I guess I’d grown and experienced enough such that, as I look back, there existed moments of my own past which I can regard as having met greatness. The renewed personal motto taken from my own poetry archive is one such example.
In Series …
THE APERIODICALS
Local (personal, potentially shallow, and subject to change) outlooks on science, technology, growth, and occasionally culture and history. The goal is to write something every week, but whether it can make its way to FWPhys is random. Hence the series title.
The Voyagers is one of my earliest surviving pieces of English-language creative writing. Drafted in January 2014 and taking its final form in 2016, it captures much of my pre-collegiate mindset. I wanted to do physics of course, had few friends with which I could share my ambitions, and didn’t know / hadn’t internalised that I’d be flown across the equator with much false senses of certainty dissolved in the ocean beneath.
That phase of general social drowsiness (but at the same time adequate and intensive technical training) culminated in me missing a form for my application to Cambridge in 2015, nullifying my application upon review during admission confirmation by St Johns College. Interesting times.
A later revised version of The Voyagers in college was the first ever blog post here. The hyperlink saves you from navigating through my blogs list. Across all the versions, from the very start of the project, has this line existed,
“We are small. Time is short.”
It is rather poetically fitting that I eventually began my career as a cosmologist. For which I truly am small and timescales I have personal access to sure are short. I didn’t — 2014/2015 FW didn’t — intend this line to be read with cynicism. It’s in the smallest and shortest that humanity found insight into nature too, after all. Learning our place in space and time is the ultimate motivator for physics, at least for me.
I meant we are “small” compared to the universe we observe, or to the subset of it our remote descendants have a shot at visiting; I meant our time is “short” compared to all the natural processes before we’d come along, or to the monumental motions that shaped the planet we inhabit.
At the same time, with our state of smallness and shortness, and sometimes despite them, we managed to grasp and appreciate – beginning to know the unknown and unknowable – the large and the long. That is matter for jubilation.
The seeds of profound epistemological revolutions lived in precision (small and short) measurements. Impeccably precise work on heat and radiation brought about statistical mechanics and quantum mechanics, precise to milliseconds measure of light travel (Michelson-Morley) inspired special relativity, and deflection of stars by far less than one degree during solar eclipse, general relativity.
Without suggesting too much resonance with the organic-hype-farms next door, I do sometimes utter in earnest “what a time to be alive!” A phrase I borrowed from them:
I find myself at the break of another cloudy dawn. With a lot of our own, and new, small and short. Ultra-squeezed laser gave us precision to detect binary black hole mergers through gravitational waves, for example, and there’s ample hope to soon measure more interesting GW from space.
I don’t want this blog to be literally 75% of the time dedicated to me determining to do physics and then offers no explicit mentions physics. FW’s notebooks series is a few years out of date, though of course I still solve problems, be it recreationally attempting olympiads, or writing a finite difference solver for Poisson equation this afternoon… Still, when times call for a largely motivational / methodological note, I’d still make one, and do so without compromise.
And this time it will stick —
We are small. Time is short.
Better use the time and treat others wisely then.
Also attached is the first version of The Voyagers. January 2014. Other than typo fixes, I left it unchanged.
Looking at the stars,
we are voyagers to the future.
We are voyagers to worlds
where someone is watching the sky, just like us.
We are voyagers to every star
that drifts across galaxies—
the islands of our universe.
Every sight,
every hidden factor
behind the mysteries.
Everything in motion
carries its own emotion.
Traveling at the speed of light,
we see gravity
and the truths predicted by calculation.
We see the history of history itself.
We start to think about
existing—
beyond any imagination.
Sometimes you have only one chance.
We are small.
Time is short.
And still you cannot prove
that the true world
is the one in which you live.
Life feels unreal,
yet there is a heart-shaking reality
that waits behind a brave new world—
a place where daily life and gossip
should never have become a heavy thing.
Take a look at your city.
High up there—
has anyone come to town?
Busy for another answer,
the world hurries on
and has nothing certain to tell you.
Chance and fortune
shape the consequences you meet.
Numbers are weak.
Stars are never gone,
beyond the reach of any spectator’s speculation.
Looking at the world,
we are voyagers to the present.
We are voyagers to worlds
where someone is thinking about life, just like us.
We are voyagers to every detail
that drifts across the waves of our universe.
Experience.
Destinies.
Behind the meandering flow of time,
everything in your dreams
comes back into your memories
again.
Yourong Frank Wang 
One response to “We are small. Time is short.”
遨游者
仰望星空，
我们是驶向未来的旅人。
我们是驶向那些
也有人在仰望天空的世界的旅人，
就像我们一样。
我们是驶向每一颗星辰的旅人，
它们穿越银河，
漂泊在宇宙的群岛之中。
每一处景象，
每一个隐藏的因子，
都潜伏着未知的奥秘。
万物在运动，
也都蕴藏着自己的情感。
以光速前行，
我们看见引力，
以及计算所预言的真理。
我们看见历史的历史。
我们开始思考
——存在——
那超越一切想象的境地。
有时，你只有一次机会。
我们如此渺小，
时间如此短暂。
然而你依然无法证明，
你所身处的世界
就是真实的世界。
生命看似虚幻，
却有一种震撼心魄的真实
潜藏在那崭新的世界里——
在那里，
日常的琐事与流言
本不该成为良善之人的负担。
看看你成长的城市吧。
高高的天际——
可曾有人造访？
忙于寻找下一个答案，
世界匆匆向前，
却从未给过确切的回应。
机缘与幸运
塑造了你所得到的结果。
数字终究无力，
而群星从未陨落，
不在任何旁观者的揣测之中。
凝望这片世界，
我们是驶向当下的旅人。
我们是驶向那些
有人正思索生命的世界的旅人，
就像我们一样。
我们是驶向每一个细节的旅人，
它们在宇宙的波涛间
悄然起伏。
感受。
命运。
在那曲折流转的时间深处，
你梦中的一切，
终将再次
回到你的记忆里。
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