GRT: Tĩnh Lặng - LTP
#31
The Monks In The Forest - with English subtitles




Copyright owned by Bayerischer Rundfunk 2012.  

A documentary of Thai forest tradition monks in Germany made by Bayerischer Rundfunk 2012. Ajahn Cattamalo Bhikkhu is the senior monk. Born in Germany, he was ordained in the Wat Nong Pa Pong tradition of Venerable Ajahn Chah, N.E. Thailand in the year 1988. He spent 7 years in various monasteries throughout Thailand practicing and studying with different meditation teachers of the forest tradition. For 13 years he lived at Bodhinyana Monastery in Perth, Australia. The last 5 years he was the vice-abbot there, helping Ajahn Brahmavamso. He has lived at Muttodaya since its beginning. Location is the Franconian Forest in Germany:  50.129033°, 11.645132° between Frankfurt and Prague near the Czech border.  (See https://muttodaya.org/)
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#32
A Life of Kindfulness - a tribute to Ajahn Brahm on this 70th birthday




This movie is a tribute to Ajahn Brahm, prepared for his 70th birthday on 7 August 2021. It has clips from interviews with eminent monks and nuns, such as Ven Somdet Thepsirin, Bhikkhu Bodhi, Ven Analayo, Dhammananda Bhikkhuni, Ven Mettavihari and Ven Kusuma. There are scenes from Bodhinyana Monastery in Western Australia and also from Dhammasara Nuns Monastery and also Thailand.

English subtitles.
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#33
Why I am a Buddhist Monk | Ajahn Brahmali | 7 December 2018




Ajahn Brahmali explains how he came across the Buddhist path and the various reasons why he decided to become a monk, in particular experiencing the peace of breath meditation led him to want to pursue this further. Ajahn explains how through experience you gain confidence in the teachings of the Buddha and he discusses the Kalama Sutta (AN3.65) on navigating among different spiritual options. Please support the BSWA in making teachings available for free online via Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/BuddhistSocie...

Recorded at Dhammaloka Buddhist Centre, Perth, Western Australia.
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#34
2 Years as a Monk: What I've Learned




Wow, it's been two years since I left my world behind in Malibu, California, USA to become a Buddhist monk in Thailand. It was not easy to leave my home, family, and friends, private practice, job, dance company, and the beautiful beaches. Living the life of a monk is simple, but definitely not easy. As monks, we try to train ourselves each day to become better and stronger human begins. Monkhood has taught me so many beautiful life lessons and I wanted to share what I learned. Hopefully, this can help you to improve your life as well. Let me know your thoughts in the comments. I hope you enjoy. #buddhistmonk #monk #buddhism

(6 Life Lessons)
Timecodes
0:00 Intro
4:12 The Importance of Community
7:41 Finding Time to be Quiet both Mentally & Physically
10:51 Have good kalyanamittas (virtuous friends)
13:48 Make Plans and Detach
15:58 Cultivate Real Happiness
18:39 Keep Your Eyes on your own Bowl
21:06 BONUS TIP: Call your parents


I turn 3 years old - What it means to me.




I turn 3 years old - What it means to me.

The Vassa (aka Pansa) is a 3 months rains retreat that all Buddhist monks enter in the Theravada tradition. This is a time around August - October (during the rainy season), where monks stay put in one place. In these three months, the monks take the time to study the dhamma and practice meditation. Each completed rainy season is how a monk counts his time in monkhood.
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#35
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#36
Giải Ngân Hà

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What time of night is the Milky Way visible?
This is the real beauty of going looking for the Milky Way during August because it’s visible right after dark.

Although it can be seen from May through October, it’s not always ideally positioned; in May you have to wait for just before dawn, in June you can watch it rise in the east, in July and August it’s “up” after dark, by September you can watch it sinking in the west shortly after dusk.

In mid-August the Milky Way is visible at 10 p.m. from mid-northern latitudes, and is acting overhead by midnight to coincide with true darkness. It’s the perfect time to see it.

How to find the Milky Way
Wait until it gets dark.
Let your eyes adjust to the darkness (by not looking at a phone for 20 minutes).
Look south.
That’s it!

If you need a few visual helpers—which you may do if you’re not in an absolutely dark place free from light pollution—look for Jupiter and Saturn.

You can’t miss Jupiter—it’s shining super-bright in the south right after dark, with Saturn slightly to its east.

The Milky Way should be visible the other side of Jupiter in the southern sky.

However, it’s really important that you get to as dark as place as possible.
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#37
Giải Ngân Hà

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Our Milky Way Galaxy: How Big is Space?





What Is Our Place In The Milky Way?





How the Universe is Way Bigger Than You Think





How long will it take to fly from earth to the end of the universe (with the speed of light)





--ooOoo--

How Many Galaxies Are There? Astronomers Are Revealing the Enormity of the Universe

The universe is awash in islands of matter — some 100 billion galaxies make up the basic building blocks of the cosmos.
By David J EicherMay 19, 2020 12:00 PM


IC 342
At 11 million light-years away, IC 342 is a close galaxy. It’s also a member of a loose group along with several others. IC 342 has a low surface brightness and lies in Camelopardalis, near the plane of the Milky Way in our sky. So it’s a little difficult for amateur astronomers to spot, despite its elegant form. (Credit: Tony Hallas)


This story appeared in the June 2020 issue as "A Universe of Galaxies." Subscribe to Discover magazine for more stories like this.

On the evening of Oct. 4, 1923, near Los Angeles, a young astronomer got into his car and began a motorized trek up to Mount Wilson. There, he arrived at the observatory that housed the 100-inch Hooker Telescope, at the time the largest telescope in the world.

Edwin Hubble was a fourth-year astronomer at Mount Wilson; he enjoyed using the Hooker Telescope because he was interested in, among other things, studying spiral “nebulae.” These mysterious gas clouds were scattered across the sky, and no one understood their nature. In the early days of the 1920s, Hubble had assigned himself the task of figuring them out.

He pointed the great telescope toward his favorite object: the nebula in Andromeda, M31. This spiral-shaped cloud is faintly visible to the naked eye under a clear, moonless sky. He then captured its image on a photographic plate. Hubble was excited by the result. On it, he found a suspected nova, an exploding star. The next night, he photographed M31 again, hoping to catch the nova and record it under better atmospheric stability. The second plate did indeed record the nova, but little did he know, he also had captured a plate that would become legendary in the history of science.

Astronomer Edwin Hubble made an exposure of the “Andromeda Nebula” with the Hooker Telescope at Mount Wilson Observatory near Los Angeles on Oct. 5, 1923. He was initially excited, believing he had recorded a nova, an exploding star. He marked the star, which lies between two tick marks he drew at the top right on the plate, with the letter N. The star turned out to be a Cepheid variable, and Hubble used it to prove that the distance to the Andromeda Galaxy was far greater than astronomers thought. (Credit: Courtesy of the Carnegie Observatories/Cindy Hunt)
His observing time over, he returned to his office to analyze the catch. Suddenly, Hubble made an astonishing realization: The nova was not a nova at all, but a particular type of star that changed its brightness, a Cepheid variable. Checking earlier plates, he was able to confirm that, and he realized that the star’s faintness had incredible implications.

The star, and the nebula that encompassed it, must lie at a distance of a million light-years — three times larger than anyone at the time believed the size of the whole universe to be. Today, thanks to improved measurements, astronomers know the object is 2.5 million light-years away.

Aided in part by earlier work done by Vesto M. Slipher and by his own colleague, Milton Humason, Hubble had at once discovered that the universe was far larger than anyone had believed, and that spiral nebulae like Andromeda were actually distant galaxies. They were whole systems of stars and gas, separated from our own Milky Way by a long hike.

