Monday, October 26, 2015

Primum Legem


                                                                                    photo by Shaun Lawton

Primordial galaxies introduced only six-hundred million years after the universe came into existence have now been glimpsed through the ever-more magnifying lens of the Hubble telescope. 

Apparently they appear towards the end of the "re-Ionization Epoch," which constituted the first seven-hundred million years of our universe.   

Massive mid-term clusters of galaxies which stand in our line of sight between our position here today in orbit about our local star and these tiny distant early galaxies produce an effect known as gravitational lensingwhich boosts the distance the Hubble telescope allows our vision to observe.     

Think of it as a sort of bauble-magnification; by focusing our visual examination in on and then through these distant intervening galactic pools of light, we are able to further magnify our visual field deeper into the early, that is to say, more distant galaxies formed right after the proposed Big Bang.   *




*  It is vital for us to keep in mind that the Big Bang theory itself has yet to be proven, of course, and therefore must continually serve as that place-holder, or bookmark if you will, which best represents what we've summed up about the early formation+ of the universe at this particular stage of our suppositions.    


+ Formation:   I find tantalizing evidence winking in and out of the idea behind this word itself: "formation."  

To opine that our universe may have been formed by a "Big Bang" is to have assumed that it necessarily "came into being" in the first place. 

What if, instead, this universe were always to have been here?  

If, in fact, the Universe were eternal then no such Bang, either large or small, would be necessarily necessary—which also means to suggest that neither does an eternal phenomenon  (such as our universe might just as likely turn out to be) necessarily have to do without such curious phases as those which might involve so-called cosmic explosions (be they huge or tiny ones, for that matter).


Suffice it to say, we have observed natural phenomena from our planetary spot here circling our local star, of both macro- and micro-cosmic caliber, to the point we might infer that a continuum comprised of an interrelated series of increasingly differing magnitudes of bigger and lesser universal outbursts might fluidly stem from stellar evolutionary forces quite beyond the current limit of our comprehension despite actively continuing through this day.  

To the best capacity of our understanding then, we can naturally allow for there to have been a Big Bang because concurrent and observable astral phenomena seem to support this sort of incident, and besides, whether or not such an event were part of a chain of similar connected affairs, if such should turn out to be the case or not for that matter, it would potentially remain of little to no consequence considering the nature of relativity insofar as how Einstein has led us to understand it. 

In other words a lot of these digressions amidst our speculative process may be considered moot even while we continue foraging our way through what is largely the unknown.

The more serious aspect of this consideration (that of our own particular cosmic emergence) should lend itself toward our venturing which category the alleged initial universal explosion of great magnitude should most likely fall into:  that of strictly a destructive nature, possibly with a byproduct of creation, or perhaps of mysterious breathing or orgasmic qualities,  or even any combination of elements possibly of a former universe whose energy given off upon detonation may have triggered and forged our own macrocosmthe next cosmological link in a chain of developing universes, one coming into being after another in the manner of a great extended domino reaction, each fated for oblivion as surely as a line of disappearing air bubbles being churned up into and then back out of our oceanic tides.**



**  Much like the smallest particles being observed at the quantum level as signified by the Uncertainty Principle.   



The one certainty which rings true about the nature of our origins remains that we actually do not know the answers to these questions positing the cause of our universe and ourselves. 

Perhaps the simple reason for that lies somewhere in the realm of our having a misplaced penchant for asking the wrong questions. 

If what we seek lies in this direction, we may rest assured that inquiries into the nature of our or our universe's commencement may ultimately be filed along with other such pleasant yet meretricious activities like navel gazing, painting pictures, the composition of music and literature, or even masturbation, to name a few examples which immediately spring to mind.      

There is no question we are here, now, today, as we have been since yesterday and will continue to be onward through tomorrow. 

Einstein has already hinted that the only real thing in our actual existence may be time itself, and that space and everything in between could amount to a grand illusion processed by the most sophisticated and least understood mechanism in the universe, our very own brains.