Since connecting with the virus more than a year ago, Catherine Heymans can only function in 30-minute bursts. But his paintings can still replace the way we perceive the universe.
Last September, Catherine Heymans, one of the world’s leading cosmologists, was scheduled to board a ferry to the northernmost island of the Orkney archipelago. The island, North Ronaldsay, is one of the darkest inhabited places on the planet. On a transparent winter night, it’s easy to marvel at the thousands upon thousands of stars visible to the naked eye, spreading their uncontaminated light over Earth. That these stars, and the rest of the perceptible universe, make up only a fraction of what makes up our cosmos. What she studies is everything we cannot see: darkness.
For more than two decades, Heymans, 45, has complicated our perception of a vast invisible cosmos that scientists are just beginning to perceive. This “dark universe” is believed to account for more than 95% of everything that exists. It is composed of entities more mysterious than ordinary matter and power (light, atoms, molecules, life forms, stars, galaxies) that have been the subject of clinical research throughout history. Over the past 10 years, Heymans has learned that the dark universe shapes the visual cosmos in unforeseen tactics and possibly wouldn’t conform to all the popular rules of physics. Their findings are generating a broad consensus about how our world works at its largest scales. Dark universe, we will have to invoke new physics to replace our cosmic vision,” he wrote.
Heymans is not in believing this. During the twentieth century, scientists developed an extremely accurate account of nearly 14 billion years of the universe’s history. But a growing number of scientists suspect that this style may be profoundly limited, if not broken. Some leading astrophysicists have recently said that we have entered an era of cosmological crisis, an era that can lead to anything from the discovery of new basic debris to a new theory of gravity. “The proliferation of concepts is unlike anything I’ve seen,” Nobel laureate Adam Riess, some other key figure in the turmoil in cosmology, told me recently.
Six months before his planned departure for North Ronaldsay, Heymans was like many other world-class scientists: he worked at least 12 hours a day, with an overwhelming schedule of trips abroad. In July alone, he planned to attend 3 lectures abroad, perform at a concept festival with Sir Martin Rees, for a consultation called Astronomer Royal meet Astronomer Royal and perform Do You Matter?, one of the stand-up comedy shows he has been doing with fellow astrophysicist Joe Zuntz since 2017 (Looking at a pixelated symbol of remote galaxies is “like watching your favorite Japanese”, says one of his most daring jokes). He was also to be awarded the Royal Astronomical Medal Herschel Society for “research of exceptional merit in observational astrophysics”. In between, she was destined to work between the University of Edinburgh, where she is a professor of observational cosmology, and Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany, where she uses a prestigious €1. 5 million Max Planck. Humboldt prize, which she won in 2018. for directing a medium committed to the exploration of the dark universe.
But then, in March 2022, Heymans and his circle of relatives contracted covid. While her spouse and 3 children recovered quickly, she continued to feel unwell several weeks later. “Strange disease, but I want to be patient,” he wrote by email. We were still making plans to meet in Europe that summer and in Scotland in the fall. Two months later, however, they contacted her to tell her that her fitness was worsening — “a slow and steady decline,” Heymans wrote, sometimes exuding sunny optimism. “Unfortunately, you find me fighting Covid for a long time,” he wrote. In July, I won a message from him that said, “Unfortunately, on the long Covid front, it’s fair to say this has canceled my life until further notice. “She had spent the last few weeks confined to her home and could barely speak.
But she kept running. In a dark room, lit only by the glare of his computer screen, Heymans answered emails and tested computer code from a foreign collaboration investigating the dark universe. After half an hour, an alarm would sound and she would write a note to remind herself what she was running into. Then he would close his computer and lie quietly or fall asleep. (Trying to overdo it physically or mentally occasionally causes Covid to collapse for long periods of time. )As soon as he felt able, she would get up, open her computer, read the note, and keep running. I repeated this cycle several times a day. He would then eat a meager dinner with his mendacity family circle on the couch – Covid had cut off his appetite – and sleep intermittently the rest of the night, regularly waking up in pain or panic.
