Recently my reading drifted back to an old love, science. I picked up Origins by Neil Degrasse Tyson and Donald Goldsmith. It is a compelling introduction to Cosmology and does a fairly nice job of explaining high level physics to the layman. It is not as dense or (my opinion) self- indulgent as another fine work “The Elegant Universe” by Brian Greene or as incredibly dense as Roger Penrose. Origins would probably be on the same level of complexity as Richard Dawkins' “The Blind Watchmen” and not as heavy as the “The Ancestor’s Tale” (plus Dawkins is married to the hot chick from Dr. Who during the Tom Baker years.)
Anyways, as I am rapidly flying through this wonderful little nugget I had a kind of small epiphany. In fourteen billion years of cosmic evolution and the thirty-five thousands years humans have infested this little orb we are running out of place to hide the boogey-man.
When mankind first gained the capacity for reason and metaphysical thought he was restricted in his capacity to solve the universe by his tools. When ancient peoples gazed up at the sky and saw the shield of blue they didn’t say
“Shit. Good thing that atmosphere is there; else we’d be singed like a sausage.” No our ancestors probably said “Ugh.”, and roamed on their merry way to an untimely death at the hands of a Smileodon. But I digress.
The first human to hear thunder, or see a rainbow did not have the tools necessary to make any more of a leap of thought than “Wow. Where did that come from?”
And… are ya ready! They made shit up!
Must be the Gods on the mountain top, or dwarves bowling, whatever. Well they got up on those mountains and guess what they found… No castle, no gods. They must have moved.
Where did they go? Of course into the heavens!
Then along came smartasses like Aristotle who informed the rest of mankind that the world was round just from observation. Not bad, he was off on the circumference but pretty close considering that he was literally eyeballing it.
The telescope really screwed things up for the superstitious because Copernicus, Galileo, and Brahe were able to say and prove “Y’know that whole we're the center of the universe jive? Forget it! And those crystal spheres that hold up the heavens, There right out as well.
Looks like it wasn’t safe for the boogey men, ghosts, or gods to hide there anymore, call the metaphysical movers! We’re going into space!
Well that lasted a couple of centuries until Hubble, the scientists not the telescope said. “Sorry to break this to ya, but our universe is finite, it’s expanding, and no winged people seemed to be floating around up there.”
The superstitious holding on to the last cliff of their reality proclaimed….. They are INVISIBLE!!!!! We can’t see them, they are there but the boogey man, the whole castle and gate thing, they are invisible.
God groaned,” Hubble you ass, we were just getting comfortable out here! Now I have to be invisible! Please don’t let these monkeys’s start coming around here.”
Sputnik, Mercury, Apollo, Pioneer, et al. allowed us higher- order primates into the ghosts’ and goblins’ new backyard but guess what. No one has come out to great us with metaphysical lemonade or smite us for that matter. Hasn't happened and it never will.
It seems the further we expand our knowledge of this wonderful universe, god has less places to hide. Maybe they moved into one of them new fangled pocket universes?
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