Things
astronomical have dominated the news recently. Earlier this month there was the
spectacle of the Perseid meteor shower, sometimes referred to poetically as the
'tears of Saint Lawrence'. And then the US witnessed the 'Great American
Eclipse' – a total solar eclipse visible across the entire United States, from
the Pacific to the Atlantic. So it seemed appropriate that I should be reading
a thought-provoking book by Adam Ford called 'Galileo and the art of ageing mindfully'.
Subtitled 'Wisdom from the night skies', this little volume is one of a series
of slim hardbacks produced by Leaping Hare Press which deal, in a very entertaining
and often rather tangential way, with mindfulness. (Other titles available include
'Einstein and the Art of Mindful Cycling' and 'The Art of Mindful Baking'.)
Adam
Ford (who has written a number of the books in the Leaping Hare series, is an ordained
Anglican priest, but there are more references to Buddhism than to Christianity
in this philosophical reflection on what we can learn from astronomy. In a
chapter called 'Time Tunnels and Eternity', Ford explains the speed of light
and what it means to us. He points out how, if we look up at Orion in December we
see Sirius (the brightest star in our sky):
"Like the sound of the woodcutter's
axe delayed when seen from the far side of a field, the light of Sirius is
somehow delayed by its speed, so we do not see it as it is now but as it was
eight and a half years ago. What we see in our present moment is something happening
eight and half years ago in our past. What were we doing then?"
Ford
goes on to consider that, because of the time taken for light to travel, using
light years as a measure of distance, when we look at Betelgeuse for example (450
light years away) "we see it now as
it was in the past, in the first Elizabethan era." While the three
stars of Orion's belt "are seen even
further back in history, for they shine to us from hundreds of years ago before
the days of William the Conqueror."
I,
with little knowledge of astronomy and still less of Galileo, had never contemplated
how, because of the speed of light, when we look at the stars we are looking
into the past – a kind of everyday, interstellar time-travel that might help us
maintain a healthy sense of perspective when we reflect on our place and time in
the world.
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