Ha ha.
That's the first headline I read — absolutely not kidding — after I emerged from the comments section of the first post of the day, where I'd just written 4 comments bouncing off the question — posed by Inga — "How can any human not be in awe?"
1. "If you're so lacking in imagination, then your idea of what is objectively awesome is meaningless."
2. "BTW, what is 'awe'? OED: 'Originally: a feeling of fear or dread, mixed with profound reverence, typically as inspired by God or the divine. Subsequently: a feeling of reverential respect, mixed with wonder or fear, typically as inspired by a person of great authority, accomplishments, etc., or (from the 18th century) by the power or beauty of the natural world.'"
3. "'Reverence' is 'Deep respect, veneration, or admiration for someone or something, esp. a person or thing regarded as sacred or holy.'"
4. "What is the object of respect here — the universe itself or the images human beings were able to produce? I think it's the latter."
This post gets my "religion substitutes" tag. And I have imagination enough to know that some of us don't do religion or even have a "religion-shaped hole" that we hanker to have something jammed into.
In any case, many of us feel suspicious of the color-and-shape manipulations of these images. They're nudging us too much, insisting that we feel awe. It's a little like the January 6th Committee's over-produced show that insists that we feel anger and outrage. And some people don't think hardcore pornography is sexy. What X thinks is so sexy is exactly what makes it not sexy at all to Y. Maybe something subtler, something more real. Something human.So let's take a look at "James Webb Space Telescope images ranked by how good they look to eat," a column, in WaPo, by Alexandra Petri:
#4 Carina Nebula — Hmm, I am not sure about eating this. On the one hand, it looks savory, and I love savory eats! That rich brown color would go great in a stew or a steak pie! On the other hand, though, the texture. The texture looks, not to put too fine a point on it, very dusty. That’s not a characteristic I like in food! When I look at this, my first thought (after about 90 minutes of thoughts that are awe and wonder about the cosmos and our place in it) is: This looks like mushroom powder. Or the gravy you get in a packet. It might be okay to dip a chip in, but I am not raring to get at it, exactly. I think I would have a little of it if the person I was with said it was good, but if it were just an hors d’oeuvre being thrust at me, I might demur.
Oh! She had to put in that parenthentical!
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69 comments:
A smorgasbord of inferential cuisine.
A twilight faith, an ethical religion, a liberal ideology?
'...or even have a "religion-shaped hole" that we hanker to have something jammed into.'
Is that even legal?
Some of us relate to what ghosthoney said on TikTok: "Uh, yeah, space is sexy. It's also none of my business... the cosmos... is mesmerizing... but I didn't need to see an HD photo to understand that. Hot recognizes hot. I could feel it in my bones this whole time. I just knew."
The Carina Nebula may be the top "Eye Candy" object for amateur-observers in the southern hemisphere. LOTS to see in a 25" telescope. Certainly in the top 5.
Worth the trip all by itself.
And speaking of getting over-nudged about what to think about photographs... in the previous post virtually every single commenter is getting on The Daily Mail's case for asserting that the photos it has of the man-who-fell-into-Vesuvius showed "horrific" injuries.
Awesome, horrific... settle down, everyone. Things are as routinely normal as ever. But why are you not marveling continuously at everything?
"What is the object of respect here — the universe itself or the images human beings were able to produce? I think it's the latter."
How about both? And it's not to be forgotten that humans are a manifestation of the universe (the old observation that we are the universe contemplating itself)..
"4. "What is the object of respect here — the universe itself or the images human beings were able to produce?"
Clearly the administration is the object which was why they had to be the ones to release the images - which have nothing to do with politics - to the world.
And on that note, Stonetoss's recent comic was very on point.
The blog has a theme today.
You just need to connect the "abort/vibrator" post and the biden-looks-boring post. It's not hard!
How can any human not be in awe of this convergence?
"In any case, many of us feel suspicious of the color-and-shape manipulations of these images."
It's an infrared telescope. If they didn't manipulate the picture, it would be blank.
What I don't understand about Ann's instinctive objection to the manufacturing of these images as object for human consumption is who she imagines benefits from this manufacture. Will it make us more willing to give large amounts of money for telescopes? That doesn't seem insidious. Will it make us reverence science or scientists more? The rigorous study of astronomy seems like exactly the sort of science we should have reverence for.
