I would say that I am deeply spiritual but not religious, and that I arrived at my spirituality through science. Science is a mechanism by which we discover the nature of the universe, and what we have revealed is tremendously beautiful in it’s order, complexity, and scale. How could one not be spiritual about living in a universe with (at least) ten thousand billion billion stars? A universe where the ash of stars can form patterns which grow, change, experience and think about themselves? Through science I have also discovered that all things are interconnected. For example, a single sodium atom moving in the axon of a neuron experiences a small gravitational and electromagnetic force from every other particle in the universe. The origin of these forces are distributed over time at the speed of light, so in this moment that atom is simultaneously experiencing the moon from 2 seconds ago, and the big-bang from 13.7 billion years ago. The nature of our existence is dependent on every past event that has ever occurred within our light-cone, and our every action creates the future of universe for trillions of years. All boundaries or separations are illusions created by time. To me this is the most wonderful implication of science; We are the universe, creating and experiencing itself.
Neural Network
Lives in Nitrogen-Oxygen Atmosphere
270 K - 300 K
Eats, Breathes, Thinks, Creates
A false-color scanning electron micrograph of a marine diatom undergoing cell division. As the two thecae of this diatom separate, torsion causes the frustule to shear. Flagella extending from holes in the frustule can be seen wrapping around a nearby chain of marine bacteria.
Credit; James Tyrwhitt-Drake, UVic Advanced Microscopy Facility
hologram: Saturn’s rings, photographed by Cassini, 18th January 2007.
Images taken as Cassini moves from one side of the ring plane to the other, neatly showing how the rings look in reflected and transmitted light (brighter and darker, respectively).
Image credit: NASA/JPL/SSI. Animation: AgeOfDestruction.
Eruption of the Tvashtar volcano on Jupiter’s moon Io, photographed by New Horizons, 1 March 2007, during its gravity-assist Jupiter flyby on its way to Pluto. I’ve brightened the pictures so that some detail on the darker part of Io is clearer.
The gif covers about 8 minutes of real time. If you count pixels and look up Io’s diameter, it looks like the plume’s “only” being thrown up to an altitude of 200km or so. But in fact the volcano is in the opposite hemisphere to the one we see here (albeit at a high latitude of about 67 degrees), and the plumes are reaching a height of over 300km.
There is much more detail about this volcano at the Gish Bar Times blog.
Polar vortex on Saturn, photographed by Cassini, 27 November 2012. See also a processed version by Kevin McAbee at Emily Lakdawalla’s blog, where the effect of Saturn’s rotation and the camera’s perspective are corrected for.
Scanning electron micrographs of diatoms, microscopic algae that form the base of the food chain and produce 20% of Earth’s oxygen.
(Source: sciencephoto.com)
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