For the Gloucester Unitarian Universalist Service of July 24, 2022
Service Leader and Author: Roger Garberg
With Associate: Mern Sibley
Our Purpose Today
Our service today reminds us that we are not isolated beings, but connected, in mystery and miracle, to the universe, to many human communities, and to each other. We gather here today to rekindle our appreciation and gratitude for one community, the community that includes both scientists and all the others who, quite apart from their daily business, seek to witness and record the truths of creation. We gather so as to shine our own lights on creation so it is not lost in the shadow of forgetting, inattention, and fretful rumination. Come, let us attend to the miracle of existence!
Reading
“The venture into space is meaningless unless it coincides with a certain interior expansion, an ever-growing universe within, to correspond with the far flight of the galaxies [that] our telescopes follow from without. the journey is difficult, immense.…. we have joined the caravan, you might say, at a certain point; we will travel as far as we can, but we cannot in a lifetime see all that we would like to see or learn all that we hunger to know.” — Loren Eisley
Address to the Congregation
Looking up, our ancestors saw the play of Gods and demi-gods directing events on Earth. Their imaginings included stories about what they saw. They saw groups of stars—in some groups they imagined lines connecting the stars, the lines forming shapes that recalled characters and animals in the stories, myths, and dreams they used to explain the way the world worked. One such shape, or constellation, resembled a swan, or in the Latinized Greek, “Cygnus”. Cygnus rises overhead in the summer. Another constellation recalled for them the hunter Orion, demigod son of Poseidon. The Orion constellation begins his hunt over the night sky in the fall.
Yet another constellation, Gemini, becomes prominent every winter in night skies over the northern Hemisphere–it’s visible the entire night in Dec-January. “Gemini” comes from the Latin meaning “twin”, and it is associated with the twins Castor and Pollux from Greek mythology. Castor and Pollux were twins with different fathers. (The formal Latin-rich phrase for this is heteropaternal superfecundation, it’s a real thing, and, no, it won’t be on the test!).
In the Greek story, Pollux was immortal, son of Zeus; Castor was mortal, son of Sparta’s king. Pollux asked Zeus to let his brother share immortality with his twin. Zeus accommodated by setting both of them in the sky, together forever, making the constellation Gemini.
Gemini contains 85 stars visible to the naked eye. Its brightest star is…. Pollux, of course, the original immortal, son of Zeus. Second brightest is Castor, the mortal brother.
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I’ve been linked to Gemini by family association. My father worked in the ‘60’s era NASA program, called Gemini, that sought to learn how to do long duration space flights. The method involved building a spacecraft that could accommodate two astronauts, our modern Castor and Pollux. I think I was closest to my father during those years. He shared with me literature about the project, and samples of the materials created for it— of a miraculous honeycombed aluminum that served as the heat shield for the re-entry vehicle planned for Apollo lunar mission. He learned a bit about fuel cells because among other technical achievements, Gemini V would be the first manned-space flight to use fuel cells for supplying power.
A fuel cell converts energy from a fuel, such as liquid hydrogen, into electricity through a chemical reaction with liquid oxygen or another oxidizing agent. For a middle-school science fair project, my father suggested I construct a fuel cell, and found for me a set of instructions for the project and phoned in the orders from a science supply company for several of the materials needed. I soaked a fiberglass net in electrolyte, cut out two disks of plexiglass to make the frame, sandwiched the net and metal meshes in the frame, fed the frame from tanks of oxygen and one of hydrogen, and attached a voltmeter to the metal meshes. Both of us shared the excitement when the thing worked–there was an electrical potential!! The science fair display wasn’t pretty—it didn’t earn a ribbon at the fair—I think only my father and I found it exciting. But it taught me a (small) bit about electrochemistry. And it brought us closer together for a time.
Later, after his work shifted to supplying government arsenals for materials for the Vietnam War, we drifted apart. My father supported the war. But living under the shadow of the draft and convinced that the war was a moral and practical disaster, I detested it, and mistrusted its supporters, as did many kids in the day. It seems now that project Gemini, and our fuel cell, represented a fleeting period of mutual understanding.
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As you’ve probably seen in the media, the James Webb Space Telescope has begun sending us pictures of new constellations, new galaxies. The telescope was launched on Christmas Day, 2021, and arrived at its final position on January 2022. It is there now, perched nearly a million miles from earth. In the last few weeks, we’ve begun to get images from its camera, pictures of the most distant objects humanity has ever seen.
And so what can we expect to see from this powerful eye a million miles from Earth? In a sense, we can see nearly everything—everything there is and everything that has ever been.
The telescope is placed to study our near neighbors, planets in the solar system. It will provide data about the comets and icy bodies that lie in the outer reaches of the solar system that might contain clues to our origins on earth, to the dynamics of planet formation, planet evolution, and the suitability of planets as habitats.