Maybe her reaction is rooted in the sense that these images aren't truthful, and what she is expressing is the desire for truth. But they are truthful, just the same as any fact which is made visual but whose data is not initially visual is truthful. They haven't made up new stars! They've just made the stars that are there the sort of things that can be grasped by the visual cortex. The wonder felt is isomorphic with the data.
My awe is in the universe itself. Being able to see it is amazing, the technology is also amazing.
The photos also are a reminder that while we can see marvelous photos of what was, it is impossible to see or know what IS, if anything.
Some of the pictures are cool. Others look like fatal melanomas. Too creepy. Wear sunscreen.
'You just need to connect the "abort/vibrator" post and the biden-looks-boring post. It's not hard!'
So Biden is like a vibrator...kind of just sits there and is useless until you really need him to do something, like beat Trump.
But as soon as he's done (or his batteries die), it's OK to abort him and find another toy?
'It's not hard!'
That's what she said...
To me the most awesome thing is that a statistically sophisticated approach to the Drake Equation strongly suggests that it is essentially certain we are alone in the Milky Way, and very likely the entire universe.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.02404.pdf
I am in awe daily.
Marveling at the universe is acceptable behavior. There are no words. Poets, needed.
Marveling at an over-wrought click-bait headline. I fell for it! get it - fell.
The universe is never boring... but it is frightening. So much of nothing between the exploding stars and colliding galaxies. that nothingness is... troubling. could even be horrific.
It was exciting to think of things that were too big and too far away for humans to reach. Maybe that was because we secretly thought we'd go there anyway. Now that it seems less likely that humanity will ever make the trip, these galaxies and nebulas ought to be all the more awe-inspiring, but I wonder if they've just become more ho-hum, just other places we'll never go.
Finding something awe-inspiring or sublime may be more a result of the observer's state of mind and circumstances than of the bigness or vastness of the thing itself. The things the telescope shows us are vaster than the Pacific Ocean or the Grand Canyon, but are they necessarily more awe-inspiring?
"It's an infrared telescope. If they didn't manipulate the picture, it would be blank."
Exactly. It is not a photograph, but it is presented as a photograph. It's a display of digital data. What are we looking at? To say, but the alternative is nothing does not answer my question. It is artwork involving many choices and aimed at emotional impact. And yet it isn't artwork, because we can't reject it. We must revere it, we're told. I'm skeptical!
"Do not make unto thee any graven image or idols neither kneel before them nor worship them."
I have imagination enough to know that some of us don't do religion or even have a "religion-shaped hole" that we hanker to have something jammed into
That's a null set. We are psychologically, perhaps even genetically, destined to have religion. Everyone takes a religious attitude towards something, no matter how adamantly they may assert their atheism. Giving people a stable, outside themselves locus for their religiosity may be the most important service provided by organized religion.
"Awesome" replaced "far out" sometime by the 80's. Totally awesome, as the valley grrls would say. As the psychedelic 60s faded, my default stoic persona reasserted itself (usefully enough for a lawyer). Awestruck? Aw, shucks, ma'am, I don't need to gawk at Miss Universe in a red shift.
Heaven, the heavens, the universe, are often associated with where God resides. Why would that be? Maybe it’s true that the universe formed out of a vacuum, no gods or God involved. Maybe it’s true that an awesome God created it. I’ve been a skeptic regarding the existence of God. I’ve also come to the conclusion, based partially on instinct that there is a mighty awesome God and the universe exists because of Him.
Everyone can believe as they choose.
Hey Skipper said...To me the most awesome thing is that a statistically sophisticated approach to the Drake Equation strongly suggests that it is essentially certain we are alone in the Milky Way, and very likely the entire universe.
The Drake equation is more like an attitude than a real equation, it's a way of looking at the problem, but not really a way of solving it. Most of the parameters are pure guesswork. And, as I recall, it doesn't include a time variable. If we don't assume advanced civilizations last forever, but instead have some finite lifespan, like, say, 10,000 years, then there would have to be many tens of thousands of advanced civilizations during the lifecycle of the universe before there is a strong possibility that two would exist at the same time such that one could detect the other.
