Dr Bruce Elmegreen CHAPTER 16
n Epilogue – Dr Bruce Elmegreen CHAPTER 16 There is what seems to be, and there is what is. We look but we cannot see what is. We build instruments that do our looking and still these instruments cannot see everything. There is no limitless gaze. The horizon curves, the fog muffl es, the lights and structures get fainter and fuzzier with distance. The redshift dims. Peeling back one layer leads only to another. This is the reality of the Universe in which we live. When we think we have it just right, we see an unimagined new rightness beneath. David Block and Kenneth Freeman have been looking and measuring, classifying and pon- dering the Universe for a long time. We are fortunate they shared their story with us. This is a story about the avalanche of insight that follows the discovery of new techniques: of giant telescopes built by hand all around the globe and of the mysteries the builders solved and revealed through their drawings; of the photographic process and the replacement of vision by chemical images; of electronic antennae, cameras, telescopes, and satellites that are sensi- tive to radio, infrared, ultraviolet, x-ray, and gamma ray light. It is a story of the shrouds of the night that were slowly peeled back, of galaxies viewed both inside and out, like the x-ray fi sh in Collette Archer’s painting below. The Universe around us is rich with structure in both density and temperature. Some of this structure reveals itself by the light it radiates, the long or the short wavelengths depending on temperature and extinction, the bright or the dim light depending on dis- tance, opacity, and power.
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