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Man’s Changing View of The Universe
The way we view the Universe reveals what and who we are.
Our souls are reflected in the Universe we are attempting to understand.
The efforts of Man to understand the mysteries of the Universe is a never-ending quest. At every turn, a new astounding discovery leads to more mysteries. It took Man centuries to realize the Earth is not the center of the Universe, nor the Sun, nor our Milky Way galaxy, until there is really no center, only a ‘Known Universe’ beyond which nothing is known. It took him decades to form the Big Bang Theory, only to be questioned again by many astrologers. Here is the evolution of Man’s view of the elusive Cosmos.
1. The Earth is flat. In this crude and naïve view, if a man were to row a boat on the ocean to the edge of a flat Earth, he would fall off a dark bottomless pit.
2. The Earth is round. Man is the Center of the Universe. In this equally naïve view, there is an improvement. The Earth is round and the first pioneers, Columbus, Magellan, Marco Polo, etal circumnavigated the world, or tried to, and found themselves at the place they started from. Because the firmament which contained the stars moved across the sky on a regular rhythm, the Earth was seen as the center of the Universe, around which all the stars revolved, still an egotistical view and a long way to go.
3. The Sun is the Center of the Universe. The discovery of the ‘solar system’ and other planets showed that the Sun was the Center of the Universe, around which Earth and other planets revolved. Man’s ego was shattered by the reality that our world and our sun are not the only planet and star.
4. The Sun is just one of many other stars, revolving around a galaxy. There is a sudden radical change of perspective and consciousness. The greater reality and vastness of millions of stars was regarded with awe. It would later be discovered that there is a super-blackhole at the center of our galaxy, Milky Way, which controls the billions of stars orbiting around it, including our Sun and our entire solar system.
5. There are many other galaxies. With the advent of more sophisticated telescopes, especially NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, we see for the first time in all its splendor galaxies and nebulas never seen before, because our telescope is in outerspace, unhampered by Earth’s atmosphere. Man was amazed to see that there are millions of other galaxies in a space so vast, it is incomprehensible and unimaginable. There are new theories of dark galaxies and dark matter and dark energy which are the opposite of the galaxies or matter which emit light. Some astrologers were so bold as to say that two thirds of the Universe was made up of dark matter. This is the cosmic Yin and the Yang which complement and opposed each other all at once.
6. The Big Bang Theory. Thus was born a theory that all these billions of galaxies, all of cosmic matter, was concentrated at one time in one small space. A powerful blast sent this matter hurtling away from a cosmic ground zero, the birth of the Universe. To this day, these galaxies are seen to be still hurtling away in one gigantic slow-motion explosion. Dark matter tends to slow down this growing expansion. These galaxies were formed by its own energies interacting with each other as they moved away. There is a second theory that all these galaxies will one day reach zero momentum and return to its original ground zero location, just like a ball thrown up returns to Earth, a big bang in reverse. The big bang can then theoretically explode again and again in a never-ending series of explosions and implosions spanning trillions of light years.
7. The Known or Observable Universe. Finally, in all humility, Man saw the limits of his vision, and theorized that beyond his view of billions of galaxies is still an ‘Unknown Universe’, which we cannot see because the light from beyond the ‘Known Universe’ has not yet even reached the Earth. The cosmic events we see today, like novas or exploding stars, and galaxies colliding, happened millions of light years ago. Astronomers predict that our Milky Way galaxy will collide with a neighboring galaxy, Andromeda, 100 million years from now.
8. Multi-Verses. A new theory is that there are many other universes today, some parallel to our very own, a multi-dimensional reality which is still a mystery.
The evolution of Man’s consciousness and view of the universe, like the galaxies in motion, has been expanding through the millennia. To this day, there are more mysteries and unexplainable phenomenon, like quantum physics, which continue to defy our finite minds. Now, more than ever before, we have devised new powerful instruments to probe farther this mysterious Universe. There is a powerful ‘microwave telescope’ called VSA (Very Small Array) which can soon probe and unravel the mysteries beyond the Known Universe. (An array is a group of interconnected synchronized ‘telescopes’ acting as one powerful one.)
One lesson we must learn is humility. We must realize the we are puny and are just beginning to understand God’s mysterious creation. All these new discoveries are really just touching the surface of a ‘dark abyss’. We should never be so arrogant as to believe that we know everything. We must kneel in pray to the Creator of the Universe who can help us understand it. And when we saw awesome beauty of the Universe, it is a form of prayer to the Creator.
