The Extreme Structures of our Universe

Abstract

My story is a tale of extremes. Extreme artificial structures that we have built on and around planet Earth. Extreme natural structures that exist in our Universe, and extreme structures in our mind, when we try to understand how this all works. Of all the possible artificial structures, consider telescopes. The first one, invented by Johannes Lipperhey of Zeeland, was soon copied by Galileo Galilei, which dramatically changed our understanding of the Universe. The object itself did not look very dramatic, but its human impact was extreme. Currently, engineers in Chile are building the European Extremely Large Telescope, which will contain a segmented mirror with a total diameter of 39 meters. The building of this extreme instrument could more than cover the full grounds of the original Leiden Observatory, which is the oldest still operating observatory in the world.