Things are not what they seem

This morning I dropped my wife off for the parkrun in Pollok Park and spent the next forty minutes exploring the Park's quieter corners - which means most of them at 9.30 AM on a damp Saturday morning. I was reminded of the first time I ever visited Pollok Park. I was in the last year of my Bachelor's degree. Finals were a few months away and everything was beginning to feel a little bit tense. A few of us made plans to visit Pollok House and get away from everything for an hour or two. We took the train to Pollokshaws West station and walked along the road and into the Park. All of a sudden we were away from traffic and city noise. I felt like I was exhaling fully for the first time in months. I realised I'd been tense for weeks or months or maybe since coming to Glasgow; maybe the tension of a country boy living in the rush and noise of the city.

The Park was beautiful and relaxing but what really struck me, what stayed with me, was this sudden realisation of part of my day-to-day life, evidently ever-present but somewhere below conscious awareness.

Walking around the Park, on a pretty dreich morning, prompted by this memory, thoughts turned to how much else of the world might be lurking somewhere beyond conscious awareness; a very natural topic for a physicist, maybe, but there are many, various, baroque versions of this thought.

Here's the "sound shadow" passage in Gravity's Rainbow:

...Suppose They don't want us to know there is a medium there, what used to be called an "aether," which can carry sound to every part of Earth. The Soniferous Aether. For millions of years the sun has been roaring, a giant, furnace, 93millionmile roar, so perfectly steady that generations of men have been born into it and passed out of it again, without ever hearing it. Unless it changed, how would anybody ever know?

Except that at night now and then, in some part of the dark hemisphere, because of eddies in the Soniferous Aether, there will come to pass a very shallow pocket of no-sound. For a few seconds, in a particular place, nearly every night somewhere in the world, sound-energy from Outside is shut off. The roaring of the Sun stops...

Are there good consequences from the resulting moment of revelation? Doesn't seem very likely. Anyway it's Gravity's Rainbow so the focus moves on.

Towards the end of Stanislaw Lem's Futurological Congress the main character sees a world of luxury dissolve to something very grim and grimy. A world on its way out is made bearable for most of its inhabitants only via mass administration of hallucinogenic drugs. How could we know if this were the case? And which is worse, the miserable state of full knowledge, or the happily deluded state?

After a few Philip K Dick books, for instance, we're no longer surprised when the rug of reality is pulled from under the main characters. This is a recurring theme in philosophically inclined science fiction, in movies just as much as books. The Matrix is an obvious example. They Live is a personal favourite, darkly satirical, pulpy to the core (underlined by the casting of an ex-pro wrestler in the title role). The main character comes across a pair of sunglasses that reveal the world as it truly is, a totalitarian state run for the benefit of hideous aliens, bedecked in subliminal messages: "Obey Authority" "Have Children" etc.

Could any of these entertainments be hinting accidentally at a true, hidden state of affairs? It would be fun (of a sort) but doesn't seem too likely. Nonetheless we are led, possibly willingly, possibly kicking and screaming, but inevitably nonetheless, to some very strange understandings or theories via a road that starts not at the feet of some 60s guru, nor in the glare of the psychedelic light show with the reek of pot in our nostrils, but with hard-nosed laboratory experiments. In this fundamental case what we can't know can't be fixed, however; there are no scales that can fall from our eyes.

I thought about related questions not so very long ago, in conversation with a fellow redundancy pool member. She reminded me of the frog in the pot of boiling water. Throw it in and it jumps straight back out. But sit it in a pot of cool water and heat it up gradually and it will just sit there, possibly not even remembering a time without pain.

Mind-boggling things to see with your own eyes....

....possibly with some help from a small telescope.

The M101 supernova is harder than ever to see now. Let's emphasise just how mind-boggling several other, less elusive, maybe less hyped sky sights are.

1. Crab Nebula Quite a small telescope (e.g. 3" refractor) will show the Crab Nebula clearly, although it does suffer in light polluted conditions. Look closely at the ESO image. What is that strange blue glow it's shrouded in, that seems to overlay the coloured filaments? It's synchrotron radiation, the glow of electrons moving at 99.999999..% of the speed of light (i.e.with enormous individual energies) in the presence of a magnetic field. Synchrotron radiation seems to lack any sort of easy description on the WWW. Anyway here's the Wikipedia article, too technical for many but including a nice historical bit. Those electrons are so energetic ultimately because of the Crab nebula's pulsar; a routine kind of object to strophysicists but still, let's face it, extremely exotic. And this is some of the glow you see in a small telescope.
   
2. White dwarf A stellar ember, the mass of the Sun but the size of the Earth, glowing now only because it's still hot from its glory days as the core of a star. A spoonful does indeed weigh a ton. The white dwarf in the triple star system Keid is maybe one of the easiest to spot in a small telescope, as people in some of my DACE classes have seen.
   
3. The Andromeda galaxy Not immediately arresting, often hidden in urban light pollution, this enigmatic, elongated smudge is nonetheless quite obvious to the naked eye if you're somewhere reasonably dark and you look in roughly the right place. Who would have guessed, in the time before telescopes, that it represents the summed-up light of 100,000,000,000 stars? That had taken two and a half million years to reach us? And yet there it is in plain view.
   
4. The Milky Way that ethereal band of light, so familiar to people of earlier cultures, sadly now buried in light pollution for most Earthlings. Its appearance tells us we live in the middle of an enormous, disk-shaped system of stars, gas and dust; our own galaxy. Here's a fabulous panorama.
   
5. The darkness between the stars tells us that our Universe started at a finite time in the past. Really.
   

In small telescopes the Crab Nebula and Andromeda galaxy are just smudges, and any white dwarf just a wee faint star. It's looking at them in the knowledge of their natures that makes them really fascinating.