World Science Festival ponders the sound of silence

The World Science Festival, which started its 10th year last night in New York City, goes for very high production values…and the 2017 opening night program offered the talents of Pilobolus, Renee Fleming--and Joshua Bell knocking the hell out of the violin.  

The previous 9 years of the WSF have looked straight into the cosmos to confront the expansiveness of time and space--so this year added the relatively new knowledge that the universe is expanding at an accelerating pace.  The program ended with a wild version of “The Sound of Silence” backed by Brian Greene's forward-look into astronomical physics--a universe that's spinning away from us.   

Think about that when you think about true silence.  "Hello darkness my old friend," indeed...

For example,  soon (in cosmos-time) you won’t be able to see any stars because all the galaxies will be moving away from us at speeds faster than light.  (My partner thinks there are already versions of consciousness well beyond our current “scientific understanding” that comprehend all this already, and that humans, even if they're not debilitated by religion, are nowhere near the top of the thought chain--but that’s a somewhat side issue.)   

So, if we were to pass a note to future generations saying “hey future science dudes, there are all these cool galaxies we used to watch,” the future thinkers would ridicule our post-it as archaic myth-making.  We'd be lumped in with the thinkers who came up with the 12 signs of the zodiac and the names of the constellations.  Carl Sagan and Douglas Adams will be  post-scripts to the Dead Sea scrolls.

Greene asked the gala audience last night to remember that, if the 13 billion years since the universe appeared were a one-year calendar, scientific method would only occupy the single last second on New Year's Eve:  23:59:59.   Those last 10 or so generations in a second.

Excuse some homo sapien hubris--I know we're not that special and probably somewhere below our pets--that we've figured anything about the universe out at all.  

And of course, where is all that matter and energy and cold going…when the universe is so expanded that gravitational and particle attractions are meaningless…photons and neutrons will all be mixed up randomly, everything will have collapsed into the most local black hole and spewed out again in new versions of chaos, etc etc.   

And there we are, sprinkled across the eons, listening to…Simon and Garfunkel?   Anyway…

I would like to dream, a la my partner Mina’s comment, that there’s already a consciousness beyond science…based on love or glitter or beauty or something…that knows all this stuff.   We just can’t see it with our best telescopes…so we watch the universe gaining headway as it escapes us, leaving us…and find solace in our moment of awareness.