THE GRAVITY OF OUR SITUATION
Not long after discovering that Santa, the Tooth Fairy, and the Easter Bunny were figments of my imagination, it dawned on me that men created God in their own image and therefore, neither I, nor my Earth was the center of anything. Now, to add insult to injury, it turns out that the universe we observe when we point our instruments up into the night sky is merely a speck of residue and not the real universe at all-- this according to Richard Planek in his article, "Out There" in the NYTimes magazine section, Sunday.
No wonder we sin like drunken sailors.
It had been a universe made for dummies. We had the nearby clockwork universe of our solar system, held together by gravity: a force that Sir Isaac Newton admitted he just made up as he went along. Crazy stuff. After all, why the hell should distant objects tug on one another?
Then we had our Einsteinian universe working on vast scales, warping space into attractive but lethal potholes. Now objects were not so much pulled by gravity, as falling into depressions in space. In our relativistic existence, my watch ran slower when I rode my bicycle, which explained why the faster I rode home, the later I was for dinner.
And finally, to Einstein's chagrin, our basic building blocks turned out to inhabit a quantum universe of the very small, where universes popped into existence (and out, and in) in a never-ending roll of the dice. Good. Let's take snack.
Sure, we still didn't really know what gravity was, but hey, we could live with that. We could all just go on Atkins, and everything would be fine. But no. Then the cosmologists had to go and muck it all up.
Enter dark matter and dark energy. Not referring to the Bush/Cheney model, the dark entities came about because the universe was found to be rapidly expanding -- not contracting as predicted by the Big Bang model. Additionally, the flat spiral galaxies were not flying apart, centrifugally, as they should -- but rather, cocooned in some magic force that kept them intact.
Of course, the dark forces are dark only in the sense that no one has a clue as to what they are. Since they are not part the visible or electromagnetic universe, they're not only beyond anything we know, they may be beyond anything we know how to know. And there lies the rub. For the universe to be expanding at the observed rate, the stuff we dwell in and the stuff that dwells in us--the baryonic universe of protons, neutrons and elections--must be only 4% of the total.
It turns out that 74% is dark energy, 22% is dark matter, and just 4% is you, me, Osama bin Laden, and our whole sorry universe. It's as if our entire universe went down the drain with the World Trade Center, and everything we know of--George Bush, Alberto Gonzales, Kyle Sampson, the nine unemployed US prosecutors, the missing WMD, the planet Earth, the Milky Way, as well as all the other 10 to the 500th universes--is the soap scum left behind on the proverbial tub.
Though he didn't know about dark matter at the time, Einstein wished it away when he invoked his cosmological constant, a mathematical fudge factor that made his calculations work. I tried that on my SATs with poor results. Like Einstein's cosmic speed limit, light, the cosmological constant was a placeholder for something real. Unlike George Bush, Einstein had cheated and gotten away with it.
But dark matter was followed by dark energy, and as cosmologists like to say, you only get to invoke the tooth fairy once. Is dark energy a separate entity, or just an aspect of gravity? Could gravity behave differently at great distances? Could it be that gravity lies at the interface of the very large and the very small? Mr. and Ms. Soap Scum may never know. And it doesn't really matter. Not to be a negative Pissy Pauli, but we are completely irrelevant anyway.
Well screw you, cosmologists. Just leave us hanging in our hyper-Copernican existence, you creeps. No wonder people are switching back to Creationism.
When I was a kid, an older cousin of mine insisted I count the stars in the dark Vermont sky. I lost count at 1,733, I recall, and when I went to start over, all the damn stars had moved. So had my wallet. Had I only heeded the poem left on the walls of his cottage by our Great Uncle Ben in 1928. Appropriately it went:
There was an astronomer guy
Who spotted a star in the sky
So he like an ass
Kept his gaze to the glass
Til the telescope grew to his eye.
Not long after discovering that Santa, the Tooth Fairy, and the Easter Bunny were figments of my imagination, it dawned on me that men created God in their own image and therefore, neither I, nor my Earth was the center of anything. Now, to add insult to injury, it turns out that the universe we observe when we point our instruments up into the night sky is merely a speck of residue and not the real universe at all-- this according to Richard Planek in his article, "Out There" in the NYTimes magazine section, Sunday.
No wonder we sin like drunken sailors.
It had been a universe made for dummies. We had the nearby clockwork universe of our solar system, held together by gravity: a force that Sir Isaac Newton admitted he just made up as he went along. Crazy stuff. After all, why the hell should distant objects tug on one another?
Then we had our Einsteinian universe working on vast scales, warping space into attractive but lethal potholes. Now objects were not so much pulled by gravity, as falling into depressions in space. In our relativistic existence, my watch ran slower when I rode my bicycle, which explained why the faster I rode home, the later I was for dinner.
And finally, to Einstein's chagrin, our basic building blocks turned out to inhabit a quantum universe of the very small, where universes popped into existence (and out, and in) in a never-ending roll of the dice. Good. Let's take snack.
Sure, we still didn't really know what gravity was, but hey, we could live with that. We could all just go on Atkins, and everything would be fine. But no. Then the cosmologists had to go and muck it all up.
Enter dark matter and dark energy. Not referring to the Bush/Cheney model, the dark entities came about because the universe was found to be rapidly expanding -- not contracting as predicted by the Big Bang model. Additionally, the flat spiral galaxies were not flying apart, centrifugally, as they should -- but rather, cocooned in some magic force that kept them intact.
Of course, the dark forces are dark only in the sense that no one has a clue as to what they are. Since they are not part the visible or electromagnetic universe, they're not only beyond anything we know, they may be beyond anything we know how to know. And there lies the rub. For the universe to be expanding at the observed rate, the stuff we dwell in and the stuff that dwells in us--the baryonic universe of protons, neutrons and elections--must be only 4% of the total.
It turns out that 74% is dark energy, 22% is dark matter, and just 4% is you, me, Osama bin Laden, and our whole sorry universe. It's as if our entire universe went down the drain with the World Trade Center, and everything we know of--George Bush, Alberto Gonzales, Kyle Sampson, the nine unemployed US prosecutors, the missing WMD, the planet Earth, the Milky Way, as well as all the other 10 to the 500th universes--is the soap scum left behind on the proverbial tub.
Though he didn't know about dark matter at the time, Einstein wished it away when he invoked his cosmological constant, a mathematical fudge factor that made his calculations work. I tried that on my SATs with poor results. Like Einstein's cosmic speed limit, light, the cosmological constant was a placeholder for something real. Unlike George Bush, Einstein had cheated and gotten away with it.
But dark matter was followed by dark energy, and as cosmologists like to say, you only get to invoke the tooth fairy once. Is dark energy a separate entity, or just an aspect of gravity? Could gravity behave differently at great distances? Could it be that gravity lies at the interface of the very large and the very small? Mr. and Ms. Soap Scum may never know. And it doesn't really matter. Not to be a negative Pissy Pauli, but we are completely irrelevant anyway.
Well screw you, cosmologists. Just leave us hanging in our hyper-Copernican existence, you creeps. No wonder people are switching back to Creationism.
When I was a kid, an older cousin of mine insisted I count the stars in the dark Vermont sky. I lost count at 1,733, I recall, and when I went to start over, all the damn stars had moved. So had my wallet. Had I only heeded the poem left on the walls of his cottage by our Great Uncle Ben in 1928. Appropriately it went:
There was an astronomer guy
Who spotted a star in the sky
So he like an ass
Kept his gaze to the glass
Til the telescope grew to his eye.
posted by R. Reynolds at 9:23 AM
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