“In the mid-nineties in reading about the Hubbell telescope sending back a picture of a nickel-sized piece of the sky, they had found twenty million new galaxies.”
“Now we have pictures of billions of galaxies—not solar systems, galaxies. And the universe continues to expand. I sometimes wonder how people can go on after knowing this. Why the entire population of the planet didn’t fall to its knees in some kind of awe or swoon—I mean, you could either look at it as, ‘this really makes us insignificant,’ or ‘this really makes us part of something really grand.’ You could be inflated by that information or you could be completely deflated… Everything we perceive is made of atoms, and atoms are 99.999% empty space… If your body is made of atoms, and atoms are mostly empty space, what is holding your clothes on? Not only does the emperor have no clothes, but the clothes also hardly have any emperor.”
Wes “Scoop” Nisker, author of The Big Bang,
The Buddha, and the Baby Boom:
The Spiritual Experiments of My Generation
