I am the old man.
I am the boy.
We are called Patrick.
Old Patrick has explored worlds and vast reaches of space shown to him by scientists and writers over the years, but still is left pondering the questions he thought about as young Patrick. How big is space? What was there before time?
One summer's evening, as purple twilight darkened to velvet night, man and boy walked out, out of the farmhouse where they lived in the flat bottom lands of the Thames Valley, and away from the pools of tungsten light falling from its windows. Out to the far end of the paddock. To the edge of darkness.
Gradually Patrick's young eyes grew accustomed to the night, revealing the vast diamond dome stretching from horizon to horizon. Slowly he turned through a complete circle, gazing up at the night sky in all its stunning beauty.
A noise. A drone. A plane flies across the sparkling necklace of the Milky Way, flashing rubies and emeralds.
Patrick's world was full of boundaries. Hedges, ditches, walls, rivers, hills and mountains.
But above his head he saw none.
He saw the Moon.
He saw the Sun.
He saw Saturn, Jupiter and Mars. And beyond them our Milky Way galaxy.
He even, after studying astronomer Patrick Moore's books, could see further and make out the smudged thumbprint of Amdromeda, a sister galaxy speeding towards us. And the books talked about millions of galaxies past her which lay in the abyss beyond human imagination.
But where was the edge? The boundary?
Even if there was a wall around everything, what would there be on the other side of the wall?
Even the books couldn't help with that one.
They talked of Einstein, of curling dimensions folded in on themselves.
This is where Patrick turned to another of his sources, Carl Sagan, who said,
"Not only is the Universe stranger than we understand, it is stranger than we CAN understand."
In a way, this was comforting to Patrick. Out here on the edge of understanding, he found that even the great minds faltered.
Patrick's life still lay before him. Great discoveries were being made, more and more as time went by. This amazing show would run and run.
Would they ever discover Higg's boson?
Old Patrick smiled.
~~~~~~~~~~
