The Red Limit [antikvár]

We all dwell in a house of one room—the world with the firmament for its roof—and are sailing the celestial spaces without leaving any track. —^JOHN MUIR In the time it takes to read this sentence, the earth will travel 200 miles in its orbit around the sun, the sun 3,000 miles in the rotation of our galaxy, and 350,000 miles more space will open up between our galaxy and those of the Hydra cluster, as the universe goes on expanding. Who can comprehend such a thing, a million light-years or a billion stars? By some audacity, the source of which we do not understand, we can write: gcdaxy. A scientist can write a bundle of numbers that say galaxy and describe its size, mass, composition and so forth. We csin refer to something the direct comprehension of which would probably rob us of our sanity. That process may be called abstraction. At the frontiers of science it can lead us quite far from our experience; there is little in everyday life to prepare us for the space-time continuum, the quantum principle, or the notion of a finite but unbounded universe. Yet, after a while, we can get used to these odd concepts. As the physicist John Wheeler said about the quantum principle, paraphrasing Gertrude Stein on abstract art, "You look at it and it looks strange, and it looks strange, and it looks very strange, and then suddenly it doesn't look strange at all." • • vu