The Universe Is NOT About Us

Columnist George Will writes about the new Webb space telescope.   He writes:

"Other historians — the scientists and engineers of the Space Telescope Science Institute — study the origins of everything in order to understand humanity’s origins. In 2018, Webb will be situated 940,000 miles from Earth, orbiting the sun in tandem with Earth, to continue investigating our place in the universe."

Then he says:

"Webb, which will be the size of a tennis court, will advance knowledge about this stupendous improbability: How did material complexity, then single-cell life, then animals and consciousness emerge from chaos?

"... Webb will not shed light on two interesting questions: How many universes are there? Is everything the result of a meaningless cosmic sneeze, or of an intentional First Cause? Webb will, however, express our species’ dignity as curious creatures...."

But it's not about us. The universe is not about us.

The story of human knowledge, of science, has been a steady retreat from man's self-centeredness and self-importance.

Everywhere the universe and nature shout out man's lack of significance, while we invent mythologies that place us at the center of everything and construct gods that are like us physically and behaviorally even to the extent of being sex-obsessed. Creatures born to die in an eyeblink of time, we invent for ourselves eternal existence of a sort.

The ground-bound ape is always trying to climb trees.

There is no limit to human egotism and solipsism. Knock it down and it grows in another form.

And now Will and others present the Webb telescope as being all about human origins? About the place of man in the universe? More myths, but useful ones, used to gather funds and support for the new space telescope.

Return of El Alacran

I'm baaack!   Reports of my death or confinement in a mental ward were only figuratively correct.

What I'm going to do for the time being is to mirror selected comments I've made elsewhere, starting now.
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Ode to Old Binoculars

 I got these binocs Thurs.   Old and with haze on prisms. Some corrosion from being sweated and spat on at football games.   Go Hogs stickers on the case.   Came from Arkansas.    $14+ incl shipping. Wider angle by a degree from my other 7 X 35s claiming to be wide angle. 

So I expected wide angle right? And out in the backyard that's how they looked. Less coated than my go-to Minolta or Nikon binocs but sharp, and wide, easy to follow flocks of birds in flight or to see constellations. But yesterday I took them out to the park. Wow. Never expected that depth of field. Could see ducks 200 ft out and the roadway a quarter mile beyond, all perfectly sharp and magnified. Changes perspective by a lot, some landscape painters paint that way, as though the world is a bowl. 

The problem at football games is that you'd see the spectators in the opposite stand big and sharp at 7X and not just the players on the field and it would be distracting. You'd see them all at the same time! For nature that's perfect. Looking for wildlife, need a big deep field of view. Like to try them on mountain ranges. 

Somehow it seems different from camera lenses, where wide angle lenses shrink objects far off. My impression -- and I need to test them more -- is that they act a little like telephoto lenses in making distant things look close, but have the wide field of a wide angle lens. How'd they do that? Nippon magic? 

Optics by Toei Kogaku [stamped J-B4 on the front bridge], and marketed under different brands back in, I guess the 50s into the 70s. The scuttlebut in optics forums was that these are special and that Toei optics are special and so it seems. A couple on eBay now in better shape, but at $25-50. 

Gonna look for a more extreme wide angle, say 11-13 deg.

Moral? Don't knock old optics. Some of those little unknown companies that have disappeared used elves and wizardry.