God's own Time
Outside of people - - loved ones, friends, family, acquaintances and Neighbors as understood by Jesus in his Parable of the Good Samaritan (your neighbors are those whom you hate with vehement contempt, your most bitter enemies, every person who is different from you and differs with you) - - what has interested me during my Time?
Well, lots of things in and about life around me; but most substantially, questions about What, Why and How that in my memory seem to have first stirred an evening long ago in my Time, when my family and I - - maybe Robert remembers, maybe Carl remembers, I'm not absolutely sure whether it was a classroom event or a Boy Scout invitation and event - - when we were studying astronomy, the moon and the planets at Cove School, and someone brought a telescope, I remember it as a mirror telescope, a reflector with its cylindrical shape, set it up on the basketball court, and invited everyone to come have a look at the moon and, I recall most spectacularly, the rings of Saturn, at Saturn and its rings. This is what you see,
and I've looked at it in wonder hundreds of Times since that captivating night.
And the moon up closer, pockmarked with asteroid strikes and/or volcanoes that bubbled and burst,
We may have peered at other night sky objects that First Time for me, but these are what I remember as so strikingly wondrous.
Equally fascinating and more is Jupiter with its readily visible four moons that move in a plane, and can be plotted as they shift in their courses from night to night. And even more, spiral galaxies, and, from a really dark black place, our own Milky Way galaxy.
Since then I have realized that I could have immersed my life and Time in astronomy, cosmology (cosmology is not fixing women's hair, folks, that's cosmetology, if you don't know cosmology, look it up), and now and then I've wondered why I did not; but I did manage to do my damndest with it as a special interest and hobby for a Time, especially those Navy years when we lived high on a ridge in Yokohama overlooking Tokyo Bay and with an incredible view of the dark heavens, perfect for an amateur astronomer. .
Hubble revived my interest, and pictures coming back from JWST, the new James Webb Space Telescope. And new writings, essays, study reports, articles. One such article, published yesterday, is reprinted below (scroll down)
The interest, at least for me in my own chosen, or chosen for me, vocation, also has been highlighted by several things from the religion perspective.
One is the first few verses of Genesis One,
1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. 2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. 4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
6 And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. 7 And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. 8 And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.
9 And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. 10 And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good. 11 And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so. 12 And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good. 13 And the evening and the morning were the third day.
14 And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: 15 And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so. 16 And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also. 17 And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, 18 And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good. 19 And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.
a creation story by a writer whom scholars call "P" because he seems to have been a Hebrew/Jewish priest writing after the Babylonian Exile. An idea is that P returned from Exile to discover to his outrage that those who had been left behind in the Holy Land had, in the absence of authority and guidance, abandoned the God of Israel and merged with their Canaanite Palestinian neighbors, intermarried with them, and were now worshiping the sun and the moon. P's story was to set them straight by showing that what they were worshiping was nothing but objects created by the God of Israel, the one true God who had created all that is, seen and unseen. There may be some timing issues about what God did on which day, but overall, l think P did a really good job.
Another thing in my religion context is the so-called "Little Apocalypse" at Mark 13, when Jesus talks about the End of Days,
23 But take ye heed: behold, I have foretold you all things. 24 But in those days, after that tribulation, the sun shall be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, 25 And the stars of heaven shall fall, and the powers that are in heaven shall be shaken. 26 And then shall they see the Son of man coming in the clouds with great power and glory. 27 And then shall he send his angels, and shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from the uttermost part of the earth to the uttermost part of heaven.
And accounts in the Old Testament, and the entire Book of Revelation with Revelation John's fantasticalistic images.
And watching as the Universe expands, not only for live and real as galaxies speed away from each other, but as our sciences and explorations discover that there is not the visible "handful" of galaxies &c but billions, maybe trillions of galaxies out there, and it's confirmed to me over and over again that Phillips was right, "Your God Is Too Small" if you think he spends his Time worrying about you and your sins and what you Believe and whether you have earned your way into Heaven or Hell -
So not only is there Space to contemplate, but also Time, which is inseparable from Space. C S Lewis and Narnia, where Time and Space are another realm altogether. Madeleine L'Engle and "A Wrinkle in Time," which when I read it years ago made perfect sense about a reasonable way to be able to travel in Time and beyond, there and back.
