We’ve been reminded that the whirling galaxies, the energy and the matter, the space and the time, the quarks and the stars, the waves and the wind are all part of One, grand and unifying Spirit.
I was surprised when I learned that outer space wasn’t made up of nothing. “What do you mean, it’s not ‘nothing’ out there? What’s out there?” I wasn’t talking about stars and planets, moons and asteroids, but about all the nothingness of space between them. I was told that that’s not nothing, either.
“Have you ever stuck your hand out of a car window while driving down the road?” my teacher asked. Well, of course I had. I used to sit in the back seat of my mother’s 1970s model, wood-panel station wagon, extending the right “wing” out my window, while my brother sat across the way, a left “wing” appearing out his window. Flapping frantically we would fly down the road at the speed of the wind, laughing all the way, and, with one arm down and one arm up, we would bank the turns, and with both hands forward would apply the brakes. I was sure no kids since Henry Ford dreamed up this great, imaginary flying machine had ever thought of that before us, but I instantly knew what my teacher was talking about.
“So,” he said, “what is it that presses back against your hands as you ‘fly,’ if there’s nothing out there?” Wow. Good question. Maybe it is not actually nothing, after all.
Science reporters have recently been making a lot of excited noise over “gravitational waves” (which are actually nothing at all like my arm flapping against the not-nothingness of the wind), but as I tried to understand a “wave” moving through outer space, moving objects and bending time, my mother’s station wagon came to my mind. (It’s how small minds think about big things!)
That iconic, long-haired and shaggy mustachioed genius, Albert Einstein, dreamt a formula — E=MC2 — and mathematical minds have been working out the implications for a century. Each insight reveals a world that really is stranger than fiction, and this last discovery, announced by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), proved, as if anyone needed any more proof, how brilliant was the brain nestled underneath that shock of white hair.
Part of what Einstein anticipated in his clever little theory — Isaac Newton’s apple be damned — is that apparently gravity is not just a law and a force responsible for the banana-peel antics of slap-stick comedians the world over. Gravity is a wave. Picture it like a rubbery bed sheet, with all the heavenly bodies resting comfortably on it, that sheet stretching when a heavier body lies down in the middle of it. “Space-time” gets bent, ever so slightly, by these waves of gravity. It’s the tug of “nothing” on something. Space changes shape. Time changes speed. These waves — they change everything.
Since gravity is the weakest of the fundamental forces of nature, though, it would take a massive event to produce a wave that we could actually detect here on our quaint little planet, but those events are all-too-common in the universe — and there is obviously a lot of white hair and more bushy mustaches at LIGO, because they’ve finally “seen” one. Eureka! With two detectors, one in Louisiana and one in Washington state, these mad scientists have been able to give the first conclusive, empirical proof of these waves that Einstein predicted more than 100 years ago.
The instrument they built to measure this wave consists of two tunnels, at right angles, each one measuring 2.5 miles in length. There’s a mirror at each end, and they shoot a laser beam from the center down to the mirror and back. Since each tunnel is exactly (and I do mean exactly) 2.5 miles long, the time it takes the leading point of that laser to come back down both of those arms is exactly the same. (I’m assuming there’s not a guy there in a white lab coat, with a stop watch and clip board. We’re talking precision here.) The speed of those laser boomerangs is always exactly the same, given the consistency of the speed of light — precisely the same, that is, until a gigantic, enormous, humongous, ginormous, cataclysmic event happens across the not-nothing-ness of space and sends a wave (like throwing your giggling nephew into the swimming pool) rippling across the blackness. That wave stretches space (like the bed sheet) and warps time (like waiting on Christmas).
If Einstein was right about those waves, like he has been about everything else implied by his formula, then when that invisible tide hits Louisiana or Washington state, and there’s an appropriate instrument there to measure it, the distance of that 2.5 mile tunnel should change (which is why there are two tunnels, so they can measure both and compare those distances). Sounds simple enough, right?
And here’s the deal about catching just the right wave. Space is vast. Like, really vast. This wave had traveled 286,000 miles every second, for a billion years before it reached us. We’re talking frequent flier miles! At that speed, you can travel 5.88 trillion miles in a year. If you’re wondering how much a wave like this, created by the weakest of the four fundamental forces, stretches a 2.5 mile long tunnel, well you’re in luck. I’m going to tell you.
You probably learned in science class, as I did (it was probably the same teacher who taught me that nothing isn’t really nothing) that the closest star to us is our sun, and it’s a neighborly 93,000,000 miles away. Now, imagine that this measurement is correct, exactly correct, that the sun isn’t 93.0000000-something million miles away, but precisely, exactly, within-the-thickness-of-a-human-hair 93 million miles away. And what if you could measure that distance, precisely enough to notice 93 million miles plus the thickness of a human hair? Well, then you could measure a gravitational wave after it traveled across the infinite blackness of the not-nothingness of the universe.
And that’s what they just did at LIGO.
When I read stuff like this I am, well, pastorally speaking, speechless. The mathematics, the theories, the instruments, the forces of nature, the vast, vast, vast openness of outer space, the magnificent majesty of mystery — speechless. We live in a quantum world, and the fearful and wonderful thing is that we are getting to know it better every day. They call this scientific feat a watershed moment in the history of human knowledge, comparing it to Copernicus’s discovery that the earth is not the center of the universe. So, armed with three academic degrees that include fewer than three graduate level science courses among them, I’m trying to keep up, but when I stand on the edge of this precipice of my lack of knowledge, I feel like I am on the south rim of the Grand Canyon for the first time, again, i.e., jaw-droppingly stupefied. Wow — how did this happen!?
Since I can’t understand the physics and can’t converse in the language of mathematics, when I read of such grand things the inveterate pastor in me is always making other connections, because all this complicated stuff does mean something, and I’m convinced it can have practical application even for us who are quantum-challenged.
The biblical story begins with a simple affirmation: we’re all connected. And our whole, cosmic history, is the long, winding, sometimes sordid but always fascinating journey of trying to get back to that grand affirmation, because somehow, we have forgotten.
Maybe, without any conscious thought of it, that gravitational wave is also trying to tell us the same thing. Some unseen event, occurring so far away that it can’t even be imagined, so remote that it couldn’t possibly even matter, created a wave, out of “nothing” — and that wave ends up entering our little world and changing the shape of our very neighborhood. Literally. Ever so subtly it reminds us that across the sea of whirling galaxies, the energy and the matter, the space and the time are really the same stuff, and the quarks and the stars, the waves and the wind — even the “red and yellow, black and white” — are all part of One, grand and unifying Spirit.
Before God could say, “It is very good,” before we were even a twinkle in God’s eye, that message of affirmation was already riding the crest of an infinite tide. The message, rolled up inside that wave was not an SOS. It’s not a cry for help from an unknown world. It is a message of assurance, meant for ours. We are the ones in trouble here. The violence, the distrust, the fractured religions and competing ideologies, the hatred and selfishness are threatening to undo us. We’re the ones who need to send a message in a bottle.
The great irony is that amid such devastation and confusion, hatred and apathy, we are also showing signs of genius. We should be awestruck that the human race is visionary enough to have imagined that such a wave exists, in the first place, and brilliant enough to have measured its force.
We can only pray we will be wise enough to understand its message.
— This feature first appeared in Herald magazine, published by Baptist News Global five times a year and distributed to members of our annual fund and other stakeholders.