Surprises

Surprises   

     We love them, don't we?  Well, we love the good ones at least...the surprise birthday party, the surprise flowers or the surprise promotion or visit.  Other surprises, maybe not so much...the bad news, the discovery of a lump, the injury or death of a person.  But there is another category of surprise, that of a neutral astonishment and a discovery to oneself.  This happened recently to me for I was surprised once again at how little I knew, even after all these years.  As one example, I had no idea what a gnomon was.  No need to look it up...it's one of the oldest methods of telling time (used by early Babylonians and Greeks), a simple stick or stone placed in the ground to display the sun's shadow.  Nor did I know that I couldn't picture 98 tons of decomposed plants, ancient plants which would have covered about 40 acres.  Wait, ecologist Jeff Dukes made it easy...98 tons equals about 6500 Christmas trees.  Or 1,500,000 carrots.  Those are both equal to that 98 tons of plants.  Or here's something even easier...98 tons of plants equal ONE gallon of gasoline.  Yup, that is what it takes to produce a single gallon of gas, a gallon which will produce 5,000 pounds of CO2, 20 pounds of nitrogen oxides and 11 pounds of volatile chemicals says Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute.  But what about this...the relatively small country of Norway pledging $1 billion back in 2009 (after the Copenhagen climate summit) and challenging Brazil to stop or slow their deforestation of the Amazon.  Guess what happened?  Brazil reduced their cutting by 70%.  "That's saving 3.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions, which is the equivalent of taking all American cars off the roads for three whole years," said Michael Metcalfe in a fascinating TED Talk (and discussing his proposal for financing our fight against climate change...he's in the banking industry so his perspective is rather different).  I couldn't grasp the idea of every single car in the U.S. no longer being on the roads...and for three years!  If Norway could get such results, where was the involvement of the other countries?  The United States, China, Russia?  It was indeed...surprising.

      So here are a few more.  Remember my questioning about gravitational waves in an earlier post?  What were they, how did they travel, why the big deal now?  So let's jump back to Einstein in the early 1920s, his famous theory of matter and energy already confirmed and his now moving on to "dynamic" space which he felt was one that bends and moves (whaaat???).  Gravity, he postulated, basically ruled space and time, the "fabric of space" rippling through space and causing "waves" like a pebble making waves in a pond.  But space is big, like BIG.  And when two black holes collided a billion years ago, they emitted more energy "than the combined output of every star in every galaxy in the observable universe," says Smithsonian.  Yes, you read that correctly...the energy of EVERY star in EVERY galaxy.  But now, all this time later, that energy output is barely detectable (says the magazine: Detecting such changes is on par with measuring the distance from Earth to the nearest star beyond the solar system with an accuracy better than the thickness of a sheet of paper.)  And last November (and nearly $500 million later), instruments picked up proof of a gravitational wave making its way past our planet (such waves are believed to be everywhere and happening all the time, even if we can't detect their subtle signatures).  Once again, someone had not only thought it could be possible, but others later convinced their companies and governments to also believe that it was possible and to spend the money to prove it...and nearly 100 years later, it now has indeed been proven.
  
     So one more.  As I watch the six-part series The Brain with Dr. David Eagleman, I am surprised at how oddly I initially viewed our body's control center.  After all, he says, how does the brain see images and hear sounds and capture tastes?  Stepping into a cave meant to mimic a brain, he talks of how your "brain" never actually sees or hears or touches or tastes.  Indeed, your physical brain has no way to interpret these signals other than through its outside "portals", as he calls it.  But how do you take an image coming in and tell your brain that this is what is happening outside its shell?  It's electrochemical and electromagnetic signals, he says, and it's all basically not real.  Our eyes can only see a tiny, tiny portion of light (if the light spectrum were stretched from Los Angeles to New York, the portion of that spectrum that we could see would be limited to just half an inch), same with our ears and our other senses.  This is just the limitation of our bodies.  But here was one of the fascinating parts...what we actually "see" is just a small portion of what our brain tells us is the image, for six times that amount of information is being added to the image by our brains memories and storage, all to make sense of what it needs to process and what it needs to discard.  When he visits a man blinded since the age of three, and now having his sight nearly restored some 35 years later, the man is basically lost...with no memory of things to guide him, his brain is a jumble of light.  Freeway signs appear to be hurtling at him; images we view as everyday occurances are overloading his system (he still uses a guidedog).  With no memory to look back on, his sensory system is still in a semi-blind mode.  The point of all of this as posed by Dr. Eagleman, is to ask just how much of what we view as reality --as our "world"-- is actually real?  We are basically peeking through a keyhole and saying, that is all that exists...this hand, this concrete, this leaf falling to the ground.  As an alien told the characters in an early science fiction series, "You humans don't have the ability to pronounce my name."

     Waves of all sorts, climates and winds (as a reader asked the June issue of Smithsonian, why do Pacific storms and winds travel east across the United States but hurricanes from the Atlantic travel west?).  There is always so much to learn, to discover, to feel that each day is an exciting one to be in this "classroom."  Even with visiting or talking with friends, or even at nursing homes, people are holding up stories inside themselves, almost waiting to "teach" anyone who would listen.  Not important?  Perhaps not, or perhaps not right at the moment.  But perhaps just as with those gravitational waves that once carried so much energy, their stories and that knowledge have power and are still all around us...if only we took the time, or had the capability to detect it.  Perhaps we just need to learn what exactly is real...