Fireworks, SuperNovae and Legacy

On the 4th of July, I chanced upon a documentary about fireworks. What caught my attention was the modern technique in crafting specific patterns and shapes of fireworks in the sky (Katamono). Controlled patterns of shapes such as a heart or star can be lit up in the sky by arranging how the explosive pellets are arranged within the shell and its core.
In essence, the shape of an explosion tells much about the explosive. I call it The Fireworks Principle. If we apply this principle to Astronomy, by examining the shape of a supernova we can probably know much about the qualities of the star that produced it. For example, the polar regions of the star that spawned Eta Carinae can be discerned from the two points where the bulk of stellar mass is ejected.
The Fireworks Principle is the same in terms of life: As we live, we are fashioning the core within that will someday explode as a "lifework" - the patterns will become apparent in due time. Our character and our legacy will persist even as this body, the temporary shell gives up the spark of life.
Each human life is a supernova in the making. The legacy we leave behind - the shapes of our lifesparks will tell much about the very core of our soul.


Links:
How Fireworks are made
Eta Carinae

Blunders in our Modern Age?

Conceptual metaphors and analogies are wonderful tools for understanding the world. And same as with visual pattern detection, we are able to predict or draw conclusions by mapping statistical data and discovering a resulting pattern.
But because there is such a thing as optical illusion, could there be also such a thing as conceptual illusion? Could it be possible that a wrong analogies and metaphors applied to certain cases could produce wrong conclusions? Indeed! This has happened and been happening throughout the centuries. We used to think that the earth is the center of the universe because we "see" that the sun revolves around the earth. Now even in our modern age, the mistake in applying our mental models of analogies or similarities to observations can still occur. Today, even with the most sophisticated telescopes that see light-years in the past, or even when armed with the best compilation of statistical data ever, and even with highly advanced theories we could still commit conceptual blunders.
Only in the past 2 weeks I have come across two possible blunders that seem all too similar to declaring that the "earth is the center of the universe". The first could be about the possible error in the seed theory (see previous post) and the other is the alleged hastening of the universe's demise because of astronomers and cosmologists having observed dark matter. The error I can see in the latter is that perhaps, a theory that holds true in the realm of the very small, such as Quantum Mechanics (Schroedinger's Cat), may not hold true for the large scale macrocosm.
Lets hope the conceptual errors in history doesn't repeat itself in our time.

Smudges on the Glass for Clouds in the Sky

One of the most important theories in Astronomy developed in the past 15 years -- one that won a Nobel Prize -- could be toppled by just a simple analogy: Like Smudges on the Glass.
A recent article on Wired tells about how a lone Astronomer named Gerrit Verschuur, challenges a theory of how galaxies grew from packets or "seeds" of hydrogen in the very early universe. NASA scientists led by George Smoot announced in 1992 that their CoBE satellite had imaged the ultimate baby pictures of the universe, revealing the seeds. Like acorns growing into oak trees, they theorized, those seeds grew into galaxies like the Milky Way.
However, Verschuur's research asserts that the seeds are not located on the edge of the universe at all. Rather, he says, the so-called seeds are just previously unmapped clouds of "neutral hydrogen" gas located inside the Milky Way. In other words, astronomers who mistook the "seeds" for objects on the edge of the universe are like someone who looks outdoors through a window and mistakes smudges on the glass for clouds in the sky.