Beyond the Known World

Day 17 - 8:13am, 18 January 2019

Making tea after Bodybalance tonight, I catch the end of a radio interview with author Diane Setterfield speaking about her new novel Once Upon a River. She is explaining that as a child she read a story of a young child that had drowned and then come back to life again. The story had made a deep impression on her, providing her with some comfort as her sister was seriously ill at the time. As an adult she came across a second case of a toddler drowning in an icy river and then being brought back to life. What at first seemed extraordinary, turns out to be explained by our growing understanding of the science behind it. This ended up as the inspiration for her latest novel, set around the Thames. In answering the interviewer's further questions, Diane Setterfield went on to suggest that the river was the second writer of the book and how walking by the river can thwart writers' block. High praise indeed!

Then as I ate my tea, I watched the Sky at Night. It was reporting on the New Horizons fly by of Ultima Thule (meaning 'Beyond the Known World'), the most primordial planetary object to be explored, probably having sat in the Kuiper Belt, beyond the orbit of Neptune, for an estimated 4.6 billion years. It is a good example of why I don't tend to watch astronomy programmes: the figures are so big that they fry my mind. For example, the probe has been in continual flight since 2006 (some 4,746 days) to reach an object that is so far distant that it receives 0.05% of the sunlight that the earth does. The 'geeks', including Professor Brian May, are loving it; there appears to be a big convention of academics gathered in a large lecture theatre to see the first pictures coming through of what looks like a stone snowman, albeit 18 miles wide.

But for me, science is not enough, unless it goes hand-in-hand with storytelling. They are two sides of the same coin and complement one another as we continue to explore and push out the realms of what is the known world. So much so that maybe, one day in the future, there will only be the known world.