|
It's
all a question of things going bump in space at The Hayden
Planetarium's spectacular Cosmic Collisions. Narrated
by Robert Redford and billed as an 'immersive' theater experience,
the film (one of those rare NY events that is magically perfect
for both children and adults) is projected onto the huge domed
ceiling -- quite marvelous to step inside from a peaceful day
outside, the thick green of the park and tranquility of Central
Park West - inside the Universe as one forgets it is: a violent
and brilliant symphony, the strange crashing music and dance of
stars and planets. The show is particularly fascinating
because of its interpretative framework -- that of
collisions. Change is the constant here….
There's
a terrible beauty about these large celestial objects smashing,
crashing and colliding into one another. One thinks of
collisions as inherently perilous, dangerous events, but they can
also be fortuitous. The idea of a comet hitting the Earth is
terrifying, but as the show points out, without the meteor that
caused the extinction of the dinosaurs some sixty-five million
years ago, human life might never have evolved. The Moon was
created in a month when a planetoid struck Earth -- a month is all
the time it took for immense fiery pieces of rock to coalesce into
our pale, cratered Moon. And the same collision stunned the
Earth into its tilted axis that gave us our seasons, the Moon
giving Earth its tides with its gravitational pull. Even
more fortuitous this collision.... As with many phenomena --
natural or manmade -- mathematics lies at the core of things: it's
all a question of probability really… the chance of paths
crossing, of contact. Most remarkable of all perhaps is the
unproven but entirely credible theory that the subtle
gravitational tug from a spaceship might deflect a future comet's
orbit and prevent it from slamming into the Earth. Stranger
than fiction....
The
most arresting image may well be the brilliant glowing orb of our
Sun, imaged by NASA satellites, as it violently ejects streams of
charged particles towards the Earth. This solar wind strikes
the Earth's magnetic field and produces the magical lights of the aurora
borealis and australis that have lit the polar skies
for eons -- one little bang after another.
See:
Cosmic
Collisions, Hayden Planetarium
Permalink
Save
to del.icio.us
Digg
This!
|
