ANNIVERSARY POST. I began this blog a year ago with this post about how the static that affects radio reception arises from remnants of the Big Bang, a notion that I find very moving. In the course of the year I read THE BLACK SWAN, in which Nassim Taleb writes that much scientific discovery results from luck and gives the example that the discovery of the radiation that resulted from the Big Bang came when scientists were checking their equipment to see whether it had been contaminated by bird droppings. The static resulted not from the activity of birds, but from the beginning of the universe. I think of these lines from Wallace Stevens (from “Sunday Morningâ€):
We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.