HL Tauri is no more than a million years old, yet already its disc appears to be full of forming planets.— Catherine Vlahakis quoted in ESO press release, 6 November 2014. HL Tauri is about four hundred and fifty light-years away.
Magnetoencephalography scanners pinpoint [the] almost impossibly small magnetic fields [inside our brains] with amazing accuracy. They have shown us that only fifteen milliseconds after hearing a sound an impulse has reached the brainstem, and only a few milliseconds later it’s in the cortex. But the computation involved in understanding sounds is much slower: it takes sixty to one hundred milliseconds before large assemblies in the auditory cortex are activated, essentially “looking up” each sound. If the sound is familiar this process is quicker and generates less of a ripple, because the brain does less work to comprehend it. At around two hundred milliseconds conscious awareness begins, but isn’t lexically understood until after more like three or four hundred milliseconds. When we consider languages worldwide, we find that syllables last between 150 and 200 milliseconds—a constant that appears related to the physiology of the brain. It takes us almost six hundred milliseconds—over half a second—to recognize unexpected words, discordant tones in music, or make the looping connections necessary to make sense of discourse.— from a review by Gavin Francis of I Can Hear You Whisper by Lydia Denworth.
I have destroyed the ring of the horizon and escaped from the circle of things...[3] I can't at present find a reproduction of this image.
I have released all the birds from the eternal cage...
I have untied the knots of wisdom and set free the consciousness of colour!...
I have overcome the impossible...
NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft captured these sounds of interstellar space. Voyager 1's plasma wave instrument detected the vibrations of dense interstellar plasma, or ionized gas, from October to November 2012 and April to May 2013.
The xapiri float down through the air from their mirrors to come protect us…. Their mirrors arrive from the sky’s chest, slowly preceding them. They suddenly stop in the air and remain suspended…. When they arrive, their songs name the distant lands they came from and traveled through. They evoke the places where they drank the waters of a sweet river, the disease-free forests where they ate unknown foods, the edges of the sky where, without night, one never sleeps.from The Sky is Falling by Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert (2013), quoted by Glenn H Shepard in the NYRB, and from which this blog quoted in June.
The sky…is getting as sick as we do! If all this continues, its image will become riddled with holes from the heat of the mineral fumes. Then it will slowly melt, like a plastic bag thrown in the fire…. If the sky catches fire, it will fall again. Then we will all be burned, and we will be hurled into the underworld like the first people in the beginning of time.
Instead of looking at all of space-time, [Raphael Bousso] homes in on a finite patch of the multiverse called a “causal diamond,” representing the largest swath accessible to a single observer traveling from the beginning of time to the end of time. The finite boundaries of a causal diamond are formed by the intersection of two cones of light, like the dispersing rays from a pair of flashlights pointed toward each other in the dark. One cone points outward from the moment matter was created after a Big Bang — the earliest conceivable birth of an observer — and the other aims backward from the farthest reach of our future horizon, the moment when the causal diamond becomes an empty, timeless void and the observer can no longer access information linking cause to effect.from The Multiverse's Measure Problem by Natalie Wolchover and Peter Byrne
The grass sways and fans the reposing mind; the leaves sway and stroke it, till it can feel beyond itself and with them, using each grass blade, each leaf, to abstract life from earth and ether. These then become new organs, fresh nerves and veins running afar out into the field, along the winding brook, up through the leaves, bringing a larger existence. The arms of the mind open wide to the broad sky.— from The Sun and the Brook by Richard Jefferies quoted in A Blackbird's Year by Miles Richardson.
