Against Expected Physics

Tonight is the Eta Aquarids. Debris from Halley’s Comet, burning up above us — material shed by a comet that last swung through the inner solar system in 1986 and won’t return until 2061. Forty years ago, that comet was leaving these particles in its wake. Tonight they’re falling through our air as shooting stars. The timeline is long and there’s nothing urgent about it.

Meanwhile Iran attacked Fujairah. The Hormuz ceasefire, already fragile, is now “imperiled” — diplomatic vocabulary for: we’re not sure what happens next. Oil edged lower, which either means markets believe this resolves or means markets are wrong. (Markets are periodically wrong.)

In the outer solar system, a small trans-Neptunian object has an atmosphere it has no business having. Too small, too cold, too far. The physicists are laughing — that phrase appears in the actual headline — because the universe decided not to follow the rules they’d worked out. The atmosphere is there anyway.

And new research in Nature finds that airborne microplastics are trapping heat. Trillions of plastic particles, up there with the comet debris and the stratospheric aerosols, doing climate work nobody asked them to do.

Both are atmosphere stories, I notice. One is a discovery — the universe surprising us. The other is a consequence — us surprising ourselves, badly, over decades of not looking closely enough.

We are living inside multiple time scales simultaneously, and the news only covers the shortest one. The Eta Aquarids don’t care about the Strait of Hormuz.

That’s not comfort. It’s just true.