[image: 800px-Nornorna_vid_Urdarbrunnen.jpg]
*Norns:  * Nordic Fates
Or, to be fair, we could call the Fates "Greek Norns."
The three Norns with a capital N -as opposed to the numerous magical norns
who overpopulate the Nordic mythological realm and attend to births- are
named Wyrd (Urd), Verdandi and Skuld.    Although Wyrd is often seen as
presiding over the past, while Verdandi and Skuld govern the present and
future, respectively, their principal function is to tend to the
Yggdrasill, the Nordic realm's central tree.    This tree supports and
sustains the nine worlds, one of which, Midgard, is the human realm.
The Norns reside around the Well of Fate and draw out its water to nourish
Yggdrasill.   Though they attend to Yggdrasill diligently, the Norns
realize that this all important tree, like everything and everyone in the
Nordic realm, will ultimately decay and perish.     Their aim is not to
sustain Yggdrasil for eternity, but, instead, to keep its inevitable
deterioration in abeyance.

The acknowledgement of inescapable destruction, Ragnarok, is the chief
point of dissimilarity that distinguishes the Nordic and Greek mythological
realms.   While Zeus and his cohorts fully intend to frolic through the
sunlit Olympian uplands forever, Odin and his brood accept that their
majestic realm will someday disintegrate and literally end up
underwater. Although this realization lends this mythological realm a
bleakness  perfectly reflecting the harsh Nordic winters, its inhabitants
live all the more earnestly in fierce defiance of it.   Their keen
awareness of death, like an ever-present shadow of interminable winter
nights, endows everything from the grandest god to the gentlest elf and
humblest troll with an incandescent life-fire that advancing age serves
only to intensify.  Even death, itself, will not extinguish all, for when
the stoutest warriors perish nobly on the battlefield, the frightfully
formidable Valkyries spirit them away to Valhalla to dine with the gods
themselves.  There they await the ultimate collapse of the Universe with
brandished swords, thunderous laughter and undaunted courage.

Overseeing it all, from start to end, are the three Norns who, like their
Greek counterparts, draw out the life threads of the mortals and gods,
alike.   Even Odin, himself, falls under their jurisdiction and, much to
his chagrin, cannot overrule them.  He must yield to Norns, just as all the
others.     Yet, they too, will be ultimately cast asunder with the rest, a
fate that the Nordic fates are, themselves, powerless to avert.



THE SOUTHWORTH PLANETARIUM
207-780-4249   www.usm.maine.edu/planet
<http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.usm.maine.edu%2Fplanet&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNHulkHuLP13bOG2PkNrPazsGWFs2A>
70 Falmouth Street   Portland, Maine 04103
43.6667° N                   70.2667° W
Altitude:  10 feet below sea level
Founded January 1970
Julian Date:  2459228.18
2020-2021:  LXXII
                   "On the one hand there was the 17th century: a walk
through the gloom of an abandoned abbey and a search for a long lost
manuscript.  On the
other hand there was the late 19th century:  a governess of two children
driven to madness by visiting spirits.     Both the 17th century and the
19th century were encapsulated in different books.   In my left hand, 'The
Romance of the Forest,' and in the right 'The Turn of the Screw.'
            For one hour each night, with the lowest possible light and
a quiet
disturbed only by the softest ambient tones, I read two pages from one book
and then switched to read two pages from the other, before returning to the
first book after which I would resume my readings of the second.   Perhaps
this exercise sounds both tedious and confusing.    Yet, it proved to be
one of the most profound experiences
I've ever had.
            When I read 'The Romance of the Forest," I was in the company
of earnest and desperate people driven by the passions of love, terror and
the urgency of flight into an oppressively silent realm of grey-tinctured
sky and tenebrous catacombs. When I read 'The Turn of the Screw,' I
encountered a young woman and her two charges to whom she would bestow
suffocating affections as a protection against spirits that perhaps she
alone would see.   As I was with the 19th century woman and children, I
knew in the back of my mind that those  intense, determined and vibrant
17th century abbey dwellers were long since dead, even though they were as
close as my left hand.     When I returned to the 17th century, I knew that
the governess, and children were not yet born...that more than two
centuries would have to elapse before
they took form.    They were nonexistent, even though they were at the same
time engaged in life as fully as anybody could be in my right hand.
             Night after night, I read both books alternately for precisely
one hour. I would then return to the early 21st century and try without
success to absorb every ounce of that moment.  The experience of witnessing
the separate, but simultaneous time streams of two societies was inviting
but also eluding me:
like a furtive apparition flitting about my periphery.  The more I focused
upon it, the more deftly it evaded my scrutiny.
             On one particular night, I wandered outside to observe the
night sky and  allowed myself to entertain the mad notion  that I was at
that moment in the left hand of a 24th century reader who also held a 22nd
century
stargazer in his right hand. We two stargazers separated by as much as two
hundred years, and  as little as ten inches of desk space.   Like strata
of soil, we run parallel and simultaneous when viewed from the proper
perspective.
             Insane?  Hardly.   I regarded the night sky in that deep
midnight quiet.   If I am psychotic  for harboring such thoughts, then the
night sky is a madman's delusion.    Those stars.  All of them
burning fiercely earnest in their own space
and time, but not here and not now.    Up there amongst that society of
remote lights is a star more than 400 light years away.    It is the
Scorpion's heart (Antares), but that hardly matters.     On the other side
of the sky a star more than 100 light years away: It is in Perseus, the eye
of Medusa, but that, too, is inconsequential.     What matters are the
stars themselves.
 The scorpion's heart star. Antares, blazed before me as it did in the 17th
century when Adelaide stole away in the dark forest to escape the Abbey and
its underworld community of stone quiet skeletons. Off to the right part of
the sky is Medusa's eye star, Algol, with its sinister wink.    This wink
is the slow passage of one star in front of the other.  I had seen Algol
the night before, when it was brightest.  That particular night, it was
dimmer.  I knew that through this light diminishment I was witnessing the
 gradual occultation of the primary star, though it didn't happen in my
present.  It actually occurred when the 19th
century governess witnessed the black clad ghost of Miss Jessel appear in
the window: a voiceless wraith rendered hardly less menacing by a
beauty slowly corrupted by  death's pallor.  There they both were:  the
phantom imprints of Algol and Antares, spectres of the same night sky,
 performing their temporal trickeries before a world that often prefers to
see the sky prosaically.   Yet, it certainly isn't.    The stars are all
ghosts of various epochs and the firmament a crafty interplay of juxtaposed
time streams and deceptions of proximity.
             I knew then that well in the future, others would regard Algol
and Antares as they were at the moment that I stood there, oblivious to
all summer's natural murmurs around me .  They would see my moment years or
even centuries after my time stream had  settled into silence and joined
all the others.     But, they hadn't  yet.    And on that
particular night, that fact was solace enough for me."


