Looking Up and Down

A false-color view of the Cartwheel Galaxy

Maybe things will start to look up here on earth if we each could spend a little time looking up.  Professor Andrea Ghez of UCLA Galactic Center Group has been looking up for a long time.  She is developing high spatial resolution imaging techniques to see things in our galaxy and far out into space previously not visible with traditional imaging technology.  Her work in observing space at infrared wavelengths may well prove the hypothesis that there is a massive black hole at the center of our galaxy.  Don’t panic, we still have a few billion years in which to come up with a Plan B. 

I was spent a few hours listening to Professor Ghez over the Thanksgiving holiday courtesy of my pal Norma Acland, a UCLA alumnus.  Norma’s brother, Ian Gatley, is an astronomer (currently Dean of the College of Science at Rochester Institute of Technology) and was a leading researcher in infrared wavelength imaging into star-forming regions of space.  Norma refers to her bro as one of a handful of cowboy astronomers in the ‘70s who scrambled up mountains and built their own equipment to pursue this, then unknown, field of research.  Norma declared her astronomical connections to Andrea Ghez, who immediately affirmed Ian’s fame and influence in the community. When Ghez and Gatley say, “a star is born” and show you photographs, it somehow resonates a lot more than when Entertainment Weekly makes the same statement.

I stumbled out of Andrea Ghez’ joyful presentation, my mind boggled with thoughts and images. How small our planet is. How indescribably gorgeous is the human capacity for knowledge.  We have a galactic storehouse of information gathered over the second of universal time we have existed, yet here we are still peering into the unknown and attempting to decipher all we see.

As I slowly returned to earth the weight of all the bad news of recent weeks lifted.  We have a vast number of problems to face and overcome, but humans are a passionate, ingenious and persistent species.  I am reminded of Voltaire’s eighteenth century novella Candide.  It is a timeless and darkly comic tale of a man wrenched from his idyllic existence and subjected to unspeakable horrors, as he searches the world for his lost love. Voltaire, after witnessing war and other disasters, wrote this seeming unflinching rejection of an optimistic worldview.  However, in the end and much changed by experience, Candide does succeed in finding his love and settling down to a simple existence.  In the final passages he declares, “We should stop philosophizing and cultivate one’s garden as the only defense against boredom and dissatisfaction.”

Whichever of the myriad interpretations of “cultivate one’s garden” is used—the mind, a patch of earth, our children—it is a marvelously good idea for right now.