The Big Bang

The Big Bang

The ancients knew that the world is very old. They sought to look into the distant past. We now know that the Cosmos is far older than they ever imagined. We have examined the universe in space and seen that we live on a mote of dust circling a humdrum star in the remotest corner of an obscure galaxy. And if we are a speck in the immensity of space, we also occupy an instant in the expense of ages.

At the beginning of this universe, there were no galaxies, stars or planets, no life or civilisations, merely a uniform, radiant fireball filling all the space.

We know now that our universe – or at least its most recent incarnation – is some fifteen or twenty billion years old. This is the time since a remarkable explosive event called the Big Bang.

The passage from the Chaos of the Big Bang to the Cosmos that we are beginning to know is the most awesome transformation of matter and energy that we have been privileged to glimpse. And until we find more intelligent beings elsewhere, we are ourselves the most spectacular of all the transformations – the remote descendants of the Big Bang, dedicated to understanding and further transforming of the Cosmos from which we spring.

In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order (Carl Jung). Image: © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

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Gods Run Nature

Gods Run Nature

Metaphors about celestial campfires or galactic backbones were eventually replaced in most human cultures by another idea: The powerful beings in the sky were promoted to gods. They were given names and relatives, and special responsibilities for the cosmic services they were expected to perform. In fact, there was a god or goddess for every human concern.

Gods ran Nature. Nothing could happen without their direct intervention. If they were happy, there was plenty of food, and humans were happy. But if something displeased the gods – and sometimes it took very little – the consequences were awesome: droughts, wars, storms, volcanoes, earthquakes, epidemics. The gods had to be propitiated, and a vast industry of priests and oracles arose to make the gods less angry. But because the gods were capricious, you could not be sure what they would do. Nature was a mystery. It was hard to understand the world.

Little remains of the Heraion on the Aegean isle of Samos, one of the wonders of the ancient world, a great temple dedicated to Hera, who began her career as goddess of the sky. She was the patron deity of Samos, playing the same role there as Athena did in Athens. Much later she married Zeus, the chief of the Olympian gods. They honeymooned on Samos, the old stories tell us.

In Ancient world every tree and meadow had its dryad and maenad. Image: © Elf Princess Sketch Drawing Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

The Greek religion explained that diffuse band of light in the night sky as the milk of Hera, squirted from her breast across the heavens, a legend that is the origin of the phrase Westerners still use – the Milky Way. Perhaps, it originally represented the important insight that the sky nurtures the Earth; if so, that meaning seems to have been forgotten millennia ago.

We are, almost all of us, descended from people who responded to the dangers of existence by inventing stories about unpredictable or disgruntled deities. For a long time the humans instinct to understand was thwarted by facile religious explanations, as in ancient Greece in the time of Homer, where there were gods of the sky and the Earth, the thunderstorm, the oceans and the underworld, fire and time and love and war; where every tree and meadow had its dryad and maenad.

The early Greeks had believed that the first being was Chaos, corresponding to the phrase in Genesis in the same context, “without form”. Chaos created and then mated with a goddess called Night, and their offspring eventually produced all the gods and men. A universe created from Chaos was in perfect keeping with the Greek belief in an unpredictable Nature run by capricious gods.

Two Views of the Cosmos

Two Views of the Cosmos

Ptolemy as Astronomer

The study of the heavens brought Ptolemy a kind of ecstasy. “Mortal as I am”, he wrote, “I know that I am born for a day. But when I follow at my pleasure the serried multitude of the stars in their circular course, my feet no longer touch the Earth…”.

Ptolemy believed that the Earth was at the center of the universe; that the Sun, Moon, planets and stars went around the Earth. This is the most natural idea in the world. The Earth seems steady, solid, immobile, while we can see the heavenly bodies rising and setting each day. Every culture has leaped to the geocentric hypothesis. As Johannes Kepler wrote, “It is therefore impossible that reason not previously instructed should imagine anything other than that the Earth is a kind of vast house with the vault of the sky placed on top of it; it is motionless and within it the Sun being so small passes from one region to another, like a bird wandering through the air.”

