The Cosmic Question

                        The Cosmic Question

Planck Satellite heat map of early universe
(Image by European Space Agency)   Details   DMCA

     "To have squeezed the universe into a ball

     To roll it toward some overwhelming question"

     The astounding Planck image of the early cosmos as it existed as an expanding ball of highly energized particles scarcely 375,000 years after its fiery birth in the Big Bang brings to mind the relationship between the inspired metaphor central to T.S.Eliot's classic"Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock and our most critical earthly dilemma today.

     Poised on the unfamiliar shores of a newly modernizing age, Eliot described a world of anxious indecision with indistinct figures, like patients "etherized on a table," wandering and digressing in a dreamlike fog, never quite able to "force the moment to its crisis."   Again and again the poet asks:

    "Do I dare? and, "Do I dare?....

     Do I dare

     Disturb the universe?

     In a minute there is time

     For decisions and revisions which a minute will

     reverse."          

Next Page  1  |  2  |  3

(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).