The Dreary of Relativity

The streetlamps marked even spaces like Doric columns that I could nod my head to, and their light rolled over us like amber waves followed by a trough of shadow before the next glowing cone pushed toward us. Seams in the highway pulsed through our seats in a rhythmic reminder that we were in contact with the road. It was a Sunday night, and my dad was driving us home.

We were on the highway crossing town from the west side to the east. Glowing on the dashboard, the digits of the clock challenged me to predict the precise time we would pull into home, a game I found easy to cheat because as soon as the clock reached the time I had chosen, I would reason like a diviner that since we had exited the highway, the final stage of the journey had been reached, and I could therefore be called correct. I can imagine, recall that route in my head, not as a map but as a corridor of actual space in my city from starting point to home point. A matter of space, and the time it took to traverse it.

My dad looked down at me and flashed dark and light in the rhythmic shadows. He asked me about school, and I most likely described something I took for granted but that he had never learned, something wretched like geometry. Out of his league but unwilling to concede, my dad uttered his usual excuse for not being skilled in the basics of grade school math and without letting another streetlight go by extolled the wonders of physics, a subject he had actually paid attention to. I had heard this before, and I loved it. One of the few things about school I ever heard him talk about was the experiments that he had conducted in his high school physics lab: the motion of waves through water; the production of magnetism from electricity and vice versa; the chemical reaction of alkaline metals in water. In the dark world of a child’s mind, I was speeding through the night, catching glimpses of brilliance that would take me years to realize.

As a kid, I spent a lot of time in isolation thinking about the world, face in a book. My friends didn’t care about the mountains of the Moon nor find it funny that Long John Silver was the quartermaster under Captain Flint—his parrot. Together, we played a lot of football and discovered music and girls. But I didn’t get a sense of family from them; I didn’t feel related. Among my family, I was also pretty weird. My sister was much cooler than I and used to beat me up a lot. I countered by scotchtaping Satanic signs on the door of her bedroom. For some reason she found that disturbing. My mother had to put up with us on her own, and she struggled to feed us, let alone encourage my precocious curiosities. It wasn’t a warm, big-family upbringing, and I didn’t have a strong sense of what relatives were. I felt separate: an absolute.

As I explored the cosmos more and more, I couldn’t see myself in it. The questions of where I came from and where I belonged became troubling and disorienting, even as I learned more and more. I enjoyed learning for its own sake, but it seldom led to anything I could call meaningful. It was that beautiful moment of innocence, that existence when you’re sure of being at the center of the universe and the top of the food chain, just before the anger and the angst descend into the adrenal glands and go marching through the veins. I was to focus henceforth on the questions, not the answers.

As certain as he was about the electromagnetic field, my dad struggled deeply with one idea in particular—Einstein’s Special Relativity. On the amber-lit highway driving home, I knew it only as Relativity, and my dad turned to me and asked why the light beaming from the headlamps wouldn’t add the speed of the car to its velocity, as a stone thrown from our car window would, or a baseball thrown at my head at 90mph would smack my skull at 60mph if I was running away from it at 30mph. Relativity is an odd beast, and it’s founded on the fact that light travels at a constant speed, 186,000 miles per second whether you are moving or not.

And now that rapt young boy will turn to his dimly lit father as a grown man and shed some light on Relativity: no matter how hard you try to chase after a light beam, it still retreats from you at the speed of light.

Einstein tried to imagine riding on a beam of light. If you could ride the lightning and you held a mirror up to your face, would you see your image? Yes, because light always appears to travel away from the observer at the same speed. You would still see your face in the mirror. If I was going nearly 186,000 miles per second with a lightning bolt between my legs, and I switched on a flashlight, would its light be traveling twice the speed of light? No, because as your speed increases, your time slows down to keep the speed of light constant. Why does time slow down? Going from one place to another involves the distance and the time it takes to cross that distance. Einstein showed us that space and time are relatives. Increase movement, time slows. Decrease movement, time races. There is no absolute place and no absolute time.

Dear reader, you are on the side of the road on a Sunday night, waiting for my dad’s car to pass by carrying me in the passenger seat and my sister in the backseat. When the car passes you, my dad will turn on the dome light which is equidistant between me and my sister, and you need to tell me who the light from the dome light reaches first: me in the front, or my sister in back. From inside the car, my dad will try for the same observation. Click! the light goes on and my dad sees the light reach my sister and I simultaneously. All is well then. But wait, what’s that you say? You didn’t see it the same way? As we passed you in the car and switched on the dome light, you would observe the light coming on, but since my sister is traveling toward the light source, the beam of light has a shorter distance to cover to reach her. And in contrast, since I in the front seat am moving away from the light source, the beam of light has a longer distance to travel to reach me. What you saw was my sister light up first and me slightly after.  So whose observation is correct? My dad’s, who saw the light reach us at the same instant? Or you, dear reader, who stood beside the road and as we passed saw the light reach my sister first and me after?

