The universe is a concept that I struggle to understand on a regular basis. I don’t think my mind can every truly appreciate its size. Ever since I was a little girl, I have always been fascinated by the stars at night. There are so many of them, and they are so beautiful. The Universe is big, and we are very, very small.Puzzling out its origins and attempting to apply logic and rules to uncover the mechanics that lie underneath has been challenging some of the world’s brightest minds. I love to look up at the sky and think of all the other people before me, all the way back to when humans lived in caves, who were enchanted by those strange lights in the sky and who wondered, and dreamed.
I regret that I didn’t take astronomy in high school, and the older I get, the more I wish that courses like that had been mandatory. We should have learned about this void that we live in. Today’s pick is George Smoot who helps us learn about the universe, and it is incredible how much we are learning every year, as our technology gets better.
This is very topic specific, but consider the next 20 minutes to be an attempt to make up the lessons you might not have learned in school. 
Why You Should Watch:
George Smoot looks into the farthest reaches of space to the oldest objects in the known universe: fluctuations in the remnants of creation. Using data collected from satellites such as COBE and WMAP, scanning the cosmic microwave background radiation (a relic of the heat unleashed after the Big Bang), he probes the shape of the universe. In 1992 he and his Berkeley team discovered that the universe, once thought to be smooth and uniform at the largest scale, is actually anisotropic — or varied and lumpy.
Smoot continues to investigate of the structure of the universe at the University of California at Berkeley, mapping billions of galaxies and filaments of dark matter in hope of uncovering the secrets of the universe’s origins.
My Favorite Part
“We live in the boonies.” I loved this line. We tend to be, as a species, so arrogant when considering our place and role in the universe when in fact we are probably so insignificant that intelligent life out there has written us off as idiots who can’t even get their own house in order.
I also liked the part where he zoomed in and out and showed you the scale, at one point it was something like 3 billion light years away. Can you imagine that? It would take light THREE BILLION years to travel to those places in the universe. Wow.
My Take
These types of talks always leave me with an acute sense of humility about how little we actually know about the universe. There is so much undiscovered out there, so much more to be learned and explored. I only wish I could live long enough to finally start answering some of the questions that plagued our ancestors for centuries.
What do you think?
There should be a disclaimer that accompanies every report of a scientific announcement of a new study, discovery, theory or conclusion.
If we have learned anything about science surely it is that they don’t have a clue about what is really out there, let alone the shape of it. It has reached the point where we can hardly leave science to the scientists.
Whatever scientific conclusions have been reached and theories posited to date will almost certainly be proved wrong or contradicted by some other conclusion or theory in your own remaining lifetime if not many times in your lifetime. In fact the same rate of change affecting technology is also affecting scientific – I hate the use the word discoveries, but oh well – discoveries.
The revisionist reality is often laughable. As each new discovery is announced, is becomes an unintended punch line to the joke of the previous advancement. That may be the entire point of science, but in the meantime, let us tread cautiously about how we marvel at each rose petal of a posited theory along the garden path of knowledge and pause as long to consider how it may be wrong as we spend admiring its elegance.