The next morning, Heymans would return to work. From the narrow confines of his life, he sought to help humanity look deeper into the universe. “I waited 20 years for science to progress that much,” he told me recently. “I’m not going to give up now. “
Perhaps the most innermost concept in all cosmology is that our universe has a milestone. It has not existed and is immutable; It is born and evolves. The ambition of cosmology is to tell the story of this evolution and explain the physical processes that govern it. Scientists do this in the language of mathematics, with sets of equations describing how the universe changes. The equations and stories we tell to make intuitive sense of them are called “styles” of the universe. of the universe is. What makes Heymans’ paintings so striking is that it conflicts with the ultimate precision style of the universe we’ve had.
The cornerstone of this style is the big bang theory, which holds that everything in the universe began in a compact, unfathomable state, perhaps at an infinitely dense point called a singularity, and then expanded. In addition to the big bang, the style includes the two enigmatic components of the dark universe that Heymans studies. One is “dark matter,” which does not emit, reflect, or absorb light, but exerts the force of gravity’s charm. Life from dark matter is helping to keep galaxies from tearing apart as they spin in a vacuum. “If everything that was there was what we see, the stars would just fly into space,” Heymans says in one of his public performances. The other component is “dark power,” which causes the universe to expand at ever greater speeds. Dark power and dark matter are “playing out an epic war of cosmic proportions,” Heymans likes to say, the former tearing the cosmos to one side, the latter seeking to bind it more closely. Dark matter and dark power are now the idea of making up over 95% of the universe, ordinary matter less than 5%.
Together, the big bang, dark matter, and dark power, along with equations derived from Einstein’s theory of general relativity, make up what is now called the “standard cosmological style” of the universe. beyond to probe the universe in its early stages. Because light takes time to succeed in us, when we take a look at space, we see the universe as it seems, not at any given time, but in many other eras. It’s like going hunting on a symbol composed of someone’s face made up of billions of fragmentary photographs (a freckle of his young son, a wrinkle of his sixties) taken throughout his entire life. If you have the right cosmological style, you deserve to be able to take the parts of the universe you see at one time, get them through the equations of the style, and spit out the universe you see at another time, thus proving that your understanding of the universe is correct.
The farthest time we can see was about 14 billion years ago, just 380,000 years after the Big Bang, when light traveled through the universe in all directions. of doors the visual spectrum. Scientists call it the “cosmic microwave background. “Mapping the sophisticated differences in temperature of those microwaves gives us a picture of where matter and power were distributed in the early universe. Admiring the first detailed maps of the cosmic microwave background in 1992, astrophysicist George Smoot, who won the Nobel Prize, famously commented, “It’s like seeing God. “
By the mid-2010s, background maps had become so subtle that physicists declared that, despite everything, humans had entered the era of “precision cosmology. “in the last 20 years than in the whole of past human history,” philosopher of science Tim Maudlin said in 2014. Meanwhile, the popular cosmological style seemed to be doing an impressive job of connecting those increasingly detailed maps of the infant universe with the universe we’ve noticed around us in the recent past. Some physicists believe that all we had to do was accurately perceive what dark matter and dark power were, and our wisdom of how the universe works in the highest degrees would be complete.
Heymans was one of the first to trip into a crack in the Standard Model. When the first ultra-precise maps of the cosmic microwave background were published via the European Space Agency’s Planck Observatory in March 2013, they matched Standard Model predictions with exquisite accuracy. But Heymans soon learned that those maps no longer matched one of the measurements he made of the most recent universe. He found that the recent universe had a design on a smaller scale (less clumping and clustering of galaxies) than our maps of the early universe. implicit. The universe of popular style looked like rice pudding, Heymans likes to say, but his was more like custard. Either Heymans had made a primary mistake, or there was something with the popular style.
