opposed to possibly “many of”.
The preconception possibly has its origins in a previous mistaken belief that the earth that we live on was the centre of all things.
As our instruments give us the ability to test predictive theories as to how matter and energy (human concepts) are supposed to behave, we are continually forced to revise our theories to account for observed phenomena.
Most common folk like us generally throw up our hands when muons, hadrons and peons : ) make it to the stage, as scientists desperately try to fit what they observe into an acceptable conceptual framework.
“Dark matter”, because it cannot be directly observed, only inferred from measurements, makes it easy to theorize that our so-called “universe” is but an expanding bubble of some kind in a much larger scheme of things.
So, if we talk about something out of our present reach, I prefer the term “cosmos”.
Thursday, July 14, 2022
Cosmic speculation
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment