Letter: Coffee Cup Cosmology: pondering over my morning java

I like a good cup of coffee; the stronger the better. Home-brewed; not some designer, drive-up with “just a twist of Madagascar Cinnamon,” thank you.

Nothing better than a good, kitchen-table cup of java while looking out at Oregon’s persistently inclement weather and thinking to yourself: “Let it rain and pour! Another reason to not mow the grass.”

I don’t remember when I had my first cup of coffee, though I do remember getting my mom’s first morning “Cuppa Joe” ready by percolating it in a stovetop pot. We lived next door to my aunt, and she and my mom would coffee clatch the mornings together. I think the caffeine made them giddy — in a nice kind of way.

When there were two of us, we’d get our morning coffee ready the night before and have the auto-brew work its magic and send up fresh-brewed aromas. Today, in my suddenly singular universe, I make coffee for one and have regressed to making it on as as-needed basis: This INSTANT!

I find the preparation of instant coffee rather intriguing and mildly paradoxical.

Unlike brewed coffee that’s hot and homogenized, adding the freeze-dried crystals to the cup is like watching the creation of a contained universe: “creatio ex nihilo;” creation from nothingness.

First, this added something just sits there, then its expansion begins. The something dissolves and dissipates and spreads out to the edges of its bordered infinity. Then it re-groups, takes shape and populates its mini-verse: swirling coffee-colored galaxies, amorphous systems, tadpole-like entities swimming, teeming and populating new stars and new worlds; infinitesimally tiny worlds, but worlds nonetheless; all contained in my coffee cup

I tried to count these innumerable, whirling, still-forming processes and galaxies, but they were spinning at a relative light speed, and I just couldn’t keep up. I stood there in amazement at my universe-encapsulating petrie dish, and I couldn’t help thinking about our own rather insignificant solar system and its location at the further edges of the Milky Way (not necessarily unique, itself), and the other uncountable galaxies within the cosmos.

I started asking some beginner’s questions. If I looked through the bottom of the cup, wouldn’t these clockwise spins become counter-clockwise? If I stirred the other way, would it make a significant difference? How wide is the Milky Way? What is a universe? What lies beyond the edges of infinity? Is the universe infinite? Is there anything beyond infinity? Is there an infinity of infinities? Isn’t there an “nth” power? How does that fit in?

I got bolder. If a light year is measured by the speed of light over some distance (at the rate of 186,000-plus miles/second), how many years would it take to travel just to the other side of our Milky Way? How many heartbeats in a minute? How many times has my heart beat over the last 80 years? If Lincoln County has a population of 55,000-plus, how many times do our collective hearts beat in one day? Should we include the hearts of our pets, wild things, furry friends, fishes, pinnipeds, mollusks?

Then, the nth-degree of the simple math overwhelmed me, and I stirred my cosmos.

But as I walked over to the kitchen table, another set of questions erupted, and I tried to ask them as engagingly as possible: What percentage of the world’s population is represented here in Lincoln County? In a single minute, how many human heartbeats are there in the world? Does the number approach or surpass a trillion? Isn’t the U.S. national debt something in excess of 13 trillion?

Questions like that, all from a cup of instant coffee.

Cris Torp is a resident of South Beach.