A Hum in the Universe

 

By Marilyn Moore

It’s there…a hum in the universe.  Hummmmm, ambient noise, part of what some astrophysicists call a cosmic symphony, evidence that the universe is not static, but rocking and rolling, changing, expanding, shifting shapes….and singing.   A low-pitched hum, way lower than humans can detect, but “heard” by gigantic telescopes, measuring emissions from hundreds of thousands of pulsars.  Telescopes in every continent of the planet, except for Antarctica.  Planetary agreement among the astrophysicists that indeed the universe is humming.  

The source of the universe’s hum?  Most likely it’s from gravitational waves, coming from the spiraling and merging of pairs of black holes throughout the galaxies.  Perhaps the black holes are dancing?  I like the image of dancing, great big, huge black holes, dancing in space, a dance that makes music….it reminds me of the Northern Lights, that danced the night away…I wonder if they were making music…

Last summer the James Webb telescope let us see the universe in ways never seen before—we could see the birth of stars, billions of years ago.  Again, they were dancing….and exploding with life and light and energy and, dare I say, joy.  This summer, we learn that the universe is humming…another cause for wonder, at a time that I need a little wonder in my life.

I think, though, that while the astrophysicists are just now able to quantify, and verify, the humming of gravitational waves, there are those who live amongst us that have somehow always been aware of the universe’s hum.  They most likely did not “hear” it, at least in the sense that we think about hearing a spoken word, a trumpet’s note, a child’s laughter, but they have sensed that hum, a deep-within-the-soul visceral connection to the universe.  Across continents and across cultures, indigenous peoples drummed, and still do, to an internal beat, to a deeply felt vibration, that connected them to one another and to the earth.  I sense that harmony in the words of Black Elk, in the drums of the Masai and the Ponca.  Perhaps that is what those we describe as “old souls” are sensing, are feeling as the source of wisdom and groundedness.

And the critters….what about the critters?  If you’ve been on the prairie on a summer day, or in your own back yard at close of day in late summer, you hear the buzz of bees and the song of the cicadas.  I don’t think they hear the hum of the universe any more than people do, but perhaps they sense the vibration, and they join the chorus.  Or a flock of birds, on the ground, who seemingly without warning and without signal, all rise in flight together.  Are they responding to the universe’s vibration?  What about migratory animals, the zebra, the wildebeest, the Sandhill cranes, the Monarch butterflies…do they move with some thousands-of-years-old pull, in concert with gravitational waves from black holes?  

And finally, what about us?  People, that is.  If there are gravitational waves that create an ambient hum throughout the universe, is that hum embedded in us, too?  In our cells?  In our DNA?  Do our cells hum at a level that can’t be heard, but can be felt?  Do we give off energy, that either repels, or attracts, those we meet?  Is my sense (sometimes) of being “at one with the universe” a function of my cellular hum being the same, or in harmony with, that of the universe?  And when I’m out of sorts, has my cellular hum jumped pitches?  Can I fix that, because I always like to that I can fix anything?  Or do I have to just stop, and let myself be drawn back into the universe’s hum?  

I think about that hum, and I wonder what the note is.  If the astrophysicists have written about that, I haven’t read it.  I think they’re focusing on other questions…but I wonder what note it is.  In my mind’s ear, I’m hearing a C, many octaves below Middle C, much lower than the C the 32ft. pipe on a pipe organ can produce.  But I hear a C.  I hear it in a classical music context, because that’s what I think of.  Others may hear it in jazz, in ballad, in rap, in a march, in a lullaby, in a folk song, in any of music’s many forms.  But throughout all, it’s the universe’s hum….a single tone, wrapping all of us together.  Imagine, we're bound together by the gravitational waves, emanating from colliding and merging black holes throughout the universe....in a summer when much seems to divide us, I'm glad to know there's a hum that holds us together.

And like the images from the James Webb telescope last summer of the exploding births of stars and galaxies, the discovery of the universe’s hum this summer is one that I can’t quite wrap my mind around…it’s bigger and more complex than my brain can understand.  But my soul gets it….and I am grounded in the hum.

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