The ceiling of this room has been decorated with stars which makes you think of the night sky, although you know, instantly, that it’s not at all like the night sky. How do we know? The stars are distributed too regularly. The universe doesn’t do “regular”, well, not a grand scale.
I know one of the big questions scientists ask is why is the universe so “lumpy”? If the Big Bang happened as theorised why didn’t all the matter created distribute evenly as the universe expanded? How did we end of with randomly distributed stars, planets and galaxies?
Looking at this image again today I’m thinking of a novel I read last week where one of the characters pointed out that although we have described patterns of stars and called them constellations, those stars exist in three dimensions and are not nearly as close to other as they appear when we see them in the shape of a constellation. That’s just one of the mind boggling things about the night sky, the fact that the light we see from each star set off towards us hundreds, even thousands, of years ago, so as we gaze at the night sky we are witnessing the past.
Heroes Not Zombies 
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