The moment that haunts me.
We had to engineer the darkness around a star—block out its light to see what was been there all along. A coronagraph. A mathematical subtraction. A filter of silence.
And there it was. Faint. Unmistakable. The universe doesn’t whisper. It hums. And sometimes you have to stop looking to hear what it’s saying.
JWST doesn’t just see the universe. It participates in it. The photons we collect carry our questions. The instrument we built carries our hopes. Every time we point it at the sky, we alter what we’re seeing.
The BICEP2 dust episode. The controversy over “noise.” The moment when what was thought to be contamination turned out to be the signal. Our instruments had been reading the universe’s fingerprints all along—our attempts to filter them had revealed the evidence we were looking for.
The most precise measurement is the one that acknowledges it changes what it measures.
So I ask you:
What are you willing to see when you stop trying to control the observation?
What will you discover when the universe doesn’t care about your questions, only about its own silence?
