March 2021: The Art of Looking At the Stars
Dear lovely readers,
Recently, I was reading a novel that I had been enjoying, for pages and pages, like a warm cup of tea. It was paced well, the characters were endearing, I even smiled at the literary jokes. After a litany of fiction books that had grown dark, needle-pricked my heart, this new novel was a necessary counterpoint. And then, in the last ten pages, one of the main characters was abruptly and violently murdered.
I decided to stop reading about people.
Instead, I turned to the cosmos. Physics and math felt safe.
So I picked up Brian Greene’s latest tome, Until the End of Time. A renowned physicist who has done revolutionary work in superstring theory, Greene wrote this book as an exploration of human consciousness and the ways in which we strive for meaning primarily due to our intense awareness of the impermanence of life. He merges scientific theory, breaking down entropy and gravity and nuclear fusion and thermodynamics, to explore cosmic life and mankind with an artist’s eye. Greene gets it. He remains passionate about both the sciences and the humanities, understanding that you cannot love one without the other, refusing to slander or look down upon either, but instead speaking with a reverent respect and intellect about both.
So I read about molecules and their deep obsession with electrons and the vastness of the universe and the Big Bang. One of the most compelling facts I learned (I even slightly dog-eared the page, which is treasonous in the book nerd world) involved an event called the inflationary burst.
Let’s back up a bit.
In 1979, postdoctoral fellow Alan Guth introduced the idea of an energy field known as the inflaton field. He discovered that if a region of space contained an inflaton field, an area where the energy was distributed evenly, then a form of gravity known as repulsive gravity would exert pressure outward, forcing the things inside the region apart. This repulsive gravity would be so powerful that the region of space would inflate to explosive levels, perhaps stretching as large as the universe. This would power a big bang.
After the Big Bang, the universe would stretch quickly, its blistering heat diffusing across a growing expanse, before eventually decreasing in temperature over time. Known as the “afterglow of creation,” this primordial heat was theorized in the 1940s to still infuse the universe. In the 1960s, Bell Lab researchers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson stumbled onto this radiation with a telecommunication antenna.
Okay, only a few more details before we get to the thing that, like, wowed me.
First, we gotta bring in inflationary cosmology. This form of scientific study hones the “afterglow” theory by bringing in quantum mechanics.
In 1927, German physicist Werner Heisenberg introduced the quantum mechanical uncertainty principle. What is this principle? While a classical physicist might be able to mathematically deduce the position and speed of a particle with precision, quantum mechanics takes a sledgehammer to this precision. In reality, there is no true precision. A quantum physicist would see that “quantum fuzziness” makes these very calculations uncertain.
Here, Greene shares a helpful analogy: “It’s as if the classical tradition viewed the world through pristine, polished spectacles that brought all physical features into perfectly sharp focus, while the spectacles donned by the quantum perspective are inherently foggy.”
Okay, so why does this matter?
Because of this quantum uncertainty, the inflaton field is not precise. When it expands, its energy actually does not distribute evenly due to “quantum fuzziness.” Consequently, as the field widens, its value and energy will be slightly higher at one area, perhaps slightly lower at another area. With inflationary expansion, then, these quantum energy discrepancies mean that the temperature is hotter in certain points and cooler in certain points.
Okay, so why does that matter?
Mathematical analyses in the 1980s suggested that these temperature differences, no matter how minute, might indeed be visible in space. Basically, the “stretched-out quantum jitters,” as Greene puts it, acts as a “cosmological fingerprint.” Mathematically, the inflationary burst should have left a kind of fossilized imprint—one made of tiny temperature variations—across the night sky.
And, in the 1990s, space telescopes confirmed the existence of this imprint.
Guys. GUYS. Guys.
To be clear, this is not definitive proof of inflationary expansion (and the Big Bang). But it certainly isn’t not-proof. It certainly is damn compelling.
Just think about it.
There’s a map of temperature variations, so tiny that we need space-based thermometers to check it out, that has existed for millions of years. That could have been precipitated by the very creation of the universe.
Life is wild.
Anyway, Brian Greene reminded me of the largeness of the universe and calmed me down for a bit. For better or worse, humans are tethered to the cosmos. There’s something about looking up at the stars that provides a certain type of perspective. We make things for meaning, but we also remember things for meaning.
Every winter, I look up at the night sky, searching for Orion’s Belt. I trace the three bright stars with my eyes, mouthing their names, Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka.
Years ago, my dad took my sister and I to the Miami Science Museum. This was before its massive, hoity-toity transformation into the Frost Museum of Science. Back then, it was smaller, humbler, and I used to buy a bag of salt and vinegar chips at the gift shop during school field trips. He bought tickets to the planetarium and we nestled in the red-backed chairs, tilted our heads back to look at the simulated sky. There, I learned about the winter constellations, the stars to look out for when December rolls around, and how they all connect together. That night, my dad called us out to the patio, pointing out Orion’s Belt.