But how do we explain the apparent motion of the planets – Mars, for example, which had been known for thousands of years before Ptolemy’s time? (One of the epithets given Mars by the ancient Egyptians was sekded-ef em khetkhet, which means “who travels backwards,” a clear reference to its retrograde or loop-the-loop apparent motion).

With the Earth the center of the Universe, there is little motivation for astronomical observations. Image: Neon Light Planet © Meg Jorgensen (Elena)

Ptolemy’s model of planetary motion can be represented by a little machine, like those that, serving a similar purpose, existed in Ptolemy’s time. For example, four centuries earlier, such a device was constructed by Archimedes and examined and described by Cicero in Rome, where it had been carried by the Roman general Marcellus, one of whose soldiers had, gratuitously and against orders, killed the septuagenarian scientist during the conquest of Syracuse.

The problem was to figure out a “real” motion of the planets, as seen from up there, on the “outside”, which would reproduce with great accuracy the apparent motion of the planets, as seen from down here, on the “inside”.

The planets were imagined to go around the earth affixed to perfect transparent spheres. But they were not attached directly to the spheres, but indirectly, through a kind of off-center wheel. The sphere turns, the little wheel rotates, and, as seen from the Earth, Mars does its loop-the-loop. This model permitted reasonably accurate predictions of planetary motion, certainly good enough for the precision of measurement available in Ptolemy’s day, and even many centuries later.

Copernicus

Martin Luther described Copernicus as “an upstart astrologer… This fool wishes to reverse the entire science of astronomy. But Sacred Scripture tells us that Joshua commanded the Sunt to stand still, and not the Earth.” Even some of Copernicus’ admirer argued that he had not really believed in a Sun-centered universe but had merely proposed it as a convenience for calculating the motions of the planets.

The epochal confrontation between the two views of the Cosmos – Earth-centered and Sun-centered – reached a climax in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the person of a man who was, like Ptolemy, both astrologer and astronomer. He lived in a time when the human spirit was fettered and the mind chained; when the ecclesiastical pronouncements of a millennium or two earlier on scientific matters were considered more reliable than contemporary findings made with techniques unavailable to the ancients ; with deviations, even on arcane theological matters, from the prevailing doxological preferences, Catholic and Protestant, were punished by humiliation, taxation, exile, torture or death.

The heavens were inhabited by angels, demons and the Hand of God, turning the planetary crystal spheres. Science was barren of the idea that underlying the phenomena of Nature might be the laws of physics. But the brave and lonely struggle of this man was to ignite the modern scientific revolution.

In an inventory of nearly every sixteenth-century copy of Copernicus’ book, Owen Gingerich has found the censorship to have been ineffective : only 60% of the copies in Italy were “corrected”, and not one in Iberia. Image : Spicy Pink and Lilac Fractals © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

Johannes Kepler was born in Germany in 1571 and sent as a boy to the Protestant seminary school in the provincial town of Maulbronn to be educated for the clergy. It was a kind of boot camp, training young minds in the use of theological weaponry against the fortress or Roman Catholicism. Kepler, stubborn, intelligent and fiercely independent, suffered two friendless years in bleak Maulbronn, becoming isolated and withdrawn, his thoughts devoted to his imagined unworthiness in the eyes of God. He repented a thousand sins no more wicked than another’s and despaired of ever attaining salvation.

But God became for Kepler more than a divine wrath craving propitiation. Kepler’s God was the creative power of the Cosmos. The boy’s curiosity conquered his fear. He wished to learn the eschatology of the world; he dared to contemplate the Mind of God. These dangerous visions, at first insubstantial as a memory, became a lifelong obsession. The hubristic longings of a child seminarian were to carry Europe out of the cloister of medieval thought.

Carl Sagan's Model

Carl Sagan’s Model

Carl Sagan is a collection of water, calcium and organic molecules called Carl Sagan. You are a collection of almost identical molecules with a different collective label. But is that all? Is there nothing in here but molecules? Some people find this idea somehow demeaning to human dignity. For himself, Sagan finds it elevating that our universe permits the evolution of molecular machines as intricate and as subtle as we.

