Astrophysicist finds comfort in the big picture
DB: This is Earth & Sky, asking a theoretical astrophysicist how his job affects his day–to–day thinking.
JB: He?s Avi Loeb, professor of astronomy at Harvard. He studies the early universe.
Avi Loeb: If we are preoccupied with our daily, mundane problems, we tend to forget the big picture.? You just look up into the sky at night and you see all of these stars, you see all of these distant sources, and you wonder if maybe we are too preoccupied with ourselves, that there is much more out there, and we should think about it every now and then. We don’t often think about beyond the Earth.? As an astrophysicist, I have the privilidge of being paid for thinking about these things.? And it’s a great experience, and it puts things in perspective for me.? The things that I would be otherwise bothered by, my own death, for example. When I see the universe as a whole, it’s giving me a better sense of longevity.?
DB: Like all astronomers, Loeb believes the universe has existed for billions of years.
Avi Loeb: So it puts things in perspective.? And I like that very much, because I’m not too saddened by my failures, and not too happy by my successes.? But that’s my own personal take on this.
JB: You can see images of the early universe at earthsky.org. Thanks today to Research Corporation, a foundation for the advancement of science. We?re Block and Byrd for Earth & Sky.
Collection of deep space images from Hubble Space Telescope. These particular images are from 2004. At the time they were released, they were called “the deepest portrait of the visible universe ever achieved by humankind.” They are part of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF) project. Extremely long exposures made with the Hubble Telescope revealed the first galaxies to emerge from the so–called “dark ages,” a time shortly after the Big Bang.
You can hear more from Avi Loeb of Harvard. Read this Earth & Sky interview with Avi Loeb.