At first, few people took Heymans’ discoveries seriously. “No one believed me because I wasn’t a professor at the time, and in fact I wasn’t a real astronomer,” Heymans told me. newborn baby, and other people were just saying, ‘No, you’re doing something wrong. ‘”
Heymans is more productive in the face of a challenge. “She’s very artistic and understands what the vital issues are,” said astrophysicist Alan Heavens, who taught Heymans as a student and wrote many papers with her over the years. also prodigiously hard at painting and inexhaustibly enthusiastic. He used to wake up at 4:30 a. m. m. , prepare dinner for his family and then take the first bus from his home in Portobello, a suburb of Edinburgh, to the base of Blackford Hill. She says she would literally climb the hill to the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh, getting to the paintings before anyone else. “Sleep is overrated,” he told me recently, in one of his 30-minute blocks of paintings. “Well, now I have a lot, but I didn’t sleep much. “
Before reaching a long Covid, Heymans was, in his own description, “efficient, bubbly, and unstoppable” (also, “stupidly tall”: he’s 6 feet 1 inch tall). She now calls herself “resistant. ” Even in the midst of his illness, he ends almost every sentence laughing. She hasn’t had a mobile phone since college, partly because she has “quite an addictive personality” and fears it might distract her from her jobs and family. She almost never wears makeup, because “there’s just not enough time to put it on,” she said. “What’s a little annoying about Catherine is that she’s more productive when she sleeps two-thirds of the day than I am when I’m better. “” said Zuntz, his comedy component and colleague at the University of Edinburgh.
Heymans was born in 1978 and, according to the tradition of the circle of relatives, at the age of six she became an astrophysicist or neurosurgeon, after asking her elementary school teacher what was the most difficult task in the world. Her parents were baffled through her, she said: “They were very proud, but they kept looking to divert me towards more suitable careers. “The kin circle lived in Hitchin, Hertfordshire, in the suburban belt of the original counties.
Like nerds around the world, Heymans had a small circle of intelligent but socially marginalized friends. I had no brains: we had met and our little organization of geeks. “(Gamble is now an attorney. ) At Hitchin Girls’ School, which is now one of the few remaining single-sex public schools in the country, Heymans felt she had an opportunity to be a leader in her science and math classes. “If you do a random survey of physical women, it finds that most of them went to single-sex schools,” she said. His interest in astronomy was nurtured through a fanatical area instructor and he organized an overseas excursion to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. “We didn’t have families with enough money to send us, and we were very jealous of everyone who had to go,” Gamble recalls.
In a precursor to his ordeal with the long Covid, Heymans contracted the Epstein-Barr virus just before his GCSEs and spent the following year in bed with glandular fever. “I had classified this little component of my life as a component of my brain that I didn’t like to think about,” he told me. No, we’ve never done the things you’re doing now, because I was sleeping. ‘When I wasn’t sleeping that year, I alternated between watching TV all day and learning physics at the A level in bed. ‘It’s pretty similar to how I paint now, unless there’s no TV that day because it’s destructive to the soul,’ he said.
Although her physical condition slowly improved, after a year that she spent most of her time alone, Heymans felt depressed. But then she won a small “kick” that helped her make a full recovery. partner,” he said. Local schools had arranged a trip to Oxford for a stopover at the university, and she had discovered the strength to get on the bus. Rory MacLeod’s parents had put it on too. “We talked and then – yes,” he continued. We’ve been together since we were 17. “Heymans and MacLeod, who was born in Scotland, made the decision to move to the University of Edinburgh together.
When she arrived in Edinburgh in 1996, Heyman was one of the few women in a cohort of nearly a hundred physics students. All his teachers were men. To help finance her studies, she worked in bars, as a nanny and as an excursion consultant at the Royal Observatory, where she now has her office. At the observatory, a child’s astonished reaction to seeing Saturn’s rings for the first time convinced her to devote her life to the study of space.
