My Father’s Day Stars

Father’s Day 2018.

I’ve always been suspicious about the real meaning of things like “Father’s Day.” After all, my father lived as if every day was HIS day. He grabbed onto life with passion and gusto, intent on living life to the fullest and seeing every bit of this little planet we call home. He loved us kids with the same passion and enthusiasm, and inspired each of us in our own fashions to seize our day with both hands and eyes wide open. Although it wasn’t always a soft and easy trail, we were pretty lucky to have had him.

I was thinking about Dad a lot the other night, when I was camped out with four furry friends at the base of the North Face of Price Peak in Desolation Wilderness. It was a clear moonless night and I wanted to see the Milky Way, and maybe take some photos of it. I needed a remote place with a wide open view and absolutely zero manmade light sources to dim the light of the stars. I sat on a cliff waiting for the sun to set and watched the light fade in the west. I had plenty of time to think about how I had ended up sitting there as the night sky darkened and the stars began to appear.

Recently I have been watching a series of lectures by Neil Tyson, an astrophysicist who has a special genius for making the incomprehensible comprehensible. He can literally bring the stars down to earth in a down-home, painless fashion. For a lot of us, most of what we know about space has been brought to us through the lens of science fiction writers and Hollywood producers. (Personally, my understanding of General Relativity was gleaned by watching Interstellar 3 or 4 times!) But if you really want to understand things like the Big Bang and black holes and cosmic nebulas and so on, it’s hard to beat the work of Neil Tyson. He makes relativity relatable. I’m about half way through the “My Favorite Universe” series, feeling pretty humble perceiving myself as a fragile speck of animate spacedust crawling around on a minor chunk of conglomerated space debris orbiting a tiny star on the edge of a minor galaxy in an unfathomably huge universe full of dark energy.

And I would have been blissfully ignorant about my status as a speck except that I found all of these DVDs on astrophysics in my Father’s DVD collection. And decided I might as well pop them into the DVD player to watch while I worked out on the treadmill, which I find necessary to do these days in order to keep my 60 year old joints from turning to rust. Dad watched them all, and regarded his DVD collection as his most valuable earthly treasure. I think it distressed him greatly that he couldn’t take it with him, so I promised I’d take care of it for him. Well there’s some cool stuff here!

Neil Tyson points out that most biologists walk around with their noses to the ground, studying life forms here on the surface of the earth. I am no exception: although I think stars are pretty like glitter, I am endlessly fascinated with things that are alive, like plants and animals. But I am finally beginning to understand the idea that all of the molecules here on earth- including every atom of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen etc that make up myself and all of the living organisms of which I am so fond- came from Space Dust. Tyson: “For nearly all of the first 400 millennia after the birth of the universe, space was a hot stew of fast-moving, naked atomic nuclei with no electrons to call their own. The simplest chemical reactions were still just a distant dream, and the earliest stirrings of life on Earth lay 10 billion years in the future.” (I have to admit, he had me at the image of space as a hot stew!) From a Hot Stew of naked atoms Tyson deftly leads the viewer home to Planet Earth, to your very living room, to right now: “not only humans but also every other organism in the cosmos, as well as the planets or moons on which they thrive, would not exist but for the wreckage of spent stars. So you’re made of detritus. Get over it. Or better yet, celebrate it. After all, what nobler thought can one cherish than that the universe lies within us all?”*

So I had to go look at these stars and this galaxy myself, with my own eyes. It’s hard to see the stars at all these days because of all the man made lights covering the globe, but fortunately we have some remote areas of wilderness left to us, one of which is only an hour’s drive up the road from my house. I even got some halfway decent photos to prove it. Dad would have been tickled to death to see them. Maybe he’s up there right now exploring some new planet orbiting some other star in this very galaxy. Maybe he’s waving for the camera- I wouldn’t put it past him……The only thing I know for certain is that I couldn’t have done any of this without him. And that’s why I’m celebrating Father’s Day this year!

Have a good one,

Shirley

* From Death by Black Hole, by Neil deGrasse Tyson, c. 2007