Hi all, I've been wondering lately about how and whether the Webb Telescope may relate in any way to the great umbrella/rubric of "network culture." I see a lot of network effects, metaphors, phenomena, patterns in astrophysics -- fields, strings, probabilities, particles, systems, flows -- but that could certainly be projection on my part. The cosmos may not be digital, but analog, unless I'm uninformed there too, so perhaps it's a different kind of network from computer networks. But maybe they are related or somehow comparable?
Like many observers perhaps I like the Webb Telescope just because it is interesting on some technical level and because I find outer space phenomena beautiful much like natural phenomena on earth. I don't have any understanding of physics beyond the average I don't think, but it is also interesting that a new telescope is expected to impact questions similar to those addressed by the big "microscopes" such as particle colliders as well as the theoretical constructs of equations and so forth. This article presents the kind of net-like themes I'm thinking of, or themes that seem net-like to me sometimes: https://www.quantamagazine.org/crisis-in-particle-physics-forces-a-rethink-of-what-is-natural-20220301/ In any case, I find it interesting to wonder what kind of an "internet effect" or media presence the very cold, distant, yet precise new camera will invoke, even if the phenomena it will image are not what all definitions would call net-like; it also interests me that a very powerful, even mammoth microscope does not see what it was designed to see. Curious for sure! All best, Max
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