
7 minute read
Health & Science
When we take part in certain hobbies, it can feel a lot like love. When someone says “I love jogging” or “I love music” some may easily see it as just an expression. at said, there are some activities that can evoke such passion that they you to some special place, and we need a word to capture that feeling. e Greeks have one: meraki. Meraki is when you invest your soul into a pastime or hobby. It might be cooking a meal or playing the guitar, and the feeling of meraki borders on euphoria. It’s why, for many people, there can be a peculiar sense of grief when they come to the end of something.
For instance, as you close a book for the last time, knowing you will never again meet those characters and share their story, it can feel like you’ve lost something. You have invested so much of yourself into the story that, when it’s over, it can feel a lot like heartbreak. e same is true at the end of a marathon or a work project. Meraki is why footballers cry like babies after they win (or lose) an important match. Meraki is doing a thing with love.
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However, when most people think about ‘love’ they don’t tend to think of meraki. e hundreds of thousands of songs, sonnets, and soliloquies out there about ‘love’ are not devoted to the love of hobbies. Whitney Houston did not sing about her love of collecting teapots. For most people, love is the romantic kind. It’s that of boyfriends, girlfriends, sex, and eros. ( ere’s another Greek word.)
In Arabic, there are said to be 11 ‘stages’ of love. First, you have simple attraction (hawa) — the look across a bar or the smile on the train. In the early throes of infatuation (kalaf), you obsess over one another. You spend all your time together, and the bed is your home. Soon you become enslaved

This crazy little thing called love
to your partner (taym). Your heart is theirs, and never before have you been so vulnerable. Finally, love matures into a kind of insanity (huyum) where all reason is abandoned. Love, passion, and adoration are all that matter to you.
For Plato, eros (the erotic desire for someone) is only the rst, immature step toward love. e love of a body — of sex and physical beauty — is a ‘vulgar’ love. True or ‘pure’ love is that which sees behind the façade. It recognises the essence of someone — the bit which makes them, them — and it adores it. Plato’s love is not blind, but rather sees into the soul of someone. It says: “I see you, I know you, and I love you for it.”
Whichever type of love we focus on, most people agree that it’s an essential part of a happy life. From the love we get from our parents, to the love we give to our partners, our friends, and our children, love is the beautiful oddity of the human species.
Love is what motivates us to do the brilliant and brave, as well as the stupid and reckless. It’s what the sentient robots of our sci- future never quite understand about us. For however much love is ‘just’ a soup of hormones, it’s still the single most important aspect of human existence.
You can love a romantic partner, but also a pet, a book, God, or the sound of someone’s voice. We need many more words for love.
All of the world’s major traditions have a lot to say about love. It’s universally recognised as one of the most powerful of all human emotions. Broadly, we can divide love into three types: sacri cial love, the love of doing a thing, and romantic love. Love is what de nes humans. For however much love is ‘just’ a soup of hormones, it’s still the single most important aspect of human existence.
Of all the human emotions, love is the most powerful. Fear, anger, ambition, greed, and lust all have their pull, but they all play second ddle to love. A parent will brave their worst fear, a friend will drive ve hours, a brother will give up his job, a spouse will chain their lust — all for love. Love is what beats back the sad, lonely, and bitter in the world. A life without love can never be complete.
But, for such a great and prodigious thing, love is blurry, vague, and inde nite. One problem is that each of us will experience love a certain way, and we have no possible way by which to tell if others are feeling the same. Shakespeare’s love, Beyoncé’s love, and your love might overlap in essential ways, but they can appear utterly dissonant in others. We can never go on a eld trip into someone’s mind to see what ‘love’ means to them. e second issue with love is just how broadly we use the term. We love our romantic partners, but we also love a pet, a book, a movie, God (or gods), or the sound of someone’s voice. ere’s nothing so painful to the teenager’s ears as, “I love you — as a friend.” Friend zone love. Ouch.
So, how are we to unpack love? Most major traditions spend a great deal of time exploring it. e Baha’i faith recognizes four types of love; Hindus have ve. But, very broadly, we can identify three trends to how di erent cultures understand ‘love’.
In Mark 12:31, it’s written that Jesus said: “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” It’s one of the most famous and most quoted lines of Christian doctrine of the last two millennia. But what did he mean by that? In the original Greek of the New Testament, there are a great many words for love. e one that Jesus chose was agape.
Agape is a sacri cial love, utterly free of ego or self-interest. It’s the kind of love that cherishes another human being simply because they’re a fellow human being. In other words, agape is a kind of well- wishing that o ers up every possible bene t to a person because it recognises that they are worthy of ourishing.
When Jesus also says that we are to love our enemies, he again uses agape. Using this understanding, he means that you are to wish the best for other people, even if you don’t particularly like them.
Martin Luther King, Jr. hammered this point home in his book Strength to Love: “We should be happy that he did not say, ‘Like your enemies.’ It is almost impossible to like some people.”
Now likely two trillion galaxies in our Universe
e Universe has more galaxies than contemporary science ever imagined for when it comes to the number of galaxies in the Universe, both theorists’ and observers’ estimates are too low.
If you take the deepest image ever created of the distant Universe, the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field, and extrapolate over the whole sky, you’d estimate there were 170 billion galaxies in the observable Universe. A detailed theoretical simulation predicted far more faint, small galaxies than we’ve seen, upping the expected total to closer to two trillion. But recent observational evidence shows that even that estimate is far too low. Instead, there are between six and 20 trillion galaxies out there. Carl Sagan’s “billions and billions” was far too low of a guess. e majority of galaxies that form are faint and far away, rendering them invisible within the limitations of our have revealed thousands of galaxies in a volume of the Universe that represents a fraction of a millionth of the sky. is contains 5,500 galaxies, but takes up just one 32,000,000th of the total sky. But, even with all the power of Hubble, and all the magni cation of gravitational lensing, there are still galaxies out there beyond what we are capable of seeing.
Although some regions of space are rich in nearby galaxies while others are relatively poor, each proverbial slice of the sky allows us to grab objects of all di erent distances so long as our observations are sensitive enough to reveal them. e nearest, brightest objects are the easiest to resolve, but the entire cosmic story is told across the entire sky, and must be observed deeply and across many wavelengths in order to truly reveal the full extent of what’s out there.
All told, there are still about 2 sextillion (2 × 1021) stars in the Universe; the additional galaxies only add about 0.01% to the total number of stars present.
It’s true that there are hundreds of billions of stars within the Milky Way, which is just one galaxy among trillions — likely between 6 and 20 trillion — in this enormous, expanding Universe.
But even though we’re seeing just the tip of the cosmic iceberg with even today’s greatest, most powerful observatories, we really are capturing most of the stellar activity that’s present throughout our cosmos. With the advent of the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope, we might nally get the observational con rmation of these faint, distant, early-type galaxies that we know must be out there. e Universe, no matter how we conceive or misconceive of it, cannot hide its truths when faced with superior data.
