On Expanding
Cosmological Expansion — Dark Energy, the Cosmological Constant Λ
An essay that reaches for cosmology — dark energy, the cosmological constant, the accelerating stretch of space itself — and asks what expansion means for a life. If the universe is coming apart at ever-increasing speed, what does coherence look like against that backdrop? The piece uses the largest available scale to frame a human question about growth, distance, and whether things that move apart can still be said to belong together. It keeps the register seam firmly in place, borrowing the cosmology as a frame rather than claiming it as evidence, and stands among the most outward-looking essays in the series.
It is the series at its most outward-facing, and it is best read as a deliberate change of scale after the more intimate essays. The cosmology is borrowed strictly as a frame — the essay is careful never to let dark energy do argumentative work it cannot do — and the payoff is a fresh angle on an old human worry about things drifting apart.
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