THE ASTROPHYSICIST (2008) Acrylic - 24" x 36"
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THE ASTROPHYSICIST (2008)
Acrylic - 24" x 36"When I started this painting, the major theme concerned the power of the human intellect to light our way into the universe.
The balls in the picture came from a conversation I had with my son Adrian. 1/5
#fineart #personalvisions #imaginativerealism #neildegrassetyson

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THE ASTROPHYSICIST (2008)
Acrylic - 24" x 36"When I started this painting, the major theme concerned the power of the human intellect to light our way into the universe.
The balls in the picture came from a conversation I had with my son Adrian. 1/5
#fineart #personalvisions #imaginativerealism #neildegrassetyson

I mentioned the problem of scale in space travel as laid out by Neil deGrasse Tyson in his essay “Space: You Can’t Get There From Here.” “Space is vast and empty beyond all earthly measure...The Moon is far when compared with where you might go in a jet airplane…” 2/5

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I mentioned the problem of scale in space travel as laid out by Neil deGrasse Tyson in his essay “Space: You Can’t Get There From Here.” “Space is vast and empty beyond all earthly measure...The Moon is far when compared with where you might go in a jet airplane…” 2/5

“…but it sits at the tip of our noses compared with anything else in the universe. If the Earth were the size of a basketball, the Moon would be the size of a softball some ten paces away — the farthest we have ever sent people into space. 3/5

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“…but it sits at the tip of our noses compared with anything else in the universe. If the Earth were the size of a basketball, the Moon would be the size of a softball some ten paces away — the farthest we have ever sent people into space. 3/5

On this scale, Mars at its closest would be a soccer ball a mile away. Pluto, a baseball 100 miles away. And the nearest star to the Sun is a half million miles away." There's much more to the conversation that you can read here:
https://www.michaelwhelan.com/galleries/astrophysicist/
4/5

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On this scale, Mars at its closest would be a soccer ball a mile away. Pluto, a baseball 100 miles away. And the nearest star to the Sun is a half million miles away." There's much more to the conversation that you can read here:
https://www.michaelwhelan.com/galleries/astrophysicist/
4/5

Adrian, of course, went on to earn his PhD in Astrophysics, and this personal work eventually became a cover for BEYOND SCIENCE FICTION, a book collecting a major retrospective exhibition held at the Riverside Art Museum in 2017. 5/5
https://www.michaelwhelan.com/shop/beyond-science-fiction/

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On this scale, Mars at its closest would be a soccer ball a mile away. Pluto, a baseball 100 miles away. And the nearest star to the Sun is a half million miles away." There's much more to the conversation that you can read here:
https://www.michaelwhelan.com/galleries/astrophysicist/
4/5

Was playing with this just the other day. It is a solar system size calculator where you set the scale.
https://www.exploratorium.edu/explore/solar-system/activity/build-model
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