Hand Sanitizers And The Universe

Here I am, contemplating the bubbles in a large bottle of hand sanitizer and imagining the universe. Ok, so it’s a big leap from CVS to God’s greatest creation.

Look in the green bottle (maybe it’s really blue; friends of mine tell me I’m slightly color blind) and you will see larger and smaller bubbles suspended in the sanitizer fluid. Look at a drawing of our solar system and you will see planets and moons suspended in mid-air (or whatever they call the space we occupy).

What keeps all these bubbles up? What keeps all the planets and moons up? While we’re here, I often wonder where “up” is in the universe and how all these objects can just stay where they are, spinning away for billions of years. I think our planet slows down a second every so many years, like that matters.

So I see these sanitizer bubbles and through them I see the universe, all hanging there as far out as we can see with our fancy opera glasses. I want to take one last spin around the universe on my way out of here (or maybe as a “welcome to heaven” gift after I’ve arrived there). I want to see the edges, where we are in relationship to everyone else.

Maybe I can someday figure out how the sun has enough gravitational force so as to keep the Kuiper Belt objects in its orbit, out far beyond our planetary system, The Oort Clouds, so desperately far away yet still circling our star they (if there is any “they”) can barely make out.