Monday, Apr. 23, 1973

The Edge of Night

Restlessly computing and quantifying, weighing and rationalizing, man is forever trying to take the measure of the universe. Now Astronomer Allan R. Sandage of the Hale Observatories in Pasadena, Calif., proclaims that he and his colleagues elsewhere in the U.S. may have finally done just that. They have, he said, apparently seen "the edge" of the universe.

The argument goes like this: quasars, which are small, starlike objects, apparently shine more brightly than any other celestial bodies; the most distant quasar known to man, more than 12 billion light years away, appears so luminous to the astronomer's telescope that even more distant quasars, though less bright, should also be visible. Because astronomers do not see anything further, Sandage argues that the universe must be finite rather than infinite. And beyond that edge astronomers say there is nothing at all because, in the Delphic tongue of science, space at that distance falls back on itself.

The notion of infinity was conceived, as was the zero, by the Eastern mind. Yet it seems a peculiarly Western need to determine the indeterminable. Scottish Essayist Thomas Carlyle once noted that man must "always worship something -always see the Infinite shadowed forth in something finite." At the moment, the something worshiped is science, and the something finite is quasar OH471, the blaze marking the edge of the universe. But before the poetic notion of infinity is crushed between the calipers of science, it is best to remember that quasars were discovered only a decade ago. More probably, what astronomers are really viewing is precisely what they have always viewed -the edge of their own vision.

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