Bewilderment

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THE LAWS THAT GOVERN THE LIGHT FROM A FIREFLY in my backyard as I write these words tonight also govern the light emitted from an exploding star one billion light-years away. Place changes nothing. Nor does time. One set of fixed rules runs the game, in all times and places. That’s as big a truth as we Earthlings have discovered, or ever will, in our brief run.

But the place is big, I tried to tell my son. “You can’t imagine how big. Think of the most unlikely place…”

A planet made out of iron?

“For instance.”

Pure diamond?

“They exist.”

A planet where the oceans are hundreds of miles deep? A planet with four suns?

“Yes times two. And we’ll find even stranger places, between here and the universe’s edge.”

Okay. I’m thinking of my perfect planet. My one-in-a-million place.

“At one in a million, there are roughly ten million of them in the Milky Way alone.”