This morning, more about Time as it evolved along with and as part of creation itself, our own little Universe of a possible Multiverse, called into Being by a Word, and yeh-HI, what we term the Big Bang. For me, it all comes together as the most fascinating and incredible part of Life, which is Fun and Good.
So, scroll down and read!
RSF&PTL
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REUTERS - SPACE
July 3, 2023 4:30 PM UTC
Ferocious black holes reveal 'time dilation' in early universe
This artist's concept shows a galaxy with a brilliant quasar, a very bright, distant and active supermassive black hole that is millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun, at its center, seen in this undated handout picture. NASA, ESA and J. Olmsted (STScI)/Handout via REUTERS.
Time is a slippery thing, as profound thinkers like physicist Albert Einstein and, well, fictional time traveler Dr. Who plainly understood. The latter, in a 2007 episode of the British sci-fi series, accurately described time as "wibbly wobbly."
Scientists made that point anew on Monday in a study that used observations of a ferocious class of black holes called quasars to demonstrate "time dilation" in the early universe, showing how time then passed only about a fifth as quickly as it does today. The observations stretch back to about 12.3 billion years ago, when the universe was roughly a tenth its present age.
Quasars - among the brightest objects in the universe - were used as a "clock" in the study to measure time in the deep past. Quasars are tremendously active supermassive black holes millions to billions of times more massive than our sun, usually residing at centers of galaxies. They devour matter drawn to them by their immense gravitational pull and unleash torrents of radiation including jets of high-energy particles, while a glowing disk of matter spins around them.
The researchers used observations involving the brightness of 190 quasars across the universe dating to about 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang event that gave rise to the cosmos. They compared the brightness of these quasars at various wavelengths to that of quasars existing today, finding that certain fluctuations that occur in a particular amount of time today did so five times more slowly in the most ancient quasars.
Einstein, in his general theory of relativity, showed that time and space are intertwined and that the universe has been expanding outward in all directions since the Big Bang.
Astrophysicist Geraint Lewis of the University of Sydney in Australia, lead author of the study published in the journal Nature Astronomy, said this continual expansion explains how time flowed more slowly earlier in the universe's history relative to today.
It is not as if everything was in slow motion. If you could be transported back to that time, a second would still feel like a second to you. But from the perspective of a person today, a second back then would unfold in five seconds now.
"In modern physics, time is a complicated thing," Lewis said. "Dr. Who had it right, that time is best described as 'wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff.' This means that we don't really understand time and its limitation, and some things are still not ruled out: time travel, warp drives, etc. The future could be very exciting, though maybe not."
By looking at faraway objects, scientists peer back in time because of how long it takes for light to travel through space.
Scientists previously documented time dilation dating to roughly 7 billion years ago, based on observations of stellar explosions called supernovas. Already knowing the time it takes for today's supernovas to brighten and fade, they studied these explosions in the past - those at great distances from Earth - and found that these events unfolded more slowly then from our time perspective.
The explosion of individual stars cannot be seen beyond a certain distance away, limiting their use in studying the early universe. Quasars are so bright that they can be observed back to the universe's infant stages.
"What is observed over time is the quasar brightness. This fluctuates up and down, the result of lots of complicated physics in the disk of matter spinning around a black hole at almost light speed. This change in brightness is not simply a bright, fade, bright, fade. It looks more like the stock market, with small scale jitters on longer-term changes, with some sharp fluctuations," Lewis said.
"The statistical properties of the light variations contain a time scale - a typical time for the fluctuations to possess a particular statistical property. And it is this we use to set the ticking of each quasar," Lewis added.
Reporting by Will Dunham, Editing by Rosalba O'Brien