Today's soundtrack is k.d. lang: Ingénue.
This evening's reading is the first chapter of Carl Sagan's Cosmos, a book that I've been excited to read ever since I watched some of his show by the same name and listened to the ''A Glorious Dawn'' song featuring quotes from his work. The chapter is titled "The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean."
Carl Sagan introduces the chapter with a powerful assertion: "The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us--there is a tingling of the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries" (p. 4). The Cosmos is massive, "somewhere between immensity and eternity" (p. 4). Our explorations and discoveries of the Cosmos "remind us that humans have evolved to wonder, that understanding is a joy, that knowledge is prerequisite to survival" (p. 4). Sagan gives a warning, though: "[O]ur future depends on how well we know this Cosmos in which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky."
To explore the Cosmos, we need to be both imaginative and sceptical. We currently stand at "the shore of the cosmic ocean" (p. 5), the Earth. Our planet is "not [...] a typical place[, ...] because the Cosmos is mostly empty" (p. 5); Sagan says that "[i]f we were randomly inserted into the Cosmos, the chance that we would find ourselves on or near a planet would be less than one in a billion trillion trillion" (p. 5).
There are many kinds of stars in the universe: "Blue stars are hot and young; yellow stars, conventional and middle-aged; red stars, often elderly and dying; and small white or black stars are in the final throes of death" (p. 8).
Cosmos is the opposite of chaos. Cosmos "implies the deep interconnectedness of all things. It conveys awe for the intricate and subtle way in which the universe is put together" (p. 18). In Alexander the Great's empire lived many who were curious about the cosmos: Eratosthenes told us how large the earth is and proved that it is round; Hipparchus "mapped the constellations" (p. 19); Euclid created a system of geometry; Dionysius categorized the parts of speech; Herophilus "established that the brain [...] is the seat of intelligence" (p. 19); Heron of Alexandria invented steam engines and trains with gears; Apollonius of Perga "demonstrated the form of the conic sections--ellipse, parabola and hyperbola" (p. 19); Archimedes was a mechanical genius, and Ptolemy put together astrology.