The cosmos contains no shortage of truths. It contains multitudes. It is literally true that both observers are correct; for those riding in the car, time ticks slower than for you on the side of the road, allowing for discrepancies observed in space and time. Don’t believe it? GPS accounts for these discrepancies of Relativity to triangulate your position from satellite. GPS uses Relativity! If it didn’t correct for time passing slower in orbit, the satellites would drift out of position 98,000 feet per day!

Reality maintains its frustrating quality of uncertainty not because it has no meaning. But because it contains a multiplicity of meanings that complicate and contradict. I am all of the brothers Karamazov; I am both innocent and guilty. And I have found, dad, relativity in one another.

As I predicted. The dashboard digital reads  :   and we are nowhere near home. Long ago we emerged from the dark, confusing night, and I am still trying to catch that beam of light.

Tossing Ewoks

I created this blog as a project to re-paradise the world. But hold on a second, what does re-paradising mean? Well, I don’t know yet, but I have a hypothesis and it involves redemption. Humans have done a lot of destructive whoopee in the past century, and because of it, one tends to be cynical about the nature of man. It’s hard to trust people when you know that they’re capable of evil. Then to reflect on evil and what it implies about the meaninglessness of existence, thinking like that has more than once led me to some grim conclusions about being human. It recently became debilitating for me, and as a result, I spent most of February in bed. I am a person who spends too much time in his own head anyway, but to be extremely conflicted about being human requires way too much cognitive dissonance to healthily deal with. I began to perceive the world as a hell.

I had made a fallacious mistake, one that unfortunately pervades the world. I had denied all of the good and wonderful things at hand that I enjoy. I had forgotten what Walt Whitman told me, to look under my bootsoles. I had made a blunder on the scale of Milton's Satan, who thinks "the mind is its own place, and in it self can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n. What matter where, if I still be the same, and what I should be ..."

But something made me laugh when I really needed it. Not only that, it made me realize a philosophical practice for dealing with difficult and uncertain times: enjoy examining your life and world. We are a natural being, evolved of and within our natural world, and we have the capacity to look back upon the nature out of which we arose and wonder. Nature is capable of observing itself and responding emotionally, and we are nature taking a good look at itself. Experiencing the joy of realizing these delightful and awe-filled things about ourselves in spite of our stupidity may be the redemption that I’m onto when I say “re-paradising.” It’s individual experience, and I’m not prescribing anything. I just want to enjoy revealing some wonders that make it all worth it. Which it’s about time I got on with …

This brings me to tossing ewoks. It comes from an episode of the British television show, “QI” on which Professor Brian Cox was a guest. He is a brilliant astrophysicist who is working on one of the experiments in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. In this episode, a discussion of how the rings of Saturn were formed led to the most amazing example of the enjoyment of the examination of the natural world that I have found, and from that I not only named my blog, but also embarked on this very adventure to look into the joy that can be found by examining the world.

A large portion of my inspiration for beginning this blog comes from “QI,” an abbreviation of Quite Interesting. It’s part nerdly quiz show and part comedy show, but it’s format deliberately runs counter to the pervasiveness of vapid pop cultural television and the vicarious voyeurism of reality teevee in which we peer into someone else’s individual life experience instead of reflecting on our own. QI encourages individual thought, which is bold for a show that is partly an educational program. They invite celebrities and comedians onto a panel to investigate facts about the world and think about applying them to individual experience—which often benefits the comedy. The goal of the show is to come up not with correct answers but interesting ones.

