The Hubble Space Telescope captured an incredible
image recently, “the most
comprehensive picture ever assembled of the evolving Universe — and one of the
most colorful,” as the Hubble website puts it. Curiously, the clearer a view science gives us of the night sky, the
clearer it seems that our universe resembles a vision in Vincent Van Gogh’s disturbed
but visionary head; the Hubble photo is startlingly similar to the painter’s
famed “Starry Night,” in which the moon and stars blaze and
swirl in colorful energy above a sleepy town. It’s a case of reality imitating
art.
The Wide Field Camera of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field project, as it is called, employing a
range of colors stretching all the way from ultraviolet to near-infrared light,
enabled astronomers to observe and photograph which galaxies are forming stars
and where those stars are. “The resulting image, made from 841 orbits of
telescope viewing time, contains approximately 10,000 galaxies, extending back
to within a few hundred million years of the Big Bang.” This is a photo that
takes us out of our microcosm of obsessive selfies and toward infinity. If that
doesn’t give one some humble perspective, I’m not sure what will.
I personally find it impossible to look at the photo and not
be overwhelmed with awe by this vision of unfathomable beauty and mystery. Some
commenters at the Huffington Post article
about the photo, however, were disappointingly unappreciative; they simply could
see no further than their own negative biases. “Wow, 10,000 galaxies and not
one sign of a god anywhere,” wrote one. Seriously? I think it takes a sad and
narrow mind to look at this photo of 10,000 galaxies, “apparelled in celestial
light,” as Wordsworth put it, and not
see God everywhere in it.
Other commenters sneered that the photo only proves that the
universe is so vast that no god could possibly manage it all: “He can't
micromanage and macromanage the vastness,” said one. This attitude is echoed in
pop science icon Carl Sagan’s view
that the God of Western theology is “too small,” “a god of a tiny world and not
a god of a galaxy, much less of a universe.” With all due respect to Sagan’s infectious,
passionate curiosity, I think that such an attitude says much more about our
finite human perspective than about any limitations of divinity.
“Starry, starry night/Flaming flowers that brightly
blaze/Swirling clouds in violet haze,” sang Don McLean in “Vincent,”
his melancholy 1976 ode to Van Gogh and his most famous work. The painting always
reminds me of a mescaline-induced insight recorded in Brave New World writer Aldous Huxley’s book The Doors of Perception, the title taken from “The Marriage of
Heaven and Hell” by William Blake, another visionary: “If the doors of
perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite.
For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of
his cavern.”
Believing that the drug might expand that narrow chink,
Huxley undertook an eight-hour, carefully monitored experiment in which he
witnessed “the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.” Among his other observations,
it occurred to Huxley that “precious stones are precious because they bear a
faint resemblance to the glowing marvels seen with the inner eye of the
visionary.”
Glowing marvels seen with
the inner eye of the visionary – what a perfect description of “Starry Night.” Now,
those same glowing marvels are seen through the far-reaching eye of the
scientist. Two doors of perception, one glimpse of the infinite.
(This article originally appeared here on Acculturated, 7/1/14)
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