By Geo Ong
As a right-brained individual, I’ve never been fully willing, or fully able, to understand things like maths, science, and general good-natured logic. Now that I am an adult, I feel that things must change. Some things, at least. While maths still scare and confuse me (often simultaneously), I’ve developed a secret crush on science for a few years now. I never did anything about it, fearing what might be dangerously obvious: What if I’m not smart enough for science?
I had been ready to accept this fact as scientific truth, but past examples of Urchin Inspirations have shown that a predominantly right-brained mind can still absorb, analyse, and even write a book or two about some scientific subject. For instance, we have Bill Bryson doing that thing he does of being totally awesome in A Short History of Nearly Everything. In the 1940s, John Steinbeck, this time sadly not with Charley, went on a six-week marine specimen-collecting boat expedition around the Gulf of California and published his findings and feelings under the title The Log from the Sea of Cortez. Not to mention environmentalism, a very large tenet of Urchin philosophy, roots itself in the world of science.
I haven’t yet read the two aforementioned books, nor have I read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, or any of those geology books by John McPhee. I want to read them all; in fact, I’ve started all of these books in the past, but I get lost each time.
I refuse to give up. Perhaps delving into these books isn’t the right way to start. A friend of mine, one of those rare creatures who can explain both the concept of leitmotif in Modernist literature and, I don’t know, something sciency, invited me to a monthly lecture series held in Brooklyn called the Secret Science Club. This could be my chance. A lecture could be the way for me to grasp such foreign information.
The topic for this month’s lecture was black holes. In preparation, I have spent the past few evenings under the covers in my room with the lights off listening to Sun Ra records. On the evening of the lecture, I emerged from my room in a shockingly sedate state of mind and, having first to recall the ability to walk, made my way to the lecture site.
Which of course was a bar. More specifically, the Bell House in Gowanus, part-bar, part-music venue (with bar). I was told to arrive an hour early, which initially sounded absurd, until I obeyed and upon arrival saw the queue of people out the door. Once the door to the main stage opened, we were all ushered inside; it was only after finding seats and sitting down that I realised there were about 300 people, maybe more (I’m bad at numbers), in attendance.
As we waited for the lecture to begin, my friend’s friend said, ‘Isn’t it crazy that a black hole can swallow up a star with birthing planets while simultaneously spewing molecular sub-particles of energy into the universe?’ Another one answered, ‘I read in The Atlantic that astronomers will be able to witness a star being swallowed up in an event horizon for the very first time in history. That will answer and open up so many questions. Geo, what do you think?’
‘I want to meet an alien one day,’ I said, but before I could expound, ‘Intergalactic’ by the Beastie Boys faded out on the speakers and the event began.
The guest lecturer was the delightful Caleb Scharf, a research scientist at Columbia University, who got extra points from me for repeatedly pronouncing the word ‘coz-moss’. He opened the lecture by saying, ‘I don’t suppose it’s worth asking whether or not you all are ready to get astro-physical.’ After the laughter died down, he continued: ‘Science is made up of stories.’
For an hour he demonstrated just that, telling us stories about black holes, relating to our past, present, and future, as well as our time and our space. And it got me thinking. In one way, the left-brained minds of scientists aren’t all that different from the right-brained minds of artists. We all think about time, space, our relationships to objects, to each other, and our places in the world, the universe, and history itself. I was overjoyed with this personal realisation that I missed much of what Scharf was saying about mass and light, but I probably wouldn’t have understood much of it anyway had I caught it.
