‘In the Very Large, As The Very Small’

Artist’s rendering illustrating a star shredded by a black hole. Credit: NASA

June 22, 2026 (EIRNS)—This past month, two teams of human beings reached into the two ends of the universe at once. In the hills of southern China, the JUNO observatory—a 20,000-ton sphere of liquid scintillator, watched by more than 43,000 light-sensors, 650 meters underground—caught the near-weightless flicker of the neutrino, and in just 59 days of operation measured the laws governing that ghostly particle more precisely than all prior experiments of recent decades combined. In those same weeks, the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration published its latest catalog of gravitational waves: some 390 collisions of black holes and neutron stars have now been recorded—ripples in the fabric of spacetime itself, one of them traced to a merger more than three billion light-years away. A decade ago, we had detected exactly one.

Neither the neutrino nor the black hole can be seen, heard, or touched. They lie, as Lyndon LaRouche wrote in 2010, beyond the reach of the senses altogether: “In the very large, as the very small, the metrics of sense-perception can no longer claim authority over the principles which reside, essentially, in what Riemann points to as those extremes of our universe.” And it is precisely there, he added—“in nothing as much as those same extremes”—that the deepest laws of the universe must be sought. To discover them, humanity does not wait for biological evolution to provide us with better eyes; we build new senses. Our species is the only one we know of that reaches past its own senses to grasp the very large and the very small, and changes the universe by what we learn.

Let’s measure the present against that image of mankind.

In Switzerland, the first round of U.S.-Iran negotiations under the 14-point Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding concluded June 21 at the Bürgenstock resort, mediated by Qatar and Pakistan, with the U.S. and Iran not yet speaking directly. They agreed on a roadmap to a final deal within 60 days, a High-Level Committee to oversee it, and, most consequentially, a “de-confliction cell” to ensure the end of military operations in Lebanon—which Iran’s foreign minister called the “first real test” of the negotiations. That test is already underway: Israel refuses to leave southern Lebanon (and “nothing will change it,” Prime Minister Netanyahu insists), while Iran has tied the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz to a genuine Lebanese ceasefire. The potential for peace is real, and fragile.

Even should it hold, the damage is done and spreading. By energy-market reckoning, some 15 million barrels per day of oil—and its energy equivalent in liquefied natural gas—will be missing from world supply well into 2027, depressing an economy already enmeshed in the “everything bubble” of leveraged debt and derivatives. The effects will be felt, as they so often do, by the poorest. The UN’s latest “Hunger Hotspots” report warns that hundreds of millions face deepening hunger even as food and humanitarian aid is slashed. The same species that built JUNO is told there will not be enough food.

That is the contradiction of this moment. The species that can read the collision of black holes three billion years gone is told, by the managers of a dying system, that it cannot afford to house its young, feed the hungry, or build a railway across a desert. It is a failure of policy, not a lack of capability. Helga Zepp-LaRouche identifies the greatest failing directly: the refusal to recognize the indivisible nature of security and economic development of all nations. What Iran is insisting upon for relatively helpless Lebanon, and through Lebanon for the whole of the Global South, is what Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas states for all mankind—that no people may climb to heaven on a tower built by kicking the ladder away from the poor, as we said yesterday.

The Pope titled that encyclical “Magnificent Humanity.” The neutrino detector and the gravitational-wave catalog are examples of what that means—a fact about the creature said to be made in the image of the Creator, unlike any beast. Civilization organized around that truth would treat the development of every nation as the natural extension of the same creative power that built JUNO. A civilization that denies that truth of human nature, makes war on reservoirs and lets hundreds of millions go hungry.

Which of these we become is up to us. The decision is being made now, in the negotiating rooms at Lucerne, on the 60-day clock running toward a final deal, at this Friday’s International Peace Coalition mobilization, and in the streets of the nation soon to celebrate its 250th birthday. Let it be a celebration of what was once, and can be again, the great anti-colonial republic of the United States—a celebration led by LaRouche Presidential candidate Diane Sare, who will be holding an event in Philadelphia on July 5, joined by the irrepressible Congressional candidate Jose Vega.

The universe yields its deepest principles to those that reach for its extremes.