Good morning. I was up at 3am, not to write Thought for the Day, but in the hope of seeing a giant blood red moon - and judging by the photos coming into this programme I wasn't the only one. As we have heard, this is produced by a total lunar eclipse, with the Moon near to its minimum distance from the Earth and therefore appearing larger in the sky. The rusty hue is due to the light from the Sun having to pass through the Earth's atmosphere before it illuminates the lunar surface.
Now I don't share the views of a few extreme religious thinkers that this predicts the end of the world, rather I see it as a moment of beauty in the wonder of creation.
These moments of beauty can happen in different ways. This is the hundredth anniversary of a discovery made by Albert Einstein of which he wrote, 'For a few days I was beside myself with joyous excitement'. He was engaged in long and at times tortuous work, trying to understand gravity through the way that matter would distort the geometry of space and time. His joyous excitement came as he worked through the mathematics to solve a decades long puzzle - of the small advance of the perihelion of Mercury, that is, the closest point of the planet to the sun. Einstein found that his theory accounted exactly for this advance in very natural way without the need of other attempted special 'fixes'.
This added to the sense that the universe is intelligible and that intelligibility is characterised by simplicity and beauty in the equations of physics. Indeed the Russian physicist Lev Landau called this General Theory of Relativity the 'most beautiful of theories'.
For those who struggled with equations at school, physics is not an obvious place to experience beauty. In fact, for those of us who have worked in professional science, most of the time it is tedious and frustrating - it's about experiments that don't work, referees of papers that can't see the brilliance of your work, and research students who don't do what you tell them to do. But there are just occasional moments of joyous excitement when beauty breaks through.
Of course, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. As a Christian I see the simple, elegant and beautiful scientific laws as a reflection of the creativity of God, while others might find them at least as pointers to deeper questions about the universe. But I also find that making the effort to pause in life to appreciate beauty enhances my humanity - even if that means conquering the lure of the duvet at 3am to glimpse through the frustrating patchy North Eastern fog a most amazing sight.