So where is the center of the universe? Right here. Yes, you are the center of the universe.

When Albert Einstein married space and time in his theory of relativity back in 1905, he taught us that our eyes are time machines. Nothing can go faster than the speed of light, the cosmic speed limit, and so all information comes to us, to the present, from the past.

And so Einstein’s relativity teaches us that the center of the universe is everywhere and nowhere. It is the present, surrounded by concentric shells of the past. History racing at you at 186,282 miles per second, the speed of light, the speed of all information. Your eyes are the cockpit of a time machine, filmy wet orbs looking in the only direction any of us can ever look: backward. Everything we see or feel or hear — now that gravitational waves have been discovered — took some time to get here, and so comes to our senses from the past. The moon, hovering over the horizon, is an image of light that left its cratered surface traveling at the speed of light a second and a half ago. The sun that burns your skin is eight minutes and nineteen seconds in the past.