At Arizona’s Lowell Observatory, as early as 1912, Slipher had recorded the apparent velocities of spiral nebulae and, with the work now done by Hubble, it was clear the universe was expanding — the galaxies were flying apart from one another over time. The universe was not only far larger than anyone had previously believed, but it was growing as time went on.

NGC 4565 in Coma Berenices is the brightest and most prominent galaxy in our sky that is oriented perfectly edge-on to our line of sight. We see its disk as a thin, silvery needle. Some 57 million light-years off, it lies in the Virgo Cluster and has a prominent central bulge, suggesting it may be a barred spiral. (Credit: Adam Block)
By 1929, astronomers had put a cosmic picture of the past together. If you traced the histories of many of the galaxies backward in time, it meant that the cosmos began with a small, infinitely dense point at its origin. This research was an extension of work originally done by Belgian astronomer Georges Lemaître. Astronomers understood this cosmic point of origin, later called the Big Bang, as the start of the universe, and, they calculated, it must have occurred billions of years ago. The Big Bang had commenced the expansion that was driving all the galaxies away from each other as time rolls on. The whole universe seemed to be flying apart.

In the 1930s, Hubble began to study and classify galaxies into their various so-called morphological types, the array of structures astronomers saw in photographs. He eventually assembled the types of galaxies he observed into a tuning fork-shaped diagram. It contained spiral galaxies, barred spiral galaxies — spirals containing a linear “bar” of material passing through their centers — lenticular (lens-shaped) galaxies, and elliptical galaxies. He also identified irregular galaxies, clouds of stars and gas that lacked an organized shape. Later on, astronomers would identify peculiar galaxies, systems that appeared to be wracked with explosive or disruptive events. They also identified a class of galaxies called dwarf spheroidals, which seemed to be numerous in the local universe.

By the 1950s, French astronomer Gérard de Vaucouleurs of the University of Texas had expanded Hubble’s classification scheme into a more complex system that took into account many observed properties of galaxies. De Vaucouleurs produced a pseudo-three-dimensional plot showing the galaxies’ relationships, nicknamed the “Cosmic Lemon” due to its shape. De Vaucouleurs included details on bars in galaxies, descriptions of rings of matter visible in them, and an evaluation of how loosely or tightly the spiral arms of a galaxy were wound. He also included evaluative details about the nature of irregular and peculiar galaxies.

The last generation of extragalactic astronomy has moved into far more sophisticated analyses than cataloging. By using the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have estimated that some 100 billion galaxies must exist in the cosmos. And the number may be much greater than that. Probably some 2 trillion galaxies existed in the early universe, but it seems clear that galaxies near each other are drawn together by gravity and combine over cosmic time. Despite the universal expansion, then, normal galaxies like the Milky Way are probably made of dozens or more protogalaxies that merged into larger systems. You can see these primitive blobs of matter, bluish protogalaxies, in the early universe within the Hubble Ultra Deep Field pictures.

Our Own Galaxy

Perseus A, also called NGC 1275, is an eruptive galaxy at the core of the Perseus Cluster, which is made up of some 1,000 galaxies about 240 million light-years away. The dominant member of the Perseus Cluster, Perseus A is a Seyfert galaxy with an active nucleus, powered by a 340-million-solar-mass black hole in its core. (Credit: Hubble Legacy Archive, ESA, and NASA)
As astronomers have studied greater numbers of galaxies over the past few decades, they’ve discovered many things, but one that is impossible to ignore is that the universe is incredibly large. If you look at a galaxy in your telescope’s eyepiece tonight, the photons striking your eye have been traveling at the fastest speed there is — 186,000 miles per second (300,000 kilometers per second). Nonetheless, they have taken 2.5 million years at that velocity to reach us from the Andromeda Galaxy. And that object is nearly on our cosmic doorstep. Of course, the knowledge of our own galaxy, in a primitive sense, goes back to antiquity. The name Milky Way comes from the Latin via lactea, which derives from the original idea, the Greek term, galaxías kýklos, “milky circle.” The band of Milky Way visible in our sky, most prominently in the summer and winter evenings, is the unresolved light from billions of stars lying along the plane of our galaxy.

But only in the past few decades have we come to understand that the Milky Way is one of the 100 billion galaxies in the universe, and that its disk stretches some 100,000 light-years across. It contains some 400 billion stars, although we don’t know exactly how many because dwarf stars are faint and difficult to see over long distances. For decades, astronomers believed the Milky Way was a simple spiral galaxy. But studies in this century have shown the Milky Way is a barred spiral, and that our sun and solar system lie some 26,000 light-years from the center, in one of the galaxy’s arms.

The Milky Way consists of a bright disk, a slowly spinning platter of stars and gas that contains most of the stars we see. Our sun orbits the center of the galaxy once every 220 million years, meaning that we’ve rotated around the galactic center about 20 times since the formation of the solar system. Far away, in the center of the galaxy, lies a supermassive black hole containing around 4.3 million times more mass than the sun. In recent times, astronomers have discovered that supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies are the norm. Nearly all galaxies, except for dwarfs, have them.

The galaxy’s disk is encapsulated by a halo of a small number of stars, along with huge spheres of ancient stars called globular star clusters, and a big envelope of dark matter. Astronomers don’t yet know what dark matter consists of, but they know it is there because of the gravitational influence it has on the visible matter they can observe.

The Local Group

The weirdly distorted elliptical galaxy NGC 474 in Pisces lies at a distance of 100 million light-years. The neighboring spiral galaxy NGC 470 lies just above it. Multiple shells and tidal tails surround NGC 474, caused by interactions with its neighbors and by density waves that propagate through the medium. This mammoth object stretches 250,000 light-years across — two and a half times the diameter of the Milky Way. (Credit: P-A. DUC (CEA, CFHT), ATLAS 3D Collaboration)
The Milky Way is hardly alone in the cosmos. It belongs to a group of at least 54 objects called the Local Group of galaxies, a name Hubble gave to this local cloud of objects as he mapped the nearby cosmos. The primary members of the Local Group are the Milky Way, the Andromeda Galaxy, and the Pinwheel Galaxy (M33). But each of these big three spirals has a cloud of attendant galaxies, too. The Milky Way’s satellites include the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, visible to the naked eye in the Southern Hemisphere, and many dwarf galaxies. The diameter of the Local Group is about 10 million light-years, some 100 times the diameter of the Milky Way.

And moving outward into the deeper universe, we encounter more examples of those 100 billion galaxies. These majestic islands of stars and gas exist in groups, like our Local Group, but also in larger assemblages called clusters and very large ones called superclusters. Despite the overall expansion of the universe, meaning that most galaxies are moving away from each other as the cosmos grows, gravity keeps smaller numbers of galaxies bound to each other on their journeys. Our Local Group, for example, is a member of the so-called Virgo Cluster of galaxies, named so because its richly populated center lies in the constellation Virgo in our sky.

The Virgo Cluster contains at least 1,500 galaxies and is centered some 54 million light-years from Earth. You can see some of the brightest galaxies near the core of the Virgo Cluster in amateur telescopes, in an array called Markarian’s Chain. This line of galaxies contains supermassive elliptical galaxies such as M84 and M86, and a variety of spiral galaxies, too. For backyard astronomers, this playground of galaxy types is one of the really entrancing areas of the sky, and it is best visible on springtime evenings under clear, moonless conditions.

