Trajectory

Everything has a trajectory. Everything is moving. The great celestial joke is that we don't recognise it's happening. To see it you have to intellectualise the whole thing and that's hard with a capital 'HA'. So, how is everything moving? As an example I will use this table. Please presume for a moment that I am rational and also that my honesty and veracity is unimpeachable (neither of the presumptions is in line with reality but that's beside the point). The table is static; it is not moving, it is staying in the same position compared to every other inanimate object we can see. Nevertheless, it is moving in many different ways. On the grand scale here are three ways the table is moving:

1> The table is spinning with the rotation of the Earth;
2> The table is travelling around the Sun with the orbit of the Earth;
3> The table is following the motion of the Sun as is traverses the cosmos.

On a much smaller scale the table is still moving. There is subsidence as the Maths/Phys building creeps down the hill, maybe a little buffeting from the weather (very fine today), and sometimes lifting with the warmth given off by academic hot air. Note: Academic hot air has more buoyancy than regular hot air due to the nobility of the enterprise and domination of ego over thought in some practitioners. This additional buoyancy is prevalent in other professions which we will not discuss at this point.

Getting back to the belaboured point, the table is actually travelling very quickly indeed, and so are you. You could be travelling at the average orbital speed of 107 kilometres per hour right now! And that's not including rotation! As humans we're emotionally unaware of many things: The motion of the planet, the vastness of the cosmos, and the microcosms of life within us and around us. Many times I've written at length on the wonder of everything around us, and it still holds. We sit here on the third rock from the Sun and spin wildly about its axis while hurtling through space around the sun as it zooms through intragalactic space. The galaxy spins on in its own merry way and we all get on with life.

Is there a message behind all this? Probably not, except for the fact that the universe is huge and we understand so much less than that which exists. We don't even know how gravity works, for one thing. We just take it for granted! Is the world really as we see it or is colour a totally imaginary concept? We don't know. Is there air? Will we need to construct rudimentary lathes to make it through the whole of our technological developments? ('Galaxy Quest' is a great movie.)

Perhaps one day we'll know more than we don't know, but wouldn't that we be dull? Perhaps if it happened we'd get bored and try to set up new places with new rules and then bang! There'd be new universes! Actually that would be interesting. Let's start a new universe where gravity runs like water and we can eat electricity in chunks of dark chocolate. Or has it happened already?

O.