On My Love of Space Stuff

“Past and future are different from each other. Cause precedes effect. Pain comes after a wound, not before it. The glass shatters into a thousand pieces, and the pieces do not re-form into a glass.

We cannot change the past; we can have regrets, remorse, memories. The future instead is uncertainty, desire, anxiety, open space, destiny, perhaps. We can live toward it, shape it, because it does not yet exist.

Time is not a line with two equal directions: it is an arrow with different extremities.”

- Carlo Rovelli, ‘The Order of Time’

In case you don’t know, I LOVE space and physics. I have nothing more than a GCSE in physics but it doesn’t stop me exploring books about the universe, planets and how time works.

Carlo Rovelli is an absolute master at making highly complex science very accessible, weaving it into daily life with gorgeous lyrical writing.

One of his other books ‘Reality Is Not What It Seems’ was hugely influential when I wrote my debut pamphlet (fingers crossed I can secure a publisher for that soon!).

There’s such beauty and poetry in physics. Arthur C Clarke wrote “magic’s just science we don’t understand yet”.

The world of physics js so gorgeously weird, pushing at that line between science and magic.

What we call the present doesn’t exist. Time flows differently at different heights on earth. If we look at the stars, we look at the past. There are places in the universe where time has stopped.

Space for all. Science for everyone.