Painting the Universe by the Numbers

Some people are clearly better working with words; other people are clearly better with numbers. All of us, however, have to at some point think about the huge universe that surrounds our lives and planet Earth if we want to add a cosmic dimension to our thought.  And modern science's knowledge of the universe cannot be explained without resorting to numbers in some fashion. That is especially true when it comes to talking about the age of the universe.

The human limitation we run into here is that we humans have not evolved with any instinctive need to comprehend the kinds of immense numbers modern astronomy must employ.  For example, I have a ready, physical sense of any number up to ten because of my having ten fingers.  But how do I have a gut sense of what a million is?  I know abstractly that it is 1000 x 1000, but I have a hard time envisioning one thousand of anything repeated a thousand times over.  The difficulty of comprehension is even greater when trying to truly grasp what a billion is.

Thus it is that some metaphor using words becomes handy.  You may have heard of one often-repeated metaphor of the entire age of the universe fitting into a 24-hour clock. Personally, that common model of a 24-hour clock gets me only a little way towards imagining the immensity of the universe's age.  One problem for me with it is that I don't have a mental picture of a clock containing 24 hours.  (Our traditional circular clock-faces only go up to 12.) Also, on clocks the numbers go round and round repetitively -- but the universe's age stretches out in linear fashion far into the past with no repetition.

the universe's timeline as a row of books

A better model for me has been presented by the contemporary Christian evolutionary theologian John Haught.  He uses the model of a set of books on a shelf, something that I, with my literary bent, can more readily imagine.  Haught explains:  "Imagine that you have thirty large volumes.... Each tome is 450 pages long....  Let this set of books represent the scientific story of our 13.7-billion-year-old universe.  The narrative begins with the Big Bang on page 1 of volume 1, but the first twenty-one [of the 30] books show no obvious signs of life at all....  [L]ife doesn't appear until volume 22....  Even then, living organisms do not become particularly interesting... until almost the end of volume 29.  There the famous Cambrian explosion occurs....  Only during the last sixty-five pages of volume 30 [the last volume] does mammalian life begin to flourish....  [M]odern humans do not appear until the bottom of the final page."

With this picture in my mind, one thing in particular stands out:  That immense gap between the beginning of our universe and when life finally emerges out of formerly inorganic molecules.  Although I know it is my human-centered viewpoint, I cannot help but think of that gap as a time of waiting -- the universe working and "waiting" to make life finally appear.  On the other hand, I can look at that relatively short time in which life on Earth has existed and see graphically the power of life itself.  It only required life to finally get started before it could take off, leading to millions of species in a relatively short time.

~~~

Do you have any thoughts about humans' being such a short part of the universe's history?

(The Haught quote is from

 Christianity and Science by John F. Haught, © 2007, p. xii.)

A Land that Waits for Us to Change

ancient Egyptian farming (ca 1300 B.C.E.)

I remember in middle school being taught the word "delta".  We were in a history class, learning how the ancient Egyptian civilization developed around the delta of the Nile River where it made its outlet into the Mediterranean.  It was explained to us how that area was a fertile area because it was there that the river's branching rivulets created a triangular plain of rich soil built up of sediments from the shifting water.

The importance of that phenomenon was imprinted upon our minds by it being pointed out that in Greek the letter "delta" was a small triangle.  Moreover, the mathematical symbol delta (a small triangle) stood for change, because it was those regular changes of the river delta -- being covered with water and then draining -- that made the soil fertile.  The strength of that Egyptian civilization was thus based on the strength of the natural delta, which supported many forms of life, providing humans both fishing and farming.

William Faulkner

From thoughts of that civilization 5,000 years ago, my thoughts now turn to a story by the 20th-century U.S. writer William Faulkner.  It is a shift in time and place, but there is a common denominator -- the delta.  In Faulkner's story "Delta Autumn,"  a small group of men are making a journey to a wilderness area for their annual hunting.  To get there, however, they have to head towards where the last hill ends and an "alluvial flatness" begins -- a delta!  In his characteristic writing style, Faulkner describes the power that rich land has held for generations of humans in this way:  " [T]he rich black land, imponderable and vast, fecund up to the very doorsteps of the Negroes who worked it and of the white men who owned it; which exhausted the hunting life of a dog in one year, the working life of a mule in five and of a man in twenty."

Although that theme of the vast, sustaining power of the delta is thus described early in Faulkner's short story, the theme of change is also more subtly introduced.  From the conversation of the men in the car on their drive to the delta, the reader is able to pick up that they are living in a larger world that has been greatly changed by forces far beyond the county in Mississippi where most of Faulkner's fiction is set.  The men in the story are living on the brink of the U.S.'s entering World War II, and so some of their banter is about whether U.S. people are more powerful than Hitler.  Their exchanges reveal a degree of uncertainty about what the future might bring.

That theme of change in human society is threaded through with the theme of Nature being guaranteed to change in a rhythmic way.  That is because the story takes place in autumn, a time of change, despite the predictability of fall hunting trips.  Two words, both symbolizing change, are thus paired in the story's title:  "Delta Autumn."

As I re-read the story, in my mind's eye I see a vast, darkish delta surrounding the men.  It would be darkish with the men's melancholy about the unrecoverable past and the shrinking wilderness. It would also be darkish with their uncertainty about the future.  However, as the passage quoted above indicates, it would be Nature, the land, represented by the delta, that could still sustain life, if it was allowed to do so.

~~~

Most of us live in cities, but do you recall a piece of land that provided sustenance?

(The quote is from William Faulkner's "Delta Autumn,"

 which can be found in The Portable Faulkner, ed. Malcolm Cowley, © 1974.)

(The photograph of Faulkner is by Nobel Foundation, and is used by its being in the public domain.)