The sunrise photos are also displays of digital data.
Strike that, I just followed your link and the Drake Equation does have the time element. The rest stands--that's the one that kills the whole deal almost no matter what the other values come to.
data collects into Telescope pixels : NASA distorts into mis- mal- and false- data as they please.
this is the age of mis-mal-dis
Photos of the aurora are astounding and beautiful. Awe-inspiring. However, the aurora in person is different. It's unsettling. Of course it's natural, but it feels unnatural. It doesn't look like food, or anything familiar. Photos disguise how unnerving the aurora can feel.
’It is not a photograph, but it is presented as a photograph.’
It’s as much of a photograph as your lovely sunrise pics. The Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) has ten 4 megapixel CCDs - more complexity, but functionally the same as your iPhone camera. Your camera captures the visible portion of the magnetic spectrum; JWST captures the wavelengths beneath (infra) visible red. The color filters are assigned for interest and definition, otherwise they would be greyscale.
Exactly. It is not a photograph, but it is presented as a photograph. It's a display of digital data
How are your daily iPhone photos any different? I doubt very much that, were I standing next to you at the time, I would view the scene in the same way that your photos record the same image. I gather that you would prefer that NASA simply print out charts of the infrared data they record as they will appear in the multitude of published papers that will appear over the course of the next few years.
Good luck with bringing your wonderful imagination to THAT.
- Krumhorn
I'm not a fan of people telling me what to find awesome. I hope they realize that these views are from so many years in the past and they don't look like that anymore.
Althouse writes, "This post gets my "religion substitutes" tag. And I have imagination enough to know that some of us don't do religion or even have a "religion-shaped hole" that we hanker to have something jammed into."
A beautiful thought. It puts me in mind of Donald Trump's absurd and entirely pointless attack on Elon Musk. It's perfectly understandable and healthy for people to look kindly on one of the few bright spots in our totally fucked-up and dysfunctional United States, but it seems Trump can't stand the competition.
Commandment the First: Thou shalt have no other Trumps before me.
Download one of the JWST images to an iPhone or iPad and then open the edit feature. Select filters and set to Mono and you’ll see the unfiltered image. Still - dare I say - awesome, just not as pretty….
My favorite Meme with Webb was a variation on this one ( https://i.imgflip.com/6mqacp.jpg ), except Webb and Hubble images -- girl-shaped -- were inserted into the image. Wish I could find it.
There’s a word for those who refuse to be affected by wondrous things: Ungrateful.
The real problem is that the telescope itself is homophobic. That cancels out the beauty of the universe.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/homophobic-telescope-reveals-first-hi-res-images-of-deep-space/ar-AAZxz65
"It's an infrared telescope. If they didn't manipulate the picture, it would be blank."
Mostly true, but they did the same thing with optical images from Hubble.
"The universe is never boring... but it is frightening. So much of nothing between the exploding stars and colliding galaxies. that nothingness is... troubling. could even be horrific."
There was a Stephen King short story where people travelled through the universe. They had to be put asleep first, as if in a coma. They would enter one portal and exit another. But if they woke up, they experienced the nothingness of universal time and space, and went insane.
They used Photoshop (yes, the actual Photoshop picture editor) and an artist to colorize the Hubble images.
And again, my difficulty is not the alterations, that's great, it's that they intentionally, deliberately presented those as true photographs to anyone who didn't read the fine print.
It's the dishonesty.
I seriously disagree with our hostess on this. One can stand in the least light polluted sections of Australia and look up to the Southern sky, from horizon to horizon, in complete amazement at the vast expanse of our tiny corner of the Milky Way as well as the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds that orbit our galaxy. In the visual light spectrum, this is as much as the human eye can record. Even with the most powerful land-based telescopes, we are severely restricted, if for no other reason, our atmosphere distorts and limits what can be observed.
NASA cannot possibly over-cook the images from the Webb which reveal in breathtaking detail thousands and thousands of other galaxies and cosmic structures: (i) that are not visible to the human eye in a wavelength we can perceive, (ii) that are many billions of light years away from our relatively small Milky Way galaxy that itself contains billions of stars, and (iii) that are located in a sky field the size of a grain of sand held at the length of a human arm.
