I don’t know about you, dear reader, but I for one do most of my important thinking in the shower. In fact, it might be said that I do not do any thinking except in the shower. What it is about the bathtub and soapy water that stimulates deep contemplation is still, as I understand, an open scientific question. Anyways, it was while taking such a shower recently that I began to reflect on the cosmos (as one does). If you have been following the news, you might have noticed that the universe has been up to all manner of mischief recently. Earlier this week, astronomers informed us that they finally succeeded in taking an image of the teeny tiny puny supermassive blackhole at the center of our galaxy (The black hole is only 4 million times the mass of our sun … those astronomers are a judgey lot, aye?) Then tonight, God, the prankster, will turn the moon blood red for a whole hour.
These developments, I must admit, unsettled me a bit. I find it difficult, however, to explain exactly why I feel unsettled. Of course, I know that these portents are perfectly explicable in the language of modern science. The moon turns red because it’s hiding behind earth’s shadow (where else would it hid), and as for black holes, I have it on good authority that their existence is perfectly intelligible and can be demonstrated by means of what I believe to be math of some kind. No, dear reader, my trouble stems not from reason but from sources more spiritual and subtle. To put it simply, I was unsettled because I was faced with the strangeness and the variability of a night sky with whose predictability I had grown comfortable. Perhaps you do not understand my meaning, I am, after all, more subtle than most, and so allow me to utilize the following analogy in the Socratic tradition. Imagine discovering that your perfectly sane and reasonable roommate is an avid unicyclist. Up until the fateful discovery, the two of you hung out often and had a normal, healthy, predictable relationship. You felt that you understood your roommate, i.e. your internally generated image of your roommate matched the actions and habits of your actual roommate well enough. Then one day while headed to class, you run across your roommate flying down the road on a unicycle. You are naturally a little surprised, you did not expect this and are not sure what to make of it. Of course, there is nothing unreasonable or physically impossible about a man riding a unicycle … There are many people all over the world who ride unicycles for all sorts of reasons. What surprises you though is that clearly you do not understand your roommate as well as you thought you did. With this surprise there also comes a feeling of unease … You discover that in some sense you have been sharing your apartment with a stranger all this time. Clearly the internally generated image of your roommate will need to be readjusted to fit the unicycling episode.
The same readjustment is even more necessary for my relationship with the night sky. In a way, the night sky is closer and more familiar to me than a roommate. Who after all sees his roommate every night? The fact that the moon turns red is stranger than for a person to ride a unicycle (I have never seen the moon turn red before whereas I have seen a person ride a unicycle). Yes, a readjustment is necessary. No longer can I assume that the space between the stars is empty. Perhaps, the blackness is only the blackness of a blackhole in distant space. When I look up at the moon, I can no longer assume that its color will be white, because sometime it can be red … and if it can be red, who knows what other colors it could be … neon green perhaps? It is all terribly exciting to think about, and when I had this revelation in the shower, I smiled to myself stupidly and continued scrubbing with the loofa in an ecstasy of joy.