cosmos—and will thus be denied access to key pages from the cosmic drama that
is our universe.
Behold my recurring nightmare: Are we, too, missing some basic pieces of the
universe that once were? What part of the cosmic history book has been marked
“access denied”? What remains absent from our theories and equations that ought
to be there, leaving us groping for answers we may never find?
† The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), twinned in Hanford, Washington, and
Living-ston, Louisiana.
†† R. Israel, E. Ruckhaber, R. Weinmann, et al., Hundert Autoren Gegen Einstein (Leipzig: R. Voigtlanders
Verlag, 1931).
††† “Geodesic” is a needlessly fancy word for the shortest distance between two points along a curved
surface—extended, in this case, to be the shortest distance between two points in the curved four-dimensional
fabric of space-time.
†††† In graduate school I took John Wheeler’s class on general relativity (where I met my wife) and he said
this often.