If you download a full res image of SMACS 0723 and zoom in as far as possible, you can see and marvel at fully displayed rotating spiral galaxies much larger than the Milky Way in various orientations to our sight line as well as elliptical and irregular galaxies. If you look more closely, you'll see the faintest of dots of light that are galaxies even more deeply red-shifted and distant. Quaestor pointed out in another thread that we are way outside of the applicable principles of General Relativity as the distancing speeds approach the speed of light.
As Inga said, what human cannot possibly be in awe of this sight and our achievement in recording it?
- Krumhorn
As fake as the moon landing.
The earth is still the center of our beautiful lives. All that universe crap is window dressing to show off the powers of the artist who created it all.
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
What I see online is the insistance that we must sense how small and insignificant we are, oh and also how this all disproves your silly Sky God!
As if the immensity of time and space were just now occurring to us.
No and no. And no.
Leaving the to Awe or not to Awe question to one side, I think there's a serious misapprehension here about what has been done to create these images. Yes, there may have been a final "glamour" pass over them to get them ready for the press, but that's no different from any other image you see in the news. It's part of what professional photographers do. But the underlying data is all quite real. It's a major challenge to try to display the density of information produced by a state of the art astronomical instrument today. You can make many choices on the way to a single image. And the Webb is about as complex an instrument as man has yet built (only particle accelerators spring to mind as a possible rival, but I may not have thought hard enough). Many very gifted data scientists, the best we have, have contributed to trying to display this data. For the public, they've concentrated on maximizing the aesthetic impact, for other audiences, they will approach the data differently, probably by building tools that allow scientists to manipulate the images themselves to highlight whatever features they're trying to study. They'll also be producing lots of graphs, spectrograms, and many other plots that the media will not be putting on their front pages.
I think there's a bit of a twist on Gell-Mann amnesia at work here. When the press describes politics or foreign policy, you assume they're distorting it in various ways. When they describe how NASA processes astronomical images, don't you think they'd garble that too?
Tim:
What surprised me is how questionable the Fermi paradox is: the most likely reason we haven’t come in contact with aliens is because there aren’t any. (Never mind the cant-get-there-from-here problem.)
Also worth noting is how briefly we will have emitted significant electromagnetic radiation. How many broadcast antennas will there be in 20 years?
Are they not photon graphics?
“ The sunrise photos are also displays of digital data.”
But I don’t present them as science or demand reverence. They are only a record that I witnessed something.
Let's say these Webb pictures are today's version of Vincent van Gogh Starry Night.
Did anybody ever see eggs in that famous painting?
Maybe we missed something.
The earlier post raised the comparison with artists that painted the West. This is an excellent analogy. Take for example Thomas Moran's Moutain of the Holy Cross. Note that the only thing accurate in the painting is the cross.
On the topic of "Awe," my 10 year old daughter saw the Sombrero galaxy through a 16 inch amateur telescope. It was 20 years ago. That was awesome. It was a field trip for an Astronomy class.
why the universe is so infinitely vast, so complex in it's design, that a divine entity can only be involved,
“The sunrise photos are also displays of digital data.”
"But I don’t present them as science or demand reverence. They are only a record that I witnessed something."
Yes.
If Althouse took an accurate but unimpressive photo of a gray, mundane sunrise over Madison's Lake Mendacious, transferred it to the photo editing software on her Apple and elevated the modest levels of reds and yellows and blues to spectacular eye-watering color, then put that modified photo on Flickr and told us to look at the beautiful sunrise she captured this morning - then she would have done what NASA does.
But she's pretty honest so she wouldn't do that.
I'm just fed up with the lies - see Anthony Fauci, the FDA, the EPA, the CDC, etc., etc., etc.
Story that may even be true: John Wayne played the centurion in The Greatest Story Ever Told who said the line "Truly this man was the Son of God." Supposedly the director asked him to say the line again, this time with more awe. So Wayne said the line again as "Awe, truly this man was the Son of God."
Might as well complain about magnification.
What impresses me the most is the fractality--hey, you've seen one Universe in a speck of space, you've seen 'em all.
S Daly said,
“I think modern people living in urban areas (most people in the West and around the Globe now), have lost day-to-day touch with the universe because of light pollution, so they overreact to these images in a religious-like ecstacy.”
