Universe

“It’s easy to forget that light takes time to travel. But when we see the moon we are seeing it as it was 1.3 seconds earlier; Jupiter we see as it was forty minutes ago; the Andromeda galaxy – the nearest major galaxy to ours, and the most distant object we can see without a telescope – 2.5 million years ago.” I sit trying to imagine how far light has travelled since August 16, 2021, the day this sentence was published in ‘The New Yorker’, but it’s no use. I stare at page 29, relieved just to be able to read these scintillating facts in a cosy corner, undisturbed, in a room of lights moving at a speed something like human. It takes light no effort, but for me quite some effort to understand light. Another sentence I underline in blue biro is this: “Most of the light spectrum is not visible to the human eye.” This leads me to wonder, Bloom-like, if we dream in colours other than those readily available. Who is to say if we do or not? I couldn’t prove it to anyone, even if it happens regularly. Though the light spectrum is everything light makes, radio waves and violet radiation, but it’s still always dark at night. It is fun to read physics, but I cannot do anything about it. Perhaps that’s one thing dreams are doing, emulating the patterns of light in our universe. Then I stumble across the claim that exoplanets are “a young field”, they being planets beyond our Solar System. “The first exoplanet (outside science fiction) was discovered only twenty-five years ago. By 2005, about two hundred exoplanets had been found. Today, more than forty-four hundred are known, and it seems likely that such planets are ubiquitous.” Seems almost obvious really, but then science requires proof. I stare out the window picturing sun systems with my antiquated mind manual of cubist planes and computer graphics. Life on somewhere other than Mars being the dazzling question that reason quickly answers, at the speed of light, in the affirmative. Behind ubiquitous exists the word innumerable. Hence this underlining on page 30: “In 1924, Edwin Hubble had discovered that there was at least one galaxy other than our own; the Hubble telescope revealed that there were billions of them.” It’s when the word billions is introduced into the conversation that the cells in my mind go collectively abstract. Even billion (singular) cannot be countenanced with meaningful equanimity; contemplative acceptance is called on. While I am happy that galaxies are abundant, many of them doubtless irradiating their own colours with no name and waves from monster light sources, it is our own Earth that has a human scale, it’s blue days and dark nights my kind of corner.

Thank you Rivka Galchen:  https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/08/16/nasas-new-telescope-will-show-us-the-infancy-of-the-universe