>From the NY Times
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November 26, 2002
A Wanderer at Home in Grass and Stardust
By DENNIS OVERBYE
Where's home, cowboy?"
That's what you get for wearing your brand-new cowboy boots into a bar in a big Eastern city. Although I grew up in the West, I've never been a cowboy. I don't remember how I deflected that friendly bartender's question — it was long ago when I went in for such affectations as boots that would never meet a stirrup — but the question has bothered me ever since, mainly because, like many men of a certain age who have moved around too much, I don't know the answer anymore.
That question came back to me very late one night last week as I was lying in the grass in the darkest part of Riverside Park I could find, staring at a tree-fringed swath of sky looking for shooting stars.
It was the final hour of the earth's yearly passage through a band of dust and rocks that marks the orbit of Comet 55P/Tempel-Tuttle. As the earth plows into that cloud, crumbs of matter left behind by the comet scream into the atmosphere and die a breathtaking death that we call the Leonid meteor shower.
Every 30 years or so that shower produces fireworks to rival the end of the world, with thousands of meteors blazing evanescent streaks across the sky, and this was the last year of one of those peaks, the last chance in my lifetime to experience celestial fury. Astronomers say it won't be this good again for decades.
At least a storm of flashing fireballs is what I imagined was going on over my head as I looked up at the light-besotted Manhattan sky. There were just enough stars visible to reassure me that I wasn't wasting my time staring at a cloudbank. I chalked up the first brief, almost subliminal streaks of light I saw to reflections in my glasses or head movements, but after a few more I decided they were real meteors, flakes of cosmic dandruff falling. None lasted longer than an eye blink.
For some people, including my mother, the idea of lying in a New York park in the middle of the night might seem reckless at best. But as I lay there, I realized I was actually quite comfortable. In fact, even though the grass was wet and lumpy and I had to hold my head up with my hands while shielding my eyes from the street lamps in the distance, and in fact I was freezing, I had never felt more natural and comfortable in New York, where I have now lived this time around for five years.
I felt, well, at home.
Where is home, cowboy? My mind buzzed. Was it the apartment a few yards away where my wife and our cats were still sleeping in a warm heap? Was it the Northwest where my family still lives and where the mountains and the salmon call to me every summer? Or the farmhouse in Woodstock where I spent a decade writing books and learning to use a chain saw?
Maybe my concept of home was too small. With a swell of purple-mountained pride and a nostalgia for Fenway Park hot dogs, I wondered if America was my home. But my people all came from Norway 100 years ago. My blondish, fair-skinned and blue-eyed genes were adapted for the midnight sun and the gloomy winters above some fjord, so maybe that's home. Except that I've never been there. And everybody, anthropologists say, eventually came from Africa. I've never been there either.
So perhaps I should think even bigger, that the earth itself is the only sensible home. Surely it is the only place we know of that harbors life. But life's origin might transcend any one particular planet, astronomers say. Some of them have speculated that the water that fills the earth's oceans, and the organic molecules from which life eventually evolved, were delivered here by comets, which are half water ice, during a hellish bombardment soon after the earth was formed 4.5 billion years ago and the nascent solar system was full of debris careering dangerously between the planets.
The cosmologist and astrophysicist Fred Hoyle, author of the so-called steady state theory of an eternal unchanging universe, may have talked himself out of a Nobel Prize by arguing that viruses come from comets.
But the trail didn't stop there. Astronomers tell me that the atoms of carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and iron in my bones as well as in comets were forged by thermonuclear reactions in stars that came before us and were blown here on the winds of supernova explosions.
The solar system's home, in short, is the Milky Way galaxy. We circle the galaxy once about every 250 million years, which sounds like a long time, but the sun has had time to make 18 trips around the Milky Way since it was formed — more times than I have been to Europe. That's a lot of opportunity for cosmic enrichment. Astronomers estimate that about 40,000 tons of dust from comets and asteroids fall into the atmosphere every year.
But the Milky Way, like all galaxies, and the process by which it has enriched itself and cradled life in one corner of itself, is a creature of the universe, that is to say, of the laws of physics. And it is to those laws that we perhaps owe the ultimate allegiance.
As the visionary Princeton physicist Dr. John Archibald Wheeler once wrote in an essay titled "The Universe as Home for Man," these laws appear "tuned" to produce life the way a plant produces a flower. A slight twist of the cosmic knobs determining the masses of elementary particles, for example, and there would be no stars or no molecules to make us out of. As a result, there has been a recent spate of glossy magazine covers trumpeting the convergence of those allegedly ancient foes, science and religion. Astronomers, they say, have discovered God by discovering that we live in a "designer universe."
That's a respectable point of view, but many cosmologists have taken a harder-headed tack, saying their theories of where the Big Bang got its juice point to an infinite multiplicity of universes erupting continuously, like mushrooms out of the same dirt, for all eternity. Nobody knows if they all have to come out the same.
There could be universes full of nothing but black holes, empty universes, universes that lived a second and wilted, universes with 1, 3 or 10 dimensions. (The most advanced versions of string theory, the modern "theory of everything," posit that space-time actually has 11 dimensions but most of them can be curled up, like the loops in a carpet pile, so tiny we don't notice them.) We live in one of the lucky universes, so the story goes. Home is where there are four dimensions and four corners.
Lying in Riverside Park fighting off the cold and the growing realization that the ground was mostly mud, and clinging to the reality of a few fleeting streaks of light, I didn't know how much reality to ascribe to other universes, to "places" that you can't get to from here. I still have a hard time visualizing those points of light in the sky as deep in space and not just painted on a dome in front of my nose. Who among us, after all, can measure his stride against a light-year?
I'm not going to say I believe those other universes are real, potential homes to somebody or something, even though friends occasionally ask me which of them I am inhabiting today. But it haunts me that other universes might not be any crazier for their time than the notion of other worlds was 500 or 1,000 years ago, before telescopes proved that the lights in the sky were in fact places, however remote, where there was physics, weather and geography.
The stars and planets are distant, but they are not infinitely distant. Time is even deeper. In the fullness of cosmic time we can become as intimate with distant stars as with lovers. We've all inhaled stardust.
And we did again last week.
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Doubt.
Doubt thyself.
Doubt even if thou doubtest thyself.
Doubt all.
Doubt even if thou doubtest all.
It seems sometimes as if beneath all conscious doubt
there lay some deepest certainty. O kill it! Slay the
snake!
The horn of the Doubt-Goat be exalted
Dive deeper, ever deeper, into the Abyss of Mind,
until thou unearth the fox THAT. On, hounds!
Yoicks! Tally-ho! Bring THAT to bay!
Then, wind the Mort!
Uncle Al. the kiddies pal
NEURONAUTIC INSTITUTE on-line: http://home.earthlink.net/~thew
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