Our evening on the town—Boston, specifically—was a big success. At the restaurant, we dined outdoors in the amazingly gorgeous springtime weather. We enjoyed not only the delicious dinner but people-watching the happy pedestrians with whom we shared the sidewalk, facing the Public Gardens. Then came the show at the sumptuous Schubert Theater, where I accessed the electronic tickets on my cell phone without a hitch. Both the driving and parking went smoothly. Unlike last week, the car did not decide to break the clutch cable or some other disaster. The baby sitter, recruited from care.com, proved to be as reliable and capable as advertised, and not the scheming psychopath of darkest worry.
The bill for this simple expedition came to a total that I once might have spent on a long-weekend getaway. Indeed, the cost of an evening out in days of yore was more aligned with the tolls we paid on the MassPike. But nevermind all that. My wife and I had a lovely time. Well worth it all.
The show was a lecture, complete with sophisticated visual and audio accompaniment, from Professor Brian Cox, world-renowned physicist and explainer of the universe. Boston is the second-to-last stop on his North American tour, as delineated by the tee shirts for sale in the lobby. I’m sure that a top-notch talent agency organized the whole deal.
The Professor spoke for roughly two hours, plus intermission, all by his lonesome on a big stage. Always he was interesting, even when not understandable. Let’s see what knowledge remains in morning-after memory.
–The event horizon of a black hole is the boundary at which relative time is equal to zero. Watch an astronaut travel in their spacecraft into a black hole and you eventually will see the spacecraft frozen in place at the event horizon; I assume for eternity. However, from the astronaut’s perspective, they enter the black hole easily and do not experience any time issues, although they likely will be vaporized, or if not, then spaghettified as they approach a singularity in time. A singularity, I can tell you, is related to the concept of infinity. At least they look the same on the diagrams.
–Time and space are interlocked, and together called space time. This construction might be made of something related to quantum theory.
–Gravity affects energy as well as mass. We’ve got photos that show the same distant galaxy in two different places, a result of a phenomenon called gravity lensing, observable when light passes near supermassive objects like black holes. Einstein got this, Newton didn’t.
–At least per one of the latest theories, and my understanding of same, the big bang involved a tiny patch of a pre-existing universe. Other big bangs in other patches created other new and separate universes—or “bubble universes”—with their own physical laws. It seems likely that these laws would make a universe that would preclude much of anything useful from happening, with even a slight change in the gravitational constant making stars either too hostile or absent altogether.
–It seems quite likely that life exists elsewhere in the Universe, and even in our solar system. New evidence at least suggests that bacteria-like somethings lived for a while on Mars. But life on the order of bacteria is predicted to be about as evolved as it gets, apart from Earth. A big affront to anyone involved in SETI, and you know who you are.
The Professor’s conclusion related to that last point. We humans may occupy an extremely small fraction of the universe, let alone the multiverse that includes lots of other universes out there, but we also are extraordinarily rare and special components of this universe, the only objects able to understand what exactly we are a part of.
It is now Monday morning, and various duties of my job are nudging me for attention. Among the household, only the dog seems at all traumatized by the disruption in routine. Doggy ran into the woods unexpectedly this morning and took her time heeding the call to return. Later, she peed on the carpet. But now she seems to have calmed down. The 7-year-old had no complaints and is now at school. Donald Trump is still President but the country hasn’t quite given up the ghost just yet.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the Cox lecture suggests to me that God exists and has an active interest, perhaps even a role, in human existence. Our presence in the universe seems too unlikely and too inexplicable otherwise. It’s a hopeful thought.
By the way, if you’re wondering about the title, it’s a catchphrase from Futurama, a popular cartoon from over twenty years ago, and revived more recently. The line is spoken regularly by Professor Farnsworth, who resembles not Brian Cox but instead some old geezer who hangs out at the hardware store. Check out the link below, and have a nice day.
