Popular Culture Review Volume 29, Number 2, Summer 2018 | Page 35

Popular Culture Review 29.2
campus with a well-known quantum physicist , Einstein and his friend had been debating the apparent absurdities of some of quantum theory ’ s commitments . According to the Copenhagen interpretation , certain qualities of objects , and perhaps even things themselves , are said not to exist until a measurement is taken on them , until they are observed . Macro-objects are made up of these quantum-particles , of course , and so Einstein asked , “ Do you really believe that the moon only exists when you ’ re looking at it ?” Today the most agreed-upon answer to that question is , “ The moon is there all of the time , but only ... probably .”
When I was very young , apart from those scientists and astronauts I idolized , the most important people in my life were my boyhood dog and my great-grandmother . They taught me what it is to love . I hated leaving my great-grandmother each evening , heading back to a less than happy home and always worried about being apart from her . But she told me to look up at the moon through my bedroom window and remember that she was looking at the exact same moon , too , even if we were not in the same place , because in this way we were together . We were both there with the moon . We were both there on the Earth beneath the moon . For me , this is what it came to mean to be here . To be together . With the moon .
Phase 7 : Last Quarter
The moon has done so much to help us learn how to love . I wonder if it is not mere sentimentality but an actual foundation for an ethic to think about that love , to think about our dependence on the moon , to think about how we might learn to tread lightly on the Earth and also tread lightly , if it all , on the moon , even when merely looking . Because looking can trample , too , and looking always carries values as well .
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