We await a galaxy-rise – a morning filled with 400 billion suns

Sky — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 21:00:47 +0000

During my lifetime I have gone from viewing stars thorough binoculars, and once through a 40-inch refracting telescope (Yerkes Observatory was just miles from my home – I viewed once as a child) to the amazing deep-space digital views provided by the orbiting Hubble Telescope. I watched Halley’s comet in 1986 from the deck of my home in San Francisco, through 10x binoculars. During my lifetime, scientists dealing with cosmology have advanced our thinking about how the universe (and possible 10^10^10^7 parallel universes — oh, sorry, must not forget I am actually a mathematician and the correct notation is 10^{10^10⁷}) may have gotten to its current state and where it might be going. {the photo is Phil Plaitt, the “Bad Astronomer” — thanks, Phil, for pointing me to the video which you can play below}

This music video is a trippy artistic rephrasing of how two thinkers talked about the meaning and inspiration of all of this.

Please also continue reading for footnotes and a second video where Sir Arthur C. Clarke, Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan discuss the universe…

Footnotes:

Also for more fun, listen to this discussion: Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, Arthur C. Clarke (momentarily) — play it below God, the Universe and Everything Else

Phil Plaitt’s original Bad Astronomy blog.

Hubble Telescope web site at NASA.gov.

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We await a galaxy-rise – a morning filled with 400 billion suns