All too human tale plays out against vast cosmic backdrop
The first words Cambridge undergraduates Stephen Hawking and Jane Wilde say to each other after an initial hello at a campus function is a declaration of who they are in terms of what they stand for: science and arts.
This, anyway, is how it happens in the recent award-winning movie A Theory of Everything, courtesy of the scriptwriter, Taranaki boy Anthony McCarten. It becomes a defining moment, a demarcation for this idealistic, young ’60s couple that will eventually come to haunt and destroy them, or at least their marriage. Sitting in the theatre watching the film unroll, and their lives unravel, was an affecting experience. Apparently, Hawking himself was crying at the end of it.
Things failed, collapsed and crumbled in time-honoured fashion, as it did for many from that generation in an era of rapid change and revolution. All was under question. As Hawking’s body broke down, along with the relationship with his long-suffering, religiously-inclined wife, the way we viewed ourselves in relation to the universe also shifted. It all started coming apart, at least the vision of how we thought it was back then.
Black holes, Hawking’s speciality, became the defining paradigm of the cosmos in the late 20th century. It was dangerous out there. It was violent and cataclysmically threatening. The universe ceased to be the benign, even the benevolent space we had once envisioned and became menacing and malignant.
Actually, things in this area had become a little unsettled as far back as the 16th century, during the time of Galileo. Copernicus had started it all off by informing us that we were not the centre of the universe and our ego took a big hit. The church was furious and some cardinals refused to look through Galileo’s telescope. We were no longer special and it just got worse. Even Shakespeare, Galileo’s contemporary, had Hamlet comment about how everything had been thrown into doubt with the new scientific picture of the heavens.
By the end of the 19th century, the enormity of the size of the universe was starting to get to us, too. English novelist Thomas Hardy gave voice to this phenomenon via one of his fictional characters, an astronomer, who comments, worryingly, about the cosmic scale of things.
‘‘There’s a size at which dignity begins,’’ he exclaimed; ‘‘further on there is a size at which grandeur begins; further on there is a size at which solemnity begins; further on, a size at which awfulness begins; further on, a size at which ghastliness begins.’’
Today, with speculation about an infinite number of universes, one’s head, not surprisingly, feels like exploding, much like the stars do themselves. Among those stars and circling planets, of which there are an estimated 40 billion habitable ones in our own galaxy alone, there must surely exist, it is thought, some extraterrestrial intelligent life.
Attempted contact has thus far drawn a blank. Some want it kept that way and no less a voice than Hawking’s has recently warned against such a venture. ‘‘The outcome, he said, ‘‘would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn’t turn out well for the Native Americans.’’ Star Wars come to life here would not be a pretty picture.
Imagine if this alien crowd were as screwed up as we are, full of hatreds, paranoias, religious divisions, ethnic hostilities and nationalistic animosities, and armed to the teeth like some thuggish gang with rape and pillage on the mind. Contact, pronounced David Brin, a physicist recently resigned from Seti, would be a ‘‘colossal mistake’’.
Voracious galactic black holes and dark threatening intergalactic scenarios are a dubious legacy left us by those who questioned received wisdoms about how the world and the cosmos works.
In the final scene of the movie, time is reversed, taking the viewer back to the beginning when the happy, innocent couple, Hawking and Wilde, first met. Reversing time is, of course, the thing Hawking does in his theoretical physics. How often have we thought of turning back the clock to find ourselves in some small, Eden-like, geocentric universe, a little warm nest round which the angels hover? Or, in reordering time, we would be able to undo some of the mistakes we have made in our lives? But as the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard once stated, ‘‘Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.’’ True enough. Black holes it is, then.
The universe ceased to be the benign, even the benevolent space we had once envisioned.