One thousand and three hundred million years ago, when the Earth was busy building rocks and oceans, preparing for our arrival, covered in seemingly lifeless blobs learning to copulate and feed and building the genetic complexity that would one day be the foundation for drifting stardust to form dinosaurs and birds and the threads of your carpet, two relatively large black holes were traveling through space very far from where we sit now. It’s no use saying how far— our brains cannot fathom it. It can’t even fathom a distance one-one-billionth of it.
For example, the drive to my grandparent’s house growing up was 25 km. It took about 25 minutes. I went once a week, maybe 40 times a year, until I was 18. Around 720 times. That means I travelled 36,000 km back and forth to my grandparent’s house in my life. To reach these black holes I would have had to keep driving back and forth to this house every week for 14,615,385,000,000,000,000 years. I would be 14,615,385,000,000,000,026 years old and my grandma would be 14,615,385,000,000,000,084. Gas would cost $116,666,666,666,666,666, assuming I’m driving a Prius and they make 33,000 times the amount of money we have now without causing inflation.
This shouldn’t fit anywhere in your brain. Whatever you’re capable of imagining— the length of our solar system or of every atom of every human laid out in a line— it doesn’t cover one-one-billionth of this distance. If the distance was the width of America, the amount you can fathom is the finest grain of sand on the northeastern tip of Maine. So let it go. It won’t fit. Just put it into terms your brain can work with so you can develop a mental image of a picture of a picture of the real deal. We don’t understand Grief much either, but we listen to sad songs and think yeah, that’s it.
So these two black holes were hurtling out there, beyond fathom, when they entered each other’s gravitational field. Whoops. They leaned a little too close and met to catastrophic consequences. An event greater than any we’ve ever lived through, yet without anyone present to inflict Meaning upon, occurred in some obscure corner of existence eons upon eons before earth was covered in the ice of Kaigas, which melted into water, which refroze and melted and refroze and melted like a tennis ball on a rubber string until it settled just right for us here and now.
These two massive beings entered the same neighborhood, locked eyes, and began the ancient dance. They circled the drain, tempted each other, moved tantalizingly, hesitantly, assuredly and inevitably. They sped up, locked in a trance, moved by the other to euphoria until the instant their eternal nothingnesses made first contact on a level which you can only understand when you’ve touched the hand of your first love for the first time— only if you’ve been aware of the outermost ridges of your fingerprint making contact with the finest hairs on the back of their knuckles. The instant they met, one singularity to another, they were one. He was 25 Solar Masses, she was 31. Their baby (or perhaps it is more than a baby, perhaps it is some conclusion of their souls, or worse than a baby, a baby which kills both its parents) was named GW1509014. Let’s call him Paul. When Paul emerged to existence with a cosmic chirp he weighed 53 Solar Masses. The two had combined, and yet three units were missing. One decillion pounds (don’t worry about it) escaped the collision and disappeared into the universe in some mysterious medium which the smartest people living today are trying to understand. Which our friend Einstein hinted at, but couldn’t prove. Into what we call a Gravitational Wave.
See, everything that has mass makes an indent in space. It has presence in the folds of existence. The sun is quite large— it makes a large indent. The earth is caught in that indent, which is why it goes around the sun ceaselessly. The sun has Earth in her indent and has no intention of letting go. The earth subsequently makes an indent which the moon is caught in, rather peripherally. We’re caught in the earth’s indent as well, quite totally.
Paul’s birth was a true disturbance. It didn’t make just one indent, but ripples. These ripples travelled through space messing with everything they touched. As they moved past galaxies they wreaked havoc, less and less so as time moved on. They probably fucked up a whole solar system around the time our O-Zone stabilized. When Pangea split perhaps they were eating salsa in the Sombrero Galaxy. When man discovered fire the ripple was likely moving rocks an inch or two around Dwingeloo. When Einstein died it was somewhere near the Milky Way, maybe by the Claw Nebula or our old friend Andromeda, moving unwaveringly like a Comet in a china shop.
