Under the Football Stands

There are times and places when and where the Milky Way really is a milky way; a ragged band of light stretching across the horizon.

I still recall--all this time later--catching sight of something much fainter than what you see here--asking my mother what the Milky Way was. I do not recall her precise answer, probably because it was not precise. I am not sure that there were many people--seventy or more years ago--who would have said, plainly, that it was what we see when we look toward the center of our galaxy; that our sun--our star--was one of an uncountable number of stars circling about what is undoubtedly a huge black hole, something like a swarm of bees caught in a cosmic maelstrom.

It is to look across the center of a monstrous swarm of stars. It is brighter in that direction, quite naturally.

Just as we had to get used to recognizing that our sun was a star, pretty much like most of the other stars we see, we had to remind ourselves that we were looking at our galaxy from somewhere quite a ways out from the center.

Once, really not so long ago, we looked up from wherever we happened to be standing on earth, and thought we were looking at the home of the gods, and where we would go when we died, if we deserved it, or could manage it, or strike the right bargain. At the same time, in what we now know is a kind of absurd sense of direction, we thought hell was down, underfoot. It is astounding how fast our understanding of the natural world changes; almost weekly.

As amazing as the underground particle accelerator in Switzerland is, right now we are probably learning more from the telescopes that allow us to look incredibly far into things, which is to say, incredibly far back in time, almost to the cosmic explosion that began everything that we know. They are not alternative understandings of what we are: they are just two ways to look at things.

Some of the best optical mirrors in the world are poured and polished right here in Tucson, beneath the east stands of the football stadium. I recall the Henry Moore sculpture, "Nuclear Energy", at the University of Chicago, where the first controlled nuclear reaction was achieved, on what had been the squash court under the west stands of the Old Stagg Field.

The big and little things come together, when we look very hard, under the football stands.

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