(In) Visible

   Not long after posting about plowing through a batch of months-old magazines, a new batch of current magazines arrived with many of them posting their "year in review" issues or "the best stories of 2016" issues.  Hmmm, perhaps it would have been easier to just purchase those single issues and have a sort of Cliff Notes of magazine articles (Cliff Notes are an age-old series of "study guides" in the U.S. that we students used to call cheat-sheets simply because they summed up a book or subject quickly and concisely).  This is already done of course, with entire series of books putting together the "best of" whatever each year (from travel writing to sports to short fiction, etc.).  But as with any shortcut --even in life-- it is often the details and the small stuff in between that really matters, that fill all the cracks and help you emerge solid and polished (would you want a doctor or engineer using Cliff Notes).  So it was interesting when the latest issue of Discover (January/February 2017) plopped onto my desk.  Their top story of the year (out of 100 such stories they deemed worthy and notable) was something unseen, something that was only a theory, and something that first made for controversial discussion --perhaps because its author was Albert Einstein-- exactly 100 years ago.

   The waves of gravity are rippling through space as surely as a those in a pond when a pebble is thrown in it.  So thought Einstein, but how to prove it?  He began mathematical equations and slowly other scientists and governments became convinced as well, buying enormous areas of land and spending hundreds of millions of dollars to set up dust-free and speck-free labs and detectors (other scientists would add additional proof to his theory and go on to win the Nobel Prize).  And then they waited, and waited, and waited.  A faint gravitational wave was bound to appear, the equations said as much (as an article in Smithsonian said: Since major cosmic collisions typically happen very far from us (thankfully), by the time the gravitational waves spawned reach Earth, the amount of stretching and squeezing they cause is tiny—less than an atomic diameter.  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 where were these waves coming from?  Let's jump back to the speed of light (moving as 186,282 miles per second thus a light year is the time involved --a year-- traveling at that speed) and black holes, large cosmic "drains" of sorts that pull everything into them including entire galaxies and even light; escaping such a force appears impossible.  Now go way out there in space, as in 1.3 billion light years away from us, and discover two black holes battling to pull in the other, their massive bodies swirling around each other at speeds of 100 times each second with the "victor" releasing a blast of energy equal to "the equivalent of three times our sun's mass," said the Discover piece.  So there's that story...last year the labs picked up the signature of what they think was that gravitational wave.  But here's another.  We knew that space was big and that our mediocre (relatively speaking) solar system is but a speck in a medium-sized galaxy which we call the Milky Way and that even our most sophisticated telescopes and satellites can only view or have studied an estimated 10% of other galaxies, a number which we thought was in the millions or perhaps billions.  But in another mathematical model run by the University of Nottingham in England, it turns out that those estimates were wrong...the number of additional galaxies out there is likely over 2 trillion (the 4-minute video on their link is well worth watching).  A trillion...how big is that?  To take one example, 2 trillion seconds would be equivalent to 63,000 years.  Yikes...

   But wait, there's yet another invisible "discovery," this one from Caltech astronomers Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown (the latter gained notoriety by being credited for knocking Pluto off of our lists of planets).  Something is out there --something yet to be seen-- and it is sending a slew of stars into a regular orbit, and it is in our own solar system.  But where or what is it?  Why haven't our satellites detected or seen it?  With the force of its pull, it could be a new planet, something thought to be nearly 10 times the size of earth.  But even Brown added: Since 1845, every time anybody looks up in the sky and sees something they don't understand, they say it's a planet...and they're always wrong.  But now that their paper has been published, it likely means that other astronomers are jumping on board, each of them also searching for something that can't be seen (yet).  As Discover added: Like an unseen spider visibly tugging on a web of gravitational strings, a hidden celestial body is luring distant space rocks into clusters of orbits too conspicuous to ignore.

   In my mother's facility (a few more days remain until her move), several residents have passed on.  But among them there is little talk of what's coming, only that they want to go home.  Perhaps for many of them their thoughts of leaving are tied to faith and of comfort in their own home, their sense of wanting to be needed and wanting to connect, a feeling of an animal being left in a shelter hoping for adoption.  What awaits them as their mind and memories and bodies begin fail is likely something we all think is proven, think is real, but remains so vast and incomprehensible that even our imaginations can't see it.  It's odd for me but the more I join these people, some of them with blank stares and some being quite chatty (and shifting such roles as the meds and the hours tick by), I am pulled into their world by their invisible "strings," their tales of life and imaginations that are as real for them as they are not understandable to me.  Jibberish we say, but there's something there...and at times --just as with the astronomers-- I know that, even if it remains invisible.  Perhaps I too will someday stare out into that void, knowing that something is out there.  But for now, I am simply learning that discovery comes with patience.