He lured me with orbs. Sitting in the cafeteria, he motioned with his hands, creating the orbs out of the air, as if he could seize a proton, stretch it, extend it until it hovered in the air before us. He looked at each of us; his eyes were glistening balls of excitement. He promised us visions of the future, said we would be witnesses to the welcoming of our otherworldly neighbors. I wondered if we should bake a cake.

There were six of us. We piled into the car and drove out to the Dean Nature Preserve. Our eyes focused on the ground, our lungs wheezing, our thighs burning, we climbed our way up the half-mile hike until we reached the cliff. Yes, it was only a half-mile hike and it kicked our butts. We weren’t what you might call the most active group of adventurers.

At the top, we could look out over Lake St. Catherine and get a beautiful view of the Sun setting behind the Taconic Mountain Range in the west. The six of us sat down and started talking excitedly about the orbs.

“They appear above the Sun, and to the left of it,” he said. “There were three of them the last time I looked.”

“Did they just hover there?” one of the girls asked.

“Mostly, yeah, but then one of them moved, and…”

“How fast did it move?” someone interrupted.

“Faster than I’ve ever seen anything else move,” he answered, “They weren’t airplanes.”

“Could it have been the space shuttle,” I asked, “Or the space station?”

“How big were they?” another girl asked.

“Did they look like they were in our atmosphere,” I continued, “Or were they really small, like they were in space?”

“They were about the size of my fingernail,” he answered, “Which, to me, means they were probably in our atmosphere. If they were in space and still the size of my fingernail, they’d have to be huge.”

We got quiet and thought about how the world would change for us if they were real. I thought about the Vogons from the novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy, by Douglas Adams. The Vogons were a maliciously bureaucratic race of aliens who had earned the role of becoming the civil servants of the universe. In the novel, the Earth is destroyed when the Vogons blow it up to make way for an intergalactic expressway. All of Earth’s inhabitants are killed in a twisted execution of eminent domain. I was worried about seeing orbs.

“There’s one!” he yelled, “Just to the left of the Sun!”

We all stood up and looked. We followed his finger. We looked where he told us to look. And then…oh wait, that wasn’t it.
He was the only one that could see it. As for the rest of us, we just saw clouds. We started making wise-ass comments. But we continued to look for it. We wanted to see the orbs. But it didn’t matter if we couldn’t. We had gone for a hike and were in the midst of watching a decent sunset with friends. If we weren’t out looking for orbs, we would have sat in the cafeteria talking about nothing. This way we get the excitement of UFO hunting, and the reality of sunset watching. There really wasn’t anything to complain about. And then…

“Did you see that?” I said.

She grabbed my arm, “Yes, yes I saw it.” No one else knew what we were talking about.

“Can you see it now?” I asked.

“No, it disappeared,” she answered.

“What was it?” they asked.

“It was very small,” I answered, “About the size…”

“There it is again!” we both yelled at the same time. Still no one else saw it. We started to point it out, and then it disappeared again.

“Weird,” I said, “It disappeared again.”

“What was it?” they repeated.

“Anyway,” I continued, “It was about the size of a thumbtack. Silver.”

“No, black,” she said.

“Black?”

“Yeah, it was black, but the Sun reflecting off it made it look silver.”

“I don’t know about that,” I said, “But it looked silver to me. It was just overhead, right about where the twilight ran into the blue sky, and then it appeared again just near the Sun.”

We continued to look for it. It’s difficult to look for something when it is near the Sun. I kept hearing Alan Marwine, my astronomy teacher, say, “Don’t look directly at the Sun! Don’t look directly at the Sun!” But we needed to look at the Sun. What we were looking for was somewhere near the Sun. Then the dots appeared.

We didn’t freak out. Dots happen when staring at the Sun. But these didn’t seem like the dots you get when you’ve burned your cornea. They weren’t blind spots. I could see through the dots. It was more like the world was revealing itself to me (to us, rather, because the girl who had also seen the silvery thumbtack also saw the spots). I started to see it unravel. The world became pixelized, and I knew that if I had a magnifying glass like the one they give you in Adobe Photoshop, I’d be able to zoom in and see where the universe begins to break down. For a minute it occurred to me that I was seeing the protons, like the one he had stretched and extended back in the cafeteria.

