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| Infinite Singularities |
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| At the beginning of things. |
Now, it wasn't really Jill's fault, as she was in last minute negotiations to bring one of Aidan's friends along because Nathan has managed to catch the lurgy at school during his first week back. The tests say that it isn't COVID, but it's floored him. You always know that he's tired if he decides to go to bed early. It's a shame because he would have loved this. He's watched the Wonders series several times and loves space, science and facts. He's less fascinated by the mathematics, but this would have been perfect for him.
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| Behold, the Singularity! |
It was amusing at the start when Brian Cox referred to the show as a lecture, then recounted that Robin Ince had told him not to do that when he's charging these prices!
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| Exploring Spacetime |
The show was a grand tour of the universe, cosmology, astronomy, mathematics and physics, with a dash of biology. Professor Alice Roberts was the guest for the night, and provided a great counterpoint to Professor Brian Cox. Robin Ince just had fun puncturing Brian's bubble and making everyone laugh.
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| Robin Ince in flow |
There was one moment of drama when a fuse blew and the AV system failed. Robin Ince was onstage then in the middle of an anecdote. He handled it brilliantly, and managed to keep the audience engaged during the five minutes or so it took to bring it all back. He then launched back into the anecdote, which ended up feeling a bit like a shaggy dog story.
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| Professor Alice Roberts on stage |
The audience were encouraged to tweet questions about the show and pretty much anything that had come to mind, which Robin Ince presented as MC to Brian and Alice. That was amusing and inciteful.
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| More of the show |
In the heading of this post, I mentioned a timely reminder of my insignificance. That was because this was a birthday present. But my fifty odd years pale into insignificance compared the 13.8 billion years that the universe had been around, and the 4 billion years that it has taken life to develop on Earth. Multicellular life has been around for 600 million years, and mammals only go their break when the dinosaurs died back after the asteroid impact 66 million years ago. Humanity's ancestors develop in the last million years, and we only truly started our technological development with agriculture, perhaps 4,000 years ago. Earth is one planet in 9 (I'm still counting Pluto) orbiting a single star in a galaxy of 400 billion stars within an observable universe of 2 trillion galaxies.
How can you not feel insignificant with numbers like that? We are a tiny blip in history and space. And yet, if nothing intelligent is there, the universe is meaningless because nothing is there to give it meaning. The show talked about the potential for existential angst when you explore the science of nature around us, and I get what it means. We sit here, focussed on all these 'big' things in our lives, and in the big scheme of things, they're trivial. Yet to our tiny lives, they're huge.
The show ends with a disclaimer on screen that if you find the facts presented here disturbing that you need to take it up with nature, because that's just how it is. It also ended with Public Service Broadcasting's "Go", which amused me. During the break, Aidan had said that he felt that PSB's "Race for Space" album would have been more appropriate than Mahler's 10th symphony for the music. He went away joking that perhaps they'd listened to him.
All in all, a fantastic evening (although the less said about the challenges of parking in Leeds if you approach the Loop from the wrong direction to where your carpark is located, the better).
11 September 2022
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