The Ineffable Cosmic Dance
As you may know, I recently recovered from detached retina surgery that required 8 days of head hanging. Yep – 50 minutes of every hour looking at my toes. It was a remarkable time for self-reflection and binge-watching. A binge-watched favorite – Netflix’s Loudermilk. Per Netflix.com: Grumpy former music critic Sam Loudermilk grudgingly navigates the world of sobriety with surly rants, even as he guides others in recovery.
Season 1, Episode 6 starts with Tony, a recovering AA group member, explaining to a police officer WHY he can’t “walk a straight line:”
Do you realize, as I’m standing here the Earth is spinning on its axis a thousand miles an hour? Like, if I was God spinning a basketball. A thousand miles an hour. And at the same time it’s doing that, the Earth is going in orbit around the Sun at guess what rate of speed? Sixty-six thousand miles an hour.
Now rotating his upper body, he continues, 66,000 miles an hour, a thousand miles an hour. And on top of that, the whole solar system is going through the Milky Way galaxy at guess what rate of speed? Four hundred thousand miles an hour… Top it all off, the whole Milky Way galaxy is tearing through the Universe at guess what rate of speed? 2.2 million miles an hour.
And that, officer, is why I failed to walk a straight line!
Genius attempt. Did it work? No spoiler here – watch it!
A recent cosmology discussion with my niece rekindled my awe in our Universe. Taking from Carlo Rovelli’s Seven Brief Lessons on Physcs,
Earth is a great stone that floats suspended in space, without falling… orbiting a Sun, an infinitesimal speck in a vast cloud of one hundred billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy…itself is a speck of dust in a huge cloud of galaxies… each containing a hundred billion suns similar to ours. The majority of these suns are orbited by planets. There are therefore in the universe there are thousands of billions of billions of billions of planets such as Earth.
WOW! How AWE inspiring! How does my simple mind fathom the complexity and vastness? How can I not be humble and grateful to be part of the ineffable Cosmic Dance?