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Founded January 1970
2021-2022: XIV
"If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is." -John von Neumann
THE DAILY ASTRONOMER
Tuesday, September 21,2021
What Did Helen Do?
Or A Jumble of Space-Time Discontinuities.
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An alternate Universe branched off of the original. Our apologies for the inconvenience. We had originally intended to devote today's article to the recent Jupiter impact. That event will be the focus of Thursday's DA...unless another branch off occurs.
Now, in this new reality, we return to Helen of Troy. Yes, we did hear that exasperated sigh followed by the despairing lament, "Mythology again?!" Please bear with us, Ursa Major.
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What did the real Helen do?
That was the intriguing question a few subscribers asked us yesterday. If you missed yesterday's article, we mentioned that the mythological Helen of Troy, the one whose face launched a thousand ships and burned the topless towers of Ilium, was abducted by Paris and spirited away to Troy. Her abduction precipitated the famous Trojan War. However, Hera, who hated Paris with an unslakable passion for having awarded the golden apple to Aphrodite, was said to have stolen Helen and replaced her with a cloud that looked, felt, and even sounded like the original. Paris actually kidnapped this cloud. The entire 10-year skirmish was therefore fought over a fog-based doppleganger instead of the "real" Helen. She was said to have remained safely in Egypt while the Greeks and Trojans fought valiantly -and vainly- over her.
Well, some readers asked, "What did she do while she was in Egypt? What did she do after the Trojan War?"
Second question first. Well, while the Greeks were joyfully sacking Troy, Menelaus was reunited with Helen who, on their first evening together, promptly dissolved at, by all accounts, a particularly tender moment. (And, yes, we are going to avoid the details.) The chagrined Menalaus then complained to Hera, the goddess of marriage. His annoyance was understandable. Nothing ruins intimacy more than realizing that you've just bestowed lavish affection on a cloud bank. Hera instructed Menelaus to travel to Egypt to collect his wife. He was also told not to mention the deception to the other Greeks. (Menelaus was wise enough to have taken THAT secret to his grave.) Helen then returned to Sparta with Menelaus on her own accord. She and Menelaus conceived two children, Hermione (no, not that Hermione) and Niccostratus. After Menelaus' death, Helen was said to have traveled to Rhodes where the queen Polyxo, bitterly envious of Helen's lasting beauty, had her hanged.
As for what she did in Egypt.
Who knows?
We have scant knowledge of what transpired in Helen's life during her stay in Egypt because, well, unlike the physical Universe we inhabit, the mythological Universe is riddled with space-time discontinuities. It is a patchwork montage of sagas, poems, legends, and epics. As brilliant as many of these accounts were, they were far less than comprehensive. They had gaps, some as wide as a yawning maw. After all, Homer's masterwork, the Iliad, focused primarily on the last fifty days of the Trojan War. Apollodorus covers the entire Trojan war, but did so in an almost cursory fashion.
One finds these space-time holes through not only mythology, but throughout literature. Who knows what Hamlet ate for breakfast three days before his father died? How did Scrooge react when Bob Cratchit asked for New Year's day off, too? If the ancient mythological poets, the true gods who created the mythological Universe, didn't write about a certain time or event, that time or event will remain forever non-existent.
Our Universe isn't like that.
At least on the macroscopic level, these discontinuities don't exist. For instance, something is happening at Mount Everest's summit at the moment, even though nobody is present to witness whatever is transpiring. That is true of the moon's far side, the Sun's interior and the ice-coated renegade planets currently careening through intergalactic space. For instance, who knows what happens in this star dome when nobody is inside it? Perhaps in the middle of some quiet night years ago, a holographic iridescent icosahedron released long ago by the hyper-mathematicans of Beta Pavonis glided through the dome, down through the floor and then through the planet en route to deep space. Perfectly possible, but never knowable. (Here we will cheerfully ignore the philosophers who wonder if the unobserved truly exists. Philosophers are brainy types who delight in making difficulties.)
When we interact with the mythological, we must acknowledge its surfeit of space-time discontinuities. '
If nothing else, consider this article to be the longest, most insufferable "I don't know" ever to be found outside the halls of Congress.
Tomorrow, equinox talk....we think.
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