ISON is gone

The comet of the century IS gONe.

There it is, tucked away in the phrase. And also into dISappOiNtment.

Physicists like their frissons to be precise, measured, careful, restrained, unspeculative. And I guess that most physicists failed to get excited by the unlikely hype of the sky bisected by a bright tail from horizon to horizon, of a comet so bright that the daylight would not be bright enough to conceal it. They would not be easily drawn to their windows by the prospect of the the first similar view since 1680.

Even the name is carefully dull. ISON: International Space Observation Network. I mean, who would name a once-in-four-hundred-years comet THAT ?

But it was fun while it lasted.

In these enforcedly austere times, this was going to be some show. The best (and cheapest) helping of bread and circuses since the Olympics (yawn) and the latest royal close encounter with something approaching normality.

Richard Feynman (Nobel prize winner, bongo-player extraordinaire, general good egg) while thinking of religion famously and laconically remarked that the stage was too big for the drama. He preferred to find awe and wonder in the immensities of the unthinkable universe, and the everyday immensities that surround us all unseen: the quotidian ballet of sub-atomic particles in every desk and sandwich.

And the real frisson of ISON was not the flim-flam, the promise of cheap pyrotechnics on an unimaginable scale. The real delight was in the hidden reminders of the vastness of where we live. And not just the vastness in distance and time, but of mystery and strangeness, too.

Here, hidden in the Oort Cloud (Oort Cloud. Even the name is beyond weird.) not for millennia but for billions of years, this left-over remnant from the origin of the universe, from the beginnings of time, is suddenly nudged by something unseen, something unknown. It begins its trajectory towards the sun in a journey that makes Greek myths look truly, spectacularly tame.

It plunges through space, travelling vast distances at impossible speeds, and is finally spotted in the last leg of its trip. It is a sun-grazer, a comet passing indecently close to the sun, and, in the hype, catapulting away into deep space forever, trailing at least one show-stopping tail, and maybe two. The money note of astro-physics.

Where is this happening ? Where are the immense darknesses ? Where is this drama taking place ? In our own infinitesimal star system, our own solar backyard, a place so huge that we have not yet managed to visit a single neighbouring planet. And our teeny green-blue planet, so soon to be as red and dry and deserted as Mars travels around our unremarkable sun, one small star in the billions that make up our own galaxy, itself one of countless billions.

With such mathematical fireworks, with such impossible immensity, who needs a mere comet tail for excitement ? Such baubles might be fun for a moment, but the delight and strangeness of our home is around us daily.