How do you make a universe?
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Photo by Peter Miller (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Photo by Elliott Engelmann on Unsplash
Doomsday apparently will be dark and quiet
We have been bombarded lately with doomsday predictions for the end of the world. Y2K came and went with hardly a blip. The so-called Earth-shattering planetary alignment of May passed without a ripple. And, of course, various fundamentalist cults still wait patiently for the long anticipated Rapture.
White lady's-slipper • Photo by Dr. Thomas G. Barnes / USFWS (Public Domain)
Delicate balance makes our universe
The naturalist John Muir said the two greatest experiences of his life were camping with Ralph Waldo Emerson at Yosemite and finding the rare orchid calypso blooming alone in a Canadian swamp. Last spring I found a wild orchid as exceptional as a night with Emerson: a white lady-slipper, solitary, snow-pure, alone in a pine woods with 10,000 of its pink cousins. My Peterson wildflower guide admits the white variant of the lady-slipper and calls it rare and local. Rare and local, indeed! In my part of New England I have never seen another.
Infrared all-sky survey by IRAS (Public Domain)
New look at universe
“Look at the stars! Look, look up at the skies!” says the poet Gerald Manley Hopkins. “O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air! The bright boroughs, the quivering citadels there! The dim woods quick with diamond wells; the elf-eyes!”