Poke a hole in the center.

Put that on an olde fashioned turntable spindle.

turn on.

…

Wow.

Someday I’ll write a very thick book titled “What I’ve Learned Since I Knew It All”.

A photograph of a spiral galaxy resembles a satellite image of the rain bands of a hurricane, but the two processes which form the same morphology couldn’t be more different.

The stars and gas clouds rotating about the galactic center interact gravitationally, and eventually the randomly distributed elliptical orbits become coupled like this. Its almost a stroboscopic epiphenomenon. I guess you could call it a kind of resonance, a standing wave slightly out of phase and drifting in frequency.

http://beltoforion.de/galaxy/step2.png

These are the density waves which form the spiral arms. Nothing is “flowing towards the center”, the arms may not even be rotating in the same direction the galaxy is, or at the same speed. That spiral structure is not real at all, its a wave whose component atoms do not travel along with, they are washed over by it like a wave at sea moves through the water but no drop of water is moving along with it.

The stellar density (stars/cubic parsec)isn’t any different in the arms than it is in the spaces between them, in fact, the stars are too massive to be affected by the wave as it sweeps by. So just what is it that we see?

As the wave sweeps through the disk, the great molecular clouds scattered randomly in the galactic plane are momentarily compressed as the wave rolls through them. The compression causes stars to condense out of the interstellar medium, like the mist that forms on the wing edges of a jet fighter. Most of these stars are small, run of the mill stars like the sun, or smaller, but a very few of them are massive blue supergiants that flare with the light of a thousand suns. These giants burn brightly, but briefly, and as the wave moves on they quickly burn out. When we look at the spiral arm of a galaxy we are seeing the bright stars that formed as the arm passed. These stars burn for only a few million years, and the galaxy as a whole rotates in a few hundred million years, so we are seeing only an instantaneous snapshot of a continuous rolling explosion of star formation.

The arms form and dissolve, reform, and sometimes splinter or break. They shimmer, like standing waves in a coffee cup dragged across a rough tabletop. And yet, many galaxies show no trace of spiral stucture at all. The whole system is a quivering mass of interference patterns and ripples that play out in extreme slow motion–like a still photograph of a forest in transition to its climax stage. We can’t see it unfolding because it happens so slowly in our time frame.

And this is just the kinematics and dynamics. There are also chemical, radiation, magnetic, even acoustic phenomena going on, a continuous evolution of interacting matter and energy. The galaxy is alive. Is it evolving consciousness?

Maybe we’re it.

I’ve spent a big chunck of my career kicking around very complex rocks. Old rocks. FUBAR rocks.

In Arizona, there is a suite of rocks known as the Yavapai Suite, 1.75 billion year old volcanics and sediments that formed in an ocean basin, then got smeared into the early formation of North America.

At first glance, at a regional scale, it looks pretty simple: layers of sediments and felsic volcanics, tilted to vertical and cooked to a moderate temperature. Just enough to create a foliation of new minerals, all aligned like the pages of a book.

But when you start spending time on the outcrops, surrounded by cacti and rattlesnakes, a new complexity is apparent. Things don’t line up quite right. When you can map out the original contact between what was a siltstone and a chert layer; and, compare that to the new layering (the afore mentioned foliation)you’ll find they are not the same, differing by just a few degrees. That’s close enough to confuse the two, but enough to throw you off at the end of a long traverse, when the two are now yards apart.

Recognizing this allow the recognition that the entire rock package is folded so tightly, that the folds don’t look like folds anymore.

When I finally understood this concept, known in the literature as “Transposed Bedding,” it was a revelation. I even came to understand the fractal nature of the structural geometry, resulting in a growing level of predictabilty to my traverse. I could follow an important mineralized horizon and when it vanished, I knew where to find it again.

But there were those in the company I worked for, far more experienced and higher up in the corporate structure that just couldn’t see what I was seeing. I provided articles from the literature, extensive data from the field, analysis of that data, visual aids, 3-d models…Once I attemted to illustrate the geometry using hotel sheets, blankets, and dirty socks. But to no avail. To them everything was simple, “layer cake” it is called, and my pleas to see the complexity went unheaded. Their drilling plan ultimately failed, as I predicted.

In Colorado,similar rocks – same age, same depositional enviroment, perhaps even the same regional basin, are found. But while those in Arizona were FUBAR, those in Colorado have been FU’d a couple of more times. More heat, more recrystalliztion, folded two, maybe three more times, intruded with new igneous rocks, faulted in various ways as the Rockies moved up, were erroded, and moved up again.

These are High-Grade Gneisses,metamorphic rocks that got really close to melting entirely, but didn’t. Everything has changed: mineralogy, textures, structures… Here and there vestiges remain, a hint of bedding,the geochemistry of immobile Rare Earth Elements, all the clues we try to use to understand the geology of metamorphic rocks.

Geologists argue all the time. My introductory professor, a brilliant,crusty, irreverant geologist, introduced me to the idea that there are lumpers and splitters, and the best thing to do is pursue the middle ground. The Lumpers will over-simplify everything and miss the complexity. The Splitters risk getting lost in the details.

I try to remember that when I stare dumb founded at drill results or at the night sky. While this can frustrate curiosity and the effort of discovery, I cannot help but shake my head in awe at the delightful fractal patterns of our universe, both micro and macro.

And sigh.

Nature is jealous of her secrets, and stingy with her clues. What really amazes me is how much we know, and how clever we have had to be to learn it. But what is really humbling is to realize how as the frontier of our knowledge expands, how the true depth and extent of our ignorance is revealed. We are just scratching the surface now.

For millennia we struggled to understand our solar system. In the 19th century we first glimpsed the world of the nearby stars, and in the twentieth century we began the exploration of the Galaxy and got our first look into the the void beyond.

I realize it sounds trite and cliched, but we are really no closer now to understanding what it all means than the ancient Babylonians and Greeks were during the Bronze Age.

The farther we sail, the further the horizon recedes before us.