Not all telescopes are for looking through. Just spend some time at the NRAO’s Greenbank facility located in Greenbank, WV, and this will become readily apparent soon enough. Isolated in a 13,000 square mile National Radio Quiet Zone, the Greenbank facility is pleasantly remote, and home to the world’s largest movable radio telescope (about 480+ ft high and weighing in at over 17 million pounds!). It took around 10 years to construct the mammoth scope which was completed in August of 2000. Visitors are afforded a free guided tour of the facility by knowledgeable staff members. So what do radio telescopes “see?” For responses to that question I will have to refer you to the NRAO’s site for a proper explanation. All that I can relate is that the ‘scopes are used to collect data from radio waves emitted from stars in space that then can be analyzed. And pulsars, something about pulsars, these are used for studying pulsars.
I cannot help but relate my experience here to that of Job’s during the so-called divine speeches found in the last few chapters of book of Job. Just as I believe that the book of Job functions as a de-centering text (de-centering humans from arrogant anthropocentricity); so too is the humbling experience of inter-galactic study. For many of us, the earth is our center of existence, we seldom ponder that which exists outside of our “world.” But, when we take the time to consider with Galileo, Duke, and others, that which is beyond us, we are small, minutiae in the grand portrait of what we attempt to capture in the term, “universe.” Indeed, God’s questions to Job are truly in the vein of astronomy, physics, and the like:
Can you tie the chains of the Pleiades or loose the straps of Orion?
Can you take out the constellations each in its time, and can you console Ayish for her children? Do you know the ordinances of heaven; can you place his dominion upon the earth?
Job 38.31-33 (TNK)
We are not at the center, and the insatiable quest to know more about our place in this vast universe has been on the mind of all that ponder the stars for millennia. It is precisely in the moments which one spends gazing at the stars, experiencing an eclipse, or listening to the blip of a pulsar that we become more attuned to our infinite universe, and at that same moment, our infinite God.
The prophet is.
