Breakfast, gravitational waves and gods

Friday morning finds me sitting once again on the terrace of a French café in Madrid.  No lesson today – I lost that particular gig, but they’re the breaks.  A different student told me this week that he’s lost his fear of speaking English at work.  Feedback like that isn’t quite a substitute for pay, but it makes a real difference sometimes.

Out on the terrace, the sun still hasn’t made it over the roofs into the narrow street, but the main square across the road is bathed in Canaletto light.  Beside me, a foursome drifts from English to Dutch or maybe Afrikaans and easily into Spanish when the waitress comes.  Three American girls on another table are chattering in Spanish and English.

Paying for breakfast seems indulgent while living on a tight budget, but then there’s the context.  Just after waking this morning, I stumbled on an article about gravitational waves.  Gravitational waves.  Now, you know I’m an ignoramus and you’re just going to have to accept that I’ll have misunderstood a lot of what I read, but…

It seems someone (well, cosmologists) may have detected the waves that Einstein predicted in his mathematical models and theories a hundred years ago.  The magazine even printed a photo.  Well… it’s a photo of a sine wave on a computer screen, generated from something that may have travelled one and a half billion years from its origin.  This gravitational wave was apparently very small – a blip.  But its source was an unimaginably cataclysmic cosmic event.

Gravitational waves are produced when black-holes merge.  Boing!  What? 

Apparently, this happens.  Not between here and the Metro station, I hope.  It’s a pretty big thing, but by the time this particular piece of General Relativity / universe had travelled one and a half billion light-years it had dissipated a fair bit and faded.  Oh, and its wavelength was similar to light and ultraviolet and x-rays (or maybe not) and so masked by everything else that’s flying around.  Oh, and these particles have no mass, pass through matter, which includes sensors – so they’re almost impossible to detect.  Apparently.  I told you – I’m an ignoramus, go look for yourself.

If you look in the sky on a dark, clear night, it’s all up there.  The view of the universe is amazing from deserts and other empty places. 

Vastness.  Space-time.  Gravity.  Black-holes - destruction: what happens to all the stuff?  Well I expect it gets pretty squashed, but those elements must end up somewhere.  Recycling?  Creation?  An endless loop?

I lay thinking about all this for a while this morning.  The article threw in a load of other possible facts: gravity bending time and space; what it might be bending into; what the universe might be expanding into; about the possibility of other universes. 

Isn’t it amazing?  Isn’t it amazing that all of this can be conceived between the ears of individual human beings?  And yet most of us spend our time kicking around in the dirt - never stopping to think.  All we see is our own back-yard.  All we are interested in is money and how too get more.  The world has seldom been less equal and somebody's telling us that's a healthy thing.  It's not.  It causes  strife.  Right now, there are human beings in countries, rich and poor, planning to kill identical beautiful beings all of them capable of conceiving the universe in which we exist.  We splatter their brains all over the place every single day.

Yesterday, I had cause, again to question what God is.  Is it the deity that constantly lets down living souls in their moment of need, such as the Egyptair passengers on Thursday?  The cause of that crash is yet to be established, but when I think generally about the taking of life in the name of God, it causes me to question “What kind of God is this?” and “Whose God?”  because any God that urges people to mistreat, torture and kill is most certainly not my God.  Within Monotheism there seems to be a bewildering pantheon (yes, a contradiction) of these Gods.  All different.  It’s a joke.  The whole concept is bankrupt. 

So…  in whose name is the killing being done?  Not in the name of a single monotheistic God.  There are too many deities for Monotheism to work – we’ve all got God on our side.  Does God live in the sky?  No. God lives between those human ears.  So why are we killing?  For very earthly, human reasons: greed, power, revenge, hatred, jealousy, madness.  That, I understand – so much more easily than gravitational waves.

And the spirit?  Who knows? We are here.  We are aware.  We are more than the sum of our parts.  We are potentially beautiful.  Amazing.  We carry the universe between our ears, which is where we also carry our wickedness.

Breakfast on the terrace is cheap – within the context.