Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star
A Personal New Year Message to Carl Sagan By Don Beaudreau wbeaudreau@aol.com
W
e at Lakeside and around the world are about to complete one year and begin another one. It is something we “humans” have been doing for half a million years. Indeed, we are time travelers. And yet, we are writing only the first letter in the first word of our journey. We could have 10 million times the time we already have had. Furthermore, before we showed up, the universe of space and time had begun—15 billion years earlier. And yet, 15 billion years is not that long ago, compared to the years to come! My favorite nursery song sums up my inability to absorb the enormity of all this: Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star/ How I wonder what you are! It is a question I ask myself even more frequently than I did when I was younger. When I take my early morning walk along the shores of this ancient Lake called Chapala, and look up at the sky and see all those twinkling stars, I want to imagine they are my friends who have died. At any rate, Carl Sagan, who died in 1996, and whose sister I knew, is someone who helped to fashion my own beliefs. So I want to share my letter to him with you at Lakeside during the turning of the year. ***** Dear Carl Sagan, Wherever You Are in the Cosmos, Thank you for bringing poetry (that is to say, a sense of wonder and mystery and creative fancy) and science (that is to say, a recognition of facts proven through repeated experiments) together. Thank you for advancing Albert Einstein’s words to us about exploring the universe we live in when he advised: “Never lose a holy curiosity.” For certainly you, Carl, never lost your holy curiosity. And you helped us create our own sense of this. Millions of us remember your television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage on PBS in 1980, when you discussed the beginning of the universe. How you would ascend a staircase and open up various doors to reveal different
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time sequences in our universe’s history. How, as you climbed higher on those stairs, you went further and further back in time, all the while getting closer and closer to the very creation of the universe itself. And how, when you finally reached that magic door—the one at the very top of the staircase—you continued to keep us in suspense as you went on and on and on about all the things most of us did not know concerning when and how our infinitesimal universe came about. And then, when we thought you were finally going to open the magic door, and thereby reveal the very mystery of creation—something no one had been able to do before, as if behind that very door there was the Prime Mover him-her-itself; just when we thought the puzzle of our very existence was going to be solved and you, Sagan, were the man to do it, you refused to open the door!! Thanks a lot, Carl! (I say this to you with tongue in cheek!) “Not yet,” you said, or something like that; something all scientific and matter-of fact-like. “Not yet, but some day…some day we’ll know.” I then expected you to say, all television-like, “Stay tuned for next week’s coming attractions,” but you didn’t. All you said was “Some day.” You, Sagan, the quintessential scientist, ever-expecting to break through to the origin of the mysterious. Truly, millions of us will never forget that night of high drama—those of us who, like yours truly, still are trying to figure out why an egg boils, as well as those geniuses who read about quantum physics with all that “stuff” about quarks and neutrinos and black holes, as if they were reading the Dick and Jane and Spot books