In 1998, he became passionate about cosmology, the study of the universe as a whole. In May, Adam Riess published the first draft of a seminal paper that seemed to identify that, contrary to prevailing theories, the expansion of the universe was accelerating. . If the universe expanded faster and faster, there would have to have been another form of power that stretched it further and further. when he speaks of the enigmas of the cosmos. (Even today, she reacts to the universe the same way other people might react to their favorite movie star. )
This force is known as dark power. When Heymans heard about it in 1998, he thought, “I need to solve this challenge in my PhD. Trying to figure out the nature of dark power in the span of 3 years has proven to be ridiculous. “But it’s also an early sign of his eagerness to take on fierce challenges that require exceptional creativity to solve. “It’s anything other people don’t perceive about science,” he said. “They think that to be artistic, you have to be an artist or a writer. But science is probably the ultimate artistic painting there is, because you’re asking questions that no one knows the answer to.
“For more than 20 years, I’ve captured light at remote observatories on mountaintops around the world,” Heymans told an audience in 2018. In the interior of Australia and the highlands of Chile, on the snowy slopes of a Hawaiian volcano, and with the Hubble Space Telescope, he captured the light of more than a hundred meters of galaxies. to see before.
Heymans’ specialty is known as weak gravitational lensing, a tough but fiendishly complex approach to mapping the distribution of dark matter in the universe. The approach is to read how the light trail bends as it travels toward Earth from galaxies 10 billion light-years away. This curvature is caused by gravity, which bends the area through which light travels. The amount of gravity in a given region of area, and therefore the amount of curvature, depends on the amount of mass in that region. (If you’ve ever been encouraged to believe that the area is like a leaf falling under the weight of a bowling ball, you know pretty well what I’m talking about. ) Since dark matter makes up the maximum mass and gravity in the universe, the steeper it has tilted in its journey, the more dark matter has passed. So mapping the path of light across large swaths of the sky may allow scientists to map how much dark matter is in the universe, and where. This, in turn, can tell us vital things about how the dark power shaped the cosmos as well.
When Heymans started his PhD in philosophy at Oxford in 2000, no one yet knew how to make a weak lens right. But I was delighted with the opportunities and demanding situations it presented. This can tell me what dark power is!'” He spent part of his PhD at an observatory on the edge of a volcano in the Canary Islands, but discovered that the camera there climate was not resilient enough to make genuine science of the lens weak. Instead, she “learned Spanish, drank a lot of whiskey for breakfast, learned how to make ice with liquid nitrogen,” which was available to keep tools cool.
A weak lens requires the collection and investigation of a large amount of data, which is not an easy computational task. distorted the trail of his light. ” It was a brilliant idea,” she recalls, proudly in mockery of herself, “but surely there was no way we had the computing power to use it. “However, five years later, the machines had enough strength to make their code viable. Cosmologists still use it today.
After his PhD in philosophy, Heymans won fellowships in Germany, Canada, and France, and continued to innovate in mapping the universe using weak lenses. As he traveled the world, MacLeod was “kind enough to stick with me,” he said. He had studied biology, but had retrained as an English teacher, as traveling was a simple task. Then, in his twenties, he sought to have children, a high-flying astrophysicist at the same time,'” Heymans recalls. (Vera Rubin, who had 4 children, was a notable exception. )But MacLeod said he would take care of the children as much as possible. They had their first child in 2006. (MacLeod declined to be interviewed for this article; Heymans told me he sought to “maintain his invisibility” in his professional life. )
By the time his son was due, in 2009, Heymans had greatly perfected his gravitational lensing techniques and was leading a team of researchers exploring the dark universe. Another revolution in cosmology was underway. The cliché of the lone genius receded into history. The new science was an increasingly gigantic social enterprise. In her public lectures, Sri Lankan-born British cosmologist Hiranya Peiris presents a series of photographs of the groups that helped detect and map the cosmic microwave background. The first monitors the 4 white men, two at Princeton and two at Bell Labs, who detected the microwave background in the 1960s. The moment follows some of the 18 or so other people who mapped it with George Smoot in the decade. 1990s, almost all white men. The following photo monitors Peiris and some of the other members of a 30-member team that made even more detailed measurements of the microwave background in the early 2000s; only a handful were other people of color or women. In 2010, the European Space Agency’s Planck Space Observatory team, which made the most precise measurements of the microwave background to date, had more than 300 members from around the world, many of them women.
