I love space, stars, and all of that sort of thing, but it's hard to shake off these feelings expressed by Adam Frank:
Cosmology, it would seem, is at a precipice and we appear to be living at the twilight of Big Bang as a theory of the Universe’s origin. But would replacing time’s beginning at the Big Bang with something stranger like the infinite existence of a multiverse really matter very much for anyone else other than cosmologists? Reading popular books and magazine articles (my own included) one gets the sense that revolutions in cosmology naturally infer revolutions in human culture and even human experience. Is this really true? Does cosmology really alter the way any human being experiences the world on a day-to-day level? How can abstractions like relativistic Space-Time manifolds or String Theory landscapes ever effect anyone other than physicists in the Academy and the informed readers of magazines like this one? In others words, what would a true revolution in cosmology change?Space is no longer the place. But we can still look at the stars, the wandering stars, to whom they may concern. Evermoving from "immeasurably remote eons to infinitely remote futures in comparison with which the years, threescore and ten, of allotted human life form a parenthesis of infinitesimal brevity."
- Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
