Six minutes to the edge of the universe and back
Posted on | December 20, 2009 | 4 Comments
The American Museum of Natural History and the Rubin Museum of Art have produced an animated journey that takes us from the roof of the world in the Himalayas to the edge of the known universe and back again. The film manages to squash 13.7 billion years into just 6 minutes or so.
The blurb on YouTube says:
The Known Universe takes viewers from the Himalayas through our atmosphere and the inky black of space to the afterglow of the Big Bang. Every star, planet, and quasar seen in the film is possible because of the world’s most complete four-dimensional map of the universe, the Digital Universe Atlas that is maintained and updated by astrophysicists at the American Museum of Natural History.
If you have no desire to acknowledge just how small and insignificant we are in space and time, and therefore just how feeble and pathetic our warring, rapacious, irrational little species really is, then perhaps you’d better not watch. You will, however, miss a stunning journey!
Thank you to Dan Colman at Open Culture for the link.
Technorati Tags: open culture, American Museum of Natural History, Rubin Museum of Art, astrophysics
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December 20th, 2009 @ 4:33 pm
[...] Six minutes to the edge of the universe and back : John Connell: The Blog http://www.johnconnell.co.uk/blog/?p=2342 – view page – cached The American Museum of Natural History and the Rubin Museum of Art have produced an animated journey that takes us from the roof of the world in the Himalayas to the edge of the known universe and back again. The film manages to squash 13.7 billion years into just 6 minutes or so. [...]
December 21st, 2009 @ 9:36 am
This got me thinking of Carl Sagan, the first interplanetary geologist (now isn’t that a job title you wish you had?) who did something similar back in the 70s.
It was the bit about radio signals that really grabbed me. He wrote a book suggesting that the first evidence of alien life will appear as images of Hitler addressing the masses. Why? Because the first broadcast signal to escape the atmosphere was made by the Nazis in 1936 (I think). Sagan basically worked out how long it would take to get to a nearby star system with a planet and doubled it to allow for the signal to be sent back again with an undercurrent of prime numbers to prove it could not be random.
Happy (big) thoughts – thanks John, and have a happy Christmas.
Sean
December 21st, 2009 @ 7:25 pm
Happy Christmas to you too, Sean – big thoughts indeed.
Are you hoping to be at BETT this year (next year, actually)?
John
December 23rd, 2009 @ 10:54 am
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