Let’s open this story with my bike, because this is a cycling magazine and because it might be helpful to begin with something tactile. To call it a bike seems so informal. It’s like calling a ’67 Pontiac GTO a car, or Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers a band. This is a bike, yes, in that it has two wheels and can get you from here to there. But it’s more than that. And I can’t tell you why just yet, but I promise I’ll get there. Meanwhile, take a look at the bike. It is finished in metallic black so subdued you have to lean in to see the sparkle; and if you do, you’ll notice a few scratches and dings on the tubing. It’s 44 years old, after all, older than me by two years. The frame is held together by Prugnat long-point lugs. Run your fingers over the hand-brazed butted tubing, the sloping fork crown, the 16.5-inch chainstay. Caress the Avocet Touring I saddle, the Satri-Gallet seatpost, the Cinelli handlebar, and the Campagnolo Record calipers
By rights, it should simply not be there. “All the geological and photochemical routes we can think of are far too underproductive to make the phosphine we have seen,” said Cardiff University astronomer Professor Jane Greaves, leader of the team who made the discovery. And that conclusion leaves scientists with the bizarre prospect that microbial activity – the key source of phosphine on Earth – may be occurring in the searing, acidic clouds that swathe Venus.
Not surprisingly, the news that there may be bugs on Venus made front-page headlines. It also adds a bizarre new planetary focus for scientists hunting alien life on nearby planets – a search that is now leading them to increasingly strange and unexpected parts of the solar system, from the frozen moons of Jupiter to the methane-filled lakes of Titan, the largest moon of Saturn.
In the 1940s, trailblazing physicists stumbled upon the next layer of reality. Particles were out, and fields — expansive, undulating entities that fill space like an ocean — were in. One ripple in a field would be an electron, another a photon, and interactions between them seemed to explain all electromagnetic events.
There was just one problem: The theory was glued together with hopes and prayers. Only by using a technique dubbed “renormalization,” which involved carefully concealing infinite quantities, could researchers sidestep bogus predictions. The process worked, but even those developing the theory suspected it might be a house of cards resting on a tortured mathematical trick.
Instead, his intention is far more courageous. His memoir is ultimately not about judging or morality or illness or survival. It is not about Western versus alternative medicine. Greenland’s insight is akin to Warren Zevon’s famous dictum to “enjoy every sandwich.” It is about an active state of being. It is about being an active participant in one’s own life, and in one’s own health. It is about putting your ego aside, and it is about the friends and family that are actually one’s life. It is not about religion, or dogma. Yes, take the chemo. But feel free to do more if that’s the discipline you require.
Without visitors to bring them to life, all those stuffed corpses and suits of armour are utterly inert. That shard of grey stone becomes a Neolithic arrowhead only when someone imagines the hands that sculpted it or the hunter who held it aloft.
It also requires someone to tell its story and Rachel Morris’s new book is about the people who operate behind the scenes of our museums: the collectors and curators who gather artefacts and interpret their histories, labelling and arranging them to show what they were and how they were used – in the process, offering annotated glimpses of vanished worlds.
Sometimes, when I take a bath and recline
in the cool water on a hot day, I just want
to be human, undefined by profiles or history: