In the dark dawn of the twentieth century, in the ways of mental wandering and mathematical play, Albert Einstein came to a revelation about the nature of the universe while working as a clerk in the Swiss patent office – a new relationship between space and time, the twists and turns of a single fabric that disturbs the power and matter in the lucid dream of reality.
It took years for Arthur Eddington's eclipse expedition to confirm Einstein's theory by observing the bending of light along the screen of the sun rather than following the straight lines predicted by Newton.
“A new theory of the universe,” the London Times announced under the title REVOLUTION IN SCIENCE, “Newtonian ideas overthrown.” But no one, not even Einstein himself, thought that this theoretical revolution would have practical applications that could change human life – relativity was the paragon of “useless knowledge.”
Today, GPS controls everything from aviation to world banking, relying heavily on relativity: Einstein's central insight was that time dilation due to gravity and speed makes a clock in space run at a slightly different speed than a clock on Earth; the incredible precision of the atomic clocks on satellites, which must synchronize with earth's clocks to provide coordinates, means that small discrepancies in time can cause large displacements in space.
Building on Hedy Lamarr's technology for remote-controlled torpedoes, GPS was developed by the US Department of Defense as a military technology two decades after Einstein's death. (I wrote Traversal especially to observe this tendency of civilization to turn the best fruits of our search for truth into power bombs, and to celebrate opposing points, many and ultimately victorious – we must believe that they are dying, or perishing.)
But science, which is respect for nature, can have the last word.
Within two decades of its inception, Venezuelan rancher-turned-biologist Eduardo Alvarez pioneered the use of GPS as a biological tool. Wildlife tracking revolutionized conservation, shedding light on the movements and habits of animals that were too difficult or too extensive for humans to observe closely and consistently.
It all started with a creature most of us have never met or even knew existed.
When he left school, Alvarez was charged with assessing the ecology of the damaged river in Venezuela's Guri Lake. In the decade he spent there, he kept hearing local stories about encounters with the rainforest's living mystery – the rare harpy eagle.
Named by Linnaeus after the harps of Greek mythology – half-woman, half-bird creatures who personified storm winds – Harpia harpyja it is the largest bird in our world and one of the most endangered, its native habitat is greatly reduced by the destruction of the Amazon.
Alvarez was fascinated by this curious creature that looked like a character from the mind of Lewis Carroll. Within a decade, he had established a conservation program, pioneering GPS tracking to protect these strange, silent birds and their endangered world.
Today, GPS is used to conserve an array of amazing wildlife, from orcas to pandas. But, in the form of ouroboros, none of them could exist without birds: It was in the brain of birds that evolution established REM sleep rich in dreams as a laboratory for possible practice, and it was in dreams that Einstein arrived at the central understanding of relativity. Every harpy eagle, every heron and every sparrow, carries on its wings the wonderful world we enter at night where we can discover the deepest, most mysterious truths.
