Perspective matters

· by · in Physics, Science. ·

Anyone who knows anything about the cosmos will know that it is vast – I hope I don’t need to tell my readers this still however the vastness of the whole thing, but I found a really good video that I think will make you think – it’s only 6-7 minuets and best viewed on full screen.

I think videos like this are great because they put you back inside your box. As humans we have a tendency to think that we are in some way important, and that our country is very important and that our world is very important. But you really don’t need to zoom our far before you cannot see it at all. As you will see from the video, there is a huge amount of zooming that you need to do after you can no longer see the sun in order to get to the scale of what we know. The words what we know are very important there – because there are very few physicists worth their salt who think the known universe = the universe. We have made huge progress in science in the history of humanity – but we are but a fraction of our way through.

I remember something Tyson de Grasse said once, that if we were to condense the entire history of the universe into a calendar, a year long calendar, that Jesus was born a few seconds before midnight (sorry if that offends, but if it does you’re in the wrong place). The entire human history in a few seconds. When you start to play around with the scale of the things we are talking about I challenge you to look at the world in the same way again. We are part of something very very big.

9 responses to “Perspective matters”

    • Thank you very much, great of you to visit. And none of us really have a clue, some more than others but we are all just trying to comprehend this world we find ourselves in

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  2. Thank you, Joseph, for your wonderful posts, which make us think again and again, about the Universe around us. You are doing a great job of explaining difficult concepts in simple terms which even the layman could follow. Please carry on the great work!

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  4. “…was born a few seconds before midnight…” Makes me wonder of the track of Iron Maiden “2 minutes to midnight”. In a sense, perspective makes it or breaks it on a deeper level. To my self knowledge, it is a privelege that we all need to see all angles on a narrowed and complicated subject such as it pertains.

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    • I totally agree I think the only way to achieve anything exciting is to look at the same thing in as many ways as you possibly can… only then will you truly appreciate the thing you are looking at

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  5. I have seen some other videos talking about the same subject and every single time they made me realize that my imagination has boundaries. When you start zooming out over and over again, you just realize the vastness is beyond we can perceive. Fascinating and scary at the same time!

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