Darwin’s summary of the worm contains his usual mix of beauty and wonder at living things:
‘When we behold a wide, turf-covered expanse, we should remember that its smoothness, on which so much of its beauty depends, is mainly due to all the inequalities having been slowly levelled by worms. It is a marvellous reflection that the whole of the superficial mould over any such expanse has passed, and will again pass, every few years through the bodies of worms. The plough is one of the most ancient and most valuable of Man’s inventions; but long before he existed the land was in fact regularly ploughed, and still continues to be thus ploughed by earth-worms. It may be doubted whether there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world…’
Now gather up your bassoons and prepare to experiment, your garden awaits.
1 A renowned American botanist (1820–88).
INSIGNIFICANCE
A perspective
There is a problem of insignificance when looking at the night sky.
It takes four years for the light from the closest star to Earth, Proxima Centauri, to reach us.
It takes over 16,000 years for the light from the furthest star visible with the naked eye, V762 Cas in the constellation of Cassiopeia, to reach us. The light we see is older than our civilisation.
The Milky Way is a hundred thousand light years across, and it is one of billions of galaxies. You can understand that when dealing with such magnitudes, people can feel like specks, less than specks, barely the dust of our universe.
During every series of Monkey Cage we receive emails and letters from people questioning their own significance after being bamboozled by a cosmological episode.
‘I wish I’d never looked through that telescope, now I feel insignificant.’
After watching a lecture on the grandeur of the Universe, hearing about the light years between the billions of galaxies and the speed of expansion, with everything getting further and further apart, that sense of tiny speck-ness can be palpable. You don’t have to travel far from the Earth’s surface for human beings to become indistinguishable from the rivers, rocks and sea, and a little further away, you’ll find there’s no visible trace of the civilisation that glows and pulses as we walk through it.
As Voyager’s image of our planet as a ‘pale blue dot’, taken from the parochial proximity of Neptune, shows, you don’t have to travel a great distance for our home to look like nothing much at all.
The Pale Blue Dot, taken by Voyager 1 on Valentine’s Day, 1990, 6 billion kilometres from home.
Added to the complexity of your structure, even by Earth’s standards, your brain is complex and questioning. This may not be an ultimate advantage. It could be this very complexity that spells out your doom. You may be a creature so complex by the standards of the Cosmos that you are driven mad by this complexity. This ability to change your environment, to build and to destroy, to play around with matter at a subatomic scale, could be the making of you and the undoing of you.
Your significance may create and it may destroy.
There may be nothing else out there that will ever know that there was something that once thought and created colliders, and lasers and fibre-optic cables, and tried to find out how the Universe began and how it might end. Or other parts of the Universe may be teeming with life that would consider us as primitive as we consider a maggot.
You may be small, but you are unusual, and you know it, and there’s nothing else in this solar system beyond Earth that could say that, or say anything at all.
Every human, therefore, is a thing of great significance in a restricted but important sense. On a cosmic scale, our physical presence is of no consequence. We are temporary assemblies of ten billion billion billion atoms, and in a century or less they will all be returned for recycling. But for the briefest of moments these atoms are able to contemplate themselves. They will spend an eternity in darkness when we are gone. Our purpose should be to extend their moment in the light as best we can.
PHYSICS BRAIN
An examination
Robin writes:
The following piece is predominantly made up of anecdotal evidence, but I am currently working on a series of experiments to examine those neural connections in particle physicists that cannot be made.
From my experience with particle physicists, I have begun to note that in order to have a deep understanding of the structure of our universe, you may have to sacrifice other, more mundane skills, such as the ability to choose what socks to wear, how to make tea and cross the road effectively all the way to the other side.
One day, we were standing in the middle of the Lovell Telescope. It was a good day, not only were we at Jodrell Bank, but the science news was that gravitational waves had been detected.
We were ascending the ladders of the Lovell Telescope for a radio documentary about the General Theory of Relativity. We probably didn’t really need to, but we wanted to. If you ever get the chance to stand in the middle of a radio telescope, say yes. I first knew of the Lovell Telescope from watching Doctor Who – it was the final Tom Baker story, Logopolis. I’d also seen the telescope plenty of times as set dressing during BBC’s Stargazing, with Dara Ó Briain standing next to it saying, ‘sadly, there is quite a lot of cloud cover tonight, but behind the water vapour there should be lots of stars.’
When the telescope came into view, I experienced the same tongue-tied awe that I experienced when I saw the Grand Canyon for the first time. The lift took us to the walkway under the dish. Crossing to the final ladder, the previous dish, now decaying, surrounds you. This was where the first glimmers of psychogeography sparked. What information had this defunct dish, now shielded from the sky by the dish above it, collected in the previous century?
Climbing up what seems like little more than a stepladder, you are suddenly in a beautiful white, circular expanse. Brian had been up there before, including once for the shooting of a D:ream pop promo, but his trademark delight is not reserved for the TV cameras alone.
Our smiles are beatific. We climb a little up the side of the dish, the curvature creates an illusion that conceals the increasing steepness. The sky almost matches the colour of the dish. We look up and think of the data collected in this bowl. An Arctic-white steel structure in the middle of meadows should feel cold, but it doesn’t.
Here is the gatherer of radio waves emitted by astronomical objects. Here is the where signals of the metal-nosed