Time, the Universe, and Law and Order

It's been a long time, I know. "Aren't those kids doing anything funny these days?" you might be asking yourself. And the answer is of course they are, but I figure you people, all five of you, must get tired of me talking about my kids. So. . . I've been posting all the good kid stuff to facebook where I only have to write sentence fragments and you can easily ignore it if you're tired of 'em.

But something inspired me this morning. And not in a good way. I've ALWAYS had trouble thinking about time and space. As a child I would lie in bed at night and try NOT to think about the universe and whether it was finite--and if it was finite what it was hanging in or resting on. The universe is big and infinite in ways that overwhelm and confuse me. And don't even get me started on time. Relativity? WTF? Really it's simply more than my little brain can process with comfort. As controlling as I am, I just can't deal with the enormity of space or the squishiness of time. And right now I'm having trouble finding words that express what I mean--which upsets me further.

So, I'll get right to it. . . an editorial that appeared in today's New York Times:

In April, NASA’s space-based Swift satellite sent back a text message announcing that it had detected a gamma-ray burst, the remains of an extraordinarily violent explosion that ended the life of a distant star. Since then, astronomers using ground-based telescopes have been able to measure the spectrum of the burst’s infrared afterglow and estimate its distance from Earth.

When you look at the stars, you are looking at light that comes from the past. This gamma-ray burst, officially GRB 090423, is, in fact, the most distant, and oldest object, yet detected in our universe; it is some 13.1 billion light-years away. In other words, this is the vestige of an explosion that took place a mere (when it comes to the life of the universe) 630 million years after the Big Bang.

Light coming to us from such a distance is stretched because the universe is expanding. The greater the stretching — called redshift — the more distant the object. The previous most-distant object, a galaxy, has a redshift of 6.96. GRB 090423 has a redshift of 8.2 and appears to observers as an extremely red point of light. When that explosion took place, the universe was more than nine times smaller than it is now.

It’s one thing to explore such remote recesses of time in theory. It’s something else again to witness their afterglow. And GRB 090423 is an invitation for all of us to unfetter our imaginations. We imagine looking outward from that distant point knowing that our own exploration still lies some 13 billion years in the future.

And here, for your sourcing pleasure, is the link.

I don't get it. I mean, I do, but only kind of. It's like I have this tiny glimmer of understanding, but the whole is just out of my reach. I don't LIKE that feeling. So instead of thinking about the universe, I watch Law and Order. I get a few minutes of not knowing, followed by maybe half and hour of kind of knowing and then BOOM, they spell it all out for me. Yay. I love Law and Order. It's so. . . orderly!