Phenomenal: A Hesitant Adventurer's Search for Wonder in the Natural World (32 page)

“Well, unless I’m dead,” he says. “We might get northern lights and eclipse at the same time. That would be divine! Awesome is a word that is overrated, but that would be the correct usage. A T-shirt is not awesome. A song is not awesome. A volcano is awesome! An eclipse is awesome! Awesome means very powerful phenomena. It means something bigger than everything else! The night sky is awesome, but certainly a solar eclipse is awesome . . . We’re lucky to live on this planet. None of the moons around Saturn ever eclipse.”

He’s also wowed by this: The phenomenon of an eclipse will not last forever. The moon’s orbit increases roughly a centimeter per year. About one billion years from now, the moon will be smaller than the sun’s disc and total solar eclipses will—as viewed from earth—no longer exist.

We’re alive at just the right time to bear witness.

“I like the predictability very much,” Chris says. “You know where they’re going to be a hundred years ahead of time!”

“But what about the weather,” I say. “That’s not really predictable.”

“Yeah,” he says quietly, “I suppose it’s not.”

Miranda approaches, her arms covered with woven bracelets. “It’s refreshing, really,” she says. “We’re not in control.”

“I don’t like not being in control,” Chris says.

The jinx gives her husband a weary look and says, “No one can control the weather, dear.”

 • • • 

I soon realize that I have unintentionally arranged to spend the final hours of my great spiritual pilgrimage with an international collection of self-proclaimed, somewhat famous atheists. They include my British-born seatmate, David Malin, the astrophotographer who took the first color photographs of space.

He is in his seventies, but he’s dressed like a schoolchild today, wearing shorts and a navy-and-white gingham shirt neatly tucked in. His thin white hair is covered by a floppy-rimmed sun hat. We settle in for a four-hour drive inland, and I explain what I’m doing in Australia, musing aloud about the interconnectivity of nature. He says, “I think the sense of wonder is what makes us human. When you’re less than ten, you don’t link things together. But as you get older, the complex linking of things into a whole can re-create your curiosity. If you get good at it, that’s where wonder can be found.”

This is, I realize, what has happened to me, each phenomenal experience compounding the wonder of the last. It is through patterns—complex and simple, big and small, personal and universal—that a sense of wonder has been revived deep within me. It is an awakened awareness of interconnected mysteries. And David thinks that sort of wonder can be relayed, to some degree, through scientific imagery. “Imagine,” David says, “if every parent took their child on their knee and told them that they were made of stardust! They would never forget that.”

David’s photographs appear in galleries as well as observatories. He says, “I think art and science come from the same part of the mind. But art doesn’t have the same framework. Artists are curious, like scientists, but they can be messy.”

He shoots me an apologetic look.

Before David became an astrophotographer, he was a chemist. “You want to know something in chemistry, you boil it,” he says. “You do experiments. In almost all science, you can do experiments. You can change conditions, add new ingredients. But with astronomy, all you can do is experience what the universe sends. You have to interpret it the best you can. There’s information everywhere!”

Hearing this astronomer talk about
experiencing what the universe sends
is like listening to myself struggle with what to call the great mystery of being. When I ask him what he thinks about people using the term “universe” in a spiritual way, the way some people use the word God, he gives me an uh-oh-you’re-one-of-those looks and says: “I think that’s unfortunate.”

I try to balance my woo-woo by quoting Einstein’s bit about cosmic religious feeling.

David seems unmoved.

“I’m familiar with the quote,” he says. “But I have no religious feeling.”

For a long, silent minute, it seems that I’ve alienated my friendly, wonder-loving companion. But then David says, “I understand spiritual feeling. When I go into nature, when I’m standing before a great sunset, I get a lump in my throat. That’s difficult to experience in a rational way of living. We always seek explanations to things. In the modern world, you do it seeking science. In the world before, you saw something in the sky, you evoked a reason for it. The Greeks evoked the movement of planets in the sky. It’s reasonable to think that planetary movement affected our daily lives, because we invent things even though we don’t understand. Rituals are a good example. They’re bred into you. Yesterday, a lady came into a room where I was sitting and I stood up and shook her hand. It’s a ritual. It’s a nice ritual, but there’s no good reason for it.”

