Friday, February 3, 2012

Winter Reflections: Of stars and bugs

As I sit at my desk, a bug flutters by. It and its family share my home, adding little but some small annoyance. They are each about the size of the period at the end of this sentence. Yes, that dot, or maybe smaller. They seem to waft like a slow-motion knuckleball, though still too swift in their gyrations for me to catch them (except when I do) and they are easily killed once entrapped. But I look at these things and wonder, does it have a name (I’m hoping some scientist has dubbed it something like Timwakefieldius minoris). More importantly, does it have a brain? I know it has wings and I assume it has sex organs because spontaneous generation is no longer de rigueur in the scientific world. But how to cram all that and a digestive system and sensory organs into such a small space, and why—yes, yes, I know the story of David asking God why are there spiders, but I’m not David—all elude me.

Then I look up to the sky. It’s glorious in the winter. When there are neither clouds nor moon and the air is crisp I can see to the South the Great Winter Oval, an asterism consisting of first magnitude stars from six different constellations. Starting at what appears to be the top and proceeding clockwise there’s Capella from Auriga (the Charioteer), Aldebaran from Taurus (the Bull), Rigel of Orion (the Hunter), Sirius of the Great Dog, Procyon from the Little Dog and Pollux of the Twins. In the midst of all this, just a bit off center, is Betelgeuse, which forms the right shoulder of Orion. Viewed as in a gallery over my neighbor’s house this elongated circle forms an enormous object d’art. The red giant Betelgeuse throbs, big enough to cover our solar system at least to Mars, and possibly beyond. No Timwakefieldius minoris here. And yet, these glorious points of light are only the local eye-catchers. Our galaxy has about 200 billion stars (estimates vary) and there are probably as many galaxies as stars in our Milky Way. In the autumn, find Andromeda, two lines of stars that seem to come out of the square that is the constellation Pegasus (the flying horse). If you know just where to look, out of the corner of your eye (you can’t see it straight on) is the gauzy blur of the Andromeda Galaxy, a good 2 million light-years away (a light year is approximately five-trillion miles. Now multiply that by 2 million and you’ll agree that it’s not walking distance). It’s the farthest thing you can see with the naked eye.

How big is the universe? It depends on who you ask, but a good guess is that its diameter is just shy of 14 billion light-years from here. All of which makes me think that none of us is much more, and probably considerably less, than a Timwakefieldius minoris in the grand sweep of things.

The psalmist asks:

“When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, …what is mankind that you are mindful of us, human beings that you care for us?” and then answers his own question, “You have made us a little lower than the angels and crowned us with glory and honor.” Well, that’s one approach. Shakespeare expressed another: “Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

So, who is closer to the mark, the psalmist or the bard? I know not but as old age creeps upon me, as I look at the tiny bug and at the glorious stars and imagine the unimaginable vastness of the universe beyond, I think … it must be Shakespeare. We come, we go, like the tiny Timwakefieldius minoris unremarkable in the vastness, alone in our teeniest speck of the corner we occupy of outer space. So, petty as we are, it is the petty that consumes us. Locally this is expressed in the anger directed at a young woman who wants to honor the spirit of Rhode Island’s founder and of the US Constitution by fighting to remove a prayer from a public school. To quote Shakespeare one more time, “Lord, what fools these mortals be!”

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