Light From a Pixel: March 2024

Sunday, March 17, 2024

How Gravity Bends Light

"We have not even to risk the adventure alone

The Pillars of Creation - (c) NASA - public domain

for the heroes of all time have gone before us.

The labyrinth is thoroughly known...

we have only to follow the thread of the hero-path.

And where we had thought to find an abomination

We shall find God.

And where we had thought to slay another

we shall slay ourselves.

Where we had thought to travel outwards

we shall come to the center of our own existence.

And where we had thought to be alone we shall be with all the world."

-Joseph Campbell

Campbell was a scholar, teacher, and thinker from the GI Generation whose wisdom has gone far beyond the years in which he lived. His writing on the hero's journey has influenced books and movies throughout the decades. Campbell felt his Catholic childhood gave him a higher vantage point from which to view history and to see the commonalities that exist across religions and cultures. Like the silver threads woven into the fabrics of altar cloths, his liturgical experience gave him an ability to look across the timelines of history and see what stitches all of us together.

He once spoke about the first full image of earth, the first one humanity saw collectively of the Earth as a whole that was taken in the 1970's. This image, The Blue Marble went into circulation during the more formative years of Generation X. It may have given our generation a deeper sense of the collective experience of humanity when we were still impressionable in a way we maybe were not even conscious of. Campbell said, "Our world as the center of the universe, the world divided from the heavens, the world bound by horizons in which God's love is reserved for members of the in group: that is the world that is passing away. Apocalypse is not about a fiery Armageddon and salvation of a chosen few, but about the fact that our ignorance and our complacency are coming to an end."

2024 includes a partial eclipse on March 25th which will create a collective experience for most of North and South America. This year also includes a full eclipse on April 8th, which I am planning to go see in Austin. I am not sure what colossal shift might take place for us collectively April 8th, or what light-bending experience will happen for me individually. The path the Sun will take on that day is essentially the journey my ancestors took once they landed on the shores of the US and slowly migrated, over generations, to Texas. I will be thinking of their journey, along with my own journey so far, and where to go from here, between the light and the shadows. For a few minutes of totality, the brightness of day will become one with the darkness of night.

How does gravity bend light? It's a complex physics formula, so for those of us who'd like to look at it for a moment in simple terms, we could say it's the way stars sometimes appear in the wrong place....

Einstein, who was from the Lost Generation, hypothesized that gravity is a warping of time and space - an impact to the 'fabric' of the universe. He believed a large object like the sun could distort spacetime enough that gravity could bend light. While he published his General Theory of Relativity in May 1916, it was during the eclipse of May 1919 when scientists observed that some stars appeared in the wrong place based on previous measurements of the universe - showing evidence of Einstein's theory.

Maybe every generation gets at least one moment to graze the surface of the sun.

How do we, as humans, who find ourselves and our world in so many places of darkness, bend the light toward ourselves, and toward others? Maybe this is anything that takes something terribly wrong and makes it right. Maybe it is overcoming the obstacles that block us, maybe sometimes its fighting for something, and other times it is letting go of the fight and finding our peace.

To have survived a pandemic means we have made it through quite a labyrinth, as Joseph Campbell would have called it, a necessary and grueling chapter of a hero's journey that leaves scars on your skin and grief in your soul. History has its cycles, and generations do as well; your ancestors, as they found themselves in generations leading up to yours, saw eclipses, and pandemics, and went through immense struggle, and pushed on to wake up to another day on the planet until their time was over. And we, like living miracles, walk across the earth, not realizing each footstep is silver, each breath is golden.

How does gravity bend light?

Einstein explained it with his theory of relativity.

Joseph Campbell explained it by showing that when the hero or heroine comes home from the journey having found the answer - and the answer is always in some way rooted in forgiveness and unconditional love.

Some silver thread keeps us bound to this earth, for a time, and that thread is woven into the tapestry of the whole human story. Each religion, culture and generation may be, as it turns out, more alike than different, though we can only see this when we can see a much bigger picture.

If we are in the modern Western world, we see time as linear. If we can bend the way we see time, even just for a moment, we can bend light as well, and this is where we can get a glimpse of the eternal beauty -- the reality that all of time is one. And when we know this, both in our mind and in our heart, we know that anything that has gone wrong can be made right again.

This is how gravity bends light.

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Sources:

The Hero with a Thousand Faces - Joseph Campbell

ncronline.org/blogs/earthbeat/eco-catholic/joseph-campbell-earth-heavens

science.nasa.gov/eclipses/history/

NASA photos are public domain

And a piece about the 2017 partial eclipse as seen from Northern California, with thoughts of the Lost Generation:

The Turnings of the Universe

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