Woke up, fell out of bed, dragged a comb across my head. Found my way downstairs and drank a cup and looking up I noticed I was late. Found my coat and grabbed my hat, made the bus in seconds flat. Found my way upstairs and had a smoke, and somebody spoke and I went into a dream.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a wholly remarkable book. It has been compiled and recompiled many times over many years and under many different editorships. It contains contributions from countless numbers of travellers and researchers.
The introduction begins like this:
“Space,” it says, “is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mindboggingly big it is. I mean you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space. Listen…”
Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way Galaxy, was identified nearly 50 years ago and is among the most studied astrophysical objects.
The results released this month are the culmination of a multi-year effort and a decades-long journey by the astronomy community to approach the event horizon through high-resolution imaging, gaining new insights into accretion, outflow, and gravitational physics on scales not accessible through any other observation.
Did we awake from the stupor that can consume our lives — lost amidst bits & bytes, screens & feeds — and find ourselves, as G.K. Chesterton once wrote, “in a street full of splendid strangers?”
The idea is not that we will win in our own lifetimes and that’s the measure of us, but that we will die trying.”