I love love love astrophysics! Nothing fascinates me more and nothing takes my mind better off all mom-related things than all the wonders of our universe.
Scientists have found out that the big bang 13.8 billion years ago that gave birth to our universe, wasn’t an explosion as you would picture it. Everything was dark because there were too many particles. Atoms didn’t even exist for the first 380 000 years. Without atoms matter couldn’t exist, so the universe was basically a hot dark mess. A chaos, so to speak. After 380 000 years atoms started to form because gravitation drew the particles towards one another. Between the atoms appeared empty space and for photons, the light particles, this was the time to shine. Visible light was born and it shot like a lightning across all existing universe. The remains of that burst of light is still present in space in form of the cosmological radiation. Only this fact already blows my mind.
Big Bang played by ancient Greek gods
And yesterday I was reading the short poem “Hyperion” by the British poet John Keats (I read it because Dan Simmons has written his incredible sci-fi novels “Hyperion” and “Endemion” based on this poem. In the novels John Keats is an AI-ghost who later comes to life and fathers a child). It’s about the fall of the ancient Greek god Cronus, who was defeated by his own son, Zeus. Cronus was the son of Uranus and Gaia, who were born by Chaos and Darkness. Chaos and Darkness also had another child, the Light. Does it ring a bell? A light that emerges from chaos a darkness, which remains in this world as the cosmological radiation.
So it looks like the ancient Greeks somehow knew how the universe was born. They didn’t know about astrophysics but their intuition told them that. Isn’t it amazing? Another thing is that the Greek gods became smaller and more beautiful from one generation to another. Zeus was smaller than his father Cronus, who was smaller than Uranus who was smaller than Chaos. Which corresponds with the history of the matter in the universe where stars and planets were formed out of dust, until the finest structure that we know was created: life on earth.
Van Gogh was quicker than Einstein
What fascinates me is that not only Greeks have this idea of how the universe was created. In the Bible God created the world in seven days. The process of the big bang can also be described in seven parts, the amazing scientist Harald Lesch says.
And Liu Cixin in his amazing sci-fi novel “The three body problem” shares the idea that Vincent van Gogh knew about the space warp that is caused by gravity. His idea is that the swirls in the night sky in van Gogh’s famous painting show that the French painter must have known about how gravity changes the geometry of space. Without a degree in astrophysics, of course.
Isn’t that bloody amazing?! Maybe that’s a little nerdy, but isn’t it insane that the knowledge about the genesis and the nature of the universe can be found in the gut feeling of people who didn’t even have telescopes?
P.S. There are also other kids of self care, of course. You can check them out here and here.
P.S. The amazon links above are not affiliate links. I don’t get any money if you click on them, I just wanted to share those wonderful books with you.