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I saw the northern lights by accident one late summer night, driving with a friend on an unpopulated stretch of highway that sliced through North Dakota cornfields. Against a canvas of total darkness, something like an acid cityscape sprang up around our car, electric green towers and skyscrapers, spanning the space between the road and heaven. It was one of the most exciting things I’d ever experienced. We stopped the car and ran out into the fields, trying to get closer to the light, trying to somehow touch these pulsating columns of color that arrived from nowhere and now formed a simultaneously real and impossible landscape.
The northern lights were on my mind this week after I read a story in New Scientist about Karl Lemstrom, a Finnish scientist who, in the late 19th century, tried to create a replica of the aurora borealis with a complex copper-wire apparatus meant to channel electricity in the atmosphere. He had the mechanism wrong — the aurora is caused by an interaction between charged particles from the solar wind and Earth’s magnetic field — but he was able to produce some luminosity from his wire construction, likely something akin to St. Elmo’s fire. He believed, until his death, that his experiments had yielded auroras.
Scientists have come a long way since Lemstrom’s time, but they’re still trying to wrap their heads around auroras. The Times reported on a new 10,000-antenna radar system in Norway that aims to help us understand their finer points — like what accounts for the variations in density, and why they move. Each time I read about electromagnetism, I manage to absorb just enough to be sufficiently awed by it. I collect electromagnetic facts, keepsakes that I polish and wonder about: Birds can sense Earth’s magnetic field, which helps them with navigation. Sharks use electroreception to detect the tiny movements of prey. Our own bodies are pulsing with electrical signals.
Knowing that the spectacle of the northern lights occurs because of electromagnetism doesn’t help to explain the feeling I had that night in the cornfield, the deep gratitude I felt for days afterward. I kept thinking about how we’d gone from total darkness to pyrotechnics in an instant. I had this feeling that there was magic in the world around me, that beauty could emerge from nothingness and I didn’t have to do anything to summon it. I just had to be there in a rented pickup truck, driving from Chicago to Calgary on an ordinary September night.
Reading about Lemstrom’s experiments, I wanted to romanticize him, to make him into a dreamer. He was a scientist, but in my imagination he was also a poet, a man who approached an inconceivably large phenomenon and tried to wrangle it into a form he could experience on his own terms.
I think most people are like me in that they don’t often contemplate the elemental forces that act on us every second of our lives. We don’t consider electromagnetism; we don’t sit and marvel at the very fact of gravity. We take these things for granted because we have no reason not to, and because they’re so complicated that we fear that our limited brains, the brains that are still trying to work out what to have for lunch, will be totally hopeless to understand.
But we don’t have to. These forces are going to do what they do whether we consider them or not. And how cool is that? Gravity is going to continue to keep you grounded to the earth. The northern lights are going to continue to erect their phantom architecture from the Great Plains to the Blue Lagoon. And we don’t have to do anything at all to make it happen. We don’t have to understand it in order to experience it. How lucky are we?
THE LATEST NEWS
Trump Administration
Easy Chocolate Cake
It’s my birthday tomorrow, and I’ve got cake on my mind, particularly Yossy Arefi’s easy chocolate cake with its billowing bittersweet frosting. The American-style buttercream, made with powdered sugar, is a snap to put together, no fussy double boilers needed. It’s the perfect topping to cover the moist cocoa and sour cream layers. You don’t need a birthday as an excuse to make this simple cake, just the desire to treat yourself and the people you love.
T MAGAZINE
The Hunt: Two sisters and their husbands banded together to afford a home in the Bay Area’s notoriously expensive housing market. What did they find? Play our game.
What you get for $500,000: A bungalow in Mobile, Ala. A condominium above a storefront in Portland, Maine. A Craftsman in Astoria, Ore.
An extension, miles away: A growing family wanted more space, but also to keep their historic home. The solution? A “courtyard house.”
Celebrity pads: Lily Allen, Drew Barrymore and Pete Davidson have all recently listed homes in the New York area. Take a look inside.
LIVING
Wonder drug? MAHA influencers are spinning nicotine as a “natural” health hack.
ADVICE FROM WIRECUTTER
Protect yourself from tick bites
As you start to venture outdoors this season, there are a few effective steps you can take to prevent tick bites. First: Cover up. For hiking, gardening, camping and the like, limit exposed skin by wearing a long-sleeved shirt, a hat and long pants (even better when they’re tucked into socks). Consider treating your clothes with permethrin, or buying pretreated garments. And for skin that does remain bare, try a picaridin-based spray, which is less oily and smelly than ones with DEET. Finally, once you’re back inside, use a lint roller to wipe all your clothes (and pets!) down. Check everywhere on your body for critters. And we really mean everywhere. — Doug Mahoney
GAME OF THE WEEK
Buffalo Sabres vs. Boston Bruins, N.H.L. playoffs: If you’re looking to join a bandwagon for the Stanley Cup Playoffs, the Sabres invite you to hop on. Buffalo has reached the postseason for the first time in 15 years, breaking the longest drought in N.H.L. history. And the city’s long-suffering fans are eating it up: In Game 1, when the Sabres scored four goals in the final eight minutes, the arena was rocking. “If there was a chance at bringing the building down, they were going to try,” said Lindy Ruff, the Sabres’ head coach, who has lived in Buffalo for nearly 50 years.
Since then, Buffalo and Boston has each won one more. The Sabres have some things to improve on, The Athletic notes: They have given up the first goal in each game this series, and they’ve now gone 35 straight power plays without scoring. But they keep finding a way to win.
Game 4 is tomorrow at 2 p.m. Eastern on TNT
