Lost in space
Sometime this week I’m going to have to write a post about my weekend with my parents in D.C., which was superfun. Did you know that D.C. is, like, the cleanest city ever? Well, the cleanest but for Vancouver. You can probably eat off the sidewalks in Vancouver, or at least that was my impression when I last visited (in, um, 2005). I remember walking into a 7-11 in Vancouver (in search of booze, which it turns out they don’t really have in 7-11s in Vancouver) and thinking, “This is the cleanest 7-11 I’ve ever seen. It’s so sterile you could perform surgery in here.” Also, ketchup flavored potato chips! Which I must confess, ketchup fiend though I am, I never had the temerity to try.
Anyway, when you live in New York, which is, truth be told, one huge garbage dump with a population of 10 million (not pulling any punches today!), you learn to appreciate walking down the street without being assaulted by the smell of trash rotting in the sun. Somehow, it makes the heat and humidity a little easier to withstand.
But enough with the whining! Those who follow my Tumblr might have noticed that I’ve been posting a little about How the Universe Got Its Spots by Janna Levin. Janna Levin is an astrophysicist/cosmologist, and How the Universe Got Its Spots is a popular science book (by which I mean that is a book about science written for regular-type people and not astrophysicists) she wrote in the form of letters to her mother in which she attempts to explain, in the simplest ways possible, what she does for a living. Levin does a lot of research in the field of topology, which is the study of the shape of the universe. But you can’t just go from, “Dear Mom” to “This is what topology is” because topology is actually quite complex for your average non-physicist, so most of the book is dedicated to teaching the reader about the fundamental tenets of space and time (and spacetime), and in some respects the history of how we came to know what we think we know about space and time (in essence: first there were the ancients, then there was Copernicus, then there was Newton, then there was Einsten, and then after Einstein there were lots of other people, and all of those great minds together gave us the fuzzy, albeit logical, picture we have of where the universe came from, where it’s going, how it operates, and how it continues to flummox us).
This was my second time tackling How the Universe Got Its Spots. It’s not that long-in fact, less than 250 pages. But even though Levin does a good job of talking the reader through Newtonian physics and Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity, the actual field of her research-topology-is too complex for my puny little nerd brain. I want to understand it, and I lectured at my roommate last night in a feeble attempt to understand it (talking through things is the best way I know of to understand them), but I know that my grasp on the concept (on many of the concepts, actually) is weak and transitory at best. Levin lost me this time at precisely the point where she lost me the last time. My goal in reading Levin’s book, and in reading Brian Green’s The Fabric of the Cosmos, which I also eventually abandoned because I just cannot grasp string theory, is to remember Einstein’s theories of relativity and the concept of spacetime, and to remember that cosmic background radiation, the echo of the Big Bang, exists, because this is all very important to my understanding of what I’m trying to do with the book I’m working on now.
And wouldn’t you know it? I sat down last night to watch the episode of The Universe I’d taped and guess what? It was a two-hour special all about The Big Bang. It dovetailed perfectly with How the Universe Got Its Spots, so I sat down and gobbled the whole thing up. I got dorkily excited when they started going over the same things Levin had brought up (Newton, Einstein, cosmic background radiation) and not only did I KNOW WHAT THEY WERE TALKING ABOUT, but I could articulate the points relatively well given the fact that I am, in fact, a moron.
I am totally, totally into space, as you may have noticed. I have been since I was a child. I even went to Space Camp back when it was a thing that you could really do! Or whatever, you can still go to Space Camp, but not in Florida, which was the coolest Space Camp, not least because of its proximity to Disney World. The first time I ever tasted Dippin’ Dots was at Space Camp (they called them Space Dots, which lead me to believe that NASA had invented them-FALSE). We even got to watch the launch of the Mars Global Surveyor at Cape Canaveral from the roof of the Space Camp dorms. It turns out that a lot of people are totally into space, including my roommate, which is why this weekend we’re taking what will be my first trip to the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, which is conveniently located right in my neighborhood (er, sort of-if you have a slightly flexible definition of “neighborhood”). So excited! I’ll let you know how it goes, maybe even Tumbl a few pics.
Originally published at AnnaJarzab.com