January 8, 2012
Logic and faith seem sometimes to
conflict; to compete for our attention and acceptance. A recent experience brought them together for
me, at least briefly. With my daughter
Hannah, at the Smithsonian Air and Space
Museum, I saw an Imax
movie about the Hubble Space Telescope and its contributions to our
understanding of our universe. The
telescope's images of space were dazzling.
The facts, in the narrative, were mind-boggling. As the telescopic image zoomed out past the
edge of our galaxy (oh, a billion stars), and past our cluster of 36 galaxies,
there appeared an amazing array of stars -- what you'd see on a crystal clear Vermont summer
night. Then it was explained that those
were not stars. They were galaxies! Scientists have estimated* that there are
ten stars for every grain of sand on this planet!
* See http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/space/07/22/stars.survey/ See also http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2012/09/17/161096233/which-is-greater-the-number-of-sand-grains-on-earth-or-stars-in-the-sky
For a skeptical view (roughly the same number - limiting sand comparison to beaches, i.e., excluding ocean floor and deserts), see http://cosmologyscience.com/cosblog/comparing-total-number-of-stars-with-grains-of-beach-sand/
