The Biggest Room in Town

Gravitation Lensing on Earth

There’s something bizarre in the Universe called a Gravitational Lens.

This is how it works:

Einstein thought of space and time intertwined, a fabric. Something massive like a star would noticeably warp it. Sir Arthur Eddington proved him right with photos taken during the 1919 solar eclipse.

What about big warps in space, acting as giant telescope lenses? It would have to wait till 1979 to discover the “Einstein Cross”, a galaxy bending light of one quasar into four images.

When a bigger galaxy, or cluster of galaxies, acts a lens, one can see far, far away–and by default, into the past. It looks like this. (Note the red Salvador Dali looking things. Those are incredibly distant galaxies, bent by the foreground blurs of white.)

Have you seen one of these lenses? I haven’t with my own eyes–until yesterday, when I realized they’re all around.

Summertime

I went to see some pals down the street way across town, gathering in the shade of a room to discuss…anything. We read the first chapter of Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine.

“Summer 1928 began.”

The General added that time his New Jersey town’s fire department would shoot off one welcome firework at 8 am every Forth of July. “You knew it was the day.”

Carol spoke of three town churches, each with their own Sunday in summer, each with their own ice cream social, and each family with their own top secret recipe for the strawberry, or vanilla, or blackberry, or peach, or caramel, and we could all almost taste that hand-churned goodness, cranked from after the service till serving time, and catch the smell of hot dogs wafting up from the basement. “We couldn’t wait for church to be over.”

Don added the parades in Nashville, and how there would always be a ruckus, but a good one, and then the small town that was quiet, with the crunch of gravel being loudest.

Roberta told me about getting up early with her brothers and cousins, and the adventure: boat down the river from their town to the city, but usually getting stuck. “I wasn’t there the time they made it. Took ‘em four years. Four years.”

Betsy spoke of Sun Valley–Sun Valley, what a name–the special pool with family and the joy of it, and we sat in air conditioning in the present day and saw the immense Summers Past, all crammed into one comfortable room, and I could almost smell barbecue smoke and hear the corn on the cob sizzling down by the coals. Watch out! A lawn dart.

The human psyche is massive like a star, or a galaxy, these memories bending the view until we see far, far into the past.

Time can be lensed. Spacetime. Suddenly I sat in the biggest room in town. I heard the fountain at the pool from when I was a boy, somewhere up by the corner of the shutters.

No wonder the day seemed extra humid, dense as a neutron star, extra summers shimmering in the air–somehow more than a mirage.