My CMS The View from a New City

One of my favorite poems is by Billy Collins, entitled, “As if to Demonstrate an Eclipse.” Yesterday I witnessed a partial eclipse through smoked glasses. The sun and moon are very different sizes, but the moon almost perfectly covers the sun during a total eclipse. This could well be a coincidence, as modern science assumes without evidence. But it might also be a hint–a wink from beyond–that the current arrangement of things is not random; that the phrase from Genisis 1:16, “the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night,” might have more behind it than mere myth and metaphor.

Recently, I wrote a program that manipulated client data in a large commercial database. While I wrote and tested the program, rather than trying out my code on the real data, I used what was called the sandbox.  By using the sandbox, my program read and manipulated data in a test database, not in the production database. The sandbox was a duplicate of the live data which would be refreshed periodically from the real database.  No changes to the sandbox were ever preserved in the actual database.  So, if a buggy section of test code accidentally  destroyed or corrupted data in the sandbox, no real harm was done. At the next refresh, all was restored.

I have been thinking how much this is like life.  In a world where the second law of thermodynamics rules, human actions, whether good or bad, tend to get washed away with the passage of time. Even the monuments built to last get worn away eventually. See Shelley’s Ozymandius. The conclusion I draw from this is that the world is not changed much by the people who live in it in spite of the ambitions of every young person to “change the world.” It is the people who are changed by living in the world. The world is like a sandbox where the children go to play for a while. Rainstorms wash away the fortifications and castles but the children who play there grow up and move on.  I heard that Woody Allen was once told that his movies would live on  forever, to which he is said to have replied, “I don’t want my movies to live forever–I want to live forever.” And so it is.

There is a classic painting I like of the philosopher looking behind the starry sky to see what really is.  Science recently discovered that everything we see–everything science can measure–makes up only four percent of the matter and  energy in  the universe. The rest is something they know nothing about, so they call it “dark” as in dark matter and dark energy. This discovery should serve as notice that much still remains to be discovered.  Those who say, as some cosmologists once did, that we are on the verge of the grand unified theory of everything are whistling in the dark (pun intended). I predict the day will come when our current explanations will be revealed to be the childish speculations they really are. Let us go enthusiastically forward into the mystery, free of the illusion that our current theories will survive as the final explanation for anything.

Mystery