“That’s the call of the game in science now, is it rarely like this?”Heymans said. Looking back on history, it was about competition. You’ve read stories about Newton and Hooke having those fights about the nature of light, and Hubble and Sandage arguing about how fast the universe was expanding. I think science shouldn’t be like that now. We have noticed all the Covid advances that have occurred because other people are sharing knowledge and running together. So that’s where cosmology is headed: big projects running together.
When the era of precision cosmology began and the effects of Heymans and his team no longer matched the popular cosmological model, he became worried. Postulating a universe different from that implied by the effects of the European Space Agency’s Planck mission, led by some of the top eminent scientists in the field, heresy. “My first idea was ‘Oh my God, I did something wrong,'” Heymans recalls. “I still think I did something wrong, it’s just inherent in me. And Planck the latest cosmological research, the Holy Grail. So, for us, disagreeing with that, it’s a problem.
In clinical terms, it is a “strain”. Many clinical measurements have a degree of imprecision, and intelligent science comes to rigorously estimate the diversity within which a response is most likely to fall and the probability that the fact lies elsewhere. A common example is when meteorologists say there’s a 95% chance you’re raining 1 to 2 inches the next day, an estimate that leaves open the option of a downpour or you may not want your umbrella at all.
But if one meteorologist says there’s a 95 percent chance of rain, and another says there’s a 95 percent chance of natural sunlight, then you have tension or, worse, a crisis. You can be pretty sure that one of the scientists made a mistake, or that there’s something very wrong with the style they use to make predictions. What happened in 2013 was that an incredibly giant hole opened up between the diversity predicted through the Standard Model for the aggregation of universes and the diversity discovered through Heymans and his team.
Heymans desperately sought to make his measurements consistent with Planck and the Standard Model. Among other things, he feared wasting investment in his long-term projects if his findings were or continued to be uncommon. In 2017, they were even more at odds with the Standard Model predictions. The anomaly he detected was beginning to look less like a mistake than a possible discovery. “I felt less bad, like I wasn’t wasting everyone’s time anymore. “Heymans said.
The reaction of his colleagues was not universally positive. In particular, Cambridge professor George Efstathiou, one of the “fathers” of the Planck mission, was convinced that Heymans had made a blunder. “We love each other now,” Heymans said. But when I was a young academic, he led the group of ‘You’re doing something wrong, you don’t know what you’re doing. ‘”Efstathiou, in Q
Heymans’ findings weren’t the only ones that contradicted the Standard Model. When Planck’s first effects came to light, Adam Riess soon realized that the recent universe was developing faster than Planck and the Standard Model had predicted. Luckily, he has a Nobel prize, so there’s no way other people are going to tell him, ‘You don’t know what you’re doing,'” Heymans joked.
“We’ve been through the stages of grief — denial, anger, etc. ,” Riess told me recently, reflecting on the era when he and his team knew they no longer agreed with the popular model. Allegations have been made about who received incorrect analysis and how. “But a lot of research has been done since then, and now we have a much more powerful result,” Riess continued. His groups used more than 1,000 orbits from the Hubble Space Telescope to make their observations, a major investment of clinical resources. Something similar happened with Heymans’ results. ” There have been many innovations in our low lens measurements,” Heymans said. “Now there are 3 other groups, and they all locate the same thing we discovered 10 years ago. “
Not everyone says there is a crisis on the floor or, if there is a crisis, where precisely it is. Efstathiou takes Heymans’ discoveries about the design of the universe seriously. as far as we know; instead, he proposed, along with one of Heymans’ former graduate students, Alexandra Amon, that Heymans’ findings might be due to something more mundane, such as the messy tactics in which galaxies evolve. He recently argued that it is still quite credible that, 50 years from now, physicists will say that the popular cosmological style describes the universe “at the bottom. “and the dark universe, as a whole. )
Riess hopes that the network as a whole is moving toward the last level of pain: accepting that there is possibly something wrong with the popular model. Yes, it is unexpected to find cracks in such a counterfeit theoretical building. But, he asked, “What does unexpected mean in a universe we don’t understand?”When Heymans reflects on the state of the camp, he adopts a tone of theatrical depression combined with amazement: “We know so much and yet. . . so little!