Most of the Virgo Cluster galaxies contain supermassive black holes in their centers. M87 is quite an example. Whereas the Milky Way’s central black hole weighs in at 4.3 million solar masses, the colossal black hole inside M87 contains an estimated mass of 5 billion to 7 billion suns, some 1,000 times more massive than ours. M87 is one of the largest galaxies in our part of the universe — it is a so-called cD galaxy, short for centrally dominant — and it has “eaten” many of the smaller galaxies that once surrounded it. That’s what massive galaxies do — they consume their neighborhood partners.

Superclusters

One of the greatest edge-on galaxies in the sky, and the one most people say looks like a flying saucer, is the Sombrero Galaxy (M104) in Virgo. It consists of a great rotating disk with a prominent dust lane edging it, consumed by a glowing halo of gas and stars. It lies 43 million light-years away and is about half the size of the Milky Way, sporting a diameter of 49,000 light-years. (Credit: NASA and the Hubble Heritage Team (AURA/STScI))
A cluster containing 1,500 galaxies is one thing, but much larger assemblages of galaxies also exist. The Virgo Cluster itself is a member of the so-called Virgo Supercluster, which holds thousands of galaxies on a scale an order of magnitude larger yet. The Virgo Supercluster holds our Milky Way, the Local Group, the Virgo Cluster, and altogether some 100 galaxy groups and clusters. This amazingly large framework stretches some 110 million light-years across, and is one of about 10 million superclusters that make up the entire cosmos.

Despite the huge number of galaxies existing in the Virgo Supercluster, astronomers now know that most of the space in this volume is essentially empty. The diameters of these great voids range from dozens to hundreds of millions of light-years. Filamentary chains of galaxies wind their way around the dark, empty spaces. On large scales, galaxies in clusters and superclusters are like soap bubbles, with galaxies coating the surfaces and voids lying in between.

The Whirlpool Galaxy in Canes Venatici, another galaxy near the Big Dipper, is also known as M51 and is a top telescope target. An interacting pair of galaxies, the Whirlpool is being passed by a little interloper, NGC 5195, which is drawing material off one of the larger galaxy’s spiral arms. The pair lies 23 million light-years away, and M51’s disk stretches across 60,000 light-years. (Credit: Tony Hallas)
By the end of the 1980s, astronomers had identified the Great Wall, a sheet of galaxies measuring 500 million light-years across. More recently, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey uncovered the Sloan Great Wall, an assemblage of galaxies at least twice the size of the Great Wall, which covers a long dimension of some 1.4 billion light-years.

As astronomers discovered more and more distant galaxies, they found that some large mass seemed to be tugging on the local universe, pulling us in the direction of the southern constellations Triangulum Australe and Norma. Called the Great Attractor, this anomaly, some 200 million light-years away, puzzled astronomers. They eventually discovered that an even larger mass in that direction was pulling us. This mammoth structure, called the Shapley Supercluster, is 650 million light-years away and contains the greatest concentration of galaxies in our local part of the cosmos.

The Big Picture

Elliptical galaxies like M49 in Virgo are huge spheres of stars that float in an ellipsoidal cloud. Although their diameters are often similar to large spiral galaxies, they can hold vastly more mass because they are shaped like a football rather than a disk. This galaxy lies some 56 million light-years away and is one of the more massive galaxies in the Virgo Cluster. (Credit: NASA/ESA/STScI)
Additional surprising discoveries have occurred, too. In 2014, astronomers identified a new supercluster based on the relative motions of galaxies analyzed in a more sophisticated way than ever before. University of Hawai‘i astronomers concluded that the Laniakea Supercluster exists, and named it after the Hawaiian word for “immense heaven.”

Laniakea, which is also sometimes called the Local Supercluster, contains some 100,000 galaxies, including the Local Group and the Milky Way. This massive cluster and all its members are traveling together through space, but not all of the galaxies within it are gravitationally bound. Some will splinter apart from the rest of the cluster as time rolls on.

The Laniakea Supercluster has four major components — the Virgo Supercluster, the Hydra-Centaurus Supercluster, the Pavo-Indus Supercluster, and the Southern Supercluster.

Altogether, Laniakea contains around 500 galaxy clusters and groups. And surrounding Laniakea in the local universe are other galaxy superclusters — the Shapley Supercluster, the Hercules Supercluster, the Coma Supercluster, and the Perseus-Pisces Supercluster. Each of these structures holds hundreds of galaxy clusters and are linked by the fabriclike web of cosmic structure.

Beginning in the 1980s, astronomers found evidence of structures even larger than superclusters. At first, objects now called Large Quasar Groups (LQG) baffled astronomers.

In 1982, Scottish astronomer Adrian Webster found what would become known as the Webster Large Quasar Group, a collection of five quasars, or actively feeding black holes, stretching over 330 million light-years. Now, nearly two dozen LQGs are known. A structure known as the Huge LQG contains 73 quasars over a diameter of some 4 billion light-years. This massive structure, dismissed by some astronomers, may hold the title as the largest collection of related matter in the cosmos.

Truly, the universe is so big that it’s hard to comprehend. On one hand, the enormity of the universe makes us feel small. Our brief lives happen so quickly, and we wink out, mostly unaware of the incredibly large cosmos around us. But the fact that we are sentient, that we can ponder the stars and galaxies far away from us, makes life in the universe a truly amazing thing. And we’re just starting to get to know the immense world of galaxies.

David J. Eicher is the editor of Astronomy. His 2020 book, Galaxies: Inside the Universe’s Star Cities, is available from My Science Shop.


https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/how-many-galaxies-are-there-astronomers-are-revealing-the-enormity-of-the
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#38
https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/what-is-an-e...-universe/


What is the universe?

The universe is everything. It includes all of space, and all the matter and energy that space contains. It even includes time itself and, of course, it includes you.

Earth and the Moon are part of the universe, as are the other planets and their many dozens of moons. Along with asteroids and comets, the planets orbit the Sun. The Sun is one among hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way galaxy, and most of those stars have their own planets, known as exoplanets.

The Milky Way is but one of billions of galaxies in the observable universe — all of them, including our own, are thought to have supermassive black holes at their centers. All the stars in all the galaxies and all the other stuff that astronomers can’t even observe are all part of the universe. It is, simply, everything.

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The star-forming nebula W51 is one of the largest "star factories" in the Milky Way galaxy. "Star factories" like this one can operate for millions of years. The cavernous red region on the right side of W51 is older, evident in the way it has already been carved out by winds from generations of massive stars (those at least 10 times the mass of our Sun). The dust and gas in the region are swept around even more when those stars die and explode as supernovas. On the nebula's younger left side, many stars are just beginning to clear away the gas and dust. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech


Though the universe may seem a strange place, it is not a distant one. Wherever you are right now, outer space is only 62 miles (100 kilometers) away. Day or night, whether you’re indoors or outdoors, asleep, eating lunch or dozing off in class, outer space is just a few dozen miles above your head. It’s below you too. About 8,000 miles (12,800 kilometers) below your feet — on the opposite side of Earth — lurks the unforgiving vacuum and radiation of outer space.

In fact, you’re technically in space right now. Humans say “out in space” as if it’s there and we’re here, as if Earth is separate from the rest of the universe. But Earth is a planet, and it’s in space and part of the universe just like the other planets. It just so happens that things live here and the environment near the surface of this particular planet is hospitable for life as we know it. Earth is a tiny, fragile exception in the cosmos. For humans and the other things living on our planet, practically the entire cosmos is a hostile and merciless environment.

