Seeing the Stars

ON CHRISTMAS DAY, the largest, most powerful telescope ever built was luanched into space, and several weeks later, settled into place at precisely its intended location, one million miles, give or take a few feet, from Earth. The 'scope is now undergoing the process of precise positioning, and by this summer will begin providing amazingly clear images of stars and galaxiex amazingly far from us. The Hubble telescope has been in service for nearly thirty years, hard to believe, and has performed so admirably, after undergoing early repairs to corect imperfections in the optics, that an even larger instrument was conceived as soon as the Hubble telescope went into service, because not only did Hubble produce astounding results, it inspired scientists to imagine how much more they could do with an even larger version. Hence, the Webb telescope, named after a prominent NASA administrator. When the pictures start coming in in several weeks, the astronomical community will doubtless wax as wonder struck as it was when Hubble first began its work. Among humankind's greatest achievements the Webb miracle must be considered. Among humanity's greatest, most sublime creations are art and science. The written and spoken word, civilization.....take your pick. In a world dominated by horrible wars and a once every century deadly plague, it becomes easy to overlook the positive. Art and science stand above all the rest. Carl Sagan once said: "I don't want to believe. I want to know". Sagan was keenly aware that the quest for knowledge and understand using the human intellect and powers of observation was the most noble endeavor of our species. The earliest, most primitive people were able to understand that the world is an amazingly wondrous, complicated creation, and to help explain it, to satisfy the natural curiosity of intelligent creatures, religion was invented, all over the world. Without science, people were forced to invent their own versiion of how anything and everything came into existence. It became the work of supremely intelligent and powerful beings who lived in the sky - where else? - and these powerful anthropomorphic beings needed to eat, so ancient primitive cultures invented a system in which human sacrifices wre made to appease those in power, in the hope that the gods might reciprocate by bringing rain, that their human creations might not starve. Religion has long since served its purpose, and has become an anachronism in a world in which true understanding, science, has reached a higher level of understanding. Religion endures, but is losing popularity in a world explained so eloquently and elegantly by direct observation, science. That we have found a better way to understand ourselves and the unviese does not preclude mystery. Science willl probably never provide all the answers, but will at least ask the right questions. On the wall of his office at The Institute for Advanced Study, Einstein put a sign which read: "Not everythig that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted". That may be be both the most scientific and the most religious remark ever made.