Space-time visualised, black spacemen marginalised, and freshwater immersion: tussling with the cosmos in this week's A/V
Some videos of the cosmos, and how we through ourselves against it, in our audio-visual bounty this week:
From Aeon:
Imagining spacetime as a visible grid is an extraordinary journey into the unseen
Featuring riveting immersive imagery, this animation from the YouTube channel ScienceClic brings to life the invisible gravitational currents that shape, distort and govern our universe. Visualising the fabric of spacetime as a vast grid governed by abiding principles, the short features examples ranging from the familiar (the swell of ocean tides) to the nearly unfathomable (the meeting of two black holes) to illustrate how gravitational dynamics operate. The piece also draws out the limits of our understanding, and breaks down the fascinating process by which gravitational waves were discovered in 2015, birthing an entirely new branch of astronomy.
Video by ScienceClic
This is the story of Ed Dwight Jr., who was invited by his country to train to be the first African-American astronaut. Back in 1963, it was hot news. But the United States never sent Dwight to space. For decades, he has maintained that he was discriminated against during his time at the Aerospace Research Pilot School, a prerequisite to NASA run by the legendary pilot Chuck Yeager.
Dwight is now a prolific artist, building memorials and creating public art honoring African-American history. His footprints cannot be found on the moon. But his fingerprints can be found on sculptures across the country.
Jennefer Hoffmann trudges in the blue pre-dawn light; the only sounds are the squeak and swish of her winter gear. “Holy shit,” she stammers, mouth open, when she reaches her destination, a lake transformed by ice. It’s Lake Michigan—but massive blue chunks evoke Antarctica. “Isn’t it beautiful?” Hoffmann’s friend, Helen Wagner, calls to her from the shore.
Another friend, Deirdre Hamill-Squiers, joins them. Nearby, someone pounds away at the frozen lake with a sledgehammer, creating a hole big enough for the three women—all open-water swimmers—to bathe. “It’s raining ice,” Hoffmann says, smiling and blinking.
The trio swim every morning at sunrise—even when the water is frigid. Hoffmann got the idea after hearing about another local open-water swimmer, a woman named Joan, who swam a circle in a slurry mix of ice and water one morning. This was in the fall of 2020, and Hoffmann was in the throes of a deep depression. Immersing herself in extremely cold water allowed Hoffmann to be in the present when her mind wouldn’t stop.
“Everything that is wrong or stressful just dissipates,” she says in Samantha Sanders’s documentary “Swimming Through.” She invited Wagner and Hamill-Squiers to join her. “There was no big plan,” she told me, “it was just this beautiful ‘Let’s keep going if we can.’ ”