A Cafe I visit routinely on my morning commute exploded yesterday. We also took pictures of a black hole for the first time. My son used his potty for the first time.
Feeling slightly overwhelmed by the crazy confluence of scales which intersected in my life yesterday. On our weekly date, Shelley asked me about the long term structure and fate of the universe. Hard not to think, absurd as it is, about my own child careening into the future. Is some distant descendant going to look out the window at an earth which can barely support life on account of the increase in solar radiation or suffer some other painful sense of final detachment from the universe?
The owner of the cafe died in the explosion. I talked to him on Monday when I stopped to get a tea on the way to work. Now that impression of a friendly old man framed by the accoutrements of a bustling cafe has taken on a hyper-reality, like the morning light streaming in from the windows as the sun came up over the buildings across the street really was the excitation of a mysterious quantum field. One characterized by nothing more or less than handful of symmetry relations which ascended picoseconds after the universe began and whose reign will still be absolute when the universe is nothing but black holes and the distant, cooling, cosmic horizon.