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Eddington, Sir Arthur - The Expanding Universe - And universal expansion
Identifier
002958
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
Sir Arthur Eddington – The Expanding Universe
The spiral nebulae are the most remote objects known. They are extra galactic objects, that is to say, they are beyond the limits of the Milky Way aggregation of stars, which is the system to which our sun belongs, and are separated from it by wide gulfs of empty space. When we have taken together the sun and all the naked eye stars and many hundreds of millions of telescopic stars, we have not reached the end of things; we have explored only one island – one oasis in a desert of space. Other islands lie beyond. It is possible with the naked eye to make out a hazy patch of light in the constellation Andromeda which is one of the other islands. A telescope shows many more – an archipelago of island galaxies stretching away one behind the other until our sight fails. It is these island galaxies which appear to us as spiral nebulae.
Each island system is believed to be an aggregation of thousands of millions of stars with a general resemblance to our own Milky Way system. The island systems are exceedingly numerous. From sample counts it is estimated that more than a million of them are within reach of our present [1934] telescopes. If the theory [of the expanding universe] is to be trusted, there must be of the order of 100,000 million of them..........
In the course of time, all the spiral nebulae will withdraw to a greater distance, evacuating the part of space that we now survey. Ultimately, they will be out of reach of telescopes. The unanimity with which the galaxies are running away looks almost as though they had a pointed aversion to us. We wonder why we should be shunned as though our system were a plague spot in the universe.... It is not us they are avoiding, however, everyone is having the same experience. The law of a general uniform expansion is true throughout .. it is a general scattering apart, having no particular centre of dispersal.
The supersystem of the galaxies is dispersing as a puff of smoke disperses. Sometimes I wonder whether there may not be a greater scale of existence of things, in which it is no more than a puff of smoke