Understanding the Universe

“And then I thought about how for a long time scientists were puzzled by the fact that the sky is dark at night, even though there are billions of stars in the universe and there must be stars in every direction you look, so that the sky should be full of starlight because there is very little in the way to stop the light from reaching earth.  Then they worked out that the universe was expanding, that the stars were all rushing away from one another after the Big Bang, and the further the stars were away from us the faster they were moving, some of them nearly as fast as the speed of light, which was why their light never reached us.  I like this fact.  It is something you can work out in your own mind just by looking at the sky above your head at night and thinking without having to ask anyone” (page 10).

After rereading this passage approximately six times in order to wrap my mind around the scientific phenomenon that was being explained, I still do not fully understand it.  Christopher thinks it is obvious information.

Christopher seems to always view the things that I find complicated in the simplest ways.  Logic is something that most people can understand at basic levels but Christopher seems to have been born with the ability to logically decipher almost every situation.   This article sheds some interesting light on some of the complex subjects that Christopher masters: http://roanoke.edu/Documents/curious_astronomy.pdf

While this may not have been Haddon’s intent, I feel like the ability of Christopher to “master the universe”, at least theoretically, is an extended metaphor for the way his brain functions as a whole.  This may be a stretch, but I feel like it ultimately implies that if humans had the ability to completely remove the emotional aspect of them they would be capable of mastering any concept.  It is often the “human” part of them that prevents them from understanding a concept.  The idea of death in this context is a perfect example to look at.  Those who engage with emotions see death as not something natural, but as something personally threatening.  It is a phenomenon that extends beyond emotional human comprehension and ends up being psychologically overwhelming.  Absent that emotion death is just viewed as a process and has no impact on the individual.