17.1.07

it's the little things really, no.. really.

a long article on Dark Energy over at Scientific American, tells of how all the various processes that determine all of the universe as we know it may depend heavily on the existence of dark energy. (A weak force that pushes everywhere away from everywhere evenly.)

It's obviously cool to think of this as gevurah to gravity's hesed. Though, in a way, it seems more like in reality it is the reverse, dark energy has more in common with hesed. It is constant and it is weak but over time it will prevail. Whereas, the universal nice guy, gravity, actually is much more gevurah oriented. It's inexorable and crushes things down into black holes, given enough time; it is very strong (relative to dark energy) but it's forces peter out over time and distance.

There was a great article about how powerful gas jets from galactic centers and more generally galactic weather had a heavy impact on star formation in distant parts of galaxies, but I don't know what happened to that article. Here's a similar one. Here's some more explanation of how galactic weather affects star formation.

Similarly we are only beginning to discover how global warming trends can affect all manner of seemingly unrelated processes upon which we rely on a daily basis.

My point here is how little we know, and how much we have to learn about seemingly mild and gradual changes affecting the universe in a profound manner. Something I mentioned in passing in a previous post about breathing. Hesed is what really makes the world go round, not gevurah, but in our day to day interactions, it seems like the effects of hesed are little to nothing. Similarly, in the early universe dark energy had very little impact. Halfway through the present development of the universe, the subtle changes dark energy had wrought on the universe were already irreversible and the trend only continues in the direction of dark energy's continued and growing influence on the universe at large. (and perhaps even on a much smaller scale as the universe continues to develop.)

This is perhaps one of the reasons we have the midrash that God first created the world with midath haDin, (gevurah) and then added midath haRahamim. (by adding hesed) If we apply it to gravity and dark energy, we end up with the first half of the development of the universe being dominated by gravity/din, and then the second half being dominated by dark energy/hesed. Obviously, dark energy is still only a theory, but the nature of lengthening, the long line, is the nature of hesed, and the short line, contracting, is the nature of gevurah. [Similarly but along different lines, time dilation is closer to hesed, whereas length contraction shares more in common with gevurah.]

Anyways, what I was getting at was this: that as our understandings grow, much of what at first might seem either detrimental or ineffective will prove to be beneficial and crucial. (Another example would be oxygen; at very early stages of the development of life oxygen was life-threatening and corrosive, but as life developed it couldn't have continued to develop without embracing oxygen as a vital element in the generation of energy.)

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