I came across this conversation on YouTube and found it fascinating. A short conversation with physicist Dr. Brian Cox and Stephan Colbert, in which Cox explores or asks the question of what it means to be who we are in the vastness of the Universe.
Many things are not brought up in a conversation that is too short really for the questions asked, in my opinion. For example there is no mention of consciousness. What is it? Where does it come from?
Still, the subject matter I still find fascinating and humbling, and a great launch pad for further questions.
All transcription errors are my own.
“You brought one of your favorite images here to show and we have put it up”
What are we looking at this is a beautiful photograph. It’s a photograph from the James Web Space Telescope and it’s a tiny piece of sky that’s much smaller than a full moon. So you imagine this photograph, and in there almost everything, apart from that you can see a star-like object at the top which is a star in the Milky Way galaxy, because we’re looking out through the galaxy to the distant universe, but everything else in that photograph is a galaxy. So all those things are roughly the size of the Milky Way with the 400 billion suns.
There are something like 10,000 galaxies in that single image. So it’s I think it’s a humbling and beautiful and terrifying actually.
“Why terrifying?”
I mean one one of the things I say in my live show at the start is the thing that occurs to you when you think about images like that, is what does it mean to live a finite fragile life in an infinite eternal universe, and I immediately say I don’t know? Nobody knows the answer to that question.
Imagine that we’re the only civilization currently in the Milky Way galaxy which is a guess but it’s possibility. I would argue that that word meaning, would it mean? Whatever it is, it exists clearly, that the universe means something to us. But I would argue it’s a property of the mind human brains, complex biology. So that implies that maybe the earth is special, very special, not withstanding its physical insignificance, because it could be the only island of meaning in a galaxy of 400 billion suns currently.
So there’s a clash of ideas where when you talk about cosmology there’s the physical insignificance, as you see there are 10,000 galaxies in a single patch of sky, but there’s also this remarkable fact that collections of atoms like us exist on a world like the Earth.
Carl Sagan said, you know one of my great heroes said, “A physicist is a hydrogen atom’s way of learning about hydrogen atoms.” That when you put it like that it is a remarkable thing to be a human being.