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This true-color image shows North and South America as they would appear from space 22,000 miles (35,000 km) above the Earth. The image is a combination of data from two satellites. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument aboard NASA’s Terra satellite collected the land surface data over 16 days, while NOAA’s Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) produced a snapshot of the Earth’s clouds and the Moon. Image created by Reto Stöckli, Nazmi El Saleous, and Marit Jentoft-Nilsen, NASA GSFC


How old is Earth?

Our planet, Earth, is an oasis not only in space, but in time. It may feel permanent, but the entire planet is a fleeting thing in the lifespan of the universe. For nearly two-thirds of the time since the universe began, Earth did not even exist. Nor will it last forever in its current state. Several billion years from now, the Sun will expand, swallowing Mercury and Venus, and filling Earth’s sky. It might even expand large enough to swallow Earth itself. It’s difficult to be certain. After all, humans have only just begun deciphering the cosmos.

While the distant future is difficult to accurately predict, the distant past is slightly less so. By studying the radioactive decay of isotopes on Earth and in asteroids, scientists have learned that our planet and the solar system formed around 4.6 billion years ago.


How old is the universe?

The universe, on the other hand, appears to be about 13.8 billion years old. Scientists arrived at that number by measuring the ages of the oldest stars and the rate at which the universe expands. They also measured the expansion by observing the Doppler shift in light from galaxies, almost all of which are traveling away from us and from each other. The farther the galaxies are, the faster they’re traveling away. One might expect gravity to slow the galaxies’ motion from one another, but instead they’re speeding up and scientists don’t know why. In the distant future, the galaxies will be so far away that their light will not be visible from Earth.

Quote:Put another way, the matter, energy and everything in the universe (including space itself) was more compact last Saturday than it is today.

Put another way, the matter, energy and everything in the universe (including space itself) was more compact last Saturday than it is today. The same can be said about any time in the past — last year, a million years ago, a billion years ago. But the past doesn’t go on forever.

By measuring the speed of galaxies and their distances from us, scientists have found that if we could go back far enough, before galaxies formed or stars began fusing hydrogen into helium, things were so close together and hot that atoms couldn’t form and photons had nowhere to go. A bit farther back in time, everything was in the same spot. Or really the entire universe (not just the matter in it) was one spot.

Note:

Hydrogen is an element, usually in the form of a gas, that consists of one proton and one electron. Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, accounting for about 75 percent of its normal matter, and was created in the Big Bang. Helium is an element, usually in the form of a gas, that consists of a nucleus of two protons and two neutrons surrounded by two electrons. Helium is the second-most abundant element in the universe, after hydrogen, and accounts for about 25 percent of the atoms in the universe. Most of the helium in the universe was created in the Big Bang, but it also is the product of hydrogen fusion in stars.

Don't spend too much time considering a mission to visit the spot where the universe was born, though, as a person cannot visit the place where the Big Bang happened. It's not that the universe was a dark, empty space and an explosion happened in it from which all matter sprang forth. The universe didn’t exist. Space didn’t exist. Time is part of the universe and so it didn’t exist. Time, too, began with the Big Bang. Space itself expanded from a single point to the enormous cosmos as the universe expanded over time.


What is the universe made of?

The universe contains all the energy and matter there is. Much of the observable matter in the universe takes the form of individual atoms of hydrogen, which is the simplest atomic element, made of only a proton and an electron (if the atom also contains a neutron, it is instead called deuterium). Two or more atoms sharing electrons is a molecule. Many trillions of atoms together is a dust particle. Smoosh a few tons of carbon, silica, oxygen, ice, and some metals together, and you have an asteroid. Or collect 333,000 Earth masses of hydrogen and helium together, and you have a Sun-like star.

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This spectacular image from the SPHERE instrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope is the first clear image of a planet caught in the very act of formation around the dwarf star PDS 70. The planet stands clearly out, visible as a bright point to the right of the center of the image, which is blacked out by the coronagraph mask used to block the blinding light of the central star. Credit: ESO/A. Müller et al.

For the sake of practicality, humans categorize clumps of matter based on their attributes. Galaxies, star clusters, planets, dwarf planets, rogue planets, moons, rings, ringlets, comets, meteorites, raccoons — they’re all collections of matter exhibiting characteristics different from one another but obeying the same natural laws.

Related news Scientists have begun tallying those clumps of matter and the resulting numbers are pretty wild. Our home galaxy, the Milky Way, contains at least 100 billion stars, and the observable universe contains at least 100 billion galaxies. If galaxies were all the same size, that would give us 10 thousand billion billion (or 10 sextillion) stars in the observable universe.

But the universe also seems to contain a bunch of matter and energy that we can’t see or directly observe. All the stars, planets, comets, sea otters, black holes and dung beetles together represent less than 5 percent of the stuff in the universe. About 27 percent of the remainder is dark matter, and 68 percent is dark energy, neither of which are even remotely understood. The universe as we understand it wouldn’t work if dark matter and dark energy didn’t exist, and they’re labeled “dark” because scientists can’t seem to directly observe them. At least not yet.

[Image: 1766]

Two views from Hubble of the massive galaxy cluster Cl 0024+17 (ZwCl 0024+1652) are shown. To the left is the view in visible-light with odd-looking blue arcs appearing among the yellowish galaxies. These are the magnified and distorted images of galaxies located far behind the cluster. Their light is bent and amplified by the immense gravity of the cluster in a process called gravitational lensing. To the right, a blue shading has been added to indicate the location of invisible material called dark matter that is mathematically required to account for the nature and placement of the gravitationally lensed galaxies that are seen. Credits: NASA, ESA, M.J. Jee and H. Ford (Johns Hopkins University)


How has our view of the universe changed over time?

Human understanding of what the universe is, how it works and how vast it is has changed over the ages. For countless lifetimes, humans had little or no means of understanding the universe. Our distant ancestors instead relied upon myth to explain the origins of everything. Because our ancestors themselves invented them, the myths reflect human concerns, hopes, aspirations or fears rather than the nature of reality.

Several centuries ago, however, humans began to apply mathematics, writing and new investigative principles to the search for knowledge. Those principles were refined over time, as were scientific tools, eventually revealing hints about the nature of the universe. Only a few hundred years ago, when people began systematically investigating the nature of things, the word “scientist” didn’t even exist (researchers were instead called “natural philosophers” for a time). Since then, our knowledge of the universe has repeatedly leapt forward. It was only about a century ago that astronomers first observed galaxies beyond our own, and only a half-century has passed since humans first began sending spacecraft to other worlds.

In the span of a single human lifetime, space probes have voyaged to the outer solar system and sent back the first up-close images of the four giant outermost planets and their countless moons; rovers wheeled along the surface on Mars for the first time; humans constructed a permanently crewed, Earth-orbiting space station; and the first large space telescopes delivered jaw-dropping views of more distant parts of the cosmos than ever before. In the early 21st century alone, astronomers discovered thousands of planets around other stars, detected gravitational waves for the first time and produced the first image of a black hole.

[Image: 1767]

Using the Event Horizon Telescope, scientists obtained an image of the black hole at the center of galaxy M87. Credit: Event Horizon Telescope collaboration et al. Learn more about Black Holes

With ever-advancing technology and knowledge, and no shortage of imagination, humans continue to lay bare the secrets of the cosmos. New insights and inspired notions aid in this pursuit, and also spring from it. We have yet to send a space probe to even the nearest of the billions upon billions of other stars in the galaxy. Humans haven’t even explored all the worlds in our own solar system. In short, most of the universe that can be known remains unknown.

