Beginning in the late 1980s, Drake had begun exploring an idea that made a lunar far side dotted with telescopes seem like child's play.... He wanted to create a telescope that would surpass all others, one with a magnifying lens nearly a million and a half kilometers in diameter. Drake had found a way to transform the Sun itself into the ultimate telescope.
A consequence of the Sun's immense mass is that it acts as a star-size "gravitational lens," bending and amplifying light that grazes its surface. This effect, first measured during a solar eclipse in 1919 by the astronomer Arthur Eddington, was one of the key pieces of evidence that validated Einstein's theory of general relativity. Simple math and physics, judiciously applied, show that our star bends light into a narrow beam aligned with the center of the Sun and the center of any far-distant light source.... There are as many focal points and Sun-magnified beams as there are luminous objects in the sky--imagine a great sphere surrounding our star, its surface painted with amplified, high-resolution projected images of the heavens....
If, for instance, we wished to examine a potentially habitable planet orbiting one of the two Sun-like stars in Alpha Centauri, the Sun's nearest neighboring stellar system, a 10-meter telescope aligned with the Sun-Alpha Centauri gravitational focus could resolve surface features such as rivers, forests, and city lights....
"One of the beauties of gravitational lenses is that since the lensing object bends space, all light traveling through is equally affected," Drake said, squinting into the sunlight beneath one of his lemon trees. "Gravitational lenses are achromatic--they work the same for optical light, infrared, everything. I like to think of what they could do for radio.... You look at the numbers, and at first it seems totally insane, but this is real. You could transmit, let's see, high-bandwidth signals from here to Alpha Centauri using only one watt of power....
"That's the transmitting power of a cell phone," he finished. (pages 35-36)
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| Illustration of a gravitational lens. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain |
D&C 130:6-8
6 The angels do not reside on a planet like this earth;And I'm thinking about how we interpret John's descriptions of what he saw in Revelation as being a pre-industrial man's interpretation of modern or futuristic technology in language his contemporary audience could understand. And I'm thinking that Joseph Smith was, technologically speaking, closer to John than he was to us, and that like John, Joseph's revelations are full of poetry. And who knows, maybe that joke Mormons like to tell these days about the white stones in Revelation 2:17/D&C 130:10 being iPhones aren't actually that far from the truth.
7 But they reside in the presence of God, on a globe like a sea of glass and fire, where all things for their glory are manifest, past, present, and future, and are continually before the Lord.
8 The place where God resides is a great Urim and Thummim.
To my mind, that's one of the awesome things about Mormonism. For us, there is no such thing as the supernatural. Miracles, including revelation, are not the result of a suspension of natural laws, but of God's complete mastery over their workings. Now, lest by some chance a reader stumbles upon my blog who isn't familiar with Mormon doctrine, I must make clear that our God is not just some kind of advanced alien but indeed our Heavenly Father, and however much it might reveal to us about the nature and workings of the universe, no amount of scientific study or technological advancement can reconcile fallen humanity to Him or indeed to each other; only the atonement of Jesus Christ can do that. But I believe nevertheless that science is a source of truth and light and that, when used righteously, it is good in God's sight.
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