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
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
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.
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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