Which is not to say that Ma and Behrend consider Nothnagel’s measurements insignificant. When you’re talking about global warming and melting ice caps, as everyone seems to be, a five-millimeter adjustment in the modeled diameter of the Earth could be the difference between sea levels appearing to rise from any given year to the next and then appearing to drop. Indeed, such rises in sea level as have already occurred would probably not have been detected without a rock-steady network of extragalactic reference points. Were it not for VLBI, we might think that everything is fine.
Of course everything isn’t fine, or so it seems. The ice caps really do look as if they’re melting, and the seas really are encroaching.
If ever there was a morning to have champagne with breakfast, as opposed to the usual steadying few tumblers of hennessy, this was it.
Yet I say good-bye to Ma and Behrend in a mood of Zen-like tranquillity. The VLBI-ers were pretty tranquil themselves, come to think of it. So often scientists are restless souls, crackling with impatience, ambition, excitement—but not those two. Repeatedly I pressed them on the point of it all, on what, for a VLBI-er, was the shimmering grail that lit his daydreams and tugged him from bed on rainy mornings . . . and there didn’t seem to be one. The best Ma could do, toward the end of our talk, was to shrug and say that perhaps the holy grail of VLBI was the “establishment of a stable set of geodetic standards and measurements,” standards and measurements that would have to be updated continually . . . by doing exactly what people like Ma and Behrend are doing already.
But you know what? If such a day ever came, there’s a chance it might actually change everything.
We’ve become accustomed to every advance in science and technology raising the level of human disorientation. Psychology beefed up our self-knowledge but yanked the rug from beneath our self-recognition. Quantum physics holds the promise, so we’re told, of one day soon being able to account for the whole damn enchilada, yet do any of us feel any great empowering rush of understanding in the offing? Au contraire. From the glimpses and teasers we’ve been offered so far, it seems a safe bet that the theory of everything, if it ever gets discovered, will inspire little but headaches, nosebleeds, and bafflement among the general population. Oh, but it’s so simple! they’ll assure us, gabbling a mile a minute, the crusted residue of instant soups twinkling desperately in the shag of their stubble. How could it have taken us so long to realize we were obviously but one of an infinite number of universes arrayed upon a nine-dimensional Möbius strip and that time, space, matter, and energy are simply congealed probability vibrating at four different frequencies?
Perhaps it doesn’t have to be that way. After a long century—more—of flattering and spooking ourselves with the glamour of disorientation, what if orientation is due for a comeback? When Ma, Behrend, Nothnagel, and the rest finally have the world fully mapped with perfect precision, what if it finally enables us to jettison the sophomoric truism that we are living these lives adrift and lost in a swirling, immeasurable torrent of relativity and chaos? What if we come to see that knowing almost exactly where we stood in the Universe was no substitute for knowing exactly where we stood? What if, in short, being almost sure of one’s location turns out to be like being slightly pregnant: a source of constant, gnawing anxiety that colors everything you see in apocalyptic hues of foreboding?
Perhaps on the morning that we finally stop being lost, we will wake up to the fact that while, yes, there is chaos around, and there are aspects of reality that have a swirly sort of appearance, it isn’t all like that. Perhaps when we stop feeling lost, we’ll be fine again. Because they’re out there, the quasars, waiting in perfect patience and constancy at the edge of the universe, like parents on the edge of a sandpit, for us to finish our existential tantrum and reach out to them for support.
I think that would be a pretty good morning, the morning we finally, once and for all, knew where we were. And I say that not only as a man who will never stop believing that our best days are before us but as one whose satellite navigation unit tried to make him drive over a small cliff into a gravel pit on the way back to the airport.
