Andrew Miller: Cherish our beautiful baffling universe but only if your Glasgow Coma Score allows it

On Sunday I woke up in a hotel room in the middle of the night, and already you know two more things than I did. I felt like I was deep under water, unsure which way was up. For a dozen floating seconds, I had no traction on the idea of where I was, or how I got there. In medical jargon I was disoriented in time and place, so my Glasgow Coma Score was at best 14 out of 15. Doctors and nurses have been using the GCS since 1974 as shorthand for a patient’s neurological status. The Scottish citizenry was presenting in obtunded states often enough that a grumpy consultant was tired of burring into the phone “exactly how comatose is this particular Glaswegian? A wee bit or mair?” The eyes score a maximum of E4 for spontaneous opening; E3 if they open when asked; E2 if only in response to pain, and E1 if not opening at all. Movement scores M1 to M5, with M2 decerebrate extension posturing denoting an even worse brain state than M3, decorticate flexion of the limbs. Verbalisation, maximum V6, is where I lost a point, because they ask where you are and what day it is. After figuring out that I had fallen deeply asleep in a hotel bed made up by someone who had nailed the covers to the base to prevent guests becoming too comfortable, the first thing I recalled was Professor Brian Cox’s latest stage show, Emergence. Of all the remarkable ideas that I understood briefly that night, the most reassuring was that 15,000 harmless, sober and good-humoured geeks left home on a crisp autumn night to politely attend a two-hour physics lecture. Brian Cox had just the right combination of humility, cheekiness and Attenborough-level eloquence to charm the audience along a path from an earthly scale to the subatomic, then out to the farthest galaxies, before lowering us gently back into our seats. All the while, his PowerPoint on steroids demonstrated that big screens at rock concerts are wasted on sweaty performers grinding their axes, when they could be displaying Edwin Hubble’s 1923 photograph of a Cepheid variable star in the Andromeda galaxy. That one picture exploded the prevailing dogma that our Milky Way comprised the entire universe. Any coherent journey is founded on orientation in space and time. Cox started on a beautiful bridge in Prague in the year 1610, then connected the tiniest building blocks of the universe to the incomprehensibly vast fabric of interstellar space. The rarity of complex life in our may-as-well-be infinite universe can generate hubris or humility, depending on which wolf is winning in the soul of man, but Cox’s message echoed Stephen Hawking’s advice to “remember to look up at the stars, not down at your feet”. The thoughtfully quirky film, Project Hail Mary, is the latest to explore the popular trope of an astronaut mysteriously emerging from hibernation on a spaceship, then trying to work out what the heck is going on. The theme has great appeal because that is precisely the predicament of humankind on Earth. While science understands how and when the universe was formed in all its pixellated, Planck-length atomic detail, exactly why we are hurtling through space as the timer counts down is unknown. We don’t have to take any human’s word that they verbalise God’s answers, because as Christopher Hitchens said, “what can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence”. We must reconcile with incomplete explanations. We can trust science, because it is ruthlessly reproducible, and it states its limits honestly. We know our world is an oblate spheroid, because we can prove those observations with just a little work, but the cosmic microwave background tells us there is neither up nor down in the universe — we are simply floating, as if underwater. Nevertheless, the geeks can sit comfortably with this disorientation on our strange little evidence-based world, because we have one another.