When I go out on my patio at night (20 miles NW of DC) if I had enough patience I could count the number of stars I can see, because of light pollution.
There is a technological spectrum that we can only wholly perceive in the abstract. The tech that produces images that we can also see and believe serve to ground us. It brings us “home”, in a sense, because we have seen like images and believe they are real. The sunrises exemplify this. The images from the tech such as Webb are literally unreal to us. The tech and the image are both crazy-wild, bordering on imaginary. It’s difficult to wrap our heads around the possibility that they’re both real and true - the tech and image both. Somewhere along the tech-image continuum we can fall off believing, despite the fact that our tech has evolved in an amazingly faster and faster pace in the last twenty years than we could ever imagine. Tech advances logarithmically, and it does not stop, because each step literally enables ten(s) more.
Aside, the sunrise pics are reverential, to me. You may not demand that, but I appreciate them in that vein. Webb captures a similar record in the interstellar domain, I believe.
Believe the science! And more than that: Stand in awe of the science. And don't even talk about all the art and politics that are mixed in.
"It is not a photograph, but it is presented as a photograph."
I don't know what that means. Seriously, not trying to be difficult. I don't know what quality of "photograph" these images don't have.
Maybe it's because my whole career revolved around digital images that I'm missing your point. We took x-ray data detected with a solid state detector and made images out of the data. We adjusted properties of those images to enhance and suppress certain aspects. That didn't make them "fake".
Most of our cameras modify all of the images we take. It’s converting 3-d to 2-d, for one thing, and adjusting light, color balance, depth of field, etc. The photos capture enough of the image to remind us and help us remember the place and time, but they are all manipulated images. You may not realize it’s been modified, but it has. It’s just that we recognize those images, and they are keepsakes or memories or simply witness images. Whatever, all digital images have been manipulated by both hardware and software. If we’re familiar with the subject, it rings true, and a decent representation, that’s all we need. It’s actually quite extraordinary how much closer to “real” our phone images are, compared to even 10 years ago, say. Why wouldn’t the same degree of tech advances take place in other applications?
They say the metaverse keeps bubbling with popped and emerging cosmos. Our cosmos is just one of many. If you could see what bubbled and popped in some of the other cosmos over the previous infinities, you'd be much more impressed. I personally don't think a cosmos reaches its flowering of beauty until it's about 17 or 18 billion years old.
Sorry, once I learned many years ago that the photos had been "improved", I stopped caring or watching them.
Believe the science! And more than that: Stand in awe of the science.
Now I get it.
Caution, science in progress.
Just as there are multiple layers to looking at these images, there are also multiple layers of looking at a work of art. One could examine the medium used to create it. What pigments were used to create the paint? Are the colors an adequate representation of reality, or has the artist enhanced or diminished the actual colors? What kind of tools were used to apply the paint? Was the work done by a single artist at one point in time or is it the work of multiple artists done over time? Another artist or an historian might be interested in those fine details while a lay person might be only interested in viewing the finished work. And there may be people who view the work of art and don't see anything special. They aren't awestruck at the beauty of the art. That doesn't mean the work isn't awe inspiring to others. I've been to many art exhibits at world class art museums, and sometimes I walk away in awe, and other times I wonder what all of the hype is over. But that doesn't mean those pieces are "less than". It just means they don't move me. I find it disappointing, but I don't want the museum to put the work in a basement somewhere. It should be there to inspire the people who see more there than I do. I'd feel bad if someone could look at images from the Webb or the Hubble and not have her imagination stirred, but I understand because I look at a Picasso and just can't imagine what other people see in his work.
Webb is as science as science gets. Beginning of our universe. Not metaphorically, really. Beginning of our universe.
I would be in awe if the images were in grayscale. And I don't have a religion-shaped hole to fill. I am in awe of the data and I am in awe that our species collected that data.
A former coworker who was infatuated with the possible existence of alien life visiting earth used to tell me how it would change life as we knew it.
I told him we would still have to come to work the next day.
These images have about the same effect...little to none.
The people who are supposed to be awe inspired are the old white guys who funded and created this project. They aren't much in favor these days. And POC's don't give a shit.
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