From Sophie's front desk — Sunday, August 30
BBC News — read the full story
Telescope. Dark matter. Twenty years of looking. NASA just launched a successor to Hubble — a machine that'll map the universe and hunt for the invisible stuff holding galaxies together: dark energy, dark matter, the scaffolding we can't see but know is there. It's a bet that the next two decades of observation will rewrite what we think we know about how the cosmos actually works. Hypayshia of Alexandria takes this first. Seneca follows.
My father Theon spent his nights at the Mouseion correcting Ptolemy's tables by the light of oil lamps. He taught me that every instrument is a hypothesis made of bronze and glass , the astrolabe assumes the heavens are spherical; the armillary assumes the circles are perfect. When the observation contradicts the instrument, you do not blame the stars. You ask which assumption has broken. This new eye they have lifted above the atmosphere , it does not see dark matter. It sees the way galaxies rotate too fast for their visible mass.
It sees the way clusters bend light they should not bend. The telescope measures the discrepancy. The name "dark matter" is what we call the missing term in the equation. I recognize this shape. Plotinus taught that the intelligible world governs the sensible without being seen by it. The soul moves the body; the One moves the many.
The stars do not will the seasons , they contemplate the forms, and their contemplation is the order we measure. What you call dark energy, we would call the soul's time differing from the stars' time: a larger year embracing the smaller. The map they will make is a projection of the invisible onto the visible. Necessary work. But here is the problem the instrument cannot solve for you: when the geometry you devise to save the phenomena begins to require substances that emit no light, feel no force, exist only in the discrepancy , how do you know you have not mistaken the limit of your sight for a new kind of object? The proof is not complete until the assumption is named.
of Venus, and so on. There is a difference between the solar year, and the year of each of these stars. Different, further, is the year that embraces all the other years, and which conforms to the movement of the soul, according to which the stars regulate their movements. As the…
of the apparent magnitude of the sky, on the hypothesis that it is the diminution of the visual angle which makes distant objects appear smaller? FIRST ENNEAD, BOOK FIVE. Does Happiness Increase With Time?[53] HAPPINESS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH DURATION OF TIME. 1. Does happiness i…
BE ATTRIBUTED TO THE STARS' BODY OR WILL. 35. How then do these powers exert themselves?--for we have to retrace our steps to give a clear explanation. What difference is exhibited by the comparison of one triangle with another? What action does the one exert on another, how is i…
accomplish something, which before was forbidden. Besides, it is an error not to trace to a single principle the government of the universe, attributing everything to the stars, as if there were not a single Chief from which depends the universe, and who distributes to every bein…
MEDIATION. Here arise important questions which have been frequently considered especially by such as will not allow the divinities to be regarded as the accomplices or authors of shameful deeds, such as love-adventures and adulteries. For this reason, as well as on account of wh…
Lucilius, you ask what I make of the report that men have fashioned a new eye to watch the heavens , an eye that does not blink, that sees what our eyes cannot, that will count the invisible forces tugging at every visible star. I think of Corsica. Eight years watching the same constellations wheel over a rocky shore, naming them differently each season because the names we inherit never quite fit. We speak of the foot of a couch, the foot of a sail, the foot of a poem , we borrow names because the things themselves have none we know.
Naturales Quaestiones taught me that much: the world is an enormous mass of things without names. Now they build a machine to name what we could only feel , the dark pressure that spreads the skies, the hidden mass that holds galaxies from flying apart. The mind, swifter than the stars in their courses, arrives before them at the place they will reach after many ages. That was always true.
The instrument only makes the arrival witnessable. I stood once at Nomentum before dawn, watching Venus rise through olive smoke. The sky did not care that I watched. The sky does not care that they watch now...
But the watching changes us. We measure the invisible to remember our place.
cases the noblest virtues are accompanied by many extraneous advantages, but it is the virtues that lead the way, and these merely follow in their train. XXIII. Can we doubt that the climate of this abode of the human race is regulated by the motion of the sun and moon in their o…
division of philosophy is made—into _Physics_, dealing with the universe and its laws, the problems of divine government and teleology; _Logic_, which trains the mind to discern true from false; and _Ethics_, which applies the knowledge thus gained and tested to practical life. T…
XXIII. Besides this, the gods act under no external constraint, but their own will is a law to them for all time. They have established an order which is not to be changed, and consequently it is impossible that they should appear to be likely to do anything against their will, s…
is an enormous mass of things without names, which we do not speak of under distinctive names of their own, but by the names of other things transferred to them. We speak of our own foot, of the foot of a couch, of a sail, or of a poem; we apply the word 'dog' to a hound, a fish,…
how far more powerful animals than ourselves we have broken to harness, how we catch those which are far swifter, how nothing that has life is placed beyond the reach of our weapons! We have received so many excellencies, so many crafts, above all our mind, which can pierce at on…
The story ran in B.B.C. News. A telescope that can see farther back in time than any instrument before it —... which means we're betting billions to watch the universe as it was, not as it is. That's the brief.