Cowabigbanga!
by Kim Pederson…….
Science is one of the many things that interfound (interest and confound) me constantly. Such is the case with the gravitational wave, the recent “rumored” discovery of which has many in the egghead community all a tither. Or as The Guardian put it, “scientists struggle to stay grounded after possible gravitational wave signal.” Such waves, to make it exceeding clear, are “ripples in the fabric of space-time.” When I read this, I pictured the solar system, galaxy, and universe sashaying around in one of my tres-not-chic t-shirts, the ironing-phobic cloth of which invariable resembles the face of a hungover Shar-Pei.
Anyway, if you’re like me, you’re now struggling to understand the nature and importance of the possible discovery of gravitational waves. If you’re not (lucky you!), you have gone back to watching Wolf Blitzer drone on about Donald Trump, Syria, and the Chinese economy (including, probably, the price of tea there) as you wonder when and how CNN replaced him with a cyborg. (Or is it an android? I always get them mixed up.)
For those of you still with me, grav waves occur when, say, two black holes collide. As they surge outward, they stretch and compress space-time, probably much like what we did to Sunday funny-paper images pressed into Silly Putty. The whole of space-time, in short, is like a carnival house of mirrors of immeasurable dimensions, something which gives me great pleasure to imagimate (imagine and contemplate). The scientists, too, are agog but for them it’s because they may get to record “primordial gravitational waves” as they pass, study them, and better understand things like the Big Bang.
What The Guardian and other sources did not tell us, however, was that another group of people is equally excited by the news. As uber-wave-rider Laird Dax Dover Dillan Bainbridge III put it, “Intergalactic surf’s up, man!” Laird might be facing his biggest challenge now, though: how to make tow-in surfing work in outer space. For this to happen, he will need to come up with a surfer space suit, a board with serious anti-grav generators, and a way to harness the SpaceX Dragon for the ride in. But Laird is amped for the task: “This is a very complicated case. You know, a lotta ins, a lotta outs, a lotta what-have-yous. And, uh, a lotta strands to keep in my head, man. Lotta strands in Laird’s head. Fortunately, I’m adhering to a pretty strict, uh, drug regimen to keep my mind, you know, uh, limber.”
Whoa. What just happened here? It must have been some side effect of a gravitational wave. If these astrophysical swells have been stretching and compacting space-time since the beginning of everything, they must be having a similar effect on human cognition.
Wow. Wow. I now understand the maddening nonsequiturial nature of humans. With huge gravitational waves constantly crashing down on our brains, pulling our synapses this way and that willy-nilly, rational thought has never and will never stand a chance. As someone nonexistent yet famous once said, “You can imagine where it goes from here.”
*”Sushisharpei.” Licensed under Public Domain via Wikipedia.
Visit Kim Pederson’s blog RatBlurt: Mostly Random Short-Attention-Span Musings.