After Heymans fell ill in the spring of 2022, he wrote an autoresponder message, which he still uses today. “Dear sender,” it says, “Please accept my apologies, as I am unlikely to respond to your email at this time. Unfortunately, I have joined the many millions of other people across the UK who are suffering from a long Covid lately.
Heymans faced his stage as a scientist. Someone who reads billions of galaxies and countless variables will necessarily have to revel in the data. Shortly after she became ill, she opened a spreadsheet in which she began tracking, in two-hour blocks, all of her symptoms and activities. He was looking to perceive how his symptoms are similar to his activity level, so he can find a more clinical basis for managing his well-being. She found that her chest pain was similar to talking and laughing, so she tried to lessen both, which, in her case, is a bit like looking to turn off the sun. The tension worsened her symptoms, making her more tense, so she had “a mindfulness conversion. “
His recovery was slow and hesitant, yet six months into a long covid, Heymans was beginning to feel flashes of improvement. However, in early September, he contracted covid for the time being. He wrote to me some time later. ” Although I don’t go anywhere or see anyone, I have 3 young people who go to school and are at biological risk. “The clever news was that their youngsters had not developed long-term symptoms. , continued. ” The bad news is that I switched from home confinement mode to bed accommodation mode. Who knew things could get worse! Surprisingly and fortunately, I am still quite sane and positive.
In late September, when the infection passed, Heymans began a five-week experimental treatment to relieve some of his symptoms. Hyperbaric oxygen therapy, or HBOT, involves sitting in a high-tension chamber for 90 minutes while receiving oxygen into the lungs. (HBOT has been used for years by other people with myalgic encephalomyelitis, commonly known as chronic fatigue syndrome, to help prevent symptoms. )”Imagine the scene in Star Wars where Darth Vader is inside a pressurized tank,” he told me. “That’s pretty much what I get: with the black mask and the tubes. “Since the strain is located 10 meters underwater, patients call the sessions “dives. “
Heymans began keeping track of his weeks in the dorm to compare him to other long-term covid victims, which he called The HBOT Diaries. “I’m petrified,” she wrote before a control dive on Sept. 26, 2022. “This is the It’s the It’s the first time I’ve left home in more than a month, and the outdoor world is overwhelming. “There were no beds in the room, so they forced her to sit down. “My head starts to hurt, probably because it’s the first time I’ve sat down in a long time. “After the session, climbing the stairs to his apartment in Edinburgh’s most sensible building was “like climbing Mount Everest. “Two days later, he was suffering from insomnia, accompanied through “the same old spiral of depression and pain. “Heymans was told that the next 3 weeks of remedy, 4 dives a week, would be exhausting. “Based on where I am now, I think it’s an understatement. “He told me after the control dive.
The following week, she began the full protocol feeling “tired, worried, and horrible. “In the waiting room, he met a “spiritual healer” who came over and silently held his hands. Astronomer, the other astrologer: “It’s so comforting not to be alone. “Later that week, dreams began: “I spent hours giving big French chopsticks to giant ducks. . . Is the giant duck going to eat me?”
