URSABLOG: Lost In Wonderland

The world seems to be changing at an alarming rate, and it is hard to keep up with developments. I am increasingly bewildered by the pace of change, as though as much as possible is being crammed into an incredibly short period. This is unsettling: rather than being able to digest and reflect on what is happening, it is as though time itself has grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and is dragging me behind him (why am I so sure it is a he? Old Father Time?), leaving me bruised and battered in his wake.

Alice sighed wearily. “I think you might do something better with the time,” she said, “than waste it in asking riddles that have no answers.”

“If you knew Time as well as I do,” said the Hatter, “you wouldn’t talk about wasting it. It’s him.”

Is this because I am getting old? I don’t think so; but I have the benefit of some experience to know that there have been periods of my life where time seems to have moved glacially, and I have been impatient for something – anything – to happen, whilst during others it was bliss in that dawn to be alive, young or otherwise, and then time danced around me, quickly and spritely, and beckoning me into the golden future. Now, and I am sure I am not alone, I feel as if time is just taking the piss.

The ability to absorb change, and adapt to it, is being challenged by the speed of it, and at times the impossibility of it.

“Alice laughed: “There’s no use trying,” she said; “one can’t believe impossible things.”

“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

I obviously need practice in order to digest the six impossible things I read every morning before the coffee is ready.

I also need to calm down, and look at the bigger picture. The biggest picture, in fact, in order to get some sense of perspective, so I am looking at inflation; not economic inflation, but cosmic inflation. This is not, as you may may imagine, an investigation into the growing size of Elon Musk’s ego but the measurement of the expansion of the universe from the Big Bang onwards.

According to Science magazine, what happened in the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang, the start of the creation of our universe, in theory at least, is extremely important in understanding how the universe exists now, and how it continues to grow and expand. When I mean the immediate aftermath, I mean in its first billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second, when it ballooned a trillion trillion times, from a size of less than a neutron to that of a large orange.

The Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization, and Ices Explorer (SPHEREx to you and I), an infrared telescope with mirrors no bigger than a dinner plate, with a modest price tag of US$ 488 million (around the price of two LNG newbuildings), is scheduled to launch this week into low-Earth orbit. During its two year mission, it will map the entire sky every 6 months, surveying 450 million galaxies to create a vast 3D map, recording the “colour” of galaxies in infrared light.

Astronomers hope the resulting data will give them insights into the possible drivers of cosmic inflation. This theoretical concept was developed in the 1970s to address certain problems thrown up by the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, an all-pervading afterglow of the Big Bang. This afterglow, dating from just 380,000 years after the Big Bang, appears now remarkably smooth, suggesting a uniform universe in all directions.

Considering – to my eyes at least – the power and strength generated by the Bag Bang, it is surprising that its expansion was and remains so uniform and controlled. Not only, according to astroparticle physicist Lucien Heurtier of King’s College London, is it uniform it’s “extremely boring… it’s basically the same everywhere.”

It is hoped that SPHEREx will help to understand cosmic inflation better, whilst at the same time studying the evolution of galaxies. SPHEREx’s infrared vision will also identify water ice, carbon monoxide and dioxide, and methanol – potential building blocks for life – frozen onto grains of dust.

“‘Twinkle, twinkle, little bat!

How I wonder what you’re at!’

You know the song, perhaps?”

“I’ve heard something like it,” said Alice.

“It goes on, you know,” the Hatter continued, “in this way:—

‘Up above the world you fly,

Like a tea-tray in the sky.

Twinkle, twinkle—’”

Living in an era where great power games and great man theory (it always seems to be a man) is taking us back to the nineteenth century, and egos and arguments replace rules and institutions, we seem to be hurtling towards another type of big bang, one over which none of us has any control. That – according to theoretical physics at least – our universe was formed and grew in an unexperienceable amount of time, but was none the less uniform and controlled helps me not lose all hope in the face of the chaos-mongering and hyperbole of those moving fast and breaking things.

“I can’t explain myself, I’m afraid, sir,” said Alice, “Because I’m not myself, you see.”

More than that it reduces my existentialist angst in these times. I have been a competitive ship sale and purchase broker for over thirty years: I should be used to not being in control by now. The shipping markets cannot be controlled, they can only be lived in, just as life itself – as I need to be reminded occasionally – cannot be solved, it has to be lived. I should not stress too much about what I cannot control – even if I should make efforts to make the best of things that I can – because it is wasted effort.

Last weekend, I was texting with a friend and basically moaning about my life.

Me: The general news and atmosphere is depressing.

Her: Why? Did something happen?

Me: President Trump mostly and the increased threat of European war.

Her: I think that everything will be fine at the end (as always).

This reply irritated me a great deal. Couldn’t she see what was going on in the world? How things were changing so suddenly, and for the worst? How could she reply in such a way, when the threat of disruption, death, pain and destruction hangs over us?

“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.

“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”

“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.

“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”

This weekend, I feel different, calmer, even after the bust up in the Oval Office on Friday.  It is not as if the threat of disruption, death, pain and destruction has ceased to hang over us, in fact the darkness of the approaching storm clouds seems to have increased. Nothing has happened, or if it has, I haven’t noticed it. I can’t point to a particular conversation, or event, or achievement, or failure that has changed my point of view. The only thing I can think of – as you may have guessed by now – is that I read Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland by Lewis Carroll.

It is a strange, fantastical, funny book, brilliant in spite of – or perhaps because – there is no real plot, or moral, or lesson that we must learn. It is a masterpiece, and it also brought me some peace. We are such unimportant things – either individually or as a species – in the universe, and yet we want to imagine ourselves important, essential, consequential. We want to control history, and time itself, and everything around us, and yet my small attempts to do so usually tend to end up in unhappiness and frustration. My friend is right.

Despite our best efforts one way or the other, the universe still appears to be expanding in an orderly way much as it always has done since that unimaginable, unmeasurable moment just after the Big Bang. We, the eventual – but by no means the most perfect or final – product of it remain curious and hopeful. And crazy and self-destructive. And creative and brilliant. And argumentative and conciliatory. The biggest, and smallest, picture can sometimes put things into perspective.

“Cheshire Puss,” she began, rather timidly, as she did not at all know whether it would like the name: however, it only grinned a little wider. …. “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”

“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.

“I don’t much care where—” said Alice.

“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.

Simon Ward