应用科学类纪录片，PBS 频道 2007 年出品。
封面
Seeing_in_the_Dark_cover0.jpg
Seeing_in_the_Dark_cover0.jpg
影片信息
官方网站
http://www.pbs.org/seeinginthedark/
影片原始规格:
中文片名 ：黑夜遥望
中文系列名：
英文片名 ：Seeing in the Dark
英文系列名：
电视台 ：PBS
地区 ：美国
语言 ：英语
时长 ：约 58 分钟
版本 ：TV
发行时间 ：2007
影片内容介绍
剧情简介
The awe-inspiring sight of a sky full of stars can render us speechless—and understandably so. Two very different entities are involved, and they’re both rather mysterious.
At one extreme stands the individual observer, peering through a telescope or simply staring up at the stars. To ask who is doing the observing is to raise one of the oldest questions of philosophy. “Know yourself,” said Socrates, although he made the mistake of assuming that one had to accomplish this before trying to learn about the rest of the universe. (Rejecting a scientific account of the winds, Socrates said, “I can’t as yet ‘know myself’ … and so long as that ignorance remains it seems to me ridiculous to inquire into extraneous matters.”) Actually, we humans have since learned more about ourselves by studying the wider world—by investigating the processes that created life and shaped its evolution—than we ever did through introspection, and we see those processes written large in the depths of the sky.
At the other extreme stands the wider universe itself, unimaginably vast and yet, as Einstein said, “at least partially accessible to our inspection and thinking.” Notoriously indifferent to the human condition, the universe is also curiously involving. We feel that we belong to it, or in it—that the blades of grass underfoot are as much a part of the universe as the blazing stars seen through the eyepiece. We may love this sensation, but as it says in the film, “it can be hard to put love into words.” So this is a film in which stargazers try to describe an ineffable experience, and invite viewers to share their wordless awe.
Time inevitably figures in stargazing, since everything we see in the night sky belongs to the past. This relationship is embodied in the “light year,” a standard cosmic yardstick defined as the distance light, moving through the vacuum of space at 186,000 miles per second, travels in one year—nearly six trillion miles. We see the Moon as it was 1.3 seconds ago, bright stars as they were decades to centuries ago, and galaxies as they were millions of years ago. To confront light older than the human species and even the Earth may be disconcerting at first—big time, like big space, making the us feel inconsequential by comparison—but in the end it can be oddly reassuring to consider the fleeting span of human life in a cosmic context. We may be only actors strutting on a stage, but the stage is big and the play has been going on for a very long time.