When
in Barcelona a coworker of mine and I were eating dinner at a fabulous (!)
restaurant; I don’t remember the name… I asked for their card, and got it, but
it was stolen, but I know my coworker still got the one I forced upon him: If
ever in Barcelona again, I will go back. The food was beyond heavenly tasteful
and delicate.
Anyway…
I am not going to write about a restaurant I can’t remember the name of, so I
will leave that for some other time, but during the meal it started raining.
You
know: the kind of really
hard shower which seems to rain upwards.
All
of the guests dining outside pulled their tables closer together, to get out of
the rain and under the canopy. It became a rather… intimate meal, shared with
random strangers.
As it
turned out I ended up sitting close to a man who was dining alone, and even
though he had finished his meal, he took the time to chat with me when I
approached him. You know, making comments about the rain, about the meal, the
wine, where he was from…
He
said things which made me think he was not just another tourist, so I asked
what he was doing (I know, I am terrible like that: always interested in
learning as much as possible about people who happens to be unfortunate enough
to cross my path).
He
was really easy going about my inquisitiveness and told me he was giving
lectures and meeting up with scientists in Europe. And the field he was dealing
with was astronomy. Imagine that! How exciting!
When
I went to high school, I had a classmate who was very interested in
astronomy, and he tried to make me understand the nature and principles of
black holes. He spent an entire school year talking to me about it… and every
time we had one of these discussions, he ended up shaking his head in resigned
astonishment over my lack of scientific comprehension.
But
this guy in Barcelona, Mark Neyrinck, had his own way to
explain which made me understand what he was talking about.
He
was working with (as far as I understood) a theory about: “Structures like galaxies and filaments of galaxies in the Universe come
about from the origami-like folding of an initially flat three-dimensional
manifold in 6D phase space”. OK, this is not a language I master. I understand
it, but I don’t know how to create the sentences, so I stole the quote from http://arxiv.org/abs/1309.4787 In short: The Origami
Cosmic Web of Galaxies.
To me
this makes perfectly sense.
Our
planet is still shaping, folding and shifting. “The Indian plate is continuously moving north at
the rate of about 2 cms every year. Because of this reason the Himalayas are
rising at the rate of about 5 millimeter per year. This means that the
Himalayas are still geologically active and structurally unstable.” http://library.thinkquest.org/10131/geology.html
(Internet is a great thing when it comes to
copy and paste… why spend minutes pondering about how to put it in words, when
someone else already did it so much better than I will ever be able to.)
The ravine dividing America from Europe
is getting wider and deeper every year. Maldives may disappear from the world in next 100 years if the sea-level
keep rising; Because of global warming, glaciers are melting so rapidly it
results in sea-level rise. The
entire planet is still changing and under construction. I used to think the
world is changing, but the planet is constant. I am not so sure I believe that
anymore.
I am
not going to try to be scientific or anything, but as far as I know all ancient cultures have
stories about how the world was created, and they refer to it as being flat.
I know for a fact that the stories which
were told through times, and later written down, hold a lot of truths in them.
They are wise guidelines to a good life, and are valid even today, thousands of
years later. Those old guys were smart; they knew what they were talking about.
Maybe they knew this about the making of
our planet as well…?
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