The Pillars of Creation, Time Travel, and Hangover Physics

This weekend is special for any a number of reasons. For one thing, it's the first time in forever I get to see my lovely, and it's the first time in about as long that I've woken up on a Sunday morning with a hangover and major craving for a nice, buttery roll.

It's also special, because this is the weekend I'm going to blow your mind, courtesy of help from Jesus Diaz of Gizmodo, who pointed my attention in the direction of a very special, very powerful demonstration, in real-time, of how Relativity works, and the implications of that discrepancy.

Hubble Telescope Image

This image to the right is of a feature called an Elephant Trunk, a formation of gas within a nebula. In this case, these are the poetically-named Pillars of Creation, located within the Eagle Nebula, and about 7000 light-years away from Earth, and us. That means this photograph is actually a form of time-travel, a snapshot of a 7000-year past state, a state that we are learning no longer exists.

Light travels at an absolute and known constant speed through, which is the maximum speed for the universe. This speed is actually so well known that it is considered to be a fundamental physical constant and is normally expressed with the mathematical constant, c, in place of the actually number, which is on the order of ten-millions of metres per second. A key implication of that law is that information (in its precise physical sense) cannot be transmitted faster than light either.

A star, 6000 light-years from us, and about 1000 light years from the Pillars of Creation superstructure, was recently noticed to have "gone nova", exploding as a supernova, which is, for all intents and purposes, the largest of explosions in our universe. The explosion is expected to reach and destroy the Pillars' structure, something we'll see a thousand years or so from now. Which means, in 1000 years, the pillars of creation will have been destroyed.

Here's the thing, now: the light that shows them being destroyed will reach earth 1000 years from now. That light had to travel 7000 light-years to get here, which means, in actuality, that the pillars were destroyed 7000 years before... or 6000 years ago. We discovered the pillars with the Hubble Space Telescope, sometime between 1990 and now... so we discovered them about 5900 years or so after they were destroyed.

Though their majesty would be lost to real-time viewing in future generations, images of the Pillars of Creation will not be their only legacy. It is the current understanding of astronomical theory that the pressure of such blasts, moving through nebulae, helps to induce the dust and gasses to coalesce into stars and planets, beginning the cycle anew. For what might well be the first time in human history, we'll have an opportunity to watch, over hundreds and thousands of years, as that happens.

I love living in the future.

In Praise of Polish

When I was an army cadet, there was a lot of importance placed on appearance, but, paradoxically, you never actually noticed what the other cadets uniforms looked like. I mean sure, you knew where to look for rank or qualifications, which was a fast way to settle arguments back then (even tangential ones), but you never really looked for the loose-threads or scuffed boots that the higher ranking cadets and adult officers seemed to care about. Now, that never stopped any of us from busting our asses for hours at a time trying to put a mirror polish on our boots, and believe me when I tell you that one of the only smells that brings back summer more than the tall grass is the smell of an open tin of Kiwi.

But then, I never placed much importance in clothes. "Whatever was on top" in the dresser seemed to get the job done, and the idea of planning an outfit seemed limited to the affairs of those mysterious women-folk I heard so much about.  But then, "gets the job done" was (and still often is) my default attitude about damn-near everything. No drafts for blog posts and low-value papers? Gets the job done. One pair of shoes? Gets the job done. Scarf and hat don't quite match? Gets the job done. Overdue for a haircut but don't look like trash yet? Gets the job done.

So what's this got to do with shoe polish? Nothing. It's about polish in the broader sense. Finishing touches. Sure, a high-school education "gets the job done". Being able to express any emotion without filling spaces with "um" or expletives takes polish. Clipping your nails gets the job done. Making sure the edge is smooth afterwards takes polish. Getting your cash-flow statement set up on excel is quite literally getting the job done, but documenting it with reference-comments and named ranges is a very user-friendly level of polish.

I have this blazer. It's a nice blazer, from my favourite local purveyor of such things. I wear it almost every day, and have since about October (before that, I hardly ever wore it at all). But I'm a bit abusive. It's been a while since the jacket (which is "mostly clean") has seen the dry-cleaner. It's showing its age. Four or five years might not be bad for a jacket, but the four or five years between leaving high school and actually starting to take an adult body-type can be quite destructive for even the best-made suit, and that jacket used to fit me "quite well", so now, the better part of two inches and ten or twenty pounds later, not so much.

So I retired the jacket, quietly, on Monday. I figured nobody would notice. Other than the jacket, I wore what I'd normally wear: jeans and a t-shirt. A knit sweater, because it tends to get cold in my classroom, which was converted from a computer lab and has very, very powerful air-conditioning. In January in the Maritimes. But I digress.

People noticed. I got lots of quiet "you're looking sharp/nice today"s from people you'd both expect and not expect it from. So I've retired the jacket. Sure, it was getting the job done. But until it gets a dry-cleaning and some repairs (maybe even let out a bit), it's lacking in polish.

I suppose, if I can't get it let out, I can always donate it to a Frenchy's or a ValueVillage or the Salvation Army or something. Come to think of it, I have quite a lot of "lacking polish" clothing floating around... I should do something about that.

A Proper Cup of Tea

This morning, for whatever reason, I am reminded of the character Arthur Dent, of Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy fame, who spent a good portion of the book (and the majority of the film) in the quest for a proper cup of tea. Not because of any real difficulty in sourcing the proper cup of tea (though admittedly the beverage at hand is Root Beer, not tea), but because of the sentiment.

There are little things in our life to which we become accustomed and which are, consciously or subconsciously, a source of pleasure in our lives, and which the removal thereof can place a strange and often unidentified stress upon our lives. It's not addiction in the medical expense, because there's no withdrawal. We are simply accustomed to them. They universally cost us next to nothing to maintain, but a time almost always comes when we don't have them, and we feel off-balance for the rest of the day.

For me, it's a cold root beer, a cup of hot earl grey with lemon, a Schaeffer filled with silky smooth ink, or a hot bath. What are your little things? Leave a comment below.

The Perfect Cup of Tea: Twining's Earl Grey, steeped overhot for about two minutes, taken with the juice of 1/8th to 1/6th of a fresh lemon.