Looking into the Past - Really!

For awhile now I have been reading an absolutely fascinating book. It is, "A Short History of Nearly Everything." It was written by Bill Bryson in 2003. This book is full of extremely interesting information related to science, astronomy, chemistry, biology, geology, anthropology, physics, paleontology, taxonomy, history, mathematics, genetics, and the people who were and are involved in discovering some of the mysteries of the universe. I will eventually post a great deal of information about this book but for now I want to focus on one thing: gamma ray bursts. These are among the biggest and most violent events that take place in the universe.

Today in the New York Times, I read about a gamma ray burst that was briefly visible to the naked eye on Wednesday morning (if you knew where to look). Of course when you look at something like that, you are actually seeing something that happened a long time ago - in this case about seven billion years ago which is about 2.5 billion years before the earth had even formed! Right now the scientific best estimate for the age of the universe is 14 billion years old.

I have been fascinated for a long time by the fact that when we look at the sky, you are seeing light that left the stars, moon, or sun sometime in the past, and sometimes in the ancient, to say the least, past. Actually if you think about the speed of light, whenever we look at anything, we are seeing the light that left that object at some point before we actually experience the sight. In most cases the amount of time is so brief that we simply cannot comprehend it.

However I digress. Here is the link to the Times article on the gamma ray burst.

Here is a link to an opinion article written by Arthur C. Clarke for the Times in 1994. In the article he makes reference to a novel he wrote in 1973, and in a quote from that article, the date of September 11th is used for a monumental event in the history of the planet.