But the essence of life is not so much the atoms and simple molecules that make us up as the way in which they are put together. Every now and then we read that the chemical which constitute the human body cost ninety-seven cents or ten dollars or some such figure; it is a little depressing to find out our bodies valued so little. However, these estimates are for human beings reduced to our simplest possible components. We are made mostly of water, which costs almost nothing; the carbon is cost in the form of coal ; the calcium in our bones as chalk ; the nitrogen in our proteins as air (cheap also), the iron in our blood as rusty nails. If we did know better, we might be tempted to take all the atoms that make us up, mix them together in a big container and stir. But in the end all we have is a tedious mixture of atoms. We can do this as much as we want. How could we have expected anything else?

Harold Morowitz has calculated what it would cost to put together the correct molecular constituents that make up a human being by buying the molecules from chemical supply houses. The answer turns out to be about ten million dollars, which should make us all feel a little better. But even then we could not mix those chemicals together and have a human being emerge from the jar. That is far beyond our capability and will probably be so for a very long period of time. Fortunately there are other less expensive but still highly reliable methods of making human beings.

Is there nothing inside us but molecules? Image: Lilac © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

Mythology : Mythical Beings & Creatures

Mythology : Mythical Beings & Creatures

The purpose of the present history essay, is to briefly look at mythology, especially as it applies to mythical beings and creatures. Overtime, Gothic novels and other horror tales have resulted in media tourism in the form of sightseeing in the areas of Dracula’s rumored past whereabouts in Romania, as well as, historical landmarks commemorating witch trials in Northern Europe and Salem, Massachusetts. Other locations are fictional or imaginary, such as Gotham – the city of darkness in the Batman franchise.

But Gothic or not, horror fails to limit itself to landscapes, it features many paranormal entities such as ghosts, vampires, werewolves and other shape shifters – as the half-human, half-bear in Lokis by Prosper Merimee. Similar instant metamorphosis is recurrent in mythology, with Morrigan transforming into birds and animals at wish, similar to the Greco-Roman pantheon’s ruler – Zeus (e.g. Europa).

Winged Lion. A griffin-like creature. In Wicca themes inspired movies such as The Craft, witches are able to cast their supernatural spells with the aid of the five elements. Magic and the extraordinary have always fascinated the human psyche. As can be seen from the picture. Image: © Megan Jorgensen (Elena).

Interestingly, when it comes to architecture, Gothic art is often associated with gargoyles. Tales and films about gargoyles coming alive at night are abundant, close to the likewise fictional belief that toys come alive when all are asleep…

In the contemporary media, myth can be perceived in such animations as The Smurfs, manga series Dragon Ball, video games Final Fantasy or Frozen Throne (Blizzard Entertainment: Warcraft III), to name a few. Further, computer games portray most actors of the fantasy world: dragons, elves (light and dark), dwarfs, gnomes, goblins, pixies, trolls, fairies, enchantresses, magicians and wizards. But enchantment, magic and wizardry aside, math wiz, sometimes spelled whiz, is a an expression used to describe someone particularly gifted in the area of mathematics.

Gothic Memory. Image: © Megan Jorgensen (Elena).

Different gods and goddesses appear in diverse mythologies. For instance, Norse and Germanic: Odin, Thor and Loki, among others. Thor the movie and sequel, as well as the Nibelung saga, relate to this collection of myths. To reiterate, other belief systems include the Greco-Roman with many deities and mythical creatures such as the Medusa Gorgon and the Minotaur. In Ancient Egypt, the focus was on Isis, Osiris and Ra manifesting as the sun. Of course, the pyramids have attracted a lot of interest, being popular in adventure, fantasy and horror stories. Clearly, the worlds of the literary genre – fantasy – have many mythological elements. Thus, hopefully, the present paper achieved its purpose of looking at mythological beings and creatures, and other fantasy related aspects of historical literature.