Jupiter from a New Perspective

     I am not sure how obvious this has been up to this point, but I am very much a man of science and math when it comes down to it. I love to critically analyze the world around me, and nothing excites me more than figuring out how the world works at the most fundamental level. This is why I am choosing to major in applied mathematics as well as physics during my undergraduate career at OSU, and it is also why I am so fascinated by the recent launch of the James Webb Space Telescope and the fascinating images that it puts out.

    One picture in particular that fascinates me is the Webb's image of Jupiter depicting the King of Planets in a completely new light- literally. JWST is an infrared telescope meaning that it detects light in a spectrum of wavelengths longer than what the naked human eye can see. In spite of this, scientists are still able to process the data from JWST in a way that allows us to make visible images our own eyes can make sense of, but this has led me to really rethink my view of the universe. Even as I was writing this post, I was troubled that JWST can't show us the universe as it truly is due to the wavelengths of light it can detect being different from the wavelengths of light our eyes can detect, but upon further review, I realize that this view is totally nonsensical. In many ways, the image above is just as real if not more so than previous images of Jupiter in the visible spectrum, and this is because the universe as we see it from the human perspective is not how it objectively is.

    This ties into a discussion about language that my honors English class went into on Thursday, August 25th. Look at a chair. Pick it up. Touch it. Heck, smell it. What inherently about this object makes it "chair-like". Is it because it has four legs, a seat, and a back? That can't be it, because the chair I am sitting in now only has two legs; both just happen to be shaped like squares as they line either side of my seat. If you take away the back, what happens to this object ordained a "chair". Does it magically transform into a stool just because you took away a small portion of it, or is it now just a chair without a back? The point of this thought experiment soon becomes clear when you realize that how we define and classify the world around us is totally arbitrary and only a product of human thought. Even if multiple people define something in a certain way, that does not make it objectively so either. This concept is swiftly shown to be true by garnering another group to define that same object in a different way. At one time, you have two interpretations of the universe that are not fundamentally true yet not wrong either.

    In this way, language is similar to the electromagnetic spectrum. One key difference is that while different humans can take up different perspectives in language, we are pretty much all constrained to viewing the universe in the same visible electromagnetic spectrum, but that just expands the discussion past solely human experience. JWST allows us to look at Jupiter with more detail than we have ever had before despite detecting light that none of us will ever be able to comprehend because our brain is literally incapable of fathoming what infrared light truly looks like. However, that does not mean we can't admire the beautiful aurorae on Jupiter's poles, electromagnetic storms caused by the same interaction between charged solar particles and Jupiter's magnetic field that creates the aurorae on our own planet. That doesn't mean we can't gaze in awe at the Great Red Spot, a storm twice the size of Earth that has been raging for centuries, though will sadly disappear one day as Jupiter's turbulent atmosphere shifts its favor toward other developing storms. That doesn't mean we can't appreciate the presence of such an alien, yet familiar celestial body in our solar system just because we have to translate light from an alien, infrared spectrum to familiar, visible light.

    Through this blog I hope to update the uninformed person on significant images from JWST while relating that to my studies of the Bible in English. I have an odd feeling that there will be a lot to compare between this holy Christian text and the modern space telescope, both due to their human influences as well as how they demonstrate our understanding of the world and Universe around us.