heaven and hell.

This is the music by the Greek composer Vangelis that Carl Sagan chose as the theme music to his PBS series Cosmos, here set to iTunes' visualizer sequence.

I have been fascinated by watching these installments, courtesy of Netflix. Tonight's was about time travel, the theory of relativity and how light bends and time decays near the speed of light (and props to J for getting through all of it this time without stating to me "too many facts, Dad!").

Absolutely incredible, even if I still have a difficult time wrapping my head around those ideas, and the idea of wormholes and the possibility that the laws of physics (admittedly, as we know them to be up until now) might allow space and time to be non-simply connected (also known as "multiply connected," depicted by the diagram above) as Sagan postulated in his novel Cosmos.

In preparation for that book, he consulted with a friend from Cal Tech named Kip Thorne – a leading and world-renowned theoretical physicist – who initially dismissed the idea of wormholes, but later had an epiphany that they could in fact be used as time machines and ended up publishing a thesis entitled Wormholes, Time Machines and the Weak Energy Condition (it is, I should note, highly speculative at this time).

I still have to read Sagan's novel, and I am all set to watch the movie adaptation again. And we still have three more discs of Cosmos in our Netflix queue. And additionally, Stephen Spielberg is set to release a film called Interstellar that is based on Thorne's theories of time travel through wormholes (though a release date is not given).