Falling Thru the Universe

Sometimes in moments of emotional torque I envision myself falling boots first through the universe. I fall out of the solar system and galaxy and away out into the cosmic void. As astrophysicist Janna Levin has informed me, this is not technically accurate. While it is literally true to say the moon is falling—as you or I would fall down Alice’s rabbit hole—it does so because it is freely falling along the orbital path of curved space bent by the gravitational mass of Planet Earth. To keep my vision true to physics we must imagine (in the style of Douglas Adams) a planetary mass affect conversion device that will allow me to drop, at extreme velocity, across the chasm of the universe—dressed in my Carhartts and REI Goretex—in free fall around the curved spacetime of the gravitational field emitted by my own emotional vortex. The Earth, meanwhile, is currently spiraling through the solar system around the bent helix of our local star that is itself ever falling—dragging along its planetary debris—through the galaxy at a velocity of 450,000 miles an hour, plunging down the 50,000 light-year spanning arc of spacetime curved by our galactic dead-center that is the supermassive blackhole known as Sagittarius A*.