Voyage of discovery ~ Life Stylzz

There is no theoretical or scientific reason that requires the birthplace of the universe to be fifteen billion light years away. It is an empirical discovery. The point here is that these numbers do not follow from some prior scientific or philosophical theory about the universe; they follow from an extremely sophisticated measurement of the universe.

When the astronomers Vesto Slipher, Edwin Hubble, and others first began gathering data on the motion of galaxies, they had no idea they had embarked on an empirical investigation that would lead to the discovery of the universe's birthplace. They were simply observing the universe and carefully attending to the movements of the galaxies.

Sense of bafflement
It is significant that the very people who discovered the birthplace were shocked by the discovery. Some were depressed by it. Rather than trumpet their great achievement, they reported it with a sense of bafflement. Hubble, the very scientist whose work was central for convincing the scientific community that the universe had a birthplace, refused to make any interpretations; he simply published what he found, however strange it might appear to him. And Einstein, whose theory provided the deepest interpretation of the data, began by actually altering some of his best ideas in order to avoid confronting their radical implications. At the very least, we need to understand that they were not projecting their mathematical theories nor imposing their philosophical perspectives on the universe. They were, rather, attending to the movements and structures in the universe. They were, rather, listening deeply to the patterns in the photons that came to them each night in their observatories.

The seemingly innocent phrase "came to them" hides yet another important truth that we need to bear in mind. Scientists, and everyone else as well, can experience only what the universe brings to us here. What we know about the universe is gotten by listening to and reflecting on the news the universe brings.

Reaching into, not out
Take the Andromeda Galaxy. Every night throughout all the millions of years of human existence new photons of light have arrived from Andromeda. But it was not until we had painstakingly developed all the necessary tools, including telescopes and mathematics, but more generally all the arts and languages and conceptual capacities of modern homo sapiens, that we could penetrate into the information these light particles carried. The story of Andromeda and its three hundred billion stars and its circling spiral structure has been present to Earth all along. And no one ever had to journey to Andromeda to learn her story. Rather, humans had to develop the sensitivities necessary to awaken to the story that has been here throughout our entire existence.

We scientists tend to use phrases that speak of our ability to "reach deep into space". We speak of our invention of instruments that "probe the farthest regions of the universe". These are certainly valid expressions, but they can also give the mistaken impression that we actually "reach out" in some literal sense. There is no reaching out. Rather, we reach into our immediate experience.

Alive to the universe
We reach into a droplet of the universe, and we find there photons with wondrous stories from the farthest regions of the universe. All the books on the distant galaxies, all the tomes on the dynamics of neutron stars, all the studies of super red giants are, strictly speaking, explications of the stories that exist in each cubic centimetre of the universe. These stories have been there for all of human history, but not until recently have we been able to read them. Optical telescopes, infrared detectors, x-ray diffractions, and spectroscopic devices - all such instrumentations of modern astronomy aims at becoming sensitive to the news of the universe contained in each drop of the universe.

The discovery of the birthplace of the cosmos, then, is the discovery of the story that has been present from the beginning. The universe's primordial origin has been here with us for millions of years. Our own generation is simply the one to emerge at the time when human consciousness has become subtle enough and complex enough to awaken to what the universe has been telling us from the beginning.