Sunday's postcard and an introduction to the Provenance project

February 5, 2023

An introduction to Provenance

Examinations of creations, from heaven and earth

The world is so big it can scare you, just by being so overwhelmingly vast.

Timothy Connor

I remember an evening—a couple decades ago now—when my cozy family of four casually decided to leave our home near downtown Spokane and head west on U.S. Highway 2, into the darkness beyond the city lights. It was the end of an ordinary day and we haphazardly agreed to take what, for us, was a not-so-ordinary trip—not from point A to point B—but from point A toward infinity. My wife and our children—our 9 year-old daughter and 4 year-old son—had never seen the Milky Way, and it seemed as good a time as any to check it out.

“It’s incredible, you’ll see,” I promised.

The night sky is not so dazzling in the city because only a smattering of stars and planets can be seen through the creamy tide of urban photons. Twenty minutes, at highway speed, away from the city lights changes the equation. Near the county line, on a cloudless night, you can look up and see what looks to be a faint cloud, or a thin plume of smoke. Even when I know what I’m looking at my mind does a somersault before it can make room for the realization that what I’m seeing is the disc of our home galaxy. It makes me giddy and a bit light-headed. The kids, though, had a different reaction that night. Whether it was the darkness, the openness of the desert terrain, the boundless scale of the stars, or all of the above, they were overwhelmed and visibly anxious. Within a minute or so they both decided to get back in the car.

I think I know why 9 of 10 of us cry when we are born. Practically speaking, it’s good for us to scream and sob upon delivery, as it clears the lungs. But it’s also because it’s both shockingly colder and brighter out here. In short order, most of us are weighed, and wrapped, and held, and nursed, and otherwise assuaged. Eventually we are schooled.

photo courtesy National Science Foundation, NOIRLab

I was born Catholic. I don’t remember being baptized, but I do remember being socialized: to dress myself and tie my shoes, to say please; to not create a fuss in church. As to the profound question of just what we’re all doing here, and what it’s all about, the Catholics have their creation story along with clear rules on how to secure a harmonious afterlife, as opposed to eternal misery.

Other creeds and cultures have their own explanations: about how and why we are here, about the nature and purpose of our lives. It’s just that the Catholics have a long history of demanding conformity and purging heretics, sometimes even roasting them, literally. It wasn’t until 1992 that the Pope apologized for the church’s prosecution of Galileo in 1633 for the heresy of proposing that the sun, not the Earth, was at the center of the solar system. Modern recriminations are generally more subtle, but the subject of creation and how the faithful should look at the world can still be fraught with peril.

I enjoy writing about my mother because she was one of those rare people who translated everything and anything about faith into her relationships with others. She was raised Methodist. Her mother’s father was the pastor at the Methodist church in Pasco, where she was born and grew up. Yet she converted to Catholicism by the time she was 30, so the burgeoning family could all go to church together. (It had been a pre-condition by the Catholic Church that the children of the marriage would be raised Catholic.)

Part of what was inspiring about her life is how she flipped the script. She had no interest in the sharp edges of Catholicism—the fear, the guilt, the fire and brimstone—and she rounded them off by the constant application of her love, not just for her family, but for humanity. She was living proof that a person could accrue more moral authority than a church.

My father evolved into an acolyte of the woman he married. After he’d fathered six children and advanced in his career as an educator he found himself squarely in the crosshairs of the conflict between religion and science. Traditionally, the Connors were what I think of as big “C” Catholics—diligent about the rituals and sacraments and rigorous about attendance. A cousin recently reminded me of how—on a large family camping trip, deep in the woods—my dad rousted us out of our sleeping bags on a Sunday morning and drove us to a Catholic church in the nearest town. At the same time, he was also devoted to his profession and committed to the ethics of a civil society. As his son, I couldn’t help but notice his commitment to civility which encompassed his respect for the beliefs, or non-beliefs, of people who were not Catholics.

By the time he was forty he was the head of the Science department at a large (~2,000 students) junior high school near the Pacific entrance to the Panama Canal. I well-remember the day a senior priest in our diocese told our Sunday school class how upset he was that junior high instructors were teaching sex and evolution. I doubt he knew my father was in charge of that curriculum, both designing and defending it.

Rather than being afraid of empiricism my father was enthused about science—not just the discoveries but the process. The scientific method made sense to him. His attitude was that cognitive reasoning was God-given; not the work of the devil. He saw the wonder of the world and brought it into his classrooms. So far as I could tell, he had no problem grasping and accepting the science of evolution even though it involved timescales that discourage a literal interpretation of Genesis.

Lamentably, my dad passed away before the James Webb space telescope was deployed in early 2022. He would have been fascinated by its capacity to “see” back across billions of years, to the light from the first galaxies to form after the Big Bang.

