{"id":18709,"date":"2024-12-20T09:02:10","date_gmt":"2024-12-20T10:02:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=18709"},"modified":"2024-12-20T10:24:17","modified_gmt":"2024-12-20T10:24:17","slug":"a-solstice-of-the-soul","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=18709","title":{"rendered":"A Solstice of the Soul"},"content":{"rendered":"
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For his next trick, your cosmic correspondent for the past quarter-century will (try to) retire.<\/p>\n

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As the day shrinks into its annual darkness, here\u2019s what I know about the cosmos \u2014 so far.<\/p>\n

For an instant of cosmic time you are the center of the universe, wondering where everybody is going and why, as trillions of galaxies, smudges of light and possibility, recede. You trust that the steady rise and fall of stars heralds order, only to be ambushed by surprise and confusion.<\/p>\n

For the last quarter-century, I have been privileged to ride on a vertiginous wave of awe and terror. Armed with the coolest business card in journalism, identifying me as the \u201ccosmic affairs correspondent\u201d of The New York Times, I descended into the bowels of the Large Hadron Collider<\/a> in Geneva, froze on stormy mountaintops in Mexico and drank in glittery star fields on peaks in Chile and Hawaii. I lectured about Albert Einstein in Hong Kong and Berlin and despaired as I wandered the muddy rubble of the World Trade Center after Sept. 11.<\/p>\n

Now, I am retiring from The Times and must relinquish that business card, although not the mission behind it. I will continue to appear in these pages from time to time and work on a book trying to marry the personal and the cosmic.<\/p>\n

This gig provided me with a thrilling vista of history and science. Researchers and the rest of us heard black holes colliding, spreading ripples through the fabric of space-time, and saw them staring like smoke rings from the hearts of galaxies \u2014 trap doors into the end of time. After 50 years and $10 billion, physicists finally discovered the Higgs boson<\/a> (or \u201cGod particle\u201d). It was the missing key to physicists\u2019 best, but still unsatisfying, theory of nature yet, called the Standard Model.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Astronomers discovered that there are billions of possibly habitable planets<\/a> in the galaxy. At the same time, they have had to accept that 95 percent of the cosmos consists of invisible \u201cdark matter\u201d that binds stars in galaxies and a \u201cdark energy\u201d that pushes those same galaxies apart ever faster. Nobody knows what this dark stuff is.<\/p>\n

In 2015, when I first heard rumors that the twin antennas of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory had felt the cosmos quaking from the collision of two black holes<\/a> deep in space and time, I didn\u2019t believe it. What I knew about LIGO had convinced me that it was an outlandishly ambitious experiment bound to fail.<\/p>\n

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Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and\u00a0log into<\/a>\u00a0your Times account, or\u00a0subscribe<\/a>\u00a0for all of The Times.<\/p>\n

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For his next trick, your cosmic correspondent for the past quarter-century will (try to) retire.As the day shrinks into its annual darkness, here\u2019s what I know about the cosmos \u2014 so far.For an instant of cosmic time you are the center of the universe, wondering where everybody is going and why, as trillions of galaxies, smudges of light and possibility, recede. You trust that the steady rise and fall of stars heralds order, only to be ambushed by surprise and confusion.For the last quarter-century, I have been privileged to ride on a vertiginous wave of awe and terror. Armed with the coolest business card in journalism, identifying me as the \u201ccosmic affairs correspondent\u201d of The New York Times, I descended into the bowels of the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, froze on stormy mountaintops in Mexico and drank in glittery star fields on peaks in Chile and Hawaii. I lectured about Albert Einstein in Hong Kong and Berlin and despaired as I wandered the muddy rubble of the World Trade Center after Sept. 11.Now, I am retiring from The Times and must relinquish that business card, although not the mission behind it. I will continue to appear in these pages from time to time and work on a book trying to marry the personal and the cosmic.This gig provided me with a thrilling vista of history and science. Researchers and the rest of us heard black holes colliding, spreading ripples through the fabric of space-time, and saw them staring like smoke rings from the hearts of galaxies \u2014 trap doors into the end of time. After 50 years and $10 billion, physicists finally discovered the Higgs boson (or \u201cGod particle\u201d). It was the missing key to physicists\u2019 best, but still unsatisfying, theory of nature yet, called the Standard Model.Astronomers discovered that there are billions of possibly habitable planets in the galaxy. At the same time, they have had to accept that 95 percent of the cosmos consists of invisible \u201cdark matter\u201d that binds stars in galaxies and a \u201cdark energy\u201d that pushes those same galaxies apart ever faster. Nobody knows what this dark stuff is.In 2015, when I first heard rumors that the twin antennas of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory had felt the cosmos quaking from the collision of two black holes deep in space and time, I didn\u2019t believe it. What I knew about LIGO had convinced me that it was an outlandishly ambitious experiment bound to fail.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and\u00a0log into\u00a0your Times account, or\u00a0subscribe\u00a0for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?\u00a0Log in.Want all of The Times?\u00a0Subscribe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":18711,"comment_status":"close","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18709","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18709","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18709"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18709\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18712,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18709\/revisions\/18712"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/18711"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18709"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18709"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18709"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}