On the episode in question, a comedian called Ross Noble retrieved the show from a descent into didactic lecture by asking Prof Cox where ewoks might live. Truly in the spirit of the show, Prof Cox described Saturn’s moon, Titan. It’s one of the largest moons in the solar system and has an atmosphere thicker than the earth’s, possibly requiring its inhabitants be furry. However, as Prof Cox explained, Titan is so far from the sun that its freezing temperatures would cause an ewok to freeze so completely that it would shatter against the ground like a glass vase, bumping the traditional sport of ewok tossing up from lots of fun to insanely funny. But it gets better …

The atmosphere on Titan is largely made up of methane, and because of the low temperature in that remote corner of the solar system, methane exists in three states much like water does on the earth. (The triple-point temperature of water on earth is .01 degrees centigrade, meaning it can exist at one temperature in all three of its states!) On Titan, methane is a gas in the atmosphere like water vapor here, solid at the poles, and remarkably fills liquid methane lakes on the surface. Well, as you might have figured by now if you know anything about methane, another panelist on QI pointed out to Noble that methane is what farts are made of. Therefore, if you participate in ewok tossing on Titan, you could toss an ewok into a lake of liquid farts and it would shatter.

Noble proceeded to go insane with joy at imagining such a paradise. It didn’t matter that there was no physical paradise that we could go to to toss ewoks into lakes of liquid farts. Being alive and actively learning about our world and its possibilities is paradise. We belong to it, and I don’t want to lose it. As far as I can tell, if I make the examination of my life as enjoyable as Ross Noble did, if I seek out paradise, I will realize that I have been there all along.

All that said, I must return briefly to my depressive disposition. I may come to the conclusion that life is meaningless, but what if I take that same sentiment and make it enjoyable? Like this: “I was convinced that the more I thought about life, the more I would see what a bummer it is to be a human being.” I’ve just made myself laugh. The conclusion is the same, but how I feel about it has changed, and when a reader reads these two statements, the emotional response will likewise be different. This exploration of the world with a purpose became the key to my rediscovered appreciation for life and the pleasure of learning, changing, and the project of re-paradising the world of my own reality, and possilby yours as well.

Loomings

Logos is the Word that invoked the universe’s creation. Not literally the word, but like a wizard incanting magic words, God spoke, and Chaos assembled into Cosmos. It’s the original story, the first one. It’s a story that we can now apply as a metaphor for the Big Bang, and that utterance began a long tradition of storytelling in which any and all of us can participate, listening or reading, writing or telling. Out of a jumbled heap of words and thoughts come stories which contain knowledge and emotion, the exploits of wizards, poets, and wanderers—or anyone growing grim about the mouth in need of an adventure. They have sung their songs and passed along a mythology upon which I can stand and see what they saw and created. Here I am now, telling what joy I have seen, and adding a little creation of my own to the Cosmos.

“Do you realize that all great literature—Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, A Farewell to Arms, The Scarlett Letter, The Red Badge of Courage, The Iliad and The Odyssey, Crime and Punishment, The Bible, and ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’—are all about what a bummer it is to be a human being?” Lol. Kurt Vonnegut was brilliant at blending the sordid with the hilarious, and it’s a relief to me. He has shown me that life is such a grave matter that it must be approached with humor, or else you’re just not taking it seriously. I’ll probably mention death in each blog I write, but it’s only to make the jokes funnier.

Another thing about Vonnegut: he was classified as a science-fiction writer by the critics of literature. Products of English Departments, he called them. I am a product of one of the finest English departments in the world, yet I side with Vonnegut in his irritation of being classified as a science-fiction writer. He certainly didn’t want to be. But he had a technical education, majored in chemistry at Cornell, associated with engineers, physicists, and mathematicians. He brought his quite interesting knowledge of the technical to the analytical, emotional, and philosophical realm of storytelling. Being quite interested in learning for its own sake, with this blog I plan to marry my background in literature with my interests in physics and astronomy. Carl Sagan revealed how well that can be done, and I have ideas that are truly fascinating to anyone interested in what a bummer it is to be a human being. Vonnegut said, “I think novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex.” Well, I’m not a gadget writer, but I will bring up quantum physics, relativity, and the Large Hardon Colluder (that should be Large Hadron Collider, but I wanted to show you what a sense of humor my spellcheck has) in my discussions of literature. Take the idea of Logos above. I have blended a creation story with cosmological theory. I don’t limit my thinking to science on one hand or philosophy on the other. I want to see both simultaneously, as they are a unified multitude. My entire project hinges on unifying the physical world we observe together and my individual experience within it.

I have high aspirations for this blog. Like Milton’s unattainable project to justify the ways of God to men, I reclaim his overblown sense of purpose, along with a few of his ideas, and set out to re-paradise the world. I’ll make up lies called stories in order to make sense of nonsense and meaning out of meaninglessness so they all may fit nice and make out of this sad world a paradise.

For this is a damp, drizzly February in my soul. Writing about the world is all I can do to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street and methodically knocking people’s hats off. Now, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.