I watch a lot of science shows on cable, and I especially like cosmology and particle physics. Both of them are spooky to me. Of course, I’m not smart enough to understand a lot of what the scientists are talking about, but I am nonetheless fascinated. I once read a classified ad where a hair salon was looking to hire a cosmologist. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why they’d want one of those on staff, maybe to lecture the ladies while they were getting their hair done. My wife reckoned that they were really in the market for a cosmetologist, but I like to think that there’s a whole world of job opportunities for cosmologists in the beauty industry.
Cosmology is awe inspiring. I find that I get a tingly sensation and the hairs on the back of my neck stand up when I think about the subject. It is close to some spiritual experiences I have had, and I find that cosmology reaffirms my religious faith. It also informs my faith in that it helps me to see God as so much greater than I can even imagine, as the Creator of a 100,000,000,000 galaxies. God is more awesome even than our capacity for awe. The vastness of the universe helps me remember that we talk about God in metaphors that make sense to humans and that relate to the human scale but which do not really capture God in the essentials at all. We mustn’t get too attached to our metaphors and should allow for creativity in coming up with new ways to talk about God.
Knowing that the universe is so immense and so old even affects the way I pray. I don’t even use language most of the time. God knows how I feel and what I’m thinking better than I do. I know God is greater than anything I can even imagine, so I am reluctant to articulate the inadequate and faint praise that I am capable of generating with human speech.
There is something comforting in knowing that I am as insignificant as I am. It makes the grace of God all the more wonderful and mysterious.
Did you know that in several billion years Andromeda and the Milky Way are going to collide? Man, that is going to be spectacular and destructive. With that to worry about, my little day to day problems pale in significance. Global warming troubling you? That’s nothing compared to the warming we’ll see when the sun blows up. I hope somebody videos these events so we can watch them after the Resurrection. At least take some cell phone pictures or something. Better yet, maybe we’ll have the capacity to drop into time and see them for ourselves. Maybe I’m watching myself right now and wondering what I was thinking when I made my life choicers?
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between john clease and cosmology, you inspired me to some comedy on my own, thanks. It allowed me to make a couple of distinct digs at the science community.
here is something to contemplate - both cosmology and particle physics use the same advanced math concepts to come to their science - but this math is not applicable to the physics of the newtonian scale, where we find ourselves. Mebbe the problem in the logic is that we set one to be a much greater entity at this scale than reality does. Perhaps the scale of one should be with the mesons, quarks and other tid-bits of information.
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