Alex Therrien Week 9 - Ozymandias

 N) The tyrant or referring to him in Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias”. Or referring to the decay after his death.

Another name for Ramses II. 

I actually found this word in another book, called We Have No Idea. It’s about physics, and has a chapter talking about the size and complexity of the universe. It’s quite interesting, because at the moment we may be living in the era where the universe is the most complex. When the Big Bang happened, everything was a mostly uniform soup of energy, quarks, and things like that. Afterward inflation quickly amplified tiny variations. When atoms formed all of the charges in the strong, weak, and electromagnetic forces were neutralised. Gravity is much weaker than any of these others, but it cannot be neutralised, and eventually clumped things into balls of gas that formed stars and planets. These clumped together into galaxies, which clustered into superclusters, which clustered into this odd network of planes and filaments. After which there has not been enough time for more complexity to have formed. Dark matter might be able to tear apart these structures however, so eventually this grandeur may decay bak into a field of sand. 

“Is it just a coincidence that we live in the Ozymandias Age of the universe?” (Cham and Whiteson 263).

There is also a footnote:

“Look at my large-scale superclusters, ye mighty, and despair!”

Apparently Shelley’s friend Horace Smith wrote a poem about the same statue, since both of them had read a work by another poet, and were inspired to write poems about it. The inscription on it is different in that poem, but most things are similar. That poem focuses more on how it talks of a great city, but there is none to be found. And wonders if future people will stumble upon a fragment of london, wondering what was there before it’s destruction.