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The Known Universe

By Gregon

The American Museum of Natural History has created a wonderful visual experience: “The Known Universe”. This short video takes viewers…

…from the Himalayas through our atmosphere and the inky black of space to the afterglow of the Big Bang. Every star, planet, and quasar seen in the film is possible because of the world’s most complete four-dimensional map of the universe, the Digital Universe Atlas that is maintained and updated by astrophysicists at the American Museum of Natural History.

Or, if you’re a Douglas Adams fan, you’d know it better as the Total Perspective Vortex. Enjoy (or run screaming, if you’ve got an overblown ego):

In truth, it’s still really just a superficial look – I doubt the human brain can even begin to understand the truly awesome distances and timeframes involved, and a 5 minute film on a few inches of screen is never going to immerse you in it. Nevertheless, it’s still one of the best things I’ve seen this week (thanks to @LeeBillings for the heads-up).

Greg
Editor
Greg is the owner-editor of The Daily Grail, as well as the author of a number of books including Stop Worrying, There Probably is an Afterlife.

4 Comments

  1. Fractional perspective
    Granted a 5 minute film definitely will not.

    I still remember what one of my lecturers said on the first day of my geology degree. ‘One of the hardest things in geology is understanding the timescale’.

    Actually what he said that that mentally jumping from processes that last 1/1000th second to ones that last a billion years, relating them, filling the timescale in our minds, and understanding them in the context of their physical, chemical and biological processes, then conceptualising the whole thing to arrive at what we call the Earth, was the hardest thing in geology.

    After years of study i still wouldn’t say that i ‘understand it’. I don’t even remember most of yesterday.

    However i have nothing to compare my intuitive feeling of it against any more. I can say that i have a better feel for what 4.65 billion years is that i had before i started my studies.

    All i have really done though is pad out the timescale with an understanding of all the myriad events given by the geological, paleomagnetic, paleoclimatic, extra-planetary evidences required to get a picture of Earth history.

    This is the best ‘non-narrative’ way of understanding the time scale, but we can do other things.

    Buddhist monks and other meditators have long claimed to be able to experience timelessness and ‘the universe’. Interestingly when these highly experienced meditators are placed in an MRI machine so we can see what is going on the areas of the brain responsible for dimensionalisation of the brains model of reality, so the part responsible for formulating a 3 dimensional picture in which to place ‘ourselves’ and time have very low blood flow.

    I wouldn’t call it understanding of time and space (over experiencing an absence of them), though i expect it might feel like such. Shutting down the minds ability to conceptualise time is probably a good way of ‘feeling’ what the geological timescale is like though.

    Shutting down the brains ability to conceptualise space must feel interesting. You would feel the ‘universe’ and feel as if you were as big as it or ‘one’ with it. Of course that is the narrative we place on top of reduced blood flow in the brain.

    Either way, we have knowledge and understanding of what has occurred in the timescale, which can give appreciation, but probably not ‘understanding’ of the great depth of time in any deep sense. Then we can, through a large amount of effort, experience the timeless, but it looks like an experience of something we imagine to be like the timeless, rather than actually being that amount of time. Simply being unable to understand or conceptualise something is not the same as understanding it afterall, though it is a different perspective on it.

    These seem to be all we have at the moment, and neither is truly ‘understanding’ it. As you say Greg, we probably cannot understand it, but there are ways to better understand it than if you don’t try, or just make up narrative. Or at least we can say there are ways to have a better grasp of what it might mean.

    1. opposites
      I have made the opposite experience with regard to time scales. When you work on parallel computers, the number of events that happen in one millisecond is very large. What makes it more interesting is that the order of these events makes a difference. The every day concept of things happening “immediately” takes on a different meaning. When you rely on things happening in a particular order, you are usually in deep trouble.

      We may not find other life because it functions at a vastly different time scale. We may be too fast, or too slow to even notice them.

      Also I am not sure that all the stuff we see very far out is really from “our” universe.

      1. Fortunately nature doesn’t
        Fortunately nature doesn’t rely on things happening in the same way. It is a better example of causality, or at least natural causality. It always astounds me that while we construct out of low entropy nature builds out of randomness using laws that force order, such as gravity or different melting points. This construction using randomness is also one of the ‘things’ to get your head around on your journey of understanding. Like a landmark on the way.

        As for life functioning at vastly different timescales. Maybe…

        There is a fantastic essay on size that i will look up the reference for if you fancy. It draws awareness to why we exist at the scale we do, at this magnitude. A few orders of scale smaller and the required complexity vanishes – you get simpler as you get smaller down to single celled. Then an order smaller again and we are too small for the required complexity. Getting bigger life is very limited by gravity. Say we are about 1 meter tall, go up an order to 10m and few animals have achieved it, none 100m. Obviously Earths gravity is a principle factor here, but start increasing the orders of magnitude and an objects own gravity becomes an issue.

        The universe ranges in size from around ten-30 to ten+30, we have a small window in the middle to play around with. Again we are back to the laws of physics and if you want to call it that, ‘fine tuning’. Though the scale we could exist at is a bit more movable i guess than many of the constants.

        Either way, that is life as we know it, but it shouldn’t come as a surprise that we are exactly in this high-information low-gravity window. The fact that we are is suggestive to me that this is the high probability window for life.

        As for the time scales you mention. Obviously the observation is based around any of this type; we just don’t know. One assumption i would make is that information would need to be passed around inside a lifeform. In us this is happening chemically over very short time periods. So we have functionality. Taking something like the universe; information from one side of it now takes so long to get to the other that if this information was involved in thought it is difficult to see how many more thoughts the universe can have left, unless it exists forever. An if it has infinite volume then information transfer across it becomes impossible, even with infinite time. Assuming speed of light transfer times. Information degradation will be more of a problem and information theory might have more to say. This is all conjecture of course.

  2. Nothing’s gonna change my world
    When I’m in the country, away from the city where I can see the stars, I stare up at the night sky with full awareness that I’m standing on a ball of rock, the milky way galaxy spiraling around me, with other galaxies beyond, billions upon billions of stars… it’s humbling and awe-inspiring, knowing I’m a mote within an atom within an entire universe.

    Images of broken light which
    dance before me like a million eyes
    That call me on and on across the universe

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