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Here is a very interesting video of Earth, as seen by astronauts. This external point of view has changed their “point of view” about life on Earth.
Category Archives: …and other stuff
miscellaneous postings by Lawrence R. Spencer
CONSTANT CHANGE
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“The Only Constant is Change.”
Heraclitus of Ephesus (c. 535 BC – 475 BC) was a Greek philosopher, known for his doctrine of change being central to the universe, and for establishing the term Logos (λόγος) in Western philosophy as meaning both the source and fundamental order of the Cosmos. From the lonely life he led, and still more from the riddling and paradoxical nature of his philosophy and his stress upon the needless unconsciousness of humankind, he was called “The Obscure” and the “Weeping Philosopher”. He believed in the unity of opposites, stating that “the path up and down are one and the same”, all existing entities being characterized by pairs of contrary properties. His cryptic utterance that “all entities come to be in accordance with this Logos” (literally, “word”, “reason”).
TRAVEL TWO BILLION LIGHT YEARS IN TWO MINUTES
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OUR UNIVERSE….. actually only 0.000001% of it…. each yellow dot is a single galaxy!
( CLICK ON THE PHOTO TO ENLARGE )
WATCH A VIDEO ON THE MILLENNIUM SIMULATION WEBSITE: http://www.mpa-garching.mpg.de/galform/virgo/millennium/
The Millennium Simulation used more than 10 billion particles to trace the evolution of the matter distribution in a cubic region of the Universe over 2 billion light-years on a side. It kept busy the principal supercomputer at the Max Planck Society’s Supercomputing Centre in Garching, Germany for more than a month. By applying sophisticated modelling techniques to the 25 Tbytes of stored output, Virgo scientists have been able to recreate evolutionary histories both for the 20 million galaxies which populate this enormous volume and for the supermassive black holes which occasionally power quasars at their hearts.
The movie shows a 3-dimensional visualization of the journey through the simulated universe. On the way, we visit a rich cluster of galaxies and fly around it. During the two minutes of the movie, we travel a distance for which light would need more than 2.4 billion years.
REST AND PEACE
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FEELING ELEPHANTS
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“I took an elective course just for the (bleep) of it. It was called Intimate Interpretations of Einstein’s Unified Field Theory. The instructor was a former room-mate of Al Einstein from when Al worked in the patent office in Switzerland from 1902 to 1909. His name was Professor Hans Schlongholder. This is how he explained Einstein’s theory to our class in his cheesy, Swiss accent:
“The universe, or any other relative reality, is like a group of people, each of whom is blindfolded. Each person is feeling a different part of an elephant. Each person describes the part of the elephant he feels. Al’s theory says that if everyone compares what they feel and they all agree on a collective feeling of the elephant, then they will all have an accurate picture of the whole elephant.
However, Al was never really quite sure that the picture of the elephant we were getting was of the hole, or the trunk. It all depends on which end of the elephant one is feeling and how fast he is traveling while feeling it, relative to the speed of the elephant itself and how the elephant feels about being felt at the time”.
Transcendentally speaking, in order to understand any universe one must look at the word itself: UNIVERSE. Basically, it’s made up of two separate words, “univ” and “erse.” Does anyone understand what these words really mean? No. So, is it any mystery why the mysteries of the universe have never been solved?” — Excerpt from THE BIG BLEEP by Lawrence R. Spencer