We went back to the campus and I found myself a spot in the library to think about this weird thing I had seen. It must have been the Western man in me to try to figure it out, to try to explain the pixels in the universe. John Fowles, in his short essay “The Green Man,” included in The Nature Reader, writes “But it is in the nature of all society, let alone one deeply imbued with a scientific and technological ethos, to bombard us with knowledge…”. I wanted to join the front lines of that war. I wanted to be bombarded by knowledge.

I went online and read an article in Scientific American, titled “Peering Over Einstein’s Shoulder.” The author, JR Minkel, writes that “physicists think that a theory combining quantum mechanics and gravity will show that spacetime is made up of pieces…” and that “(t)he structure of these pieces…could mean that space has a slight grain to it.” I wonder if I saw the grain; I wonder if, for just one moment, the universe in all its complexity revealed itself to me through a sensual experience, a vision of the world as it is. That thought reminded me of a question I was once asked, “Do we lose some significant good when we explain all natural phenomenon with a few natural laws?”

In the late 18th century, William Herschel took a look at the night sky with his telescope and found a distant light. After watching it for a few years, he determined, using Kepler’s law of planetary motion, that it was the planet Uranus. In the middle of the 19th century, two astronomers working independently of each other, John Couch Adams in England and Urbain-Jean-Joseph Le Verrier in France, used Newton’s law of gravity and irregularities in Uranus’ orbit to predict the location of Neptune, which German astronomer Johann Galle visually verified on his first try in 1846. Irregularities in Uranus’ and Neptune’s orbits then led to the prediction of the existence of another planet by the American Percival Lowell. Lowell’s successors empirically proved the existence of Pluto in 1930. The natural laws of gravity and planetary motion made this possible.

The planets were once explained as deities (hence, the names of the five visible planets: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn). They wandered across the sky, and they carried omens and good tidings, depending on the circumstances. Today, then planets are explained naturally, using a scientific blend of chemistry and physics. But does that make them any less powerful to our imaginations? I don’t think so. I think it makes them even more powerful.

The explanation of the planets is more powerful because we’ve discovered so much about them through the mysterious means of mathematics. Yes, we can discover that the planets will sweep out equal areas in equal time, and we can explain that through Newton’s law of motion, and even get into the shady realm of Einstein’s 4-dimensional spacetime universe, but we have yet to figure out why. Why does F = G[(M1M2)/R22]? And not only why does it, but why are we able to know that it does? Why does mathematics work?

Mathematics, contrary to popular belief, is not a completely abstract language. It allowed Adams and Le Verrier to predict(!) the location of Neptune, and it allowed Lowell to predict(!) the location of Pluto. Mathematics isn’t a language like English or Latin. It’s a language that reveals what’s behind the curtain, without needing to see it first. In English or Latin, for example, we can’t describe what we can’t see (or conceptualize); in mathematics, however, it describes things for us.

Do we lose some significant good when we explain all natural phenomenon with a few natural laws? My answer is that we lose some significant good if we don’t understand the mystery of those natural laws. Why is it better to say Mercury travels quickly around the sky because he is the messenger of the Jupiter than it is to say the planet Mercury travels quickly around the sky because it is pulled by Gravity? Just as we have no explanation of the gods, we have no real explanation of Gravity. The mystery is still there.

In my Astronomy textbook, the author, James B. Kaler, writes, “The natural phenomena taken for UFOs is far more interesting [than hoaxes]. Venus tops the list.” I asked Alan Marwine if Venus is visible this time of year, right about sunset. He told me it was. I described the silvery object I had seen, described its movement and its disappearance. He smiled and said, “That’s just Venus.”

One might think that I’d be disappointed after learning the silvery orb was “just Venus.” But it was quite the opposite. I saw Venus! I saw, with my naked eye, an object that is .279 Astronomical Units away from me. And it disappeared because of the way the sun’s light reflecting off of it got lost in the Earth’s atmosphere for a few minutes. This is more impressive to me than thinking I saw an orb in the sky. He lured me with orbs. I saw Venus. I saw the granularity of the Universe that the physicists are looking for. And, on top of those two miracles, the sunset was beautiful.