The vastness of the universe doesn’t have an audible voice, but if it did I imagine it would be a gasp. It was only 98 years ago—during the lifetimes of my grandfathers—that Edwin Hubble formalized his discovery of the Andromeda galaxy beyond the Milky Way. Then, in less than a century, Hubble and his successors used increasingly powerful telescopes to prove we live not in the only galaxy, but in one of at least 100 billion galaxies. It’s a shocking number if you pause to consider what it means in proportion to our existence. The implications can exhaust our imaginations. If humans have the only souls and stories that matter, the universe is as vastly more oversized for us than the Earth’s oceans would be for a thimbleful of plankton. If there are other forms of intelligent life in this expanse, that’s a profound twist as well—a very big wrinkle in creation stories that cast us as divinely chosen beings at the center stage of existence.

In the same timeframe, science also delivered evidence that the world within an arm’s length is dramatically more complex than we perceive it to be. The idea that atoms exist and constitute the smallest building blocks of matter goes back to the ancient Greeks. But it wasn’t until 1800 that the British chemist, John Dalton, presented the first experimental evidence to support their existence. A century later British physicist J.J. Thomson discovered the electron, the sub-atomic particle that is integral to molecular architecture and the formation of chemical bonds. The discovery of the electron began to bring the structure of the atom into view. New Zealand’s Ernest Rutherford discovered atoms had a positively charged “nucleus” at their cores. His protégé, James Watson, later found that the nucleus consists of protons and neutrons. If, like me, you started grade school in the 1960s, it’s likely your image of an atom is a very, very tiny version of a solar system, with a nucleus of protons and neutrons at the center and electrons buzzing around that core.

By the early 1970s we learned that protons and neutrons actually consist of smaller particles—particles that Nobel Prize winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann named “quarks.” By the middle of the 20th century physicists had already discerned that the world of the smallest particles is incredibly weird: that electrons, for example, can behave both as particles and waves. But the weirdness of the small doesn’t stop there. With the discovery of the quark it was logical to assume that the mass of these elementary particles dominate the mass of atoms, in the way you’d expect the weight of bowling balls to dominate the weight of a duffel bag if you stuffed a couple of them into the bag along with your socks. Yet, it turns out the particle mass of quarks is only a tiny fraction of the mass of the atom (the whole of the duffel bag, so to speak).

This doesn’t seem to make sense. The solution to this conundrum is Albert Einstein’s insight, from 1905, positing that energy and mass are transferable; fungible. (The flip side of the famous E=mc2 equation is m=E/c2. .) This means that the preponderance of the mass of an atom resides in the incredibly strong nuclear force—the so-called “gluon” energy—the pure energy that binds quarks together inside protons and neutrons. As Nobel laureate Frank Wilczec puts it, succinctly, this is how atoms acquire “mass without mass.” Because it is gravity that gives weight to mass, when you step on a scale to weigh yourself, almost all of what you weigh is a measurement of the “gluon” energy that binds your quarks.

Perhaps the most elegant fact about our being resides in the inventory of the essential elements we’ve required to become human, for our bodies to exist and function. For a couple hundred million years after the Big Bang (13.8 billion years ago) the only elements existing in meaningful amounts in the universe were the light elements of hydrogen and helium. It is from these two elements that the first stars and galaxies were formed. As the first stars approached the ends of their lives—another 100 million years or so later—they began to collapse and explode, some in spectacular fashion as so-called supernovas. It was only in those broiling forges and explosions that heavier elements essential to our lives—oxygen, iron, iodine, potassium, carbon, etc.—came into being. They were blasted into the cosmos to then become the raw material for successive generations of stars, including our sun and the earth itself, some 4.5 billion years ago. Hydrogen and helium are still the most abundant elements in the universe. But our bodies are more than 80% oxygen and carbon and other heavier elements—all forged near the end of stellar life cycles.

To put that in perspective, besides the sun (which is only halfway through its lifespan) the nearest star to us is Proxima Centauri. It is 6 trillion miles away. So while we humans may never be able to reach the stars, we are mostly of the stars, a manifestation of a story eminently larger than we are, and one from which we are quite literally made.

This part of the truth—about what we are made of and its clear connection to our evolution in the vast expanse of the cosmos—lifts my spirits. There’s nothing quite as satisfying as learning something that gives us a sense of awe and hope, not just because we know something new but also because it comes from the remarkable capacity humans have for discovery, for learning.

I chose the motif “Provenance” for this series of stories and essays because it’s a word geologists use to signal the study of sediments in order to identify and understand the origin and history of their parent rocks. To be sure, “where do things come from?” is a big question and voicing it can lead to uncomfortable re-examinations of longstanding notions and beliefs that shape our identities. But my hope—as I dig more deeply into earthly landscapes and nature—is to at least be a reliable hiking partner, so to speak, in searches for better explanations and understandings of the world, and the wonder of our place in it.

—tjc