Maybe it began when someone first explained to me what a light year is. Traveling at 186,000 miles per second, light beckons us to do the math: 186,000 times 60 equals the distance light travels in one minute. Multiply that by 60, then by 24, and you have the distance light travels in one day. Multiply that by 365 and you have a light year.
Can you fathom that number or that distance?
Few people will travel even one seconds worth of light 186,000 miles in a lifetime.
The notion of a light year got me started on the speaking literally awesome messages from astronomy.
Voyager 1, the man-made spacecraft now poised to leave the solar system, discovered 23 new moons of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Earths one moon the moon we see waxing and waning in the sky is a mystery. That human beings reached it O so briefly, and walked on it O so lightly, was an achievement dreamed of for millennia. And yet, here are 23 new moons, each one of which human beings do not even dream of coming near to. Awesome, indeed, is this universe.
Most of these planets in our solar system are so much larger than the earth, yet so much smaller than the sun, which itself is a tiny part of our galaxy, which contains millions of stars, most of them millions of light years apart and this galaxy is but a drop in the ocean of galaxies! Can our awe looking up at them, or even contemplating them, send us beyond them?
Take these galaxies, whose numbers dwarf the incomprehensible number of miles that light travels in one year, and call them a universe. Note the latest: there are, supposedly, parallel universes. How can the vastness of G-d possibly be grasped by the human being confronting the messages of astronomy?
Before attempting to address that question, please forgive me as I reel from two other messages: that of the black hole and of the Big Bang.
A black hole is a star so dense that its gravity is so great that even light cannot escape from it. How much could one of those black holes weigh? Well, what does the earth weigh? To grasp that, we may unravel the same type of sequence: Whatever the earth weighs, it is but a drop in the bucket of the suns weight, which is nothing compared to a stars; on up the scale to a black holes incomparably greater weight.
Can we grasp it?
I focus on the r in the word grasp and remove it in order to reach the world gasp. How intimately related those two words seem in astronomy. I gasp trying to grasp the ungraspable.
Then there is the Big Bang, when the universe supposedly began with the explosion of so much matter, with so much power, that the universe (or at least this one) all came from that single moment, which we measure by earth-bound time as a fraction of a second.
To me, astronomy has always been the firmest, most palpable evidence for a Creator and His act of creation.
That little spacecraft, Voyager 1, which has been in flight for 34 years and may fly for another 10, and which has reconnoitered our solar system and taught us more about our immediate surroundings than ever seemed possible, is phenomenal. But in what context? In the context of human exploration, Voyager 1 is resplendent. But in the context of the universe? That the Voyager has revealed Saturns braided ring structure, Jupiters ring system and Great Red Spot, plus these 23 moons and so much more, is nothing.
What is the human being, that You should remember him? and the son of man, that You should take notice of him? asks Psalm 8 rhetorically, but then continues: And You have made him [the human being] just short of G-d, and have crowned him with honor and splendor.
We are nothing.
We are everything.
I am dust and ash. For me the world was created.
Gazing out at the uncharted astral straits, we are inexpressibly small; yet it is we who gaze, we who can grasp both our own smallness and the awesomeness of the size and the weight of the universe.
Either way, we gasp. And who gave us that capacity if not the very G-d Who beckons from beyond, and through, the awesome messages of the universe?
Copyright © 2012 by the Intermountain Jewish News
