Why grokking space is so hard + Tartar nays Hawking on ET threat + The Cosmic Web

[C C]

This Is Why Understanding Space Is So Hard
http://nautil.us/blog/this-is-why-unders...is-so-hard

EXCERPT: [...] After more than three centuries, the questions sparked by Newton’s spinning bucket—about space and motion, about mass and inertia—continue to trouble both physicists and philosophers. Something makes the water rise up against the side of the bucket—but whether it’s ultimately the structure of spacetime, or the Higgs field, or some kind of quantum foam, remains to be seen....

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Jill Tarter says Stephen Hawking Is Wrong
http://www.businessinsider.com/jill-tart...ens-2016-1

EXCERPT: [...] Many intellectual leaders of our age, including Stephen Hawking, say that the idea behind Active SETI should be avoided at all cost, but co-founder and former director of the Center for SETI Research at the SETI Institute, Jill Tarter, pointed out a serious flaw in Hawking's philosophy. While Hawking fears that giving aliens our cosmic address could potentially bring death and ruin — much like what happened to many groups of Native Americans when Europeans invaded North America — Tarter thinks that aliens advanced enough to skip across star systems and reach Earth will be friendly, not aggressive....

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'The Cosmic Web' weaves tale of universe’s architecture
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/%E2%...chitecture

EXCERPT: We live in a universe of either honeycombs or meatballs. At least, that’s how cosmologists imagined the universe not long ago. But neither analogy is quite right. The universe instead resembles a vast spiderweb, made of gas and galaxies. It’s a view of the cosmos that partly originated in a high school science project. Weaving together personal anecdotes with physics and math, Princeton astrophysicist J. Richard Gott’s The Cosmic Web chronicles the nearly 100-year quest to understand the anatomy of the universe. The journey focuses on efforts by Gott and his colleagues to see the “big picture” and figure out what the universe’s structure can reveal about the conditions during the first moments after the Big Bang....

[Magical Realist]

"Far, far away, in the abode of the great god Indra, king of heaven, hangs a wondrous vast net, much like a spider's web in intricacy and loveliness. It stretches out indefinitely in all directions. At each node, or crossing point, of the net hangs a single glittering jewel. Since the net itself is infinite in dimension, the jewels are infinite in number. The sparkling jewels hang there, suspended in and supported by the net, glittering like stars, dazzling to behold.

Close your eyes, now, and imagine what this magnificent jeweled net looks like, spread across the vast expanse of space. Now, keep your eyes closed and move in close to one jewel in the net. Look closely, and you will see that the polished surface of the gem reflects all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number, just as two mirrors placed opposite each other reflect an image ad infinitum. Each jewel reflected in this gem you are gazing into also reflects all the other jewels, so that the process of reflection is itself infinite."==http://www.uua.org/re/tapestry/youth/bri...hop7/indra

[Image: indras-web-spiders-web.jpg]