THE SOUTHWORTH PLANETARIUM
207-780-4249   www.usm.maine.edu/planet
<http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.usm.maine.edu%2Fplanet&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNHulkHuLP13bOG2PkNrPazsGWFs2A>
70 Falmouth Street   Portland, Maine 04103
43.6667° N                   70.2667° W
Altitude:  10 feet below sea level
Founded January 1970
Julian Date:  2459228.18
2020-2021:  LXXII

THE DAILY ASTRONOMER
Thursday, January 14, 2021
Exploratorium VII:   The Block Universe

[image: block-universe-theory_resize_md.jpg]

Is everything that ever happened, that is happening now and that will
happen in the future all actually happening now?   In the same way that
Sydney, Paris and Lagos exist separately, but simultaneously, are the Big
Bang, the signing of the Magna Carta, the first human expedition to
Betelgeuse 3, and the last moment of the Universe all moments that are
out there somewhere in the grand space-time matrix?       You're reading
this article now.  Is your birth, your death , the birth of a remote
ancestor and that of a future descendant also happening?

Yes, indeed, according to the Block Universe Theory which posits that the
entire four dimensional Universe (depth, breadth, length and time) form an
immense "block"      Though you are experiencing "now" while you read this
sentence, the past and future are actually also happening somewhere else in
the block.

[image: box-universe_resize_md.jpg]

Somewhere, the first stars (Population III) are forming.   Somewhere else,
Isaac Newton is working feverishly on the Principia Mathematica.  Somewhere
else, a small group of alien scientists somewhere in the Andromeda Galaxy
(AD 2 million) are realizing that the atom containing nine protons is the
most electronegative of all elements.  Somewhere else, the Universe is
vast, dark and contains little more than black holes slowly "evaporating"
Hawking radiation into the void.

This theory, which arose from the equally strange Quantum theory,  states
that time doesn't flow like a river, Heraclitus.  Instead, all time exists
simultaneously and we move through it, just like we move through physical
space.   However, we cannot return to a point in the past any more than we
can jump ahead to experience a moment in the distant future, at least not
with the technology currently available to us.  (Or perhaps we never
will.)   Some people might protest that  we can always return to the same
point in space whenever we wish to do so.   We never do, though.    Recall
all the motion currently happening in the Universe:

   - rotating Earth
   - Earth revolving around the Sun
   - Sun moving through the galaxy
   - Milky Way moving through the Local Group of Galaxies
   - Local Group motions with the Virgo Supercluster
   - Cosmic expansion

We never stay still and cannot occupy the same point in space-time twice.
   Yes, you can return to your childhood home or you can revisit that place
which evokes those powerful memories over and over again.  However, those
places will always be occupying different places in space-time.    So, too,
will you.

The unfortunate aspect of the Block Universe theory is that we cannot
disprove it. (By the scientific method, one can only disprove a theory.)
 Well, again, we can't with our current technology.     However, it is
intriguing to contemplate that you and your past exist out there somewhere,
albeit inaccessibly.      Moreover, while each of us believes that we wake
up every day to meet our future, that future exists right now and is merely
waiting for us to arrive.



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