10th April 2023.

Drawing on Cixin Liu’s reference to van Gogh, string theory, and the reduction of the solar system to two dimensions (Death’s End: Three Body Problem series audio book 2018), this is (hopefully) going to be an exploration of Van Gogh’s approach to a cosmology he could never have seen and, for the latter part, doesn’t actually exist. It’s also in oils which I found in the bottom drawer of a stack. Bit of a first for me.

Liu devotes an entire chapter to the dispassionate description of the process of becoming two dimensional. With no drama at all in the language, it’s shockingly convincing in its physics and solidly inevitable in its process. The Sun is first but instead of simply becoming a flat cut-out of itself, Lui makes clear that it retains its mass which has to go somewhere, and where it goes is outwards towards…