The universe is nearly 14 billion years old, our solar system is 4.6 billion years old, life on Earth has existed for maybe 3.8 billion years, and humans have been around for only a few hundred thousand years. In other words, the universe has existed roughly 56,000 times longer than our species has. By that measure, almost everything that’s ever happened did so before humans existed. So of course we have loads of questions — in a cosmic sense, we just got here.

Our first few decades of exploring our own solar system are merely a beginning. From here, just one human lifetime from now, our understanding of the universe and our place in it will have undoubtedly grown and evolved in ways we can today only imagine.

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30 Smartest People Alive Today

History is peppered with influential geniuses who changed the world. Individuals like Socrates, Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein all had groundbreaking ideas that have lived on long after their deaths. Following this fine tradition, we take a look at 30 of the smartest people alive today – including brilliantly accomplished academics, former child prodigies, IQ whizzes, and super sharp young intellectuals with their whole lives ahead of them.

30. Paul Allen
Billionaire Paul Allen reportedly has an IQ of between 160 and 170. Allen was born in 1953 in Seattle and made friends with Bill Gates while still at school. He attended Washington State University but quit his studies in 1974 and then talked Gates into leaving Harvard. The following year, the pair founded Microsoft in New Mexico. After he was told that he had Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 1982, Allen stepped back from Microsoft and eventually resigned in 2000, although he remained in an advisory capacity. He is a renowned philanthropist, and his donations to science, education, conservation, the arts and technology exceed $1.5 billion. As well as being a stakeholder in technology, media and other companies, Allen owns the Seattle Seahawks and the Portland Trailblazers and part-owns MLS team the Seattle Sounders. He launched the Allen Institute for Brain Science in 2003 and founded space transport company Stratolaunch Systems in 2011.

29. Christopher Langan
Born in San Francisco in 1952, self-educated Christopher Langan is a special kind of genius. By the time he turned four, he’d already taught himself how to read. At high school, according to Langan, he tutored himself in “advanced math, physics, philosophy, Latin and Greek, all that.” What’s more, he allegedly got 100 percent on his SAT test, even though he slept through some of it. Langan attended Montana State University but dropped out. Rather like the titular character in 1997 movie Good Will Hunting, Langan didn’t choose an academic career; instead, he worked as a doorman and developed his Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe during his downtime. In 1999, on TV newsmagazine 20/20, neuropsychologist Robert Novelly stated that Langan’s IQ – said to be between 195 and 210 – was the highest he’d ever measured. Langan has been dubbed “the smartest man in America.”

28. Judit Polgár
Born in Budapest, Hungary in 1976, Judit Polgár is acknowledged as without doubt the best female chess player in history. Polgár was a chess-playing child prodigy and overcame her first grandmaster when she was just 11. At present, she is the only woman in the World Chess Federation’s Top 100 Players. She has also beaten nine world champions, including Garry Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov. In 1991, aged 15 and five months, Polgár won the Hungarian National Championship and became the then youngest grandmaster – eclipsing Bobby Fischer’s longstanding record by one month. Apparently, the way in which Polgár’s father raised her and her sisters was part of an experiment to prove that “geniuses are made, not born.” And considering Polgár’s reported IQ of 170 and significant accomplishments, perhaps he was on to something.

27. Marilyn vos Savant
Marilyn vos Savant was born in 1946 in Missouri. In 1986 the columnist and author made history when she was named in The Guinness Book of World Records as the person possessing the highest IQ, with a reported score of 228. She is said to have achieved the score on the Stanford-Binet test at the age of ten. In the mid 1980s, Savant also took the controversial Mega Test, scoring an IQ of 186. In the wake of her newfound fame, Parade magazine launched the popular “Ask Marilyn” column, which still runs today. Savant has been a member of elite “one-in-a-million” IQ society the Mega Society. And in 1989 New York magazine called her and husband Robert Jarvik – who designed the first successful artificial heart – “the smartest couple in New York.”

26. John H. Sununu
With a reported IQ of 180, John H. Sununu is another individual who has proved equal to the eligibility criteria for acceptance into the Mega Society high IQ club. Born in 1939 in Havana, Cuba, Sununu studied mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, achieving his bachelor’s degree in 1961, his master’s in 1963 and his Ph.D. in 1966. After he graduated, Sununu worked as a professor at Massachusetts-based Tufts University until 1968, when he was appointed the school’s associate dean of engineering, a position he held until 1973. Between 1983 and 1989 Sununu served as the governor of New Hampshire; then in 1989 he became the White House Chief of Staff. However, in 1991 Sununu stepped down following allegations that he had abused his government travel privileges.

25. Neil deGrasse Tyson
Neil deGrasse Tyson is a high-profile American astrophysicist and research associate at the American Museum of Natural History, and he is also Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City. Tyson was born in New York in 1958 and loved astronomy from a young age. In 1980 he graduated from Harvard with a bachelor’s degree in physics, and he went on to earn his master’s in astronomy from the University of Texas in 1983. He then went to Columbia, where he obtained his M.Phil. in astrophysics in 1989 and his Ph.D. two years later. Tyson achieved pop culture fame presenting educational PBS show NOVA ScienceNow from 2006 to 2011, and he has made numerous TV guest appearances. The awards he has received include a NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal, and in 2001 Asteroid 1994KA was renamed 13123 Tyson in his honor.

24. Kim Ung-Yong
Before The Guinness Book of World Records withdrew its Highest IQ category in 1990, South Korean former child prodigy Kim Ung-Yong made the list with a score of 210. Kim was born in Seoul in 1963, and by the time he turned three, he could already read Korean, Japanese, English and German. When he was just eight years old, Kim moved to America to work at NASA. “At that time, I led my life like a machine. I woke up, solved the daily assigned equation, ate, slept, and so forth,” he has explained. “I was lonely and had no friends.” While he was in the States, Kim allegedly obtained a doctorate degree in physics, although this is unconfirmed. In any case, in 1978 he moved back to South Korea and went on to earn a Ph.D. in civil engineering.

23. Mislav Predavec
Mislav Predavec is a Croatian mathematics professor with a reported IQ of 190. “I always felt I was a step ahead of others. As material in school increased, I just solved the problems faster and better,” he has explained. Predavec was born in Zagreb in 1967, and his unique abilities were obvious from a young age. As for his adult achievements, since 2009 Predavec has taught at Zagreb’s Schola Medica Zagrabiensis. In addition, he runs trading company Preminis, having done so since 1989. And in 2002 Predavec founded exclusive IQ society GenerIQ, which forms part of his wider IQ society network. “Very difficult intelligence tests are my favorite hobby,” he has said. In 2012 the World Genius Directory ranked Predavec as the third smartest person in the world.

22. Manahel Thabet
In 2008, aged 25, Yemeni economist and scientist Manahel Thabet became the youngest person to receive a financial engineering Ph.D. magna cum laude. Thabet earned the degree at the University of Illinois and has since worked towards a second Ph.D. in quantum mathematics. In 2012 she came up with a revolutionary 350-page formula to calculate distance in space without the use of light. She also has an IQ higher than 168 and garnered a Genius of the Year Award and a spot on the 2013 World Genius Directory’s list. Thabet set up the company Smart Tips Consultants in 2008. Her accolades include a humanitarian award for her efforts with the United Nations and a Woman of the Year Award from the Women’s Federation for World Peace.

21. Richard Rosner
U.S. television writer and pseudo-celebrity Richard Rosner is an unusual case. Born in 1960, he has led a somewhat checkered professional life: as well writing for Jimmy Kimmel Live! and other TV shows, Rosner has, he says, been employed as a stripper, doorman, male model and waiter. In 2000 he infamously appeared on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, answering a question about the altitude of capital cities incorrectly and reacting by suing the show, albeit unsuccessfully. Rosner placed second in the World Genius Directory’s 2013 Genius of the Year Awards; the site lists his IQ at 192, which places him just behind Greek psychiatrist Evangelos Katsioulis. Rosner reportedly hit the books for 20 hours a day to try and outdo Katsioulis, but to no avail.

