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A Lutheran minister called comets "the thick smoke of human sins," a hypothesis that finds little support nowadays among scientists. They prefer to see comets as big dirty snowballs trailing gas tails and subjugated by gravity. And coming not from God but from the equally ineffable Oort cloud, a gigantic shell far beyond the solar system where aspiring comets spend hours of quiet despair until they are disturbed by a celestial accident. and called to run to the sun and make men cry.
Except that men do not cry anymore. Comet Halley may have brought victory to the Normans in 1066, announced the descent of Turkish armies to Belgrade in 1456 and, in 1910, killed Mark Twain and Edward VII. This time everything is forgiven. After all, he does not know what he's doing. And we know what it is: an abandoned mass of rocks and ice, a few kilometers away, caught in an endless revolution around our sun. Now an object, not an omen, is the source not of panic but of curiosity. Five land spaceships were sent to greet him and take his picture.
Science has completely desecrated the universe. After Neil Armstrong and George Lucas, there is more than "space".
Do not mistake yourself. I do not regret the wizard's days. Things are much better now. There are costs to demystify the universe and give in to science – Carl Sagan's omnipresence is among the heaviest – but the payoff is big.
Halley, like the rest of the space, is friendly now, tame. This will probably be the first time in history that Halley will bring a wonder without fear. Halley's is turned into a celebration, a story of scientific love.
The romance is in the return. Halley returns, always exactly at the hour. After his current spell, he will travel 3 billion miles from Earth and then turn to revisit your children. He comes back every 75 years, once in his life.
The sun also rises regularly, but so often that we can not help blunting in front of the wonder of its rhythm. And what rhythms, beyond that of the familiar year, really touch us? The sun spots come every 11 years, and what interests the layman? Others are just too long. The ice age will be back too. Adjust this in your calendar.
Halley is alone on the human scale. Its duration is precisely a lifetime. Birth and death are perhaps the only events that correspond to Halley's periodicity. And none is almost as reliable. Birth and death are regularly irregular (to borrow a term from cardiology). Halley, you can count on.
We do not know, for example, what the world will be in 2061. Except one thing: Halley's will illuminate the sky.
One of the prices of the demystification of the universe is that science, unlike religion, only asks how, not why. As for the purpose of things, science is silent. But if science can not speak meaning, she can talk about harmony. And Halley is both a symbol and a proof of a deep harmony of spheres.
The great author of this harmony was Newton. And one of the first empirical demonstrations of his gravitational theories was provided by his friend, Edmond Halley. Twenty-three years after the great comet of 1682, Halley deciphered his logic. He predicted his return in 1758. Halley died 17 years before it could be proven right. The return of the comet was a sensation. That made Halley immortal. Faithful to its nature, science married the comet forever to the man who did not discover it, but who was the first to understand it.
This time, there will be no sensation. Halley's will give one of the worst shows of all time. It's perhaps its weakest appearance in more than 2,000 years. What we are going to celebrate, then, it is not the show, but the idea.
Halley is a monument to science, a spokesperson for his new celestial harmonies – and an indication of mortality. It is both recurrent and, for us individually, singular. It will be my only Halley's, and if you're old enough to read it without moving your lips, the last one too, I'm scared of it.
Halley speaks to me particularly intensely. As he turns around the sun, the middle of his journey, I will mark the middle point in mine, say the tables of metropolitan life. Our perihelias correspond.
Mark Twain was rather pleased that he came with Halley and that he got along with it. Ash ashes, Oort to Oort. Hi Halley.
The following is republished on December 13, 1985, in memory of Charles Krauthammer, who died on June 21, at the age of 68:
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