JASON SILVA: The philosopher Tolstoy
wrote about how, in order to live,
man must find a way to connect the finite to the infinite.
We need to form some kind of kinship between ourselves
and the unfathomable vastness of the cosmos.
We are star stuff, said Carl Sagan.
We are made of atoms, literally cooked
in the furnaces of dying stars.
And so, in many ways, we are infinite.
Yet a psychologist, Ernest Becker,
wrote, we are nevertheless housed
in heart-pumping, breath-gasping decaying bodies, simultaneously
gods and worms.
And so we need a bridge, a conduit to the numinous.
And perhaps no greater instrument
in the history of humankind than the telescope
can provide this cathartic bridge,
as it blasts open new tunnels between the mind and the other.
Ross Andersen's dazzling essay on the James Webb Telescope
reminds us that in his metaphysics,
Aristotle called seeing the noblest faculty of man.
Andersen goes on to describe with requisite virtuosity
how the deep field images of the universe taken by the Hubble
literally mainline all of space and time in the optic nerve.
So that the Space Telescope has downloaded space and time
into our eyeball.
Where as once we were blind, now we could see.
He continues, through the sheer aesthetic force
of its discoveries, the Hubble has
distilled the complex abstractions of astrophysics
into singular expressions of color
and light, vindicating [INAUDIBLE] beauty
is truth, and truth-- beauty.
And thus, allowing the layman to witness the scope and grandeur
of the universe through an unprecedented expansion
of human vision, something the new James Webb Space Telescope
will take to a whole new level.
Andersen continues, the telescope
has provided nothing less than an ontological awakening,
a forceful reckoning with what is--
because we get to witness galaxies pinwheeling
in [INAUDIBLE].
Something happens to us during these moments
of introspective contemplation, drunk on awe, as we literally
get to contemplate space and time on a scale just
shy of the infinite, that enlarges
the boundaries of our being.
Astronauts have called this the overview effect.
Neil deGrasse Tyson calls it the cosmic perspective.
We get to move beyond the self toward something
grander, more majestic, ineffable.
And we chase these experiences ravenously.
As Henry Wismayer wrote, as spirituality wains,
experience is the new faith, and we
are refugees from the mundane.
And so we shall continue achingly
to resuscitate that sense of humbling incomprehension,
so that we may say, ah yes, I remember what I forgot.
In the words of Nisagardatta, the other world
is this world rightly seen.