It’s not surprising that the eyes begin their warning – oculi nantes in palpebrarum rate, “Eyes swimming in the raft of the eyelids,” as the Archpoet said in a more romantic context.
This, the last in the Astronomical Companion‘s series of pictures of expanding spheres of space, uses a touch of distortion amd fantasy to suggest the strangeness of something beyond our comprehension: the whole universe, which is not infinite in size and yet has no center and no boundary.
The surface of this sphere should be the very largest in area, since it is at the greatest distance. Any light arriving from it has been traveling, at the ultimate speed, for the whole age of the universe. But the surface is also a point, from which that photon of light and all others started. That is the consequence of the discovery that galaxies are moving away from us, and from each other, at speeds proportional to their distance.
The objects in the picture, shooting out like sparks, are the quasars, whose outrageous brightness in proportion to their star-like size was, after they began to be observed around 1920, a mystery, explained by central black holes of masses that have long since burned out. The quasars are in the most distant shell of space – of time – receding at the speeds nearest to the limit.
The production of the new Astronomical Companion, with pictures like this re-made so that they could be improved with color, has been at White Dwarf rather than Supernova speed. The set of instructions by which I constructed a picture twenty years ago typically needed many hours of debugging, of staring (and swearing) at it to find, one by one, the sources of error. And breaking off for a rest at the incipient-dizziness warning.
Still, I might have met the July 1 target that had been set. Blame the quasars. It took me several long days to find by trial-and-error (which means constant messing up of the program to make it display what it thinks it is doing) before I could find out whether it was outdated numbers for the quasars’ red-shifts, or an outdated number for the ultimate Hubble Distance, or errors in my logic, that caused these monsters either not to appear in the picture at all, or to appear outside the sphere: outside the universe.
Dizzy Language Department
Parse this sentence, from the New York Times, August 20:
“China’s online poses parsing rumors for power shifts has a lot to work with as Xi Jinping pushes aside his own appointees, our columnist writes.”
The main clause is the last three words. The 23 words before that are a subordinate noun clause, the object of “writes,” as you can see by mentally placing them in the normal order, “Our columnist writes that….” A clause has its own subject and verb. What are they?
The verb is “has.” Finding its subject is no quick task, because there are so many words with forms that could mark them either as nouns or as verbs: “poses,” “parsing,” “shifts.”
And the subordinate clause contains a clause, an adverbial one, at a lower subordinate level, “as Xi Jinping pushes….”
I didn’t succeed in the parsing task. I get the general idea, but I don’t know what exactly it is that “has a lot to work with.”
I don’t claim that you have to have learned, or be interested in, traditional grammar in order to be able to write lucidly or to read with understanding.
But, consciously or not, when you write lucidly you are using the grammar of your language, and, when you read a complex sentence and want to understand it, you are, consciously or not, parsing its grammar.
Grammatical terminology is just what brings these processes to the conscious and discussable level.
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This weblog maintains its right to be about astronomy or anything under the sun.
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Sometimes I make improvements or corrections to a post after publishing it. If you click on the title, rather than on ‘Read more’, I think you are sure to see the latest version. Or, if you click ‘Refresh’ or press function key 5, you’ll see the latest version.
I
WOW! Yet another Ottewellism…which I nominate for “new word of the year”
Michael Gordon
Bellevue, Washington State
Add commas after “posses” and “shifts”, and change “has” to “have”. That makes all the errors in spelling, punctuation and possession attributable to the columnist-writer and not the New York Times.
Kenneth Heisler
A Word spell-checking system would have passed “posses” without putting a red squiggly line under it, but an email system could have put a blue squiggly “better wording suggestion” line under it, which the writer may have hastily clicked, accepting “poses”.
I have to add that “posse”, Wild West slang for a band of citizen enforcers helping a sheriff to catch a gangster, was an inept word for the journalist to apply to a set of Russian opinion-monets.
Hello Guy.
What if the third word were “posses”, i. e., in this case, cadres of online trolls, rather than “poses” as written?
It makes more sense that way.
I too am a long-time reader of the New York Times and they’re not above the occasional misspelling.
Kenneth Heisler
Thank you for your discussion of the universe with no center and no boundary. I couldn’t help being reminded of a piece of folklore:
Oh Hell is deep
And Hell is wide
And it ain’t got a bottom
And it ain’t got a side.
Glad we could see you in London last week. Greetings from Paris.
I didn’t know that Hell ditty. A pendent to it is the one about Heaven, or its gate:
So high you can’t get over it, So deep you can’t go under it, So wide you can’t go around it, You gotta go in through the door
I looked up the NYT article and the quote may have been updated since you last saw it. makes more sense with the headline and corrected wording:
Why Does Xi Keep Purging Loyalists? Look to Stalin and Mao for the Answer.
China’s “bedside eavesdroppers,” the online posse parsing rumors for power shifts, have a lot to work with as Xi Jinping pushes aside his own political appointees.
It’s still a wandering almost willfully obscure sentence.