For all the progress that brain scanning technologies have made over the last 70 years, the central mystery of consciousness remains as elusive as it has ever been.
In this, astronomy shares a common ground with that other frontier science, the study of the brain. “We see structures that we don’t even know what they are,” said the Nasa astrophysicist Dr. One “deep field” image of the SMACS 0723 galaxy cluster, nearly five billion light years away, brought galaxies into focus as they were more than 13 billion years ago. In this case, we are looking at scenarios - galaxies, nebulae - that may no longer have existed millions of years before a little planet called Earth began to form. On the very simplest level, the human mind has been conditioned to assume that photographs are images of what exists, or at least did exist at the moment at which they were captured. However, it is in the nature of deep space exploration that it is also a milestone in what is not yet known or understood. Apart from offering stunningly beautiful images, it is a new milestone in the human understanding of the cosmos, a technological marvel that it is hoped will continue to beam down new insights for decades to come. It does not circle the Earth, like its predecessor, the Hubble space telescope, but is in orbit around the sun. The telescope is the most powerful space-based observatory ever built. The first images from NASA’s James Webb telescope, released this week, offer wondrous glimpses into stars and planets billions of light years away: in what is truly a space opera, the telescope shows them being born and dying, and cosmic material being sucked into black holes.
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