About a Girl by Sarah McCarry

Author:Sarah McCarry [McCarry, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Juvenile Fiction, Legends; Myths; Fables, Greek & Roman, Girls & Women, Paranormal, Lgbt
ISBN: 9781250027139
Google: VfjdBAAAQBAJ
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2015-07-14T17:39:28.556000+00:00

THE RETURN VOYAGE

All my life I had let my own stubbornness carry me, that and the gifts I was sure of, the strength I’d been born with. I knew what languages were spoken in the world I wanted to inhabit, and if I was not yet fluent in them, if I needed years still to untangle the grammar and syntax of thermodynamics, the poiesis of astrophysics and particles and the movement of light, I understood nevertheless the alphabets in which they were inscribed. I had thought that I knew exactly what I did not yet know: unlearned equations like missing volumes on a shelf, to be slotted in neatly as I acquired them. I had been unable to bear anything like disorder, and no wonder—the word cosmology itself comes from the ancient Greek kosmeo, which means “to order,” “to organize”—the universe is worthy of study because it operates in patterns, and our understanding of them is, fundamentally, a kind of organization, a fact which suited my tidy nature well.

And then I had come here, and all I had brought with me seemed now nothing like what I needed, what was necessary to make the world clear. I had arrived with a star chart of a cosmos I expected and landed instead in a universe whose physics were nothing like the physics of the world I knew; I had tumbled into a landscape without polestar or cardinal direction, where the tools with which I’d flawlessly navigated my previous life—my memory, my history, my experience of love—were as useless as a compass held over a magnet until its needle spun in circles. Our universe has been expanding since the moment of its fiery birth, and for decades, cosmologists thought that there were only three possible ends to its story: it might balloon outward forever, at an ever-slowing rate; it might one day stop altogether; or its expansion might finally be reversed by the gravitational pull of its heart, leading to its long, slow collapse inward. And then astronomers studying the recessional velocities of supernovae discovered something extraordinary: the expansion of the universe was not slowing down at all, it was speeding up. Propelled by some force whose nature we do not understand, the universe is flinging itself outward like a runaway train. The history of science is a history of those moments in which a single piece of information has torn asunder everything that came before. “The years of searching in the dark for a truth that one feels, but cannot express; the intense desire and the alternations of confidence and misgiving, until one breaks through to clarity and understanding, are only known to him who has himself experienced them,” Einstein wrote; it was something I had underlined without taking to heart years ago, but now its truth was sunk into my bones.

The obsession with order and elegance at the expense of the truth is a fatal flaw that goes all the way back to the Greeks, who were the first to

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