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Showing posts from February 9, 2010

Awe-some

I'm feeling a bit in-awe today.  The word awsome  has changed its meaning somewhat over the last 50 years.  These days, people bandy it about like "Cool" or "Hey that's great!". But I prefer to reserve it to describe the almost spiritual feeling we get when exposed to something truly amazing. The reason for my feeling of awe today is that I was contemplating the size of the Universe. I was watching an episode of Carl Sagan's Cosmos , for the first time since I was a child.   I hadn't really thought about it before, but our sun is one of 200 billion (or so) other stars in our one single galaxy (the Milky Way).  Our galaxy is one on a million billion other galaxies, each one with it's own 200 billion stars.  Isn't that utterly mind boggling? Isn't that awesome? And what about time? Carl gave an excellent analogy. Let's say that all of time has been compressed into a single calendar year.  The big bang happens during the first se