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Jazmin Velasquez Professor Amy Adams Rhetoric & Composition II 5 February 2018 Who is the Universe and What are You? Earth is one of eight planets in our solar system. Our solar system orbits in the Milky Way, one out of 100 billion galaxies. This all sits within our universe. It can be extremely easy for that fact to become overwhelming. Alan Lightman’s thought-provoking essay “Our Place in the Universe,” published in December 2012, brings into acknowledgement of how vast our universe is, and how it can allow people to think twice about the world they live in. It is easy to lose sight of what exactly your role in life is when you understand the complex actuality of how the world began and continues to grow. Lightman is a theoretical physicist and novelist who explores ideas of our intricate universe and puts them in the perspective of his own, of science, and of the former civilizations that once lived on Earth. Throughout the essay you find Lightman referring to technical and broad ideas that will exploring what exactly the universe is. The opening of Lightman’s essay uses an anecdote that slowly creates the scene of the ocean engulfing all land surrounding it. Lightman states “all we could see was water, extending out and out in all directions until it joined with the sky.” The feelings Lightman experienced from being surrounded by the sea on a boat with his wife, led him to ponder the facts of our large world. This starts a detailed, scientific, and philosophical explanation from Lightman about our endless and hardly understood galaxy. Not only did the ocean seem to engulf the great land we walk on, but this led him to ponder the many curiosities about outer space and its size. Scientific and philosophical information begins the start of an overall discerning piece, not only informing
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and engaging the reader about our universe, but giving Lightman’s personal opinions of what exactly he thought about the world. As he states he felt “insignificant, misplaced, a tiny odd trinket in a cavern of ocean and air” (Lightman 1) with all the ocean surrounding him, it is easy to understand why. The ocean is immense, covering over 70 percent of the surface of the planet. That is easy to understand why Lightman felt insignificant. Both the ocean and universe are still being researched and measured because there is so much of both left to discover. It was interesting to read how a physicist and author put together the ideas that former scientists and the early human civilization started about how exactly the Earth and universe itself came to be. As Lightman writes about the incredible contrast of size between humans and our universe, we learn that the ancient Greeks were incapable of calculating the actual size of the solar system. The observable universe has now been measured by modern day scientists, but it can actually “extend far beyond that” (Lightman 3). That sentence alone really begs the question of will there ever be an end? The reference Lightman made to the Ming Dynasty and Emperor Yongle gave support to that intriguing question. Yongle’s palace in the Forbidden City had seemed almost endless just like the universe itself. There may be an end to both the grand palace and vast universe, but for now we can only continue to go off of what the universe has at the time being been shown to hold. Lightman refers to scientist Garth Illingworth, who states how “we sit in this miserable little planet in a midsize galaxy” and then adds this to the fact of that the “immensity of the situation” is “astonishing” (Lightman 3). People think they are so important, and that everything they do is paramount, but that really isn’t the case. The reference to the painting Tallulah Falls1 (1841) alludes to how people can very quickly become consumed in nature. The painting shows individuals on top of a rocky canyon surrounded by mountains filled with large trees and water running through them. The people in the painting almost go 1
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overlooked compared to the wide scenery before them. They, like other people in the world try to make themselves noticed, but there is simply far too much in our world that makes humans seem almost microscopic. As Lightman later mentions in his essay, “to what extent are we human beings, living on a small planet orbiting one star among billions of stars, part of that nature” (Lightman 3). Here, Lightman’s words led me to create a mental picture of looking down and watching me orbiting around our solar system on planet Earth with the rest of the black universe consuming all that meets the eye. We are almost nothing compared to the magnitude of the forest and nature itself that fills up regions of our world; that is something we could hardly be a part of. The Big Bang is talked about in Lightman’s essay and it is mentioned to have occurred about 13.7 billion years go. This is a concept some individuals may refuse to believe, but one that almost all theoretical physicists support. I think it was wise for Lightman to have brought up such a perplexing concept because it adds support to the fact of how the universe is expanding and started to since that moment. He later brings up the “heavenly bodies” that were once considered “divine”, and how they were “made entirely of different stuff than objects on Earth” (Lightman 3). Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle studied how the heavenly bodies were made of the “perfect and “indestructible” (Lightman 3) ether, instead of what all matter on Earth constituted of, the four elements. It is not until 1610 when Galileo found that the heavenly bodies were in fact not perfect. This would have led to Newton proposing that all laws of nature applied to phenomena in the heavens and on Earth. These engrossing ideas would later create “vitalists” and “mechanists” to speculate what we are, either “an intabglible spirit or soul?” or “elaborate machines” that “obey the laws of physics and chemistry” (Lightman 3). I found all of this information to fit right along with the rest of Lightman’s information of what the universe is. He
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brings up ideas that justifies his reasoning of our world from how it started, to what it is in comparison to humans. There really is possibly no end to the universe, and us humans are no more than specks in it. There is science to continue to uncover what is still unknown and unable for us to physically touch. All that we can do is accept, wonder, and question what we already know and want to know. Whether there is an end to it or not, we will not find out in this lifetime. Maybe in the next one humanity will. As our universe expands, we find ourselves becoming more consumed in it. For those who worry about their existence and place on earth, keep in mind to focus on the present more than the unknowns. There is no need to keep yourself up at night wondering about life somewhere else, we won’t find it just yet.
Works Cited Lightman, Alan. “Our Place in the Universe.” Harper’s Magazine December 2012. Print. Cook, George. Tallulah Falls. 1841. Oil on canvas. Georgia Museum of Art.