IN MY REVERIE (Scribbles From My High School Days)
'The Feeling Of The Mysterious' - Armand Delsemme (From the Epilog of "Our Cosmic Origins")
From my balcony, I like to look at the sky when the night comes. The stars appear one by one, and later in the night, the lights of the village go out at last;only the babbling of the creek is heard, and one smells the fragrance of pines. We are in our small dwelling at Vail, in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, where the sky is very dark because of the altitude. In the calm of the night, I feel free from daily concerns, and sheltered from the muffled noises of civilization. Then I have the feeling of being in direct contact with the pure and silent Universe of the stars, and this is nearly religious feeling.
Above the horizon, raggedly torn by the mountains, rise the constellations of Perseus and Andromeda. With the naked eye, I can finally just perceive the great galaxy of Andromeda. Its apparent size is larger than the moon, but its light has travelled for more than 2 million years before reaching my eye. I ponder then about those innumerable galaxies much too far away to be seen except with the largest telescopes, and I wonder about the meaning of this Universe whose immensity I cannot comprehend.
However this Universe has not always been so large, and it seems to have emerged from very little indeed. As time flowed, the Universe branched out into more and more ramifications that teemed and accelerated without pause. It moved through multiple stages, constantly climbing the steps toward a greater and greater complexity, based on cosmic processes present everywhere, so that the same evolution toward life must have taken place on a vast number of planets. It looks like an ascent that inevitably goes from matter to mind.
The Universe is still young, hence the ascent toward more complex entities with intelligences higher than ours may be only beginning. The summit of such an ascent is not yet discernible, so that it is impossible to guess whether it has a final purpose. But the whole scaffolding leading to life and intelligence is too well ordered, and it is tempting to believe that it has a hidden meaning. Up to the present, as the American geologist Preston Cloud has prettily expressed it "stars have died so that we could live".
we are indeed made of stardust, and it is quite recently that this stardust became aware of its own existence, and pondered why the universe existed. We still know too little to answer the most important questions, but we are so young! We have just barely emerged in the Universe. However, we can make more and more deliberate choices, and take more and more significant decisions that will influence the future. If we really want it, our civilization will be able to escape the pitfalls of cultural conflicts and nuclear wars and set off into space, to the conquest of the Universe, in order perhaps to understand one day the reason for our existence.
For it is difficult not to ponder and wonder about the ultimate end of our
ascent to intelligence, and the reason for all this undertaking. No philosophy
has ever shed light on the profound reason for our existence;no religion has
ever clarified the 'grand design of God' when He created the Universe. 'The
most beautiful experience that one could have, is the feeling of the
mysterious', wrote Einstein.
The ultimate mystery of the cosmos is its existence.
