A dream-like photo, and my pen on The Inlander's new cover story

April 6, 2023

Interstellar

The topography of wonder

Part of the fun of capturing a photo that turns out even better than you thought it would is choosing a good title for it. So it is with Interstellar one of the extra-large (20x30 inches) metal prints featured in the ensemble for a First Friday debut at the New Moon Gallery on East Sprague.

It’s no secret (at least among my friends and family) that I’m a science geek and, within that category, an Einstein geek. I don’t know of a more remarkable intellectual feat than Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity (1915) which correctly proposed that the universe has a “spacetime” topography of sorts. Massive objects like stars, our sun included, measurably warp the fabric of spacetime, something astronomers confirmed (1919) by actually measuring (during a solar eclipse) how the gravitational sink of the sun essentially bends starlight as starlight passes close to the sun on its way to our Earthly eyes. Gravity also makes time slow down, such that if you’re in or near a black hole, or passing through a so-called “worm hole,” you age much more slowly than if you were in a less intense gravitational realm.

This phenomenon shapes the plot of the 2014 movie Interstellar—starring Matthew McConaughey, as a time-traveling astronaut, out to save humanity. “Cooper,” his character, returns to earth to find he is much younger than the daughter he left behind when he launched. That’s what came to mind when I examined the photo—the contours of the water surface bending the light arriving from the high clouds above, suggesting (at least to me) the wonderfully mysterious fabric of our universe.

That’s probably more than you’d want to know about a photograph, but there you are. In addition to Interstellar and the images I shared in yesterday’s post, I’m also sharing (below) Remind Me, Preternaturally orange, Cobbles on the shore, and The Itsy Bitsy.

In other news, I’m very pleased to announce that my story Beneath our Feet is featured on the cover of this week’s Pacific Northwest Inlander which will be out on The Inlander’s newsstands later this morning, if it isn’t already.

The piece is about my visits to a half dozen favorite places in our realm where our regional geology really shines, revealing great stories that, in some cases, go back well over a billion years, including a time when Spokane (had it existed then) would have been a coastal city. Because The Inlander paid for the story, part of my job is to encourage you to pick up a copy of paper and/or visit their website to read it. I hope you enjoy it.

A tip of the hat to Nick Deshais, the Inlander’s fine editor, for his editing, and to geologists Michael Hamilton and EWU’s Chad Prichard for sharing time with me as I put the story segments together. Very special thanks go to my friend and hiking companion Steve Box, who is not only a renowned geologist (recently retired from USGS) but an invaluable mentor for me as I work my through these deep Earth stories. I’d be lost without him.

Remind Me, 20x30 inch metal

Preternaturally orange, 16x 20 inch metal

The Itsy-Bitsy, 20x24 inch metal

Cobbles on the Shore, 20x24 inch metal

Interstellar, 20x24 inch metal

—tjc