I love a good geeky story about the origins of the Universe and the incredible work being done to add clarity to a painstakingly complicated mystery. What if we humans could look back in time to the beginnings of the Universe to understand how 13.77 billion years ago, the Universe exploded from its Big Bang origins into what is now everything that we know to be true and real: space, time, matter, and energy. There have been massive advancements to this journey over the years: telescopes both on and orbiting Earth in space have been able to connect and expand the puzzle pieces that make up our understanding of the Universe. These pieces have offered tantalizing clues about how and what got us here.
The story of the James Webb Telescope is one of wonder, curiosity, determination, resilience, resolve, and most comprehensively, pristine innovation. It is a story of its predecessors and the brilliant minds who were able to build something so unprecedented in its engineering and design that it is expected to add a new revolution to an already revolutionary period in astronomy and cosmology. I recently read this Pulitzer Prize-winning article about the Telescope, and what struck me was the beautiful simplicity and complexity of its mission: to better see the Universe for what it is and what it was (via infrared light), a Telescope must be placed into a spot "four times farther away from the Earth than the Moon" (or nearly 1 million miles away) to make sure the faint infrared light is not blocked by the heat emanating from the Sun, Earth, and Moon. The capacity to capture distant infrared light will open the door to better perceiving and understanding the light originating from the early years of the Universe, i.e., 50 to 500 million years after the Big Bang.
The James Webb Telescope's famous predecessor, the Hubble Telescope (launched in 1990), was also a story of engineering ingenuity and audaciousness. After its launch, scientists quickly discovered Hubble's primary and secondary mirrors, critical for focusing light on its camera lens, were slightly misaligned. A risky spacewalk mission fixed the alignment, and the study of cosmology and astronomy would change forever. One stunning example of this revolution in cosmological understanding was Hubble's use to capture a "dark, featureless patch of sky" expected to be a massive waste of the precious Telescope's time. This "waste" unexpectedly revealed a brilliant display of thousands of galaxies, upending preconceived notions of what space really means in our Universe.
In addition to capturing the light from the very beginning of space and time, the James Webb Telescope is expected to better view and understand the atmospheres of exoplanets outside our Solar System and hopefully add some clarity to the existential mystery of whether life exists outside of our planet.
The James Webb Telescope is now in its final observing spot. If it is damaged and needs repair, those repairs will never happen. It is a solitary object in a solitary part of space one million miles from Earth, and what it does now depends on the over thirty years it took to plan, build and launch the Telescope into space. I am intrigued by the story of the James Webb Telescope because it is a story that easily symbolizes the very best of what humanity is capable of: building on years of learning, curiosity, and hypotheses to develop something that has the potential to transform our understanding of something still so boundlessly mysterious yet splendidly accessible. It is a story of setbacks and challenges, wonder and resilience. It is a story of the determination to add some clarity to the enigma that is the origins of the Universe and how it could have possibly started as a single point in space and time and expanded to what we know it is now. It is the story of endless questions and the tenacity to do whatever it takes to find the answers.
The tale of the James Webb Telescope is one that will continue to be told. During coaching sessions, one of my favorite questions involves what a hypothetical third-party person may perceive by viewing the coachee's situation from afar. What would that individual feel, discern, understand and determine from these observations? What is the real purpose of observing from that third-party perspective? What might be missed from that observation? What might be misunderstood? As the James Webb Telescope observes ancient light and exoplanet atmospheres (amongst a few of its many planned future tasks), how will its observations add value to what has already been so meticulously studied yet so incipient within the scope of what is presently understood?
Before Nicholas Copernicus's famous "heliocentric theory," which stipulated that the Earth orbited the Sun (rather than the inverse Sun-orbiting-Earth version that was widely accepted at the time), there was the story of Aristarchus of Samos (c. 310 - c. 230 BC), whose own theory that the Earth orbited the Sun was primarily both ignored and derided by his contemporaries. It would take over 2000 years for this theory to be revived, reconstructed, and refined to fit the present understanding of the Earth's relationship to the Sun and the Universe at large. Yet the fact that Aristarchus presented a theory that would journey over 2000 years to reach a point of more considerable clarity demonstrates the very fallacy of what it means to have absolute understanding. Learning and improvement are the paths of persistence and mobility. To reach a greater cognizance is to question, realize, question, and realize constantly. To do so requires that hypothetical third-party question of what might be perceived from the novel eyes of a distant object.