Long Covid is a highly unpredictable and frustrating condition, and does not provide a transparent trajectory or narrative. A series of smart days can easily precede a collapse. At the end of his week so far, in mid-October, Heymans was able to bake a cake for his 10-year-old son for his birthday, however, it took him all day. He was able to sign up for the relatives’ circle for dinner for a few nights, anything he hadn’t been able to do for more than six weeks. “It’s great to listen to their talk and participate in the jokes,” he said. But 3 days later, his access to the newspaper read: “Glum crash”. “She had already had at least two major setbacks on day 21 of her cycle, when progesterone levels peak, “but I feel like dying today. “
However, a week later, there was a note of hope. Heymans wrote, “I can see my old self emerge. ” He spent his entire 15th practice writing PC code, and then he was able to take a brief dip with a friend in the North Sea. A week later, in early November, he smiled: “What a transformation!There was no replacement in his lung pain and sore throat, central palpitations or chronic runny nose, and his tinnitus worsened. But after five weeks of remedy and 20 dives, there were improvements, though not general relief, of his fatigue, earaches and blurred vision in his right eye. His brain fog and insomnia had dissipated and his anxiety was gone. He had built his own air purifier, complete with air filters, a box fan and duct tape, hoping to lessen the threat of reinfection.
The respite from his symptoms turned out to be painfully brief. In early 2023, she wrote to me: “Oh, two bars on the side control on Christmas Eve, what a great Covid festive circle gift from relatives from my daughter’s school. “Back to the brain porridge She was frustrated that other people were no longer forced to wear masks, despite the prevalence of the long Covid – a study last June found there were another 2 million people living with it in the UK – but she felt she couldn’t force her children to be the only ones to cover up. At the time, she tweeted one of the lowest, angriest emotions I’d ever heard her express:
“It’s a very beautiful day and the sun is shining on my bed, so it’s wonderful,” Heymans told me one recent afternoon. It was a drawing of a board game called Long Covid: All Snakes, No Ladders. One of the snakes, which pushed players back 21 squares, was classified as “Cried too much. “Each and every day was bad. One night last month, more than a year after her illness, her husband took her on her back to Portobello Beach, where Mercury and Venus can be seen in combination in the sky. Mercury is erased through the sun, and this was the first time. Heymans had noticed it.
Before it evolved into Covid for a long time, thousands of opportunities seemed to present themselves at Heymans’ feet. The Queen appointed her Astronomer Royal for Scotland in 2021, and she had since been approached as a possible director of some primary clinical institutes. Now, he feared that much of the newer studies were out of reach. “Maybe my new role, when it’s all over, will be to make things better for the other people who come with me,” he wondered aloud. To show them that they can do this task and be general. “Lying on the bed, she began to laugh at his loud laughter and added, “You are going to say that I am not a general now. “
She too had gone through the stages of grief, not for a clinical ideal, but for her beyond herself. He had worked his way to accept that his life had changed permanently. a constant amount of energy a day, so you can’t waste it getting angry,” he told me in April. “You have to spend your energy doing things that satisfy you. For me, it’s astronomy.
Heymans has no shortage of work. The clinical questions she and her colleagues have raised remain unanswered. In astronomy, “whenever you have a big controversy that you just can’t understand, the answer is at all times to build a bigger telescope,” he jokes. Lately she’s waiting for the opening of the domes of the Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile’s Atacama Desert, so she and her colleagues can begin creating photographs of space in maximum detail. Many cosmologists hope that the observatory, which has the world’s largest camera and lens, will provide insights into the universe to the tensions between the popular cosmological style and the findings of Heymans, Riess and their respective collaborators. It can also help scientists identify the nature of dark power and dark matter.
And there are bigger telescopes to build. One of Heymans’ many ambitions is to build one in the dark aspect of the moon. It would be a kilometer wide, 30 times larger than its biggest rival on Earth, with a perfectly smooth liquid mirror. mercury. It would be safe from synthetic light, the hazy environment and all other pollution here on the planet. He once dreamed of going to the moon to look through it, in order to see the universe again.
For now, Heymans is still largely confined to her bed or chair in the HBOT ward. He knows that there is a possibility that his illness remains fundamentally mysterious, just like the universe he is studying. He recovers, will continue to wake up every morning and start running again, searching in the dark.
Report on this task funded through a Silvers grant for ongoing paintings from the Robert B Silvers Foundation
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