One of the early images from the telescope is of a galaxy cluster named SMACS 0723—a picture teeming with thousands of galaxies, each containing billions of stars. The light from SMACS was emitted 4.6 billion years ago, only reaching the telescope in the last few weeks. That is to say, looking at SMACS is looking back in time to a moment just before our planet came into existence, and 600 million years before the first single-celled organisms first appeared on Earth.
In the last week, the telescope has provided images of a new galaxy, named now GLASS-z13. At 13.5 billion light years, GLASS is only a bit short of the theoretically farthest point that can be seen by any current or future telescope. Looking further would mean looking at things that existed before The Big Bang, but that means doing the impossible: looking at things before things existed, before space and time and the laws of physics came into existence.
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The James Webb Space Telescope joins other space telescopes that together observe several types of deep space radiation. Most of these are launched into low Earth orbit–they regularly passes below an altitude of 1,200 miles of Earth’s surface. Of these, perhaps Hubble is best known because it observes visible light (and near ultraviolet). Many of us will have seen images of deep space taken by Hubble. Other space telescopes observe gamma rays, x-rays, or infrared.
The Webb Telescope can see infrared light. Infrared radiation is associated with heat. It turns out that everything produces infrared radiation. All of us sitting here today are both reflecting sunlight as well as producing our own light in the form of infrared radiation. We are each of us points of light (“This little light of mine” could be a song about people seen in infrared!). By measuring the wavelength of infrared radiation, we can know the temperature of distant stars, and their outline and composition.
The cool thing about infrared is that looking at it you can see right through dust. And there are a lot of things astronomers want to look at that are obscured by dust in space. The Webb telescope can show them those things.
Unlike my fuel cell project, the Webb telescope is a marvel of engineering, representing the solution to innumerable impossible seeming challenges. In order to see the faintest infrared heat signals from distant galaxies, the telescope had be kept as cold as possible in space–like 400 degrees below zero cold–despite that its surface exposed to the sun would be heated to something like 500 degrees hotter than that. Engineers devised an ingenious heat shield and a heat pump to manage this.
In order to achieve the resolution required to see these distant objects, the telescope’s lens needed to be enormous–over 270 square feet. But if it were built as a single large mirror, the telescope would be far too big to fit inside a rocket and launched into space. The remarkable solution included a mirror consisting of 18 hexagonal segments that can be separately focused to create a vast combined image, like the compound eyes of the honey bee. But unlike the bee’s, the eye of the Webb telescope had to be foldable–it was folded concertina style into the small space allowed in the rocket payload section. Once in space, the lens could be unfolded, and its 18 segments individually focused by motors that can position the segments to within 10 nanometers accuracy (for comparison, a human hair is 60,000 nanometers thick).
All this is a remarkable testament to the abilities of humanity to solve hard problems. Such solutions represent many convergences—each of the engineers and scientists working out these solutions was once a kid who encountered a parent, a teacher, or another adult who started them down a road of solving such problems—someone who helped them with a math problem, a writing assignment, maybe even a fuel cell project for the science fair. The children, the adults, along with the distant nebula brought into focus by astronomers—these are one constellation of lights.
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The James Webb Space Telescope is named after the person in charge of NASA during the time my father worked there on project Gemini. This is the constellation Gemini that connected me with my father—and James Webb, and perhaps even the telescope named after him.
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The sky has always been a canvas on which we project pictures—of who we are, from whence we’ve come, and of to where we’re going. Many peoples first learned to navigate the vast oceans using celestial observation and calculation. They imagined lines between the points of light they saw in the night sky, and saw figures in the lines: Hercules, Hydra, Draco (the dragon) , Pegasus (the winged-horse), Centaurus (the centaur). These constellations of theirs testify to the astonishing mystery: that the universe is the kind of thing capable of producing both stars and stories—constellations made from a compound of cosmic fires, dust, and rock, along with human purposes and human perceptions.
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How did the constellations arise? How did we come to be here? Some part of the answer will come from efforts to see far with instruments like the Webb Telescope. Other parts will come from looking inwards, into the minds that that project their imaginings and stories across the sky and deep into space—because the spaces we explore looking for answers cannot be found simply by looking away from our own existence. We are also explorers of interior space, the place our minds fashion for ourselves, the space we find when we look into the eyes of a friend or lover or look into ourselves with our “mind’s eye”. This space requires, not a telescope, but another kind of instrument—the common eyes of humanity that can look inward and find the motives and means for human cooperation, compassion, community, purpose, and meaning.
Looking up, looking inward: we mix all these points of light in confusing, beautiful constellations made of stars, poetry, songs, galaxies, acts of kindness. And we can’t do otherwise—because the building of constellations is the business of the universe itself, its way of being, its fundamental principle. The principle has been known for thousands of years. It is called “love.” And after we’ve looked far and looked inward, we discover what we’ve long suspected: love does cause the world to go around, after all.
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Benediction (Roger) from Responsive Reading #434, Anonymous
“May we know once again that we are not isolated beings, but connected, in mystery and miracle, to the universe, to this community and to each other.”
