The Universe Is Nothing Without Us

When I was a kid, I dreamed of transcendence even if I didn’t know to call it by that name. I walked through the world with my head in the stars, trading the industrial wastelands of New Jersey for pictures of distant galaxies, my leaky roof for books about the solar system. I spent hours in my room dreaming of space-suited astronauts bounding over alien landscapes.

Whenever things were bad, I retreated into space and science. When I was 9 years old, a drunk driver careened over the centerline and killed my 15-year-old brother. The shock of his sudden, irrevocable disappearance propelled me deeper into my astronomy books. I devoured telescopic images of interstellar clouds and star fields. They showed me a cosmos in which my story, my pain, was just one narrative in an infinite book of stories.

I yearned to follow my heroes, such as Newton and Einstein, into the rarefied realms of mathematical physics, a desire that only deepened as I along with the supposedly timeless reality of mathematics, meant that human experience could be overcome through a higher, more complete perspective. I left for college wanting to join in the effort to climb those heights, to pierce the veil of this messy world and find a view of the universe free of human bias and tragedy.