Commentary

When it’s impossible to exaggerate

October 8, 2026   ·   0 Comments

By Constance Scrafield

Finally, I am reading Stephen Hawking’s book, A Brief History of Time. Hawking was a very famous British scientist, professor and author who performed groundbreaking work in physics and cosmology. His books help to make science accessible to everyone.

Published on April Fool’s Day, 1988, it outsold every book ever printed, except the Bible and Shakespeare.

I could not know if Hawking’s writing is used to access his work, since the study of space is mandatory in Orangeville’s schools.

It really does not matter how long I spend reading it because, while one could run out of time and even that is negotiable, depending on what mountain one is living on, one cannot run out of space.

The thing is, you see, all the historical thinking about the universe as a package has led repeatedly to asking what is beyond that package. Irresistibly, we have come to admit that which truly overwhelms and confounds us and then lets us relax because there is no way to struggle with the idea: the universe is unending, with no beginning and no end.

In other words, there are no borders to the universe.

Of course, we would like to divide it, preferably, so it inevitably seems, between warring factions on a very big scale — just like all our favourite Star Wars, Star Trek — and the rest of sci-fi that insists on predicting, just like here on Earth.

There is a World War I Christmas story about a moment and space when German troupes were in trenches on one side of a battlefield, and British troupes were in trenches on the other side.

It was Christmas Eve.

A calm in the exchange of fire had come, and someone began to sing Silent Night — Stille Nacht in German. Their united voices — English and German — rose above them and the truth rang out in the moment.

The story goes that the soldiers actually left their holes to greet and shake hands with each other — a brief moment — a passing miracle, but miracle it was. Yet, they returned to their trenches, and the sound of grief and pain began again.

In a limitless universe, we need a Silent Night moment.

The failure of our beloved science fiction stories is that they take all their plots from the battle soaked example of earth but who is to say that in this unending universe of countless stars and planets, there must be many life forms that have figured out how to live reasonably with each other.

There is plenty of stargazing technology on Earth and spinning in space; there are gadgets on the moon and nearby planets, delivered and followed here to see what they can see and even to sending samples of alien ground back to us.

Yet, what fun it is to know that however far we look and yearn, we will never see a final border to breach. We can live with the hope that in that distant time when space travel is possible, we will have evolved beyond the senseless pain of war.

Here is how Hawking described galaxies in the universe: he talked about Edwin Hubble, an American astronomer who finally demonstrated, following in the shoes of other astronomers all the way back to ancient Greece, that ours is not the only galaxy.

Back in 1924, by measuring the “luminosity” of stars both nearer and further away, Hubble was able to work out the distances of nine other galaxies.

“We now know,” writes Hawking, “that our galaxy is only one of some hundred thousand million that can be seen using modern telescopes, each galaxy itself containing some hundred thousand million stars.”

An illustration of a central spiral cluster of stars encompassed by irregular matching arcs of stars one above and one beneath the centre presents an image many of you have seen of our galaxy. Hawking posits the illustration must look like this to someone living outside our galaxy. Someone should draw it.

“We live in a galaxy that is 100,000 light-years across and is slowly rotating; the stars in its spiral arms orbit around its centre once every several hundred million years.”

“Our sun,” he sums it up, “is just an ordinary, average sized yellow star, near the edge of one of the spiral arms.”

“We’ve certainly come a long way,” Hawking jokes, “since Aristotle and Ptolemy when we thought that the earth was the centre of the universe!”

Once, I stood in the middle of the Sahara desert and tipped my head back to wonder at the clear canopy of stars, some formations I recognized and others not, as the sky changes on the way south.

In Hockley, my daughter Patricia and I would share a sleeping bag and lie on our picnic table to watch the dance and dash of the stars’ grand displays.

There are plenty of interpretations to consider under a starry sky, making us feel tiny; making us feel like giants with such a background to support our best plans and wishes.

There is peace in the thought that no one can conquer infinity.

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