The Sensual Universe Book
Notation: A = Amara F = Fiorella [ ] = extra comments by Amara
A: Now what about galaxies falling in love?
F: I've been thinking about my book, _The Sensual Universe_. These days I'm very much in an inspirational mode, spending time almost every week in the studio, composing music. So my imagination is really active now. When I thought about how galaxies sometimes get together, I started to see an analogy with relationships between men and women, here, and galaxies, out there. If I find myself thinking about, say a relationship with some guy, it is as a kind of cosmological event. I think that we are two galaxies out there, and we attract each other. And of course we are up there in empty space and we look at each other and say, "let's get together." Then we make a first approach and start to attract each other and then to gravitate and rotate around each other. We can be either the whole galaxy or a star. Then there is a point when gravity isn't enough. Some other processes start happening. A big jet of superheated material goes flying Whoomf! off in one direction... shoots right through me. And I respond! And slowly, slowly we fall in love, we get together and we live in perfect harmony. So from two galaxies, we get together and form one galaxy with a double nuclei. Like what we observe out there in the Universe.
But sometimes people aren't so lucky. They are galaxies, they fall in love, attract each other, but they don't stay together. They pass through each other, they realize that they are not made for each other after all. So poof! They kiss goodbye, one goes in one direction, the other goes in the other direction, and that's it.
Another galaxy, perhaps in a burning passion of love, cannibalizes some other galaxy and eats the nucleus. Then those two galaxies destroy each other.
So that's love in the Cosmos and that's going to be in my book.
Likewise, now I'm beginning to see personalities as being like stars in the cosmos because we are from stars. Some people are like comets, like some artists. They have one great success, and pass through the Solar System and are gone! Then they come back in, say, 15 years, have another success, and are gone again.
Some other people may be so lonely that they just die like a white dwarf. They die alone in silence and coldness because they have no more energy or passion to burn.
A: Or brown dwarfs who never have enough mass to ignite in the first place.
F: Or others who have so much passion that they explode, and turn into a supernova.
Others are cyclical and pulse like a pulsar.
Maybe there are people like the North Star who stand, always perfect, always up there shining.
Likewise I like to think of myself...
A: Oh! What kind of star do you imagine yourself being?
F: I don't want to be just a star- I want to be a galaxy! Because I want to be one hundred billion stars! Then that's enough.
A: Is every astronomical object in your _Sensual Universe_ book going to be tied to a person? You said previously that you want the book to draw parallels to real life.
F: Definitely my love story is going to be in the book. My grandmother is going to be in the book. Likewise, some of my experiences that I went through in the University, and also here in America, will be in the book. I will try to give them good interpretations and try to relate them to some cosmological event. Sometimes human nature is so particular and so unique that we astronomers haven't found yet an object that describes it!
A: But we will!
F: Yes we will! As technology progresses (laughter).
A: You may have some trouble, though, in getting this theory accepted in a paper submitted to the Astrophysical Journal!
F: But you never know... That's the beauty of the cosmos!
[I have some suggestions for Fiorella about this approach in: Sidebar: Aristotle's Cosmology.]
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