Physics is like sex. Sure you can get some interesting results, but that’s not why we do it.
Richard Feynman
Think about this: You look at a far off star, say one of the brightest stars of night sky - the Deneb. You would think the star is there, you are following it but in reality you are seeing how the star was 2600 years ago! The star could have collapsed and you woulnt even know until 2600 years later. This is one of the stars we can see with our naked eye that we are talking about!! Now imagine you look into the deep end of the universe. What you see is how the universe was billions of years ago. You would have no idea what is happening there right now! Take the galaxy Saraswati - light takes 650 million years just to go from one end to the other end of this galaxy - the light we see from saraswati was emitted 4 billion years back!!!
It is truly a mind blowing experience to revisit the scale of the universe each time. It just makes you wonder how small and insignificant humans as whole are. Extraordinary as it is how we all came to be from the leftover carbon of dying stars, it is just but one of many many many things that one can ponder over.
A list of things that I find absolutely fascinating and make me love physics all the more:
- Black Holes :
- Dark Energy & Dark Matter:
- Matter and Anti-Matter:
- Superposition & Entanglement:
- Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB):
- What happened in the first 10^-43 seconds of the big bang:
- Gravity: