Elegant truths
Exquisite interrelationships

Awesome Nature
Marinades
Serenades

I believe our future depends powerfully
On how well we understand Cosmos

In which we float like mote

In morning sky

Carl Sagan, Glorious Dawn (Prof P-mix)

We owe our existence to supernovae: they are the source, through transmutation, of most of the elements of which our bodies, and our planet, are composed.

David Deutsch, Beginning Of Infinity

It has become rare for us to experience the full extent of wonder that our predecessors must have felt as they saw the night sky from open country or from their unlit dwelling places.

On every clear moonless night they would have experienced what we can do only by going to remote parts of the countryside far away from city lights.

They would have noticed that as dusk gives way to night, more and more stars appear.

And as their eyes slowly adapted to the dark, even more would appear until they became uncountable.

On a really clear, cold night they would also experience the feeling that the universe was somehow alive with activity as the faintest stars seem to appear and disappear depending on whether one looks directly at them or at a slight angle.

There is a depth also to the sheer blackness of space between the stars that contrasts so markedly with its light blue during the day.

The sky at night viewed in this way, when there is little or no moonlight, is a miracle, with a giant belt (the Milky Way) running across it, with countless stars appearing, more the longer we look, and with the occasional larger movement as a meteor appears.

To crown the spectacle, it moves slowly and majestically throughout the night.

Denis Noble, Dance To Tune Of Life

A still more glorious dawn awaits
Not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise
A morning filled with 400 billion suns
The rising of the Milky Way

Carl Sagan, Glorious Dawn

Another class of cosmic monsters, the intensely luminous objects known as quasars, are in a different league.

Too distant to be seen with the naked eye, they can outshine a supernova for millions of years at a time.

They are powered by massive black holes at the centers of galaxies, into which entire stars are falling—up to several per day for a large quasar—shredded by tidal effects as they spiral in.

Intense magnetic fields channel some of the gravitational energy back out in the form of jets of high-energy particles, which illuminate the surrounding gas with the power of a trillion suns.

David Deutsch, Beginning Of Infinity

As humans, we are not good at judging the size of large numbers or appreciating the magnitude of differences between them.

We know a million, a billion and a trillion are different sizes, but we often don’t savor the staggering increases between them.

A million seconds from now is just shy of eleven days and fourteen hours. Not so bad. I could wait that long. It’s within two weeks.

A billion seconds is over thirty-one years.

A trillion seconds is over thirty-one thousand years.

The gap between a trillion and a billion feels about the same as the jump between a million and a billion—because both are a thousand times bigger.

In reality, the jump to a trillion is much bigger: the difference between living to your early thirties and to a time when Man may no longer exist.

Matt Parker, Humble Pi

Each cell in your body contains trillions of atoms.

And there are many trillions of cells in your body.

Thus the same relative difference in scale applies to each cell in your body compared to your whole body, as to each atom in each cell compared to the whole cell.

One way to imagine the difference in scale between the level of atoms and that of your body is to note that there are more atoms in your body than stars in the visible universe.

When you contemplate the sheer immensity of the known universe, remember that—from the viewpoint of a single atom—you are as immense as the universe.

Denis Noble, Dance To Tune Of Life

Your smile contains multitudes
My smile conveys gratitudes

P Willy