Astronomy Buff

Compared to Love, Infinity is Just A Sideways Eight

by Tony on February 8th, 2007

Skewed perspective time (”Yay.” “Daddy, I’m scared.” “It’s alright son, I’ll protect you from the strange man.” “w00t.”).

This is my contribution to the Science and Health Channel Theme Day, which this month is love.

Lately my life has afforded me many opportunities for reflection on matters of love and the heart. I’ve invested a extensive amount of time thinking about how love develops, what keeps it alive and thriving and what limits exist, if any, on this most intense emotion.

There’s no question to anyone whose ever been in love, that the experience is life-defining and completely absorbing. It sucks you in like black hole, engulfing you until you are utterly unrecognizable at the end of the journey.

It is a fierce experience. Severe and sharp, exquisite and excruciating. It tests you unlike any other human experience. It forces you to question your sanity, your judgment, everything that has ever defined you. You begin to search for ways to describe it, the intensity, the raw emotion, the vulnerability and the overwhelming expansion of your being.

For me, the need to understand what the hell I’m doing becomes consuming; the scientist in me wants to describe and quantify so that I can get some goddam sleep. I must know what the f*&k is going on!

I mean, if I don’t get a grip, it’s enough to make me want to get in a car and drive 900 miles in a diaper.

So I attempt to compare the experience with the only thing that seems barely able to contain it: the universe. Ideas like infinity are usually too hard for our brains to fully appreciate. Concepts like the size and age of the universe are essentially meaningless intellectually, the number of stars, planets and atoms in the cosmos completely fly over our heads, and the intensity and ferocity of black holes are just mathematical constructs. The true meaning of these things is virtually lost on us.

Compared to the timescale of a human lifetime, the universe is simply beyond us in many important, crucial ways.

That is, until you begin to experience an emotion that encompasses you like no other, opens up your essence and gives you a true glimpse at infinity. The cosmos seems to actually shrink under the weight of it.

• There are over 100 billion stars in our galaxy. To search just 4% of those stars for life would take half the age of the universe. Yet I found her in less than a human lifetime.
• The Andromeda Galaxy is speeding toward us at 300,000 miles per hour. It will collide with our galaxy in five billion years, possibly throwing our solar system into oblivion. Going one day without talking with her is worse.
• The Hubble Space Telescope stared for over 11 days at a patch of sky smaller than the head of a pin held at arms length, where no stars AT ALL appeared to be, and returned an image containing 10,000 galaxies. I see at least that many when I look into her eyes for five minutes.
• The chances of the Earth getting hit by an asteroid large enough to destroy all life is roughly one impact every 500 million years. I found her among six billion people.

It could be argued that love is just a chemical reaction: peptides and amino acids spewing forth from our hypothalmus and interacting with our bodies, altering our perceptions, essentially driving us slowly insane. At times, I’m prepared to agree with that assessment (I know Lisa Nowak is).

But in order to truly understand our universe to the extent that our biology allows, we need to alter our perceptions every chance we get, sometimes in very extreme ways so that we may fully grasp the incredible potential and variety of the universe we live in. Altering these perceptions should be our life’s goal, we should always live outside of our comfort zone and take a good, hard look around.

We need all the perception we can muster to glimpse even a miniscule fraction of what the cosmos is. Humanity is just too small to fully get it, at least for now. With respect to the notion of infinity, the emotion of love helps us by altering our perceptions just enough to give us a flashing glance at its nature.

And I appreciate that more than I can say.

Yes, the universe is a very big place, perhaps even infinite, but I see now that there is no hope of it ever containing my love for her. I finally have a frame of reference from which I can understand infinity, and it’s not as big as I thought it was.

Now it’s just a sideways eight.

Technorati Tags: astronomy, SciHealth Theme Day, the end of the world

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