A great choice of background music. Oh and I think they may have said some cool stuff too.
Friday, April 18, 2008
Pretty Cool
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Symbol of Chaos © Ant Allan and used with permission.
4 comments:
Sorry, it made me laugh. I though you guys needed to be tricked as well.
+1 for the Floyd. Fat guy was funny. And I'm always game for cool space photos.
But to speak to this notion that the numbers in astronomy are too big to be comprehended, I think that the guy is fundamentally mistaken about something. Descartes once pointed out that while I can conceive of a chiliagon (that is, I can think of a closed figure which has 1000 sides), I cannot picture (he used the term 'imagine')one to myself(I would be unable to distinguish between the picture a figure with 999 sides, or even a perfect circle, and a chiliagon).
The same is true with astronomical distances, or geological epochs. The massiveness of the universe cannot be pictured by any mortal - we simply don't have the cognitive capacity (even when provided with images from the Hubble). We can, however, conceive of its massiveness. We can talk meaningfully about this with one another without being super-smart astrophysicists (as if they could do any better in picturing the size of the universe).
So, I guess what I'm saying is that I could have done without the dude's narration. Give me the Floyd and cool space pictures, skip the Discovery Channel babble.
I agree that for us that isn't too big to comprehend. However, I really think the common person, or at least a few people I know, have no idea how big that number really is. (Damn preposition at end)
I would like to give people more credit than this, but it's really hard when you watch the news or pay attention to society.
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