20. Chris Hirata
Astrophysicist Chris Hirata was born in Michigan in 1982, and at the age of 13 he became the youngest U.S. citizen to receive an International Physics Olympiad gold medal. When he turned 14, Hirata apparently began studying at the California Institute of Technology, and he would go on to earn a bachelor’s degree in physics from the school in 2001. At 16 – with a reported IQ of 225 – he started doing work for NASA, investigating whether it would be feasible for humans to settle on Mars. Then in 2005 he went on to obtain a Ph.D. in physics from Princeton. Hirata is currently a physics and astronomy professor at The Ohio State University. His specialist fields include dark energy, gravitational lensing, the cosmic microwave background, galaxy clustering, and general relativity. “If I were to say Chris Hirata is one in a million, that would understate his intellectual ability,” said a member of staff at his high school in 1997.

19. Steven Pinker
Canadian visual cognition and psycholinguistics expert Steven Pinker was born in Montreal in 1954. His work covers popular science, experimental psychology, linguistics and cognitive science, and he is currently a professor of psychology at Harvard. Prior to taking up this position, between 1982 and 2003 he was a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor within the school’s brain and cognitive science department. During his MIT tenure, Pinker took over as the director of the university’s cognitive neuroscience center. In 2004 TIME magazine featured him on its list of the 100 most influential thinkers and scientists. His awards include a Troland Research Award from the National Academy of Sciences and a Royal Institution Henry Dale Prize. Perhaps Pinker’s best-known work is his 2002 book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature.

18. Ivan Ivec
Born in 1976, Ivan Ivec is a Croatian mathematician and IQ test specialist with – according to the World Genius Directory – an IQ of 174. He holds a Ph.D. in mathematics and works at Gimnazija A.G.Matoša High School in Samobor, Zagreb. Ivec’s website is dedicated to IQ testing and results, and his own tests cover IQ ranges of between 120 and 190. He has also worked with fellow Croatian mathematician Mislav Predavec to design such tests. Interestingly, Ivec says that the time restrictions on intelligence tests devised by psychologists are not ideal for everybody. “Specifically, there are intelligent people, capable of performing complex actions and resolving complex tasks, although their speed of solving is low,” he has explained.

17. Garry Kasparov
Born in 1963 in Baku, in what is now Azerbaijan, Garry Kasparov is arguably the most famous chess player of all time. When he was seven, Kasparov enrolled at Baku’s Young Pioneer Palace; then at ten he started to train at the school of legendary Soviet chess player Mikhail Botvinnik. In 1980 Kasparov qualified as a grandmaster, and five years later he became the then youngest-ever outright world champion. He retained the championship title until 1993, and has held the position of world number one-ranked player for three times longer than anyone else. In 1996 he famously took on IBM computer Deep Blue, winning with a score of 4–2 – although he lost to a much upgraded version of the machine the following year. In 2005 Kasparov retired from chess to focus on politics and writing. He has a reported IQ of 190.

16. Terence Tao
Born in Adelaide in 1975, Australian former child prodigy Terence Tao didn’t waste any time flexing his educational muscles. When he was two years old, he was able to perform simple arithmetic. By the time he was nine, he was studying college-level math courses. And in 1988, aged just 13, he became the youngest gold medal recipient in International Mathematical Olympiad history – a record that still stands today. In 1992 Tao achieved a master’s degree in mathematics from Flinders University in Adelaide, the institution from which he’d attained his B.Sc. the year before. Then in 1996, aged 20, he earned a Ph.D. from Princeton, turning in a thesis entitled “Three Regularity Results in Harmonic Analysis.” Tao’s long list of awards includes a 2006 Fields Medal, and he is currently a mathematics professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.

15. Scott Aaronson
Scott Aaronson is an associate professor in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s electrical engineering and computer science faculty. According to his website, his research focuses on “the capabilities and limits of quantum computers, and computational complexity theory more generally.” Aaronson was born in Philadelphia in 1981. In 2000 he earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Cornell, and four years later he achieved a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Then in 2012 he was given the Alan T. Waterman Award for “illuminating the fundamental limits on what can be computed in the physical world” and breaking “important new ground in computational theory.” He is known for his key contributions to algebrization and the abstract quantum Turing machine.

14. Nikola Poljak
According to the World Genius Directory, Croatian researcher and physicist Nikola Poljak has an IQ of 183. Born in 1982, Poljak is at present an assistant research fellow and instructor in the University of Zagreb’s physics department. In addition, he is an assistant research fellow at CERN, working on the collaborative A Large Ion Collider Experiment in Geneva, Switzerland. And he is also an assistant research fellow with the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, involved in the STAR detector experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. In 2010 Poljak received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Zagreb. He has carried out scientific assignments for the Croatian Ministry of Science and the Agency for Mobility and EU Programmes, and his current projects include the “exploration of hadronic systems with relativistic probes.”

13. Alan Guth
Born in New Brunswick, New Jersey in 1947, American physicist and cosmologist Alan Guth was smart enough to leave school a year early and go straight to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he earned his bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate degrees in physics. Guth initially began evolving his notion of cosmic inflation when he was a junior scientist at Cornell in 1979. Then in 1981 he officially put forward the theory, which is now widely accepted by many scientists. The theory suggests a time prior to the Big Bang during which the universe was able to evenly disperse itself thanks to its smaller size. This model also looks to explain more clearly the conditions that brought about the incredibly fast, exponential growth of the universe. Guth has been described as “the man who put the ‘big’ in ‘Big Bang.’” He has held positions at Princeton, Columbia, Cornell and Stanford, and he’s currently a physics professor at MIT.

12. Donald Knuth
Born in Milwaukee in 1938, Donald Knuth is a groundbreaking computer scientist and mathematician perhaps most renowned for his multi-volume tome The Art of Computer Programming. In recognition of his pioneering work, he has been referred to as the “father” of algorithmic analysis. Knuth is also well known for his popular 1978 open software typesetting system TeX, which is one of the world’s most intricate typographical frameworks. In 1971 Knuth won the inaugural Grace Murray Hopper Award, and his other honors include the A.M. Turing Award and a National Medal of Science. Knuth obtained his Ph.D. in mathematics in 1963 from CalTech, and he is currently a professor emeritus at Stanford.

11. Noam Chomsky
Philosopher, cognitive scientist and political observer Noam Chomsky has been called the “father of modern linguistics,” and his revolutionary work has had an impact on everything from artificial intelligence to music theory. Born in Philadelphia in 1928, Chomsky enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania in 1945, at the age of 16. There, he achieved his B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in linguistics, leaving in 1955 to take up a post teaching philosophy and linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – where he presently holds the position of professor emeritus. A revered cultural icon, Chomsky is still politically active, especially when it comes to issues of American foreign policy, state capitalism and mass media news. He has written in excess of 100 books and was named the “world’s top public intellectual” in a poll conducted in 2005.

