Trust the science — to keep changing! Particle #1

Who made us? God made us in his image and likeness!

Aside from the Great Extinction due to a stray bit of space dust, the greatest story is said to be the return of Jesus the Christ to judge the living and the dead. Both likely occurring on the same day. (All those Hieronymus Bosch drawer-ings can’t be wrong.) (And who names their kids Hieronymus? Why must they remain anonymous?)

And I will shew wonders in the heavens and in the earth, blood, and fire, and pillars of smoke. The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and the terrible day of the LORD come.

— Joel 2:30-32

Sounds like Trump’s re-election, but let’s move on. Third on the list of Breaking News! CNN chyrons would be a Mostly Peaceful visit from an extra-terrestrial alien. (If justice served, he’d walk over the Rio Grande river amidst a horde of swimming Hondurans into the U.S. and demand to see Dolly Parton.)

If the Head Groundskeeper believed in an afterlife, it would look like this: The newly arrived pilgrim would tell sister Elizabeth wish he had done more, visit mom and dad, and finally get to ask the great-great grandparents what made you decide to cross the ocean and leave the Old World behind? (I’d also tell Diane, sorry I made you cry and sure, let’s go to high school Homecoming.)

Mysteries of the universe, explained!

Then God or one of his minions would whisper two sentences into the ear of the new arrivals — a pithy statement that would solve all mysteries. O.K., maybe an announcement over an invisible public address system. To which, all who heard it would exclaim, “So THAT’s it!” and wonder why it had not occurred to us in life. (“Still don’t get the Big Brain Bit, do you? the angel Rip Torn asked of Albert Brooks in Defending Your Life.) Answers to Life’s Greatest Mysteries like:

• If the universe is expanding, what is it expanding INTO?
• What existed before the Big Bang?
• Did the octopus come to earth as a frozen embryo on an asteroid? (Each of its eight legs has its own brain?!)
• Whatever happened to that one Sterling Hall bomber? 

Next on the agenda, as we imagine it: a tour of the universe, from beginning to end. Eternity, otherwise, seems like a very long time. Scrabble boards may be needed.

Which takes this discursive rumination to a must-read op ed in the New York Times: “Is there a Crisis in Cosmology?” The gist of which is that everything we thought about the universe is probably wrong. (Not to mention home-made Covid masks!) That miraculous Webb telescope is finding galaxies long before they should have existed, for one thing. (It’s always the last place you look.)

“Physicists and astronomers are starting to get the sense that something may be really wrong. … We might have to change the way we think about some fo the most basic features of our universe — a conceptual revolution that would have implications far beyond the world of science.”

— “The story of our universe may be starting to unravel.”

Blaska’s Bottom Line: No doubt in time to save Joe Biden’s re-election!

Time to stockpile toilet paper?

Next up: The Little Book of Aliens