Astronomy and Space!

If anyone’s interested, this is an article I wrote that was published in the Cotswold Astronomical Society. It fuses my two fave things! Happy reading!

Article for CAS Mercury November 2017

*Man the microcosm, Universe the macrocosm*

At Woodstock, Joni Mitchell sang that "we are stardust". And while that is unquestionably, chemically quite true (the organic compounds we are made of are wholly comprised of chemical elements from exploding dying stars etc.), how many of us have ventured further and really contemplated any similarities that may or may not exist between humans and the universe?

I am a member of the CAS and whilst having an amateur level interest in astrophysics, my everyday passion and profession is medicine and healthcare.
Last month at Pete Williamson's fascinating talk about The Sun, I heard the word 'granulation'. This was when referring to the grainy appearance of the solar photosphere and it was a word I recognised for an entirely different reason.

When a wound is healing, new connective tissue and microscopic blood vessels form in the process, usually from the base of the wound and we refer to this as granulation or granulation tissue. And it got me thinking... Sunspots, liver spots, dark matter, grey matter. Do human bodies actually resemble celestial bodies beyond the sharing of some words?

In Ancient Indian Philosophy, Eastern Taoism and Ancient Greece, the human body was considered a small universe. What played out 'up there', played out in a smaller but significantly connected way 'down here'.
To find out the more current scientific thinking about this, I did a bit of searching (Please note: this was blatant avoidance of university work I should be doing instead, unfinished and due to be submitted in 4 days at the time of writing).

There are generally accepted basic similarities such as the human body originating and developing from a single cell just as the universe originated and expanded from a singularity. However, it seems in recent times scientists have been discovering rather striking geometrical similarities between our ever dividing cellular make up and the ever expanding universe.

In research published just last year in the journal, Physical Review C, scientists have found that the 'crust' (or outer layers) of a neutron star has the same shape as our cellular membranes. This could mean that, despite being fundamentally different, both humans and neutron stars are constrained by the same geometry. This could suggest that the energy of a system may depend on its shape in both a simple and universal way.

In 2011, scientists published an article in the International Journal of the Physical Sciences explaining how a black hole resembles a cell nucleus. A black hole’s event horizon also resembles the nuclear membrane. It is also claimed that both living cells and black holes emit electromagnetic radiation. Now that's quite cool.

Karel and Iris Schrijver, husband and wife and Astrophysicist and Physician respectively, have published a book entitled "Living with the Stars". In this book they examine how the human body is ever connected to the life cycle of the earth, the planets and the stars. Amongst other topics, they discuss these general and cellular similarities. Such as, how the cosmic web bares an uncanny resemblance to the neural patterns of brain cells in the brain and how the impulses in the brain resemble electromagnetic energy in the universe and how this moving energy is replicated in ever moving bodies.

Of course, I also found some tenuous "facts" such as similar hydrogen to water composition around 70 % in both universe and body and even more tenuous claims that the number of neurons present in the human brain are equivalent to the number of stars in the Milky Way Galaxy. That, unfortunately, just isn't true.

Still, on the whole it's really interesting stuff isn't it? Cell-lestial, one might say. However, for those of you thinking Astrophysician sounds a teensy bit too much like psychic surgeon, it's worth remembering that Joni Mitchell also sang Clouds. If you look for long enough, clouds can look like anything to anybody; rabbits, pigs, quasars. We, as humans seem to like to belong, to feel "the same as". When we recognise ourselves in the universe, perhaps we don't feel so alone out here in space, unique and brilliant as we are. When we 'discover' these patterns, do we feel familiarity, a part of a universe so vast we can't fully comprehend? ...Unless, it's some master plan and a God somewhere was saving money on blueprints so did a bit of divine photocopying. Austerity even in the heavens!

The End