What blows your mind most......................

 

............................about the Universe?

via

rare fabric....................

 

What can be more foolish than to think that all this rare fabric of heaven and earth could come by chance?

-Anatole France

enlargeable image, with description, via

Thank God..............................

 

Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.

-Frank Herbert, Dune

Surfing...................

 .............................................the APOD site:

Content...........................

 I am content to place humankind at the center of Creation.  We are complex enough, interesting enough.  What we have learned, limited as we must assume it to be, is wonderful even in the fact of its limitations.

-Marilynne Robinson, The Givenness Of Things

image via

There's a lot going on out there..........

 Merging galaxies via APOD and Webb's camera:

Emerging.......................

      As geological time goes, it is but a moment since the human race began and only the twinkling of an eye since the arts of civilization were first invented.  In spite of some alarmists, it is hardly likely that our species will completely exterminate itself.  And so long as man continues to exist, we may be pretty sure that, whatever he may suffer for a time, and whatever brightness may be eclipsed, he will emerge sooner or later, perhaps strengthened and reinvigorated by a period of mental sleep.  The universe is vast and men are but tiny specks on an insignificant planet.  But the more we realize our minuteness and our impotence in the face of cosmic forces, the more astonishing becomes what human beings have achieved.

     It is to the possible achievements of man that our ultimate loyalty is due, and in that thought the brief troubles of our unquiet epoch become endurable.  Much wisdom remains to be learned, and if it is only to be learned through adversity, we must endeavour to endure adversity with what fortitude we can command.  But if we can acquire wisdom soon enough, adversity may not be necessary and the future of man may be happier than any part of his past.

-Bertrand Russell (9/3/1950)

Freedom...........................

 But there is something freeing about doing your best, being yourself and letting the chips fall where they may.

-Ben Carlson, from here

Unfolds..............................

Each year we learn more about the incredible complexity of our universe.  The mind staggers at the intimation of billions of galaxies, each made up of billions of stars, slowly revolving in every direction for unimaginable distances.  And inside each grain of matter supercolliders reveal ever-receding constellations of strange particles streaking along mysterious orbits.  In the midst of this kind of stupendous forces a human life unfolds in what is less than a split second on the cosmic scale.  Yet, as far as we are concerned, it is this, our own short life, filled with its few precious moments, that counts for more than all the galaxies, black holes, and exploding stars put together. 

-Mihaly Csikszentmihali,  The Evolving Self: A Psychology For The Third Millennium

Correction..............................

       He was emerged from his struggles with a large sympathy for the machinery of the universe.  With his new eyes, he could see that the secret and open blows which were being dealt about the world with such heavenly lavishness were in truth blessings.  It was a deity laying about him with the bludgeon of correction.

-Stephen Crane,  The Red Badge of Courage

It is a big Universe, and there's a lot going on...

In fact, the Crab is now known to be a supernova remnant, debris from the death explosion of a massive star, witnessed by astronomers in the year 1054. 

-from this APOD post

in collaboration and tension................

 Pushing beyond Chrysippus's "no shoving" rule, he believed every human being was quite literally on the same team.  We are all tied together in cosmic sympathy, Posidonius believed, and none of us are entirely self-sufficient or autonomous.  Each of us has been given a role to play in this large body—one of us is a finger, another a skin cell, another a liver—and we exist in collaboration and tension with each other.  It was God, he thought, that ran through this organism as pneuma—a kind of soul of the universe.

-Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman,  Lives Of The Stoics:  The Art of Living from Zeno to Marcus Aurelius

You can google pneuma here

Meanwhile, sixty million light-years away..............

 

      via

the elegant patterning................

The universe is a form of divine law,
your reasonable father.

When you feel ungrateful to him,
the shapes of the world seem mean and ugly.

Make peace with that father, the elegant patterning,
and every experience will fill with immediacy.

Because I love this, I am never bored.
Beauty constantly wells up, a noise of springwater
in my ear and in my inner being.

-Rumi

enlargeable photo and description here

And the question arose...........

........................................................"How much should we know?"  And the answer gently wafted by, " Not so much."

Explanation: Beautiful spiral galaxy NGC 6744 is nearly 175,000 light-years across, larger than our own Milky Way. It lies some 30 million light-years distant in the southern constellation Pavo and appears as only a faint, extended object in small telescopes. We see the disk of the nearby island universe tilted towards our line of sight in this remarkably detailed galaxy portrait, a telescopic view that spans an area about the angular size of a full moon. In it, the giant galaxy's elongated yellowish core is dominated by the light from old, cool stars. Beyond the core, grand spiral arms are filled with young blue star clusters and speckled with pinkish star forming regions. An extended arm sweeps past a smaller satellite galaxy (NGC 6744A) at the lower right. NGC 6744's galactic companion is reminiscent of the Milky Way's satellite galaxy the Large Magellanic Cloud.

      "The simplicity of the universe is very different from the simplicity of a machine.  He who sees moral nature out and out, and thoroughly knows how knowledge is acquired and character formed is a pedant.  The simplicity of nature is not that which may easily be read, but is inexhaustible.  The last analysis can no wise be made.  We judge of a man's wisdom by his hope, knowing that the perception of the inexhaustibleness of nature is an immortal youth.  The wild fertility of nature is felt in comparing our rigid names and reputations with our fluid consciousness."

-Ralph Waldo Emerson, from his 1841 Spiritual Laws essay

Dreaming.............................

“Now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. I have read and heard many attempts at a systematic account of it, from materialism and theosophy to the Christian system or that of Kant, and I have always felt that they were much too simple. I suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth that are dreamed of, or can be dreamed of, in any philosophy. That is the reason why I have no philosophy myself, and must be my excuse for dreaming.” 

-J. B. S. Haldane, Possible Worlds

enlargeable photo and attempted explanation here

This I believe.............................

"I find in the universe so many forms of order, organization, system, law, and adjustment of means to ends, that I believe in a cosmic intelligence and I conceive God as the life, mind, order, and law of the world."

-Will Durant

larger image, and description, via

There goes the neighborhood................

back story. and enlargeable image. here

Not Heinz 57........................

Henize 70 is actually a luminous superbubble of interstellar gas about 300 light-years in diameter, blown by winds from hot, massive stars and supernova explosions, with its interior filled with tenuous hot and expanding gas.

full story here

I'm not sure which I like more..........

..............the photography at the Astronomy Picture of the Day, or the educated guesses offered to describe and explain the pictures.