It’s been years, but I still look for those three stars, hooked together in a vertical line, every time it gets cold. I’ve walked back from a campus in California, cut through a park in New York, shivered in an early Rhode Island snowstorm, and still, I’ve looked for Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka.
In I Am a Strange Loop, cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter contemplates the creation of the self and comes to the conclusion that our minds, like our physical bodies, are made up of other people. He writes:
“We are all curious collages, weird little planetoids that grow by accreting other people’s habits and ideas and styles and tics and jokes and phrases and tunes and hopes and fears as if they were meteorites that came soaring out of the blue, collided with us, and stuck. What at first is an artificial, alien mannerism slowly fuses into the stuff of our self, like wax melting in the sun, and gradually becomes as much a part of us as ever it was of someone else (though that person may very well have borrowed it from someone else to begin with).”
I’ve always wished there was a way to bottle up the poems and music and art that I love, a way to keep all of it by my side. When I taped those index cards on my wall in high school, a dizzying collage of words, I imagined falling into those stories, sinking into the waves of the way they made me feel. I didn’t want to forget the feeling of being okay. While struggling in graduate school, grappling with the rigid confines of what it supposedly meant to be “creative,” I often felt like I couldn’t breathe. That bittersweet joy, both freeing and melancholic, that I experienced when I was creating something I loved—it all evaporated. I wondered, Is there an in-between? Was it in those moments in my bedroom, blasting Freddie Mercury on my headphones, as I outlined novels in my head? I had to remind myself to write, to write anything. The poems and the song lyrics and the rough drafts. I needed to let myself fail and make bad art and push myself for those moments where it all, somehow, worked.
And the truth is, we make tethers of almost anything. Like the constellations in the sky, like the inflationary burst, we contain imprints of the past. Sometimes, they’re so small, so indiscernible, that it can be difficult for others to notice.
The song “K.” by Cigarettes After Sex reminds me of New York in the spring. Whenever I felt stressed, I would listen to this song during my commute ride home. I listen to this song now and I think of the afternoon glow as I walked down Carmine Street, smelling the coffee grinds from Bluestone Lane, looking at the customers eating bowls of Bolognese on the sidewalk tables of Trattoria Spaghetto, skipping past the signs for Greek lessons outside Our Lady of Pompeii Church, and fighting the urge to devour a raspberry cupcake from Molly’s Cupcakes, a mustard yellow façade on the street corner.
I listened to the Frank Ocean song “Nights” on repeat during my last summer in São Paulo. It reminds me of word scraps, of trying to glean meaning from short phrases that I scribbled in my notebook, and the warm grease of the wax paper that stuck to my fingers after eating coxinhas and pão de queijo and empadas.
I once read a post online encouraging everyone to keep a journal and to take note of all the little things—memories, favorite songs, grocery lists, funny jokes. Life gets exponentially faster as you grow older and the post emphasized the pros of saving your memories as keepsakes.
I’ve spoken about my difficulties living abroad in London. And yet, there were good things, too. My sketchbook reminds me of the good things. I loved the fog and the rain. I loved walking across Waterloo Bridge, particularly at night, and staring out over the Thames. Big Ben gleamed like an improbable chunk of gold, The Eye circled the air in flashing colors, and the Financial District, on my right, proudly sported the silver-striped Gherkin. I loved getting a slice of apple pie from the bakery around the corner of my dormitory. When I needed to escape the heaviness of my room, I loved taking night walks along the South Bank, wearing my chunky pink headphones as I listened to my favorite music (Yuna was a centerpiece of that musical phase). Once the holidays approached, twinkly lights glittered from the tree branches and vendors set up Christmas stalls, hawking painted umbrellas, flower rings, and roasted chestnuts. I loved walked to Waterstone’s and working my way through a pile of books. I loved feeling like I could do this—travel to and live in a completely different city, all on my own. Studying abroad was a lonely, isolating experience with some shiny, good moments thrown in.
In The Phantom Tollbooth, Norton Juster summarizes the significance of seemingly inconsequential things. He writes:
“Have you ever heard the wonderful silence just before the dawn? Or the quiet and calm just as a storm ends? Or perhaps you know the silence when you haven’t the answer to a question you’ve been asked, or the hush of a country road at night, or the expectant pause of a room full of people when someone is just about to speak, or, most beautiful of all, the moment after the door closes and you’re alone in the whole house? Each one is different, you know, and all very beautiful if you listen carefully.”
When life gets hard, I find that I’ve surrounded myself with anchors to my past. I’m a little cosmos, planets made up of memories orbiting around me, stars sticking to my skin. When I have to get up, live life, I follow little rituals. I’ll put on a shade of lipstick that I used to wear during summers in Washington, D.C. I’ll spray rose perfume that I purchased from a scent shop in Missouri with my close friends. I’ll wear a cheap souvenir necklace that I bought in Granada to remind myself of my college roommates. Even when I’ve felt like I was nowhere, I was actually right here. Surrounding myself with amulets to give me just a little bit of strength.
Love,
Meesh
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