I Have Seen the Dark Universe Yawning

It is better to laugh at man from inside the Void, 

than to weep for him without ...

 

 

I. 

 

Regular readers will know that I've recently been thinking about the philosophy of absence - click here - and the call of the void: click here.     

 

But the Great Nothing that has really captured my interest of late has nothing to do with subjective experience, but is, rather, a spherical region of space in the vicinity of the Boötes constellation, about 700 million light years from Earth, known as the Boötes Void ... 

 

 

II. 

 

To be fair, it's not quite a void, as it actually contains a number of galaxies. 

 

However, this number is small; just a few dozen and thus significantly fewer than the approximately 2,000 galaxies that one might expect to find in an area of space of comparable size.

 

And let's be clear, here: the Boötes Void, discovered in 1981 by Robert Kirshner [1], is an unimaginably large area of space, with a radius just shy of 330 million light years, or 62 megaparsecs as our astronomer friends would say [2]. 

 

That makes it one of the largest known voids in the visible universe [3] and some even like to think of it as a supervoid.  

 

 

III. 

 

Of course, size isn't everything and there are plenty of smaller voids to contend with and marvel at. In fact, voids constitute around 80% of the observable universe - and don't even mention black holes [4]. 

 

Scientists hope that by studying the Boötes Void they will be able to learn more about the dark energy that drove their formation as the universe expanded. Cosmic voids also conveniently allow for the study of elementary particles known as neutrinos that freely stream across them on a massive scale. 

 

For me, however, as a philosopher rather than an astrophysicist, why the Boötes Void and other such structures excite is because they reaffirm the inhuman scale and nature of the universe. 

 

D. H. Lawrence hated that modern science books made him "dizzy with the sense of illimitable space" [5]. It is, he says, "the disembodied mind alone" which thrills to the thought of the "hollow void of space, where lonely stars hang in isolation" [6]. 

 

But, for me, what this dizzying and profoundly pessimistic thought does is remind one that "Nihilism is not an existential quandary but a speculative opportunity" [7]; i.e., a chance to think alien thoughts and to experience monstrous new feelings, that may or may not coincide with human interests. 

 

When one stares at the night sky and contemplates the fact that there exists a mind-independent reality which, "despite the presumptions of human narcissism, is indifferent to our existence and oblivious to the 'values' and 'meanings' which we would drape over it in order to make it more hospitable" [8], one simply can't help smiling. 

 

Lawrence says it's astrology rather than astronomy that gives a marvellous sense of freedom and release [9], but I simply don't agree with that. 

 

For astrology, with its central teaching of as above, so below is an all too human practice that projects man on a cosmic scale. It is astronomy - and the speculatively material way of thinking that comes out of it - that truly provides "entry into another world, another kind of world, measured by another dimension" [10] and which reminds us that the universe "is not our or anyone's 'home', nor a particularly beneficent progenitor" [11].        

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Whilst the American astronomer Robert Kirshner and his team at the University of Michigan were surveying galactic redshifts in order to create a 3D map of the universe, they discovered a huge and largely empty region of space, which was originally called the Great Nothing, but which is now known as the Boötes Void. Due to its size and the fact that it does contain some galaxies, they knew it wasn't a black hole and comparisons with the molecular cloud Barnard 68 soon made clear it couldn't be a dark nebula either.

 

[2] A megaparsec (Mpc) is a unit of astronomical distance equal to one million parsecs, or roughly 3.26 million light-years. It is commonly used to measure the vast distances between galaxies and galaxy clusters, helping astronomers map the large-scale structure of the universe.

      To give some idea of how big a distance 62 Mpcs is, keep in mind that the nearest galaxy to our own - the Andromeda Galaxy - is less than 1 megaparsec away or about 2.5 million light years (i.e., 15 trillion miles). Or, if you want to think of it another way, we could fit billions of galaxies the size of the Milky Way into the Boötes Void. 

      Of course, Lawrentians hate to think this way, sharing (or imitating) their master's horror of large numbers (meganumerophobia): 

      "All this modern stuff about astronomy, stars, their distances and speeds and so on, talking of billions and trillions of miles and years and so forth: it is just occult. The mind is revelling in words, the intuition and instincts are just left out, or prostituted into a sort of ecstasy [...] that lies in absurd figures such as 2,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 [...] figures which abound in modern scientific books on astronomy [...] It is all poppy-cock." 

      See D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction to These Paintings', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 208. 

 

[3] It's important to understand that the portion of the universe we can see (even with the aid of technology) is strictly limited and that the total size of the universe is unknown; it's estimated to be at least 250 times larger than the observable universe, but may, in fact, be infinitely bigger. We're basically living in a bubble and have no real idea of what lies outside.   

 

[4] Spatial voids, of course, are fundamentally different from black holes; the lattrer are extremely dense and have powerful gravity, whilst the former are vast regions of space that are largely empty of galaxies and matter. In other words, whereas black holes are the densest objects in the universe, voids are the least dense regions, formed by the expansion of the universe.   

 

[5] D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction to The Dragon of the Apocalypse by Frederick Carter', in Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, ed. Mara Kalnins (Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 46.

 

[6] Ibid.

 

[7] Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. xi.    

 

[8] Ibid.

 

[9] I've written about this in more detail in the post entitled 'I Would Like to Know the Stars Again: Reflections on Astronomy and Astrology in the Work of D. H. Lawrence' (28 March 2021): click here. 

 

[10] D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction to The Dragon of the Apocalypse by Frederick Carter', in Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, p. 46. 

 

[11] Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound, p. xi.