What occurred to me was that I could use the universe as a guideline (even while typing the sentence I’m smiling at the audacity) for making the tough choices in life. Well, that was my thought and I do believe it has validity. Interesting to me, is that even an astrophysicist cannot define how big the universe is because the answer changes within an instant – so it seems is life. It is impossible to identify a single movement called ‘now’ because doing so will not hold up across the universe. Where you are in any moment and time, changes the meaning. We are unbounded (or perhaps curved which is essentially the same thing to my way of thinking). There is not an edge.
Like the universe, life problems do not have a definition (or an edge) that can withstand the test of time and be true for all people. If we are lucky enough to have basic human needs such as food and safety met; the mind can open to studying other connections with the universe at large. For me, answers to questions are more like waves of movement; and, within a wave are ranges. When I labor to describe and understand what is happening to me now, I must accept that my comprehension will be different in time and space from another mind partially dependent on where, in the world or space, that brain calls home. This is like the ‘Doppler effect’. There is information approaching at the same time other information is receding and in addition, like a galaxy, there is also dark matter that I do not see.
To help make sense, I envisioned Sir Issac Newton passing a ray of sunlight through a glass prism. Aha! He must have been ecstatic to witness that light is not a single beam but instead an assortment of wavelengths from the long red through to the short violet … a rainbow that is there even though I cannot see with the naked eye. Later, to give you a very inadequate background, W. H. Wollaston (1801) demonstrated that dark lines crossed the colored bands. He thought the dark lines were boundaries. Ten years later, Joseph von Fraunhofer mapped the dark lines. In 1858, Gustav Kirchhoff and Robert Bunsen documented that these dark lines give information about motion and distance. Ah, the birth of modern spectroscopy. A spectroscope can break up light into a gamut of color. Lower the pressure and Kirchhoff and Bunsen observed that each line identified an element with exactness much like a bar code or the ISBN number of the book I refer to, are tied to a specific item.
I am not trying to be complicated. (I am out of my league – uncomfortable with my lack of expertise.) What I have decided, though, is that I would like to use astronomy to enhance perspective. Being rigid is foolish; history has proven that fact. I am dedicating 2013 to a study of astronomy, partially because I want to converse with a ten year-old boy who seems to be looking toward the stars and also, because I have a desire to learn more about the cosmos to which I am integrally connected.
Yes, I am going to have to go back to school. My blog entries will be once a week dealing with such questions as: What’s it like to start anew? How does it feel to be (probably) the oldest person and perhaps the least knowledgeable student in the class? So, what readers can expect is my assessment of this experience, plus a bit of what I learn about astronomy. I may not “rock you” like Queen did, but I am going to try.
Happy New Year!
* By the way, one of the authors, Brian May, is a founding member of Queen. He was a PhD student in Interplanetary Dust when the rock group hit the charts.
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