When I wrote “The Lights in the Sky are Stars” I was trying to remind people we live in this far out universe but most people fail to look up and notice. Sadly, light pollution has destroyed the impact of the night sky thus diminishing our sense of wonder. Now I’m reading Einstein by Walter Isaacson and its like a lesson in astronomy on LSD.
Over the years I’ve seen many documentaries and read many books on the theory of relativity and other ideas discovered by Einstein but I never really got them. I still don’t get them, but this book by following Einstein step by step as he grows up and then works on each problem helps me visualize the immensity of his discoveries better than anything so far. Coming to grips that space and time are not absolute and that they are really one thing called space-time is hard.
Einstein often uses vivid thought experiments to teach his concepts and one of my favorites is trying to imagine people living in a two dimensional world like the classic book Flatland. This is a great metaphor because for most people on Earth we only see the universe in a very limited way, and the genius of Einstein was he looked intensely at reality and said to everyone, “Hey guys, we’re not in Kansas anymore.”
I took many physics and astronomy courses in college but I never achieved orbit with them. I am like Charlie Gordon in Flowers for Algernon in that I once had a bit of smarts and got a tiny glimpse of reality but now it’s all forgotten. I’m like a woman of 56 trying to recapture her beauty of 22, so I don’t know if its physically possible to facelift my brain, but I keep trying. Hell, there’s got to be more to life than watching Lost on my HDTV (not that I don’t love that show).
Plastic surgery only succeeds so far with the body, so I don’t know how much I can push my brain at 56 to rejuvenate. Awhile back I bought The History of Science: 1700-1900 on DVD from The Teaching Company. I’m going to start watching those lessons again and study physics again. Einstein wrote his own popular science book about special and general relativity and I’m also going to buy that and try to “see” into his world using his own words.
Science is weird because a few really smart people study reality and make discoveries, and then they tell everybody and the rest of us go, “Oh yeah, I get that,” and then go on with out lives. We’re all taught in school that the Earth orbits the Sun even though when you look outside it sure does look like the Sun moves around terra firma. Most people live their lives like ants unaware that our little hive and its activities is part of something much bigger. The Earth is like an atom in an Apple.
Cosmology is the science of describing the whole enchilada. When Einstein first theorized the nature of space-time Hubble hadn’t even made his breakthroughs to explain galaxies. By trying to understand the nature of light and gravity he became the father of cosmology. Einstein’s brain and mathematics brought forth our whole spooky universe of quantum physics as if we were born out of his thoughts.
It didn’t take long for other scientists to see what Einstein saw. He quickly became movie star famous. A hundred years later we take all of his discoveries for granted, but not really. How many people really think about their place in the cosmos?
Now, at 56 I wonder how much I can see if I try? My memory is already a sieve. One reason I write these essays is to exercise the mechanism in my brain that processes words. Since working on this blog my brain is just a bit better at finding words, so maybe thinking about physics will be gym for my mind.
Jim
Auxiliary Memory 
I’m glad that you are working on recapturing the knowledge and the passion of your youth. Until one is dead one should never give up on their dreams, passions, etc.
I love the night sky. Fortunately I live in a small enough town and in an area with very dim street lights that I get a really nice view of the stars. Certainly it is even better once I get outside the city, but it is adequate enough that 2-3 times per week, every week, I am out of the back porch taking a gander at the stars. Even in cold weather (though those times are necessarily brief in nature). I cannot imagine not being excited about the stars.