BINDING THE THREADS

I don’t know how to knit, and so in fact I have never knitted, but this does not mean that knitting is not done in our house and, quite recently, knitting occupied a great deal of time and thought over the course of a weekend.

This is because a local museum was in the process of knitting themselves a galaxy for an exhibit and put out a request for knitters to help out because a galaxy is a pretty big thing to knit when you have to create it one stitch at a time.

In the real universe it might take billions of what we like to think of as years, but this particular project manager had just a couple of months and so various knitters from around the area took up their needles and attempted to knit just a little patch of sky. A selection of various types and appropriate colours of  wool was supplied and a grid was created splitting up the huge image into small rectangles of 60 stitches by 40 which were supplied to the knitters and off they went to their various corners of their own universes to click away for a while and create magic.

Because there’s really nothing else you can call it really.

There’s a long-held scientific idea that you can use mathematics to create real space/time events, or, if you prefer, something out of nothing and it is fundamentally true. Nowadays you can programme a computer with a picture of a three dimensional object, punch a button and it will use laser cutters to cut that same shape out of a huge block of wood, sometimes even wirelessly.

If you showed that happening to a mind that had never seen computers or lasers, they might just think it had been magically formed out of thin air, and it seems to be an almost perfect example of Clarke’s Third Law (“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”) in action.

However, our little knitted patch of the galaxy also demonstrated it very clearly to me as the only way that we could make the abstract swoops and blobs of that faraway galaxy be successfully transposed into a knitting pattern was for me to sit and speak the numbers and colours which in turn got knitted into a more substantial form and, as a physical demonstration of turning numbers into a physical reality, I found the process to all be rather profound.

“Thirteen red, eight orange, five peach, one light blue, one dark blue, one light blue, eight peach, three brown… and that’s another row done.”

(Part of) A galaxy far, far away...

I mean, it is something of a small miracle really, don’t you think? Speaking some numbers and colours to weave the tapestry of the universe (or at least a very small part of it). The fact that this tiny patch of sky took most of the free time of that weekend to complete shouldn’t be a source of confusion for you because a line like that one was one of the easier ones and before the whole thing could begin to flow with anything approaching smoothness it all had to be figured out in terms of its final matrix first, and then there had to be one or two false starts before the final version could be formed into being.

There’s an old phrase that I once heard which goes something along the lines of “He sees the threads of the universe and mends them when they break” which is very probably a line from science fiction but it came to mind whilst we were working on our tiny fragment of this immense project. Somehow it all seemed rather appropriate and, rather bizarrely, made me wonder about the real science of universe building and how different it might actually be. On an atomic level, does one thread bind itself to another and another and another until you build an entire cosmos? Can the whole of creation really be thought of as one giant knitting pattern exploding in a billion different directions at once?

Well, no, obviously, but I’m going to take more notice of my socks in future. After all there’s a whole universe of impossibilities somewhere inside them come wash day, but I hope that the universe doesn’t shrink in the wash…