Everyday choices: Ghassem Gozaliasl, how do galaxy groups reflect the need for human connection?

You’ve fallen in love with the sky a few times. Will you kiss and tell?

The first time I fell in love with the sky, I was very small. Something inside me felt the stars were not random; they were a map, a hidden language, a geometry waiting to be read. The second time I was nine – a dangerous time in Iran, when owning certain books could cost you your life. But my curiosity was stronger than my fear, and I hid banned books in an old clay oven, covered with dirt. It was always at night that I’d sneak back and read. 

Later, I became a physics teacher in remote villages near Mount Savalan, and I would often lie on the mountainside and gaze up at the night sky, where the Milky Way stretched endlessly overhead. Lying there, I felt as if I could almost touch the stars.  

Now, after years of studying the sky, are you still in love?

Back in high school, my physics teacher once asked what I wanted to study in university. I said, “I want to study something without limits – something where I will never be full, no matter how much I learn.” 

Even now, with two doctorates in physics and astronomy, I am still not full. 

You study galaxy groups with the James Webb telescope. What should we know?

When we imagine galaxies, we often picture lonely islands floating in the dark. But the universe is much more connected, much more alive. Most galaxies don’t exist in isolation; they belong to groups. Small families gather into larger neighbourhoods, called superclusters, all woven together by invisible threads of gravity. 

If you trace the architecture of the universe, one astonishing truth emerges: these patterns of formation and evolution repeat, across radically different scales, through radically different forces. Gas, dark matter, and galaxies flow along the filaments of the cosmic web, merging into larger, more complex structures. Over time, these systems evolve – colliding, merging, transforming – to become the cosmic giants we observe today. 

At the atomic and molecular scale, particles bind not through gravity but through fundamental forces: strong and weak nuclear interactions, electromagnetic pull, and chemical bonds. Yet here, too, simple units connect, forming atoms, then molecules, then cells – structures that, through interaction and evolution, gave rise to life.

What can galaxy formation teach us about ourselves?

Ancient symbolic traditions across many cultures echo the idea that all things are secretly connected, that energy and matter do not exist in isolation but in relationship. At the human scale, individuals gather into families, communities, societies, and civilisations. The glue here is not gravity or electromagnetism, but emotional, social, and cultural bonds: love, trust, purpose, shared meaning. What emerges is a universal architecture of connection. 

In this sense, the study of galaxy groups is not just an astrophysical pursuit. It is a glimpse into a cosmic blueprint,  one that whispers a profound truth: that the urge to connect, to bind, to transform into something greater than the sum of parts, is not just human. It is written into the fabric of reality itself. 

This article has been published in the Aalto University Magazine issue 38, September 2026.