‘We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars. Now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt.’
Interstellar (2014), with Matthew McConaughey as Cooper
The all-time winner of The Sunday Times bestsellers booklist has been firmly awarded to the late British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking for his book ‘A Brief History of Time: from the Big Bang to Black Holes’, which spent 264 weeks in the chart.
August gives us a chance to stand back from the contemporary noise of daily life, and to consider some of the ethereal wonders around us, from nature to the seeming eternity of space. I was listening to that excellent Radio 4 programme ‘The Life Scientific’ with Professor Jim Al-Khalili recently when he interviewed Nobel Prize winner Kip Thorne, the scientist behind the 2014 film ‘Interstellar’ (from which our above quotation is drawn).
His captivating insights, including answering a raft of audience questions, led me to enjoy an evening watching the movie itself. It certainly gets you thinking about the wider direction of life.
Time is one of the three crowning glories, or tools, of creation: the three great laws of nature — gravity, light and time. Material evolution relies completely on their reliability and constancy, and of course each one carries in their foundation that same unconditional love which is the character of the conscious creator. That's why, in my composition ‘Love in Creation’, I describe each of these three as ‘hard to fathom, for we are touching on the membrane of divinity’.
The time we experience day by day is extraordinarily reliable, and its constancy is fundamental to our existence and everyday life. But, as Kip Thorne explains, our developing understanding of the universe is showing us increasing evidence of the variance of time at the dimensional edge of the universe; Black Holes, Wormholes and Quantum Entanglement provide us with intriguing glimpses of those dimensions, which are not governed by the same chronological regularity.
Science fiction entertainment teases us with these concepts and, in that respect, Interstellar is no exception: except, as Kip Thorne says, there is solid scientific evidence behind some of the film’s wider claims.
Time travel is not, however, limited to entertainment: the gospel story of Jesus, Moses and Elijah standing on the mountain in the Transfiguration is one of the compelling images in the Christian story; and other faiths share this confidence in reaching across the conventional boundaries of time:
‘From the beginning you have created all things and all your works echo the silent music of your praise. In the fullness of time you made us in your image, the crown of all creation’.
(CofE Eucharistic Prayer G)
Our material world is dependent on the constancy of time, but other dimensions may not be so constrained, including the spiritual dimension.
Our human experience is so focused on the here and now that even our ability to appreciate those giants of the past on whose shoulders we stand is very limited. When you look through the trail of Sky Movie channels, it's hard to find content which is historically significant, as if the impact of technology and the watershed which was the pandemic has made it irrelevant. However, as that old George Santayana saying goes, ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’ — and indeed we are.
The eternity of time is there for all of us to see, day by day. It's not just in stars and galaxies which first lit up the sky billions of years ago but which we’re now seeing today, and it's not just in the ten-year-old child who found dinosaur footprints on a Welsh beach last week.
It's also in the continuing and vibrant evidence of the wildlife around us: for example, the birds who are the descendants of those dinosaurs and which delight us day by day. When you watch a red kite hovering effortlessly in the sky for several minutes without even stirring its wings, it brings a sense of wonder into how nature has evolved over the aeons. Likewise, the sight of a flock of geese in V-formation chattering as they fly along the coastline helps us to appreciate that humanity is not the only thing that matters in this creation.
So we should celebrate the insight of brilliant thinkers such as Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne. They may not have all the answers, but they do allow us to glimpse through that window of time to reach for a wider appreciation of God’s technology: to ‘look up at the sky and to wonder at our place in the stars’.
Gavin Oldham OBE
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