February 15, 2016

Last week, 1.3 billion years fell away

editor:	Gurmeet Singh

I feel like I haven’t really recovered from last week. News from across the world, and across the universe, felt all a bit too monumental to understand. First, there was the mind-boggling confirmation that gravitational waves, as predicted by Einstein, were real, existing phenomena. The tiny machines which can register changes across the universe, flickered to reveal a century-old prediction was right. Insane.

But then much larger, much less delicate machines also moved, or rather, stopped moving: Across the Middle-East, planes, tanks and weapons fell quiet, at least for a few hours, as a ‘cessation of hostilities’ was declared, in a joint US-Russian effort (that mainly excludes the Americans) with Syria. Most commentators agree that this decision is basically in favor of Russia, Assad and the status-quo. Who knows where this will leave the whole Daesh vs the world conflict, not to mention Syria (only today, a MSF hospital was bombed).

And then just the other day, Supreme Court Justice, Antonin Scalia died, leaving nobody mourning and everyone bickering about whether President Obama will be able to push through a nomination through the senate.

So we dwindle from the universal, to the global, and end up at the local. It’s been hard to understand, shifting from levels of complexity that go far beyond my knowledge and comprehension, so I’m tempted to just make a few comments about something I can understand – the political strategies employed now by different American actors in the appointment of a new Supreme Court Justice.

But I’m not going to – the world is in an unbelievably strange place at the moment, whose political crises and impending ecological disasters can be overwhelming. So instead of talking about the political strategies and political devastation, the wars and ecological damage, I’d like to remind everyone, myself included, that a machine, on our planet, detected two black holes crashing into one another, 1.3 billion years ago, last week.