After spending several years singing at the top of my lungs during long and solitary car journeys, one day I came across someone talking about history. Out of nowhere, YouTube suggested a lecture by a certain professor Adriano di Gregorio.
I was driving, and since he was talking about ancient Rome, I left the lecture on because it intrigued me. I was even more curious about this character with a Sicilian accent giving a lecture from a podium.
I was captivated and fascinated. I realized the era of music was over. Now it was time for “history.” Since that day, I no longer listen to music in the car. Only culture, and quality culture.
Dozens of hours spent driving and YouTube algorithms take me on a journey through hours and hours of history, modern, ancient, prehistoric, and more. I discover Prof. Alessandro Barbero, whom I consider one of the best communicators of this century. I listen to everything available on YouTube from this extraordinary historian too. As I roll miles of highways in front of me, I listened to lectures on any topic. Naturally, the highway wasn’t enough; there were “stories” even when I was doing chores at home.
One Saturday morning, I came across a new voice, with a slightly Roman accent. I let it play and realized it was a scientific lecture on space and time. Below is the video of the lecture I listened to that ordinary Saturday morning.
Needless to say, a wide range of scientific topics were included in the planetarium’s program. The lesson captivated me immensely. Many of these topics, from authors with similar experience, were related to the most captivating theme (in my opinion) of space, time, general relativity, and black holes. The narrator of that video was Prof. Eugenio Coccia
Listen and listen until you form an idea, surely a profane one, far from scientifically grounded criteria deeply rooted in mathematics and incredible physics formulas, but still an idea.
Let me digress a little. I worked for about 4 months in Salvador Bahia, Brazil. When I first arrived in a foreign country on another continent, it was natural for me to relate everything to Italy. The first morning I had breakfast at the hotel, I was disgusted by the “Brazilian” coffee and thought to myself silently, “In the country of coffee, they don’t know how to make coffee!” So I went on annoyed until the third morning without my milk and coffee. I was extremely annoyed and irritated, also because I was far from home, from my habits, and it would be like that for another 4 months. As I approached the buffet, I had a small personal revelation and thought, “Could it be that I assume that what is done in Italy is good and what others do is not?” It was enough to teach me that the preconception with which I approached needed to be reset. If I had done so for everything, I would have discovered that there is more beyond what I knew. Today, 10 years after that coffee, I miss it so much that I occasionally incorporate it into my daily habits. Salvador Bahia is a beautiful place. If they removed crime from the equation, it could be defined as a small earthly paradise.
I’ll get straight to the point. Every time I’ve listened to scientific lectures on space, time, constellations, galaxies, planets, stars, I’ve always heard measurements using our metric. I’m referring to the scientific metric established by us humans to relate to “everything.” If we talk about the mass of a star, the metric is the estimate of how many solar masses it corresponds to, with the sun being ours; if we talk about distances, the metric is our solar year translated into years traveling at the speed of light. So far so good. It’s understandable that we use our metric. My question is, “Who says it’s the right point of observation?” Let me explain, the age of our galaxy is estimated to be 90 or more billion years (4, 7.5 not everyone agrees). Derived from the data we have because we spend our time relating things to our single point of observation. What if we were born on a black hole? Would our way of counting hours be the same? Knowing that an hour on a black hole can correspond to 4 years outside the black hole? The movie Interstellar catapulted us into a universe where some truths are more than universally accepted even by science. An inhabitant of the ocean planet where almost two hours correspond to 23 years on Earth, our metric would have a different value. How old would the universe be according to the set of measurements held by an inhabitant of a black hole? Maybe there’s no answer, or maybe someone already has one. Maybe the answer is that it’s pointless to think about it. I’ll keep searching for the answer, maybe while sipping a good Brazilian coffee.
thanks for your time
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