10. Evangelos Katsioulis
Greek doctor Evangelos Katsioulis made headlines in his home country when he won the World Genius Directory’s 2013 Genius of the Year Awards. According to the site, Katsioulis’ IQ is a remarkable 198. He apparently scored 205 on the Stanford-Binet scale with a standard deviation of 16, which is on par with 258 on the Cattell scale with a standard deviation of 24 and 198 on the Wechsler scale with a standard deviation of 15. Born in Ioannina in 1976, Katsioulis studied at Greece’s Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, earning an M.Sc. in medical research and technology, a master’s degree in philosophy, and a Ph.D. in psychopharmacology. In 2001 he formed the World Intelligence Network IQ society. He is currently a member of 28 IQ societies, including the exclusive Giga Society. Only 1 in 30 billion people will match his intelligence levels.

9. Magnus Carlsen
Born in Tønsberg, Norway in 1990, Magnus Carlsen is the current World Chess Champion. He qualified as a grandmaster in 2004 when he was just 13. In 2009 chess icon Garry Kasparov began personally training him, but the following year it was reported that they were no longer working together. In 2010, scarcely a month after his 19th birthday, Carlsen became the world’s youngest ever number one-ranked player. And at the 2013 World Chess Championship, he defeated Indian grandmaster Viswanathan Anand and took the title of world champion. After the victory, The Times of India called Carlsen “a genius who’ll only get better.” So far, he has won four Chess Oscars – seven less than Kasparov. Carlsen has also done modelling work for G-Star Raw, and the media has dubbed him “the Justin Bieber of chess.”

8. Shahriar Afshar
Born in 1971, Iranian American physicist and entrepreneur Shahriar Afshar has won a number of awards for his groundbreaking inventions. Afshar is known for his 2004 Afshar experiment, which he conducted at Harvard University. The optical experiment investigates – and, according to Afshar, contradicts – the quantum mechanical principle of complementarity. Afshar served as an associate at Harvard between 2003 and 2004 and was a visiting scientist at Canada’s Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in 2006. He is a visiting research professor of physics at New Jersey’s Rowan University as well as the president, CTO and CEO of consumer electronics startup Immerz. One of his notable inventions is the award-winning “4D” Soundkix mini speaker. In 1989 Afshar won a prestigious Iranian Khwarizmi International Award.

7. Akshay Venkatesh
Born in India in 1981, Akshay Venkatesh is a mathematician and former child prodigy. He was brought up in Australia and showed promise from a young age, earning a bronze medal at the International Physics Olympiad in 1993, when he was just 11. A year later he achieved another bronze medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad. In 1997 Venkatesh gained a first class honors degree in pure mathematics from the University of Western Australia, having been the youngest person to ever study at the university. He then went on to obtain his Ph.D. from Princeton in 2002, at the age of 20. The math whiz has held positions at the Clay Mathematics Institute in Rhode Island and at New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. He currently works as a professor in Stanford University’s mathematics faculty.

6. Saul Kripke
Born in Long Island, New York in 1940, Saul Kripke is an award-winning logician and philosopher noted for the jointly developed Kripke-Platek set theory, his causal theory of reference and his “Kripkenstein” theory. He was a child prodigy, too, having apparently learned Ancient Hebrew on his own by the time he was six before quickly grasping complex mathematics and philosophical questions. In 1980 Kripke published his hugely significant book Naming and Necessity, which discusses proper nouns within the context of the philosophy of language. Kripke has also had a significant bearing on areas surrounding mathematical logic, the philosophy of mathematics, metaphysics and epistemology. In 2001 he was awarded the esteemed Rolf Schock Prize. Furthermore, according to a 2009 poll, in which votes were cast by philosophers, Kripke ranked as the seventh most important philosopher of the past two centuries. He has taught at Harvard, New York’s Rockefeller University, and Princeton – where he is currently a professor emeritus. In addition, he is a distinguished professor of philosophy at the City University of New York.

5. Ruth Lawrence
Born in 1971, British mathematician and former child prodigy Ruth Lawrence made many headlines in 1985 when, aged just 13, she obtained a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Oxford University, gaining a starred first. Another degree, this time in physics, followed in 1986, and in 1989 she received her D.Phil. in mathematics, again from Oxford. In 1990 she was made a junior fellow at Harvard. And after a stint at the University of Michigan, she took on an associate professorship there in 1997. Lawrence is currently an associate professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Einstein Institute of Mathematics and investigates algebraic topology and knot theory. In 1997 Charles Arthur wrote in The Independent, “The branch of mathematics she is now researching… is so advanced, so abstruse, so mind-bogglingly complicated for the non-mathematician that it will be years before technology and science advance enough to make any practical use of it.”

4. Grigori Perelman
Born in 1966, Grigori Perelman is a highly influential, if somewhat eccentric, Russian mathematician. In 2002 he famously cracked the Poincaré conjecture, one of topology’s most weighty and complicated problems. However, the following year he reportedly quit mathematics to live with his mother in very modest circumstances in Saint Petersburg. In 2006 Perelman was honored with the esteemed Fields Medal for his work in furthering the understanding of geometry and particularly the Ricci flow, but he did not accept the award. “I’m not interested in money or fame; I don’t want to be on display like an animal in a zoo,” he explained. In 2010 he was offered the Clay Millennium Prize and one million dollars for his solving of the Poincaré conjecture, but again he declined. “I know how to control the universe. Why would I run to get a million, tell me?” he said.

3. Andrew Wiles
Andrew Wiles was born in Cambridge in 1953. He is an award-winning English mathematician perhaps best known for officially proving Fermat’s Last Theorem in 1995. Before he cracked it, The Guinness Book of World Records listed the 358-year-old theorem as one of the world’s “most difficult mathematical problems.” Wiles attained a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Oxford in 1974, followed by a Ph.D. from Cambridge in 1980. He has worked as a professor at Princeton and Harvard, and in 1985 he received a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship, which allowed him to spend time at Paris’ École Normale Supérieure and the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifique. The mathematician currently holds a Royal Society research professorship at Oxford, and his extensive list of awards includes an International Mathematic Union silver plaque, The Shaw Prize, and a National Academy of Sciences Award in Mathematics.

2. Edward Witten
Edward Witten is a scientist recognized for his research contributions to string theory, M-theory, quantum gravity and supersymmetry. Born in Baltimore in 1951, Witten was originally a history major at Massachusetts’ Brandeis University, attaining his bachelor’s degree in 1971. Five years later he obtained a Ph.D. in physics from Princeton after first earning a master’s degree from the same school. Witten has been described as “the most brilliant physicist of his generation” and “the world’s greatest living theoretical physicist.” In 2004 TIME magazine included him on its annual rundown of the 100 most influential people in the world. Although he is a physicist, Witten has had a major effect on mathematics, and he has a slew of awards to his name, including the Fields Medal, the Dirac Prize, the Albert Einstein Medal and the Nemmers Prize in Mathematics. He is currently a professor at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study.

1. Stephen Hawking
Guest appearances on TV shows such as The Simpsons, Futurama and Star Trek: The Next Generation have helped cement English astrophysicist Stephen Hawking’s place in the pop cultural domain. Hawking was born in 1942; and in 1959, when he was 17 years old, he received a scholarship to read physics and chemistry at Oxford University. He earned a bachelor’s degree in 1962 and then moved on to Cambridge to study cosmology. Diagnosed with motor neurone disease at the age of 21, Hawking became depressed and almost gave up on his studies. However, inspired by his relationship with his fiancé – and soon to be first wife – Jane Wilde, he returned to his academic pursuits and obtained his Ph.D. in 1965. Hawking is perhaps best known for his pioneering theories on black holes and his bestselling 1988 book A Brief History of Time.

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Kim Ung-Yong Got His PhD At The Age Of 8 But It Took Him 50 Years To Find Happiness In Life

https://www.storypick.com/kim-ung-yong/

What would you do if you were the most intelligent person on the planet?