Well, there is a reason, albeit a symbolic one. Handshakes are thought to have originated as a gesture of peace. They were intended to give those encountered the opportunity to feel—with his or her own hand—that the newcomer was not carrying a weapon. It was intended as an outward, phenomenal sign of an inward, intangible peaceful intent. It still is.

Meeting David is—in terms of astrophotography—sort of like meeting the wizard behind the curtain. Among fellow scientists, he is known as the man who colored the stars. “When light levels are very low, you don’t see color,” he says. “If you live by the color of the moon, you live in a gray universe.”

It was through David’s photographic techniques that mankind gained access to the privilege of documenting purple and blood-colored nebulas. These days, he spends most of his time taking photos of his grandchildren with the small handheld camera he has packed for eclipse morning. But he still has a special interest in the way we see the wind. As in, the winds of an eclipse, shadow bands.

“They’re very subtle,” he says of the thin shadows visible on the ground before and after an eclipse. “There’s the theory that they exist, but we need tangible evidence,” he tells me. “They’re hard to photograph well.”

“But haven’t you seen them?” I ask, remembering a speech he gave earlier about watching shadow bands on beach sands. David is the only expert astronomer onboard who has actually seen an eclipse. Even Fred—touted by the news show
60 Minutes
as the lead astronomer in Australia—has never witnessed one, though he’s been giving television and radio interviews about the eclipse all morning. I would be more surprised by this if I hadn’t already talked to lightning experts who seemed indifferent about the Catatumbo and marine biologists who don’t know how it feels to swim among coral eggs.

David shrugs off his phenomenal experience with shadow bands, saying, “That’s anecdotal.” He wants photographic proof.

The thin-lined trees blurring outside our windows grow denser as we move toward Maitland Downs. With each mile, we come across increasing numbers of cars and camper vans parked alongside the road. Soon, there is little space between vehicles. “Gosh,” David says. “There are hundreds!”

But his mood dampens when he looks up, toward clouds that are forming to the east. “Oh, dear,” he says of the coming weather. “It’s something we can’t predict. Science has no way to control it. You just have to pick a spot and see what happens.”

 • • • 

Australian aboriginals were the world’s first astronomers. At least, that’s what one of guest speaker Ray Norris’s colleagues suggested in an article. When the round-bellied astrophysicist read the claim, he was skeptical. He remembers thinking:
I’m going to look into this and disprove her in no time
.

We’ve gathered under a tarp-topped dining area surrounded by rows of canvas tents. “I had two objectives,” he tells my dinner group, which includes Australian television personality Jennifer Byrne and her eighteen-year-old son, Connor. Ray says, “Were they really doing astronomy and how long had they been doing it? The culture is 50,000 years old . . . How far back does it go?”

The answer, years into Ray’s research, is:
We really don’t know.

Ray is one of the main reasons I chose Fred’s tour, intrigued by the way his work marries science and mythology, oral and literate knowledge. Ray says, “We can’t date the stories. As far as I can tell, aboriginals could not predict eclipses, but they understood how they worked.”

Most early accounts of aboriginal astronomy were written by Europeans. They are varied and often culturally insensitive accounts, but there’s one in particular Ray likes to talk about. It’s the story of Daisy Bates, an Irishwoman who lived in the desert in the 1920s. She heard word of a coming eclipse and began to warn locals. She did not want them to be alarmed. But, when she told the Wirangu people working for her about the phenomenon, they were nonchalant. They told her that the eclipse was just a visible embracing of the Moon-man and the Sun-woman.

“But that’s just creating deities,” Connor says, raising his eyebrows.

“It’s not just making up stories,” Ray protests.

Take, for instance, myths explaining the association between the moon and the tides. Modern astronomers explain the connection by talking about abstract gravity. The Yolngu of Arnhem Land traditionally explain it through a narrative, sensory approach. When the tides are high, water rises through the sky to fill the moon. When the water runs out of the moon—leaving a dark sky—the tides are low. An emptying and refilling of the moon reflects the planet’s waxing and waning.

