A bit of background: Ethan and Kimvy were Minnesotans in Cleveland to both get married and watch the stunning total solar eclipse that dazzled millions two days after their wedding. The ceremony took place inside the actual Shafran Planetarium.
In my trade, I usually only get the opportunity to wax poetic on two topics: love and commitment. And so you could imagine my delight when, as an armchair astrophysicist, I was given this opportunity to justifiably wax poetic about the cosmos. And what it got me thinking of was matters of scale.
On large scales, our universe is chock full of wonders. There are ravenous black holes of staggering density that devour neighboring stars. Some of them become quasars billions of times more massive than the Sun, and trillions of times brighter. Aging stars explode in spectacular supernovae, giving way to gas clouds that become stellar nurseries, which then in turn give birth to stars made of heavier and heavier elements, fused together by earlier generations.
And on small scales, those wonders abound as well. Did you know that photons, because they travel at the speed of light, do not travel through time? Did you know that, by the time I finish this sentence, untold trillions of neutrinos will pass through your body? And did you know that quantum mechanics is absolutely bananas? One physicist said: “its weirdness is evident without comparison” and it “shatters our conception of reality.”
But somewhere between the Planck length and the light years, at a scale of two or so meters, there's us. And what wonders await us at this scale? They are numerous, but I would argue that the greatest among them is love. Ethan and Kimvy might argue that it it's a tie between love and bicycles. Because it was, in fact, a love of cycling that brought them around to loving each other. And as they fell in love, they found they had far more in common than simply a love of mountain biking.