Meanwhile, two labs are built by a group named LIGO— one in Louisiana, one in Washington. We can imagine they bickered during conferences over the relative value of coffee vs. po’boys as they gave a go at proving Einstein right. The idea was that events in space might cause these ripples, and that they might affect earth and everything on earth (we are on earth), and that space, not the big black blanket but the dimensions of every physical object, may not be as fixed as we had hoped, and that we ourselves may be rippling, our very bodies and cells may be as elastic as the surface of a lake, if only to vary by a degree equal to the diameter of an atom.
By 2002 they had built tunnels underneath both labs extending 4 km in two directions which formed a right angle— because when you tell a scientist that we may vary in size, they’re going to spend a few billion dollars placing lasers and mirrors in the largest man-made V in existence. By this time, Paul’s ripple was somewhere out there, perhaps even somewhere observable by the furthest reaches of our observable universe. Then it happened. On September 14th, 2015, at 5:51 am— I was probably asleep in my first apartment in New York— the ripple entered the Earth and rang our equator like a tuning fork. It traveled to Livingston, Louisiana, not far from Bourbon Street or the church where Al Green preaches every Sunday or the spot in Arkansas where two friends and I crossed the Mississippi river for a piss and a decent view of Sunrise. It passed through the laser and caused a strain in space-time about .000000000000000000001 centimeters off from what we consider normal. Here’s the kicker: seven milliseconds later— I was likely still asleep— the ripple hit the other laser all the way up in Hanford, Washington. Around this same time Paul shook the lasers and me and the bridge I used to cross the Mississippi and the mug you used for your coffee this morning and the torn fringes of that rug beneath your feet as well as the one on which you took your first step and one of the hairs that was cut off after a panic attack when you were 13.
It changed the very dimensions of your finger, so that if in that moment you happened to be sitting beside someone you don’t love yet but whom you feel you might be in love with in a matter of weeks, days, seconds; if you happened to be beside that person and their hand was inching towards yours and yours towards theirs they might connect just a brief moment sooner. And if you have been in love, and if you’ve lost it, you might agree that that brief moment might be worth more than all the money you could spend on gas driving back and forth to your grandparents’ house for a few quintillion years. You might thank Paul, for in that brief moment you might’ve changed your mind, might’ve chickened out, pulled your hand back and headed home. And you can’t fathom the version of your life where you do change your mind as worth living.
The Heavy truth of Existence is that all things with Mass have Effect. Every object within and outside of your fathomable universe has an indent, and every event in which it is involved produces ripples. You can’t step out of bed in the morning or call an old friend on the phone without changing the world. And no barrier is going to stop it: this isn’t sound, this isn’t light— this is gravity. Gravity persists through all, diminished, perhaps, but never extinguished. Whatever happens moves. Whatever occurs affects. And the general hum of our home and the general chirp of our lives is all of our failures, our elections, our inhales and our exhales, our embraces and our rejections, the times we choose to extend a hand and the balconies we step back from when we decide to keep on living. It is the cigarettes we light, the emails we send, the sentences we write from the capital letter to the dot at the end. It is what we give those who love us. It is how we react to a friend’s promotion. It is the doors we slam behind us and the longing to see them reopened.
There isn’t a thing one can do that won’t generate the hum, that won’t jostle the lasers at the end of the tunnel. I like to imagine the ripples a bit smarter than one might expect, that maybe they don’t just roll. Just as no two waves in the ocean are exactly the same, perhaps gravity is no different. Imagine your ripples right now, as you clear your throat or lean back in a chair; as you tap your knee or invent regrets. How were they? Did they crystallize like a snowflake, or smear like a stain in an un-greased pan? They have consequence— everything does. They will travel outwards into the ether and move at imperceptible and diminishing magnitudes throughout the extent of existence. It’s scary, because it means you matter. It’s beautiful, because it means you matter. These things don’t exist in a vacuum. They never cease. Paul’s ripple will find Paul once again.