So, I went to see Interstellar yesterday. Even though it's practically three hours long, it's positively amazing and mindblowing. It's also pretty sciency; if you're not in the know about certain facts and theories about space and space travel, as well as timey wimey stuff, some of it might go over your head, but honestly, I thought it was amazing.
So amazing that in the whole car ride home I only spoke one word: "Mars." When I got home I quickly went upstairs and proceeded to write. It's a thing I do to help cope and think through things. What I ended up writing had some particular flair this time, and I thought I might share it with you, if that's okay.
So, without further ado, I give you What I Wrote While I Was Suffering Shock From Seeing an Amazing Movie:
I don’t know what to write.
I don’t know what to write and it’s killing me.
My head feels so screwed up right now
I’m thinking too hard about one of Einstein’s theories.
Two points in space can be galaxies away. There’s no way to get from one point to the other in any sensible way that wouldn’t take thousands of years — even if you traveled the speed of light.
Unless….
Unless you find a wormhole in space big and stable enough to send something through. And those don’t actually occur naturally, so you’d really have to create one yourself. (All naturally occurring wormholes are so tiny you can’t even see them. And good thing, too — because they are literally everywhere.)
Most people would think that when you go through a wormhole, you travel through space in an instant, time becoming nonexistent. Most people believe that a wormhole sends you through space.
And, according to Einstein, that’s where most people are wrong.
See, if his theory is accurate, the wormhole doesn’t even touch you. There’s nothing different about you; in fact, when you go through a wormhole, you’d have barely even moved. Confusing? Yes.
But this is how it works.
A wormhole bends the universe around you. More specifically, it takes the two points and touches them together, just barely. For one tiny moment of a millisecond, two points in space touch when they otherwise would never have done so.
It works like a bridge: They touch just long enough for you to cross, and then suddenly you’re in a completely new place. It’s actually called the Einstein-Rosen Bridge Theory, because that’s what wormholes are: bridges from one point in space to the other.
How cool is that?
I think about how immensely huge and different the universe is just about every day. About how huge everything else is, and yet I don’t feel small. I think about how many different galaxies there are, and each galaxy there are thousands of star systems, and in these star systems are planets, and on each of those planets is the potential for another species of living organism that no one’s even thought about before. I sit awake at night pondering how time might actually flow— is it actually linear, or is everything happening at once and our brains just put in linear order to be able to understand it all? Then again, how do we know that the universe exists? How can we be sure that we exist? We might think we are really here, breathing and living everyday lives, but how do we know that our brains don’t make that up for us, too? What would happen if we didn’t exist the way we perceive we do, but in some other way altogether? There’s no way to prove anything, when you think about it. And believe me, I’ve thought about it. I feel like I can breathe in the world sometimes. And then I breathe it back out. But man, the world passed through my lungs, and that makes me feel so important and happy. Even if it’s not quite literally true.
Every time this happens, I get inspired to do something cool.
But how do you express the feeling of existence?
How can you express the entirety of anything and everything in a picture, or a blog post, or a drawing?
How can I prove to the world that I’d rather be thinking about this stuff than remember the time of that one battle that happened over a hundred years ago?
People are advancing so much farther than we used to be. Then again, we always are. But society is changing; schools and the way they’re taught are becoming outdated. How can we move on if we only learn the same things, over and over? Why do we keep teaching every new generation the same things as the last?
Are we afraid of change?
Then why do we strive to discover? Why is it human nature to be curious?
Why am I so good at asking questions?
How can I be tearing apart the world right now?
I don’t know. I think about this stuff in my free time a lot. I consider how huge everything is, and how we can never really touch anything because the electron clouds of our atoms repel each other because they’re all the same charge, and no atom comes in contact with another one unless they bond together, which makes it a molecule, and a whole different thing. You can never really touch anything for real; everything you think is solid is actually just a ton of tiny atoms squished together, moving around constantly because of the energy they store; the scientific name for water is actually dihydrogen monoxide, and if you drink too much of it, you can die because your cells will have absorbed so much of it that they’ll start exploding; but no one can understand everything.
For instance, I’m really close to failing chemistry.
I’m not kidding.
And there you have it, folks. Unfiltered coping mechanism written by a teenager who has no life outside of school and the internet. Welcome to my world.
I hope you like it here as much as I do.
~PolarFarina
