GK>> Any of my email getting out there, or just going to /dev/null?

GK>> Curious 'cause I axed ya about part 8 of the earlier series, twice,
GK>> I think, and never got an answer.  No other mail this echo 'cept
GK>> for yours.

GK>> Rsvp either way, 'kay?

JS>>This is the first message I've received from you or the BBS you are sending
JS>>from. Did you wish to have part 8 of 'Universe' repeated?

 GK> Yeh, please!  :)

Universe: C:\FD\UFO\U8.TXT

 TIMOTHY FERRIS:  Palomar Observatory in Southern California.  [inside
 the dome; Ferris in the observer's cage]   I'm sitting  inside a time
 machine of sorts, instrument capable of looking direct into the past.
 Down at  the bottom the tube far below me, there's  a curved polished
 mirror  that  can  gather  as  much  starlight  as  all the eyes in a
 community  of  20,000  people. That light is brought here to a single
 intense focus.  And  through  that  tiny  window, one  can peer out for
 billions  of light years space, and look back for billions years into
 cosmic history.

   [video:   the telescope control room]   You can harvest some pretty
 old light with a  telescope as  large  as  the 200-inch reflector  at
 Palomar.   [pushes button  and  video  image of a galaxy  appears  on
 computer screen at Palomar]   This image just  coming  in now is of a
 galaxy 40 million light years away That means we're seeing it the way
 looked 40 million  years  ago, which is a long time.  But it's only a
 fraction one percent  of the time  that's elapsed since the beginning
 of the expansion of the universe.

   (Ferris  draws diagram,  sequential reproduced here for transcript]

    ^
  ^ |
  S |
  P |
  A |                              * (we)
  C |
  E |
    |
    |
    |_________________________________-> NOW
   B.B.             TIME

   If we were to plot our place  in  cosmic  history,  we  might  make
 a line representing  time,  starting with the Big Bang, the beginning
 of  time,  as  best  can  understand it,  and  stretching  down  some
 15  billion years or so to the present day.

   Here we  are in a galaxy today.   And  we  could  have the vertical
 axis represent space.   Now  we can only see those events  the  light
 from which, traveling through space, has had time to reach us.


   And we can designate this by drawing at the scientists call a light
 cone. The angle of the sides of the cone is defined by the velocity
 of light, the fastest way we know of that information can travel.

   A galaxy like this,  [video, computer screen] at 40 million light
 years away, is right  here in our own neighborhood. And pretty much
 all the other galaxies that we can see clearly lie quite close on the
cosmological scheme of things.

   If we look farther out,  the galaxies begin to get pretty dim. Let's
 see if can get a cluster of galaxies here. [galactic cluster seen on
 video display]  Each of those tiny little fuzzy dots, so small that
 you may find it difficult to see them--each of those dots is a
 sovereign galaxy of about 100 billion or so stars and untold numbers
 of planets.  But the galaxies are so far away that existing telescopes,
 even the 200-inch at Palomar, can't make them out very clearly.

   The greatest distance to which we can see galaxies, at the absolute
 maximum, is half of the lifetime of the universe ago. Further than
 that, they're just too dim to be seen with existing telescopes. But
fortunately, the early universe appears to have been inhabited by a
 class of objects called the quasars, which may have been the nuclei
 of young galaxies going through a violent youthful phase, or so bright,
 they shine so brilliantly, that we can see them at much greater
 distances than we can see galaxies.

   If we can call up an image of a quasar.  [pushes button and quasar
 image appears on computer screen] This one is so far away that its
 light has been distorted by a galaxy lying between us and the quasar.
 A quasar whose light has been traveling for so long that we see it as
 it was when the universe was less than five billion years old, back
 when the universe was less than one third its present size and age.

   The quasars are so bright that thousands of them have been detected
 with telescopes here on Earth. And, in fact, we could see them at even
greater distances than we do, if there were any. But at very great
distances, getting back toward 15 billion years ago, the Palomar
 telescope and otherlarge telescopes find no more quasars. The
 explanation seems to be that we're penetrating back to a time when the
universe was so young that there hadn't yet been an opportunity for
 stars and galaxies and quasars to get organized out of the primordial
material and to start shining.

   So way back here at extremely long times ago, there's an epoch of
 darkness. And yet, even before that, it's possible to see another
 form of energy, the energy left over by the explosion that began the
expansion of the universe, by the Big Bang itself.

    This energy  permeates  the universe, but its been so thinned out
 by the cosmic expansion that it shifted down from the wave lengths of
 visual light into the radio spectrum.  And this cosmic background
 radiation, as it's called, can  be detected  using  a sophisticated
radiotelescope, or, as chance would have it, by using an ordinary
 television set.

   Any TV set hooked up to  an antenna can detect the ancient photons
 from the cosmic  background  radiation.   To  see them,  turn down the
 brightness control and tune the set to an empty channel-not right now,
 hopefully, but after the show--and  about  one  percent   of  the
 specks  of snow  that you'll see  on the screen are photons left over
 from the Big Bang itself. They are relics of the infancy of the
 universe--particles that have been hurtling through space since before
 the first stars and galaxies were born.

    The legacy of the Big Bang is still with us. The heat released by
 the sun and other stars represents a fraction of the energy stored in
 the nuclei of atoms at the outset of time. It was then, when the
 universe was still bathed in fire, that nature would have worked in the
marvelously simple way glimpsed through the unified theories.

                                  *****

 continued...

--- FMail 1.22