My conscious gaze towards the cosmos began not with a telescope, but with the serendipitous arrival of a book – perhaps by Carl Sagan, perhaps by Carlo Rovelli – into my hands, a decade or more ago. Before this celestial spark, my encounters with the stars, the moon, the vast theatre of the night sky, were confined to fleeting, poetic whispers within literature. These were beautiful, yet ultimately unfulfilling; like glimpsing starlight reflected in a shallow pool, they offered a shimmer but no depth, vanishing almost as soon as they appeared. The scientific texts themselves presented a formidable frontier. I confess, their intricate terminology, equations and theories often eluded my grasp, yet their narrative grandeur proved utterly captivating. Sagan’s own words resonate: “The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.” This profound truth, even partially grasped, instilled a sense of hypnotic magnetism. The books painted not just facts, but a visceral panorama: the staggering, almost incomprehensible enormity of the observable universe, a realm where billions of galaxies spin in the dark; the intricate, near-miraculous complexity of matter itself, from the quantum foam to swirling nebulae; the timeless enigma of time, stretching beyond human comprehension; the fundamental intrigue of gravity, the invisible sculptor shaping the dance of celestial bodies. They revealed the agonising insignificance of light-years, mere scratches on the surface of an endless, silent abyss –distances so vast they render even light a slow traveller. And above all, they laid bare our profound cosmic ignorance. As Carlo Rovelli might frame it, peering into this immensity forced a humbling confrontation with the limits of our understanding, a sentiment echoing Socrates: “I know that I know nothing.” This initial encounter was less about mastery and more about awakening to the awe-inspiring, humbling scale of the mystery itself.
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