Outer space

Dr. Neville Thomas Jones, Ph.D.

Black holes, worm holes, superstrings, branes, pulsars, quasars, dark matter, nebulae, galaxies and so forth. The universe appears to be a strange, hostile, cold and purposeless place. "Many and strange are the universes that drift like bubbles in the foam upon the River of Time." (Arthur Clarke, popular science fiction writer). As for the World (or Earth), let's consider what Prof. Carl Sagan (1934 - 1996) had to say: "As long as there have been humans we have searched for our place in the cosmos. Where are we? Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people." (Sagan, C., "A Gift for Vividness," Time, Oct. 20, 1980, p. 61.)

Given all the time, effort and money that goes into astronomical sciences, it is only natural to suppose that a great deal of factual knowledge about the universe has by now been accumulated. However, this assumption is false. All that science "knows" still comes from terrestrial observation, just as Sir Arthur Eddington pointed out in 1933, "There are no purely observational facts about the heavenly bodies. Astronomical measurements are, without exception, measurements of phenomena occurring in a terrestrial observatory or station; it is only by theory that they are translated into knowledge of a universe outside." (Eddington, "The Expanding Universe," CUP.) Clearly, then, we are constrained in our data collection activities by our essentially two-dimensional imaging, instrumental imperfections and lack of spatial mobility.

Since the 1960s it could be argued that the American government agency, NASA, has provided an enormous amount of information regarding outer space, but we investigate their increasingly outlandish claims (and the agency itself) in a separate section of this site.

The theories of astrophysics and cosmology, through which astronomical observations "are translated into knowledge of a universe outside," are like a tangled ball of wool, with each knot and kink having been added as a consequence of someone's attempt to fix and preserve the previously fixed ball. Our task is either to unravel the ball, or to throw the ball out and start again with new wool. The latter course of action is to be preferred.

A very common misconception, even amongst professional astronomers, is that telescopes provide us with a measure of distance. They do not. Exactly as with a microscope, the telescope is an optical instrument that simply provides an angular resolution greater than that of the human eye.

Consider, for instance, the following quotation taken from Rev. Alexander Hislop's book, "The Two Babylons," fourth edition, 1929: "There is this great difference between the works of men and the works of God, that the same minute and searching investigation, which displays the defects and imperfections of the one, brings out also the beauties of the other. ... If the microscope be brought to bear on the flowers of the field, ... instead of their beauty diminishing, new beauties and still more delicate, that have escaped the naked eye, are forthwith discovered."

We can see these intricacies through a microscope, not because the microscope is somehow looking 50-cm into the flower, but because it can resolve detail that our eye cannot. We see exactly the same thing as the microscope objective 'sees', but we need the assistance of the microscope lenses, in conjunction with our own lens, to magnify and thereby resolve the detail.

The same is true of a telescope. That a telescope magnifies does not necessarily mean that the object being magnified is further away from the telescope. The telescope can be simply resolving a smaller, equidistant object. Just as with using a microscope to examine the detail of a flower, we can use a telescope to examine the detail and structure of a particular patch of the sky. What we observe may not be things that are further and further away from us, but finer detail of the same thing.

There is thus no observational basis for claiming that the universe is milliards of light-years in radius, apart from inconclusive interpretations of galactic redshift. We observe a rotating dome above our heads, and there is no reason why this should not, in actuality, be the case.

Summary