Maybe become the best scientist in the world or mint millions of dollars trading in the stock market. Or maybe write a great novel or come up with a cure for AIDS and cancer. There are so many things you can do when you are the most intelligent man in the world, right?

But the chances are, you would never have a choice to do anything, as Kim Ung-Yong found out the hard way.

Kim was exceptionally intelligent. He started talking when he was just 4 months old. At the age of 3, he could solve Physics problems. He could read Korean, German, Japanese and English by the age of 4.

[Image: KUY-1.jpg]

He was a celebrity figure in all of Korea! He was invited to Korean TV shows and was given complex math problems to solve. He fascinated everyone in the small country with his brilliance.

When he was just 8 years old, he was invited by NASA to work for them. He agreed and moved to the USA. And by 8 he also had a PhD from Colorado State University

[Image: KUY-2.jpg]

He worked for NASA for the next 10 years after moving to the USA.

Now just imagine yourself in his shoes. A 15-year-old kid doing top research for NASA even before your brain has fully developed. It’s not pleasant.

And understandably, Kim burnt out. He abruptly quit his job at NASA and returned to Korea. He thought that the work he was doing there was used for destructive purposes.

[Image: KUY-3.jpg]

He came back to Korea and started studying to graduate high school because he could not enroll at any university. After he got his GED score, he enrolled at a regional university to study Civil Engineering.

People around him were dismayed. They pronounced him as the ‘wasted genius’. No one seemed to care that he was finally happy studying civil engineering.
“I’m trying to tell people that I am happy the way I am. But why do people have to call my happiness a failure?”

He believed the work he was doing now – engineering – was constructive and gave him a peace of mind.

But people did not believe him. Whenever he said that he was happy, people always retorted with “There’s no way that’s possible.”

He did not like working for NASA because he just solved equations like a machine and his superiors took all the credit. Back in Korea people did not understand this and he was sick of the media attention again on his return.

[Image: KUY-4.jpg]

He never lived a normal life – a life where he studied in middle school and then high school and then graduate to go to college. Life just moved too fast and all the praises by the people around him made him think he was doing the right thing. And the same people turned on him when he returned as if they had a say in what he should do in life.

“People put too much emphasis on IQ.”, says Kim.

“Society should not judge anyone with unilateral standards everyone has different learning levels, hopes, talents, and dreams and we should respect that,”

Today, at 52 years of age, Kim Ung-Yong has fulfilled his lifelong dream of becoming a professor. He teaches students at the Shinhan University.

IQ is not omnipotent, and Kim’s story proves it. It is just another talent like being exceptionally good in sports or music. And it is nothing without wisdom, which Kim slowly gathered through his life.

All said and done, he surely will make a brilliant professor, who knows how to deal with gifted as well as troubled students.

A noble lesson for life, indeed.

Sources – Korea Herald.
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A Story of Love and Forgiveness

Forgiveness is letting go of the pain.

Many years ago, while I was experiencing the pain of being betrayed by someone I loved, I turned to Bill, one of my mentors who had gone through the same thing earlier in his life.  He told me, "When trust in a loved one is violated it causes the most devastating pain in existence.  First, you go through shock.  You fell so violated.  Then you just hurt.  I felt like someone stuck a knife in me and ripped my entire insides out."

 I asked him how he recovered from such a loss.  His answer was, "It takes a long time.  But we have to learn to deal with it,  and we have to learn to move on.  If we don't, we let it destroy us, I had the support of some great friends, talked to my pastor several times, read two powerful books, and saw a professional counselor for about three months.  All of it was helpful."

He said the hardest part was learning to forgive.  Both his pastor and his counselor told him it was the only way he'd be able to heal.  His first reaction to both of them was, "No way!  I'll never forgive her for what she did.  But the more I was  counseled, the more I read, and the more I thought about it, forgiveness made more and more sense.  I learned that forgiveness is letting go of the pain, not letting it cripple you, and not giving the person who hurt you the power to continue to hurt you.  It was sound advice spiritually, and it was sound ad vice psychologically.  I felt like a huge load had been lifted from me when I finally learned how to forgive.  Then I moved on with my life."

Bill added, "I hope you'll remember what I said about the power and freedom of forgiveness."  Then he reached in his wallet and pulled out a small piece of paper that had been laminated with a thin plastic  cover.  On one side was the quotation by Lydia Maria Child at the beginning of this  chapter.  His counselor had given it to him, and he knew he needed to look at it often, so he carried it with him everywhere he went.  On the other side was a verse from Scripture that his pastor had given him.  It said, "For if you forgive other people their failures, your Heavenly Father will also forgive you" - Matthew 6:14.

Learning to forgive was even harder than I thought it would be.  I remembered Bill saying,  "First, you go through shock.  You feel so violated.  Then you just hurt."  I did, indeed, hurt for a long time.  And there were times, like my mentor, when I thought learning to forgive was impossible.  It was, without question, the hardest life lesson I ever learned.  But it was also one of the most valuable.  It helped me put the pain behind and get on with my life.
 
The practice of forgiveness is our most important contribution to the healing of the world.
Marianne Williamson
 
It means being humble, developing empathy, showing compassion, having patience, giving of yourself, and forgiving those who have hurt you.
Eventually you will come to understand that love heals everything, and love is all there is.
Gary Zukav
 

Hal Urban


http://vietbestforum.com/showthread.php?tid=21492&pid=380982#pid380982

Post #20    Thanks-sign-smiley-emoticon Mi.
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#43
The Best Of Leo Rojas




Исполнитель: Leo Rojas
Плейлист:
1. 00:00 Der einsame Hirte
2. 03:13 Fields of Gold
3. 06:42 En Aranjuez Con Tu Amor
4. 10:22 El condor pasa
5. 13:15 Run
6. 16:52 Der letzte Mohikaner
7. 20:16 Colors of the Rainbow
8. 24:23 The Rose
9. 27:35 Farewell
10. 31:48 At Night I Think of You
11. 35:42 Luchando por un Sueno
12. 38:38 Serenade to Mother Earth
13. 43:14 Albatross
14. 45:46 You Sang to Me
15. 49:13 Luchando por un Sueno
16. 52:10 White Arrows
17. 55:46 Winnetou
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#44
(2021-07-10, 06:22 AM)LeThanhPhong Wrote: Mời Gọi

Khi làm một điều gì như xem video hay đọc sách, chúng ta sẽ mất thì giờ, mà thì giờ quý báu. Rất nhiều khi thì giờ còn quý hơn tiền bạc nữa.

Vì thế, chúng ta phải lựa chọn tài liệu nào nên nghe, nên đọc. Chúng ta không thể nghe lời dụ dỗ ngon ngọt để mất thì giờ, công sức như: "Nghe đi.  Đọc đi.  Mất có vài phút thôi.  Hay lắm đó.  Hiệu nghiệm vô cùng. Lợi lạc vô song."

Ta phải hiểu mọi sự ở đời xảy ra là do đủ duyên, không phải vì mình lặp đi lặp lại mời gọi như rao hàng lạc xoong là có kết quả như ý muốn.


Hai câu sau hay quá:

Ai cũng thương, không dễ thương thì cũng đáng thương .
Bản chất rốt ráo của hiện hữu là cô đơn .
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#45
Trái đất nhìn từ mặt trăng .

[Image: planet-earth-rising-over-moon-1905531.jpg]


Earthrise - Planet Earth Seen From The Moon - Real Time Journey Across The Lunar Surface

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6DpPQ8QdLg

1:11 sẽ thấy trái đất xuất hiện .
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