Introduction...Again

Today is May 18, the birthday of this blog, which started back in 2016 and it has been 5 years today. But these years hadn't been of maximum activity for this blog, the reasons for which we may never know. We all try to follow our passions and then life happens. What I can say, at most, is that life happened to this blog as well.

But now here we are, back with new inspirations, new aspiration and a whole new perception, towards life and its bustling vibrancies. I don't know how much astronomy will this blog have in future and how much justified its name might be, but we will never let it loose its very essence, the scientific method, and therefor it may never get a new name.

It may again house someone's weird musings, someone's heart-warming desires, someone's agony, someone's wrenching sorrows, someone's pain, someone's hard headed experiments, but beyond all it will have bare thoughts. Thoughts that might be stumbled upon but overlooked, that might be widespread but never pondered, that might be sweet but delusive.

We cannot keep this very long, not because we do not have much to speak we definitely do, but because today may be another beginning, and thus this is just a whisper, to many more thoughts, some infant some mature, but all worth sharing.

In the meