Thoughts while reading the
His Dark Materials trilogy....
The job of the writer, frequently, is to take a boring idea and turn it into something exciting. In the case of Philip Pullman's
The Northern Lights (
The Golden Compass, if you prefer), he takes an amazing natural phenomenon, made dull by science, and breathes life into it once more.
Pullman's chosen spectacle is the aurora borealis - the titular northern lights. The aurora is something difficult to fathom, as evidenced by the woodcut to the right. It comes from a book by the renowned "I. Platt," and claims to show "...An Extraordinary Appearance Of The Aurora Borealis, Observed By Captain Parry In His Expedition To The Arctic Regions." Though Platt's imprint is a bit simplistic, we can still get the general idea of what Captain Parry saw: a semicircle of bright lights in the sky. A fantastic sight, to be sure, certainly unfamiliar to most people.
(Side note: this Captain Parry happens to be William Edward Parry, an English admiral and arctic explorer. Although I have not been able to find proof of such, he seems to be the basis/namesake for Pullman's character Will Parry. But on to more important things.)
Luckily, we are a creative bunch, we human beings. We just hate it when we don't know why something happens. The red, green, yellow lights dancing through the northern sky must have some sort of explanation. In medieval Greenland, for instance, one idea held that the ocean was surrounded by a massive, circular fire. No real explanation, just a big old fire!
Ok, not that exciting, but still, the aurora themselves, still great!
When we get to Parry's time, the early-to-mid-1800s, we start to get more science-y. Some theorized that meteors caused the aurora. Ben Franklin felt it had to do with electric particles concentrating and reacting in the frigid polar climate. Wrong-o, Benny! Well, maybe. We know now that the ultimate source has to do with solar wind blowing across the atmosphere. By "we," of course, I mean "scientists who specialize in this particular field." Still, it's hard to say
exactly what makes a rainbow of colors dance across the night sky in Alaska, northern Russia, Norway, and other places far too cold for most sane people to take an interest in.
Still, it is decidedly unexciting to think of the reasoning. A stargazer and a scientist take in the aurora.
Stargazer: "Oooh, pretty lights!"
Scientist: "Yeah. It's just the solar wind."
Stargazer: "What? Look, purple!"
Scientist: "Hold on, I can explain it to you. It all starts in the magnetosphere. There's plasma up there, which..."
Stargazer: "ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ."
While the whole explanation may be fascinating to the scientist, it really contains way too many words for most people. And while if you REALLY think about it, the idea that powerful winds blow through OUTER SPACE, flying BILLIONS OF LIGHTYEARS, only to collide with our planet to produce PRETTY LIGHTS is pretty fantastic, it's pretty dull when you get down to the nitty gritty. In short, science is awesome, but it's boring. Enter Pullman (Quotes are my own. Heck, it's all made up.):
Fake Pullman: "The northern lights are a zone of weakness in the fabric between alternative worlds."
Inattentive Blogger: "Oooh. Pass the popcorn."
Fake Pullman: "You see, at this moment, millions of tiny events are happening around the world. Choices are being made, branches are snapping in the wind, butterflies are flapping their wings..."
Inattentive Blogger: "Is this where Ashton Kutcher comes in?"
Fake Pullman: "I hate you. Anyway, everywhere, things are happening. While only a limited amount of things
happen, a perfectly unlimited
number of things
could happen. Enter the alternate universes."
Inattentive Blogger: "The Butterfly effect. And only Ashton Kutcher can save the universe...."
Fake Pullman: "You know, if I believed in God, which I don't, I'd ask him to damn you right now. As I was saying, if a mosquito flies too close to a bug zapper and dies, it is altogether possible that there is another world where the same mosquito does not fly into the zapper. Or perhaps there's another world where bug zappers themselves have not been invented. Limitless possibilities exist, but only one can happen in each world. They may be minor changes, they may be large, but each one spawns a new plane of existence."
Inattentive Blogger: "Now about those pretty lights..."
Fake Pullman: *Groan*
And scene, with many apologies. Whatever the case, Pullman's explanation of what the aurora is definitely trumps science's. I want to read about multiple worlds separated by simple differences. It's fascinating, if frequently irrelevant, to think about how the world would change if things went differently. Would I be a teacher if I went to school to get a degree in music instead? Would Neil Armstrong have been as famous if he didn't play golf on the moon? If I didn't eat so much ice cream, would I be a professional baseball player? Maybe there's more to it than that, but this is a line of thought that can produce far more interest, and far more readers, than a simple, "...um.... it's the solar wind, silly."
Badteacher. is on the road! Today we come to you from the little hamlet of Wausau, Wisconsin, known for having an insurance company named after it. Well, it's not so bad. The Great Dane Brewery (anyplace named after a dog is always good, after all) makes the trip all worthwhile.
