Stars, novas and fireworks

(ok, so I actually wrote this a week ago, and meant to start my blog at that point, but I got busy. Being unemployed is a 24-7 job)

“That's the whole problem with science. You've got a bunch of empiricists trying to describe things of unimaginable wonder.” - Calvin / Bill Watterson

I just finished reading about our Milky way, and its 'satellite' galaxies (satellite galaxies being my term – the more technical expression would be the dwarf galaxies, large and small Magellanic clouds, and globular clusters that are held by its gravitational pull.) The site I read said that a globular cluster of stars had a mere 100,000 member stars. A mere 100,000 stars I think to myself? Then I look up the number of stars in the Milky Way, and find that it boasts somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 billion stars. Sigh. 100,000 just ain't what it used to be.

In a somewhat related story, I read today of a new nova that has just appeared in the sky, in the constellation of the scorpion. A nova is the result of a thermonuclear explosion, a fusion process whereby atoms are mashed together to form new elements in unfathomably high temperatures. Or, fathomable now, if you take the scientific view of things, which years ago I would have. Now I think of the explosion itself, and am struck with awe at the amazingly colorful and powerful phenomena running loose in our galaxy. What a colorful term, thermonuclear explosion (if, that is, one divorces it of any association with our nuclear weapons, which would give it a rather negative connotation). The scientific viewpoint of the whole thing is that the fireworks are a side show, a small and irrelevant emotional side effect of a rational, physical process. A process that can be described with equations and quantified with numbers. Well. Ok then, that's fine. But I'm no longer riding on that merry go round, as Mr. Lennon would say. I just had to let it go. I think the scientist is missing out on a wonderful fireworks show.

Oh, and by the way – Calvin would have named the big bang “The horrendous space kablooie”

-jbh