“They’ve come up with the correct answer in their own cultural way,” Ray says. “The story explains this in every important respect.” This lunar connection to tidal movement was protested by Galileo. Ray says, “Someone suggested to him that the tides might have something to do with the moon and he said, ‘Oh, no.’ He got it wrong, but this story had it right!” Galileo, it seems, thought a connection between the moon and tides sounded too magical to be true.

Cilla, Ray’s wife, scolds, “Ray, I think you’re being rude to Galileo.”

Ray shrugs. “If he’d just gone to the sea and looked, he would have realized it was right.” The mechanics are different from modern understandings, but the observed connection is there. “I think this is what we call science,” he says.

“But where do we draw the line between science and art?” Connor asks.

Ray shakes his head. It’s a question he spends a lot of his life thinking about. His work with indigenous groups has made him think of storytelling a little differently than he used to. He’s a skeptic, but he’s become more open to the ideas of mythology and symbolism in recent years. He can see them unfurling all around him, even in the halls of academia.

“Okay,” he says, “think about this: dark energy. We know the universe is accelerating, that there’s a real object. But we have no idea what it is.”

According to NASA, 70 percent of the universe is made up of dark energy. Dark matter makes up about 25 percent of the place. Everything ever observed, which is known as normal matter, adds up to less than 5 percent of the universe.

Ray says, “First we ask: Okay, what’s doing this? So, in order to be able to talk about it, we give it a name, dark energy. The first thing you do is give it a label. It’s like terra incognito!”

Dark energy is, in cosmological terms, the margins of the map.

“There are pictorial symbols and there are linguistic symbols,” I say. “The words
dark energy
are symbols for the unknown. All words are just symbols.”

“I agree,” Ray says.

“But is this really science?” Jennifer asks of aboriginal astronomy.

“Yeah,” says Connor. “Where’s the proof?”

But it’s not so much about proof as it is perspective.

“Okay,” I say. “I’m going to bring up a dirty word.”

This gets everyone’s attention. Jennifer leans into her elbows. I turn to address Ray: “In order to be a scientist, don’t you have to have faith that there’s something out there to be discovered?”

Faith is, of course, the dirty word among this group.

They’re unified in their tailspin. There are round-robin shouts of “No!” Jennifer throws up her hands. Ray shakes his head. I’ve committed a faux pas. I knew it was a risky question.

“It’s curiosity, not faith!” Jennifer says.

“Yes, curiosity!” Ray shouts. “Faith is something altogether different.”

“But don’t you have to believe there’s something to be curious about in order to move forward?” I ask.

I’m a little afraid these skeptics are going to see me as some sort of astrology-loving nut or religious fundamentalist. But I’m neither. I reside in the hinterlands of spiritual, but not religious, terra incognito.

Ray says, “I don’t believe in anything. I have hypotheses.”

In time, I let the conversation migrate. But, later, out of curiosity, I look up the actual definition of faith. It’s hard not to laugh out loud when I read the entry on Dictionary.com
.

The definition of faith: Belief that is not based on proof.

The sample sentence given:
He had faith that the hypothesis would be substantiated by fact.

I have, over the past few years, begun to revere ambiguity and mystery nearly as much as I fear it. But it’s not a popular view. “To form a culture like ours, a culture predicated on the avoidance of disarray,” psychologist Kirk Schneider reasons, “we need to cultivate intricate defenses against mystery, and to acquire sophisticated strategies that enable us to skirt the complexities of being. Hence, much of our speech is geared not to acknowledge our humility before life, but our control, coordination, and management.”

Writer Alain de Botton suggests that this worldview has led to a subsequent shift in what awes us. “For thousands of years,” he writes, “it had been nature . . . that had a monopoly on awe. It had been the ice caps, the deserts, the volcanoes and the glaciers that had given us . . . a strangely pleasing feeling of humility.” It is what philosophers of the eighteenth century referred to as the sublime. But its axis has shifted. He writes: “We were now deep in the era of the technological sublime, when awe could . . . be invoked not by forests or icebergs but by supercomputers, rockets and particle accelerators. We were now almost exclusively amazed by ourselves.”