GRAVITY’S ANGELS after Feynman, “Universal Gravitation: An Example of Physical Law”
To make us travel along closed curves, ellipses as Kepler understood, angels were needed. The tireless beat of their wings on space, of their angular feathers pushes all worlds together. So many angels, we mistake them for clouds furring the planet’s curvature, its cone of shadow their wake as they press inward against sunlight. Nothing desires to fall, to converge. It wants to keep going. Angels lean us into our seats and shoes, tug our skins downward, lead us toward the center of the earth, after so many years of falling into scalding nickel-iron cores of each other— God made the angels. The angels assembled galaxies, then stars, then planets. All the while, though, hidden inside the atom-hells, unpredictable demons worked hunched over. Inside the twisted and splintered space God left behind for them after the very start of things they bind sullen-browed nuclei, frantic electrons leaping away like souls toward connection. Crushed wasplike in the cores of suns, tumbled through nebulae demons are water’s architects, and snow’s; they sculpt the proteins; they the nerve-gardeners, foresters in bone. And all the while stars go through their graceful motions, the moon falls faultlessly past the horizon every time. Angels get all the credit. God (with regret) made the demons. The demons make worlds out of infinitesimal crisscross of force, flame-blur of probability. He made the angels. The angels push worlds together, making them drop
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