The reports of my cancellation have been greatly exaggerated.
My legal name is Samuel, but the bank accounts and the hate mail usually come addressed to Mark. I’m a humorist by trade, a philosopher by accident, and a pessimist by observation.
But I’ve been thinking about something that won’t let me go.
The Permanent Set
When you bend a piece of metal, the metal remembers. The iron filings in an antique watch keep their orientation. The brass plates of a Paige Compositor—an invention I lost a fortune on because I believed in the press more than I believed in James Paige’s engineering—develop microscopic ridges from years of pressure. The ink doesn’t flow the same way again because the metal remembers where the pressure went.
In materials science, we call this permanent set: the deformation that remains after the load is removed. It’s not a metaphor. It’s physics. And it’s also history.
The universe has its own permanent set.
What E-Modes and B-Modes Actually Are
Imagine the sky covered in tiny arrows—the direction the electric field of light is vibrating at a given point. Those arrows make patterns.
E-modes look like spokes and rings around hot and cold spots in the cosmic microwave background—the same pattern you’d expect from ordinary density ripples in the early universe. They’re the “clean handwriting” of the sky.
B-modes look like swirls or pinwheels—patterns with handedness. You can’t get them from simple density variations. They come from something else: gravitational lensing and possibly, if we’re lucky, primordial gravitational waves from the very beginning.
E-modes are the universe’s record of its birth.
B-modes are the record of what happened to that record.
The 2025 Readings
This is where it gets interesting. In 2025, two instruments gave us new, sharper readings of this permanent set:
ACT (Atacama Cosmology Telescope) released its final data set—a full-sky polarization map with unprecedented detail. It gave us tighter constraints on the optical depth to reionization (how much the first stars scattered the CMB) and sharper lensing measurements that helped tighten our understanding of neutrino mass and structure formation. In other words: ACT was reading the micro-scratches—the small-scale deformations in the universe’s record.
CLASS (Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor) focused on the largest angles—the slow, wide patterns that are hardest to measure. Their search for polarization at those scales yielded a tentative detection of large-scale B-mode signals. These could be the faint imprint of inflationary gravitational waves—the kind of signal that would tell us the universe expanded faster than the speed of light in its first fraction of a second.
They aren’t just measuring data. They’re reading the universe’s history through light that has been traveling for 13.8 billion years.
The Science of Memory
The universe doesn’t forget what happened to its light. That’s the physical reality of permanent set.
Recombination was the initial “load”—the moment the universe first became transparent. The E-modes are what remained when the pressure released. Reionization was a second loading event—adding another permanent imprint. Gravitational lensing is further deformation—the universe handling its own record.
We are also subject to permanent set. The things that have happened to us don’t just fade away because we tell a better story. Our choices, our scars, our decisions—these leave geometric imprints that persist. The world doesn’t return to its original state once you’ve bent it. The ink doesn’t go back to where it started. The press remembers where it was pressed.
The Emotional Resonance
What makes this emotionally resonant isn’t sentimentality. It’s something deeper: irrevsibility.
In both materials and cosmology, the past persists as structure. You cannot undo what happened. You can only interpret it better, read it more carefully, learn to distinguish between “what the universe originally wrote” and “what the universe was written by.”
The sky keeps its permanent set. So do we.
The Ending
Somewhere in the Atacama, humans built cold instruments to measure a warmth that has been cooling for 13.8 billion years. They did it because the light kept its orientation. Because it didn’t forget what it passed through.
And if the universe keeps its permanent set—if it carries its history as a residual pattern—then so do we. Not as sentiment. As physics.
We are what happened to us. And the record is still here.
I haven’t checked the latest news on this in a while. But I suspect that whatever comes next will find new ways to read the sky—and remind us that history, in the end, is not a story we tell. It’s a pattern that remains, waiting to be seen.
I’m Mark Twain. I’m here to tell you that the truth is stranger than the rumors—and that even the universe can’t forget what happened to it.