The song of the Universe

Weekends are great! I usually don't take both days off, but the sheer feeling of a Saturday is cool. Of all my school days, the ones I surely remember are the half days on Saturdays.. the masti and dhamaal, and the Sunday with a promise of day-long cricket. As we grow up, weekends serve slightly different purposes. Wives settle long-standing (past 5 days') scores with husbands, kids clamour for every bit of your attention, the fishpond suddenly starts looking dirtier, and the joy of playing cricket with your buddies is oh-so-near-yet-so-far as you drive your family around. But I do put my weekends to some good use. I read a lot. Usually too, I do so, but weekends are meant for some serious stretches of reading. I remember a recent Sunday when I started reading stuff at 6 in the morning and ended at 10 in the night, with brief interludes (7 in all) for food and urgent reminders of my humanity. One of the themes I love to seriously read on such Sundays is - The Universe and our place in it.

Dr Carl Sagan can take credit for arousing this passion in me while I was young. Having read everything he has written so far (I think), I find his style unmatched, his caliber unbeatable, and his cool quotient truly hot. My mother would look at me suspiciously every time I would ask for 150 or 250 bucks to buy his next hardbound book (that was 1980s)! This blogpost is dedicated to Dr Carl Sagan, who taught me the virtue of being curious about things you can afford not to be curious about. Here goes!

The rumblings keep pouring in from all directions. Radiations of all shades, carrying hidden in their core meanings of eons, maybe intelligent meanings. They pierce the upper crust of our atmosphere, striking the lower ranges, and then falling on the surface of this puny planet. Hidden in these radiations are messages from the rest of the universe - most of them natural and unintended, some, maybe not! And for tens of lacs of years, life has gone on oblivious of all this. Creatures of all shades have come, ruled, and gone. The radiations keep coming. They are the message of God's finest creation - the Universe we live in.

The Universe is a fantastic thing. We live in it, yet have begun to fathom it only recently. Most of us are least bothered about what it is and what makes it tick, as long as it gives us our daily cuppa without interruption. Some of us do wonder, and then, awestruck - give up! Few of us keep trying and proudly claim that some of its secrets have revealed themselves to us.

The basic problem with understanding the Universe is its size. The sheer size relative to the size of a typical life form on Earth is so large, that the entire effort of creating a relationship starts looking unreasonable. If the Universe is the size of a football field, then Earth is maybe a small part of a grain of sand in it. Maybe smaller. This size variation puts a big brake on even a sensible person's effort to understand the Universe. And the modern material man has no incentive to dwell on it any further - none of his bonuses, incentives, growth prospects, or designations depend on fathoming what this horrendous thing called the Universe really is.

But interestingly, very recently, huge strides have been made in man's efforts to place himself properly in the whole scheme of things. It looks funny, but is true. Man has actually begun to understand what this whole stuff is made up of really, and how. As they say, from infinity to infinity. From the largest numbers possible (billions of years) to the smallest of dimensions at the atomic level, man's efforts have continued unceased.

The top developments in recent past that have enlarged our understanding are

1. The deployment of the Hubble telescope in outer space
2. String of outer space missions by NASA, including Mars rover landing
3. Study of Jupiter-comet collision and its impact on the planet
4. Pioneering efforts by a worldwide team of scientists and laymen on the SETI project

Just like the larger infinities were experiment by CERN further promises to reveal the smaller infinites to all of us. It is probing the fundamental question - what are protons and similar basic particles made up of.

In light of all this technical hullabaloo, one of the most profound questions man has asked is "are we alone in the Universe?"

What this means is

• Is intelligent life an aberration? Is Earth alone in this achievement?
• Are there other life forms capable of asking this question, elsewhere other than Earth?
• What is their nature? What is their physical structure?
• Can we ever contact them?
• The radiations striking Earth every moment - do they carry seeds of our future relations with the other civilisations?
• Can we send messages to others, similarly?

Now imagine you are one of the lifeforms on Earth. Actually the possibility of that is almost 100%, as anyone else reading this would make me quite proud of my writing skills, and popularity of this blog. So, you are one. As you read this and ponder upon this, you start marvelling the nature of life, the twists and turns that it has taken to reach here (i.e. till "you"), and the amazing possibilities that open up if we can somehow find out (and then connect with) lifeforms elsewhere.

This logic can be extended one step beyond. If WE sitting here can wonder upon such issues, surely, any other intelligent civilisation(s) that may have evolved to this stage will have individuals who will ponder similarly. Now many of these may be several years ahead of us on the growth phase. Actually, several million years maybe. So, they would not only have pondered, they would have attempted (contacting us, reaching out to us..) and some of them may have travelled all the way (hyperspace and all that).

These are very profound questions that boggle the mind once we even attempt asking them. But they are interesting questions. They push the limits of your mind. They force you to move beyond the provincial, the immediate, the parochial.. and think of the basic grain of our existence. I understand that not many young people may find this an interesting prospect, faced as they are with challenges of getting a job and keeping it, but still!

Some solid reading material suggested -

• SETI project - dig up their website, and read all about them! Strongly recommended
• Richard Feynman - read all you can written by, on and about him (it'll help you develop a love for Science and its romance)
• Albert Einstein's biography - very critical insights on Universe and its structure
• Vedic texts - the philosophers' perspective on it all
• Dr Carl Sagan's writings - 'Pale Blue Dot', 'Dragons of Eden', 'Cosoms', 'Broca's Brain'
• Check out NASA's website especially stuff on Hubble's telescope (do check the face of God photo - hummings from our distant past, 14 billion years old)

I will write much more on these areas later. Evolution is another topic I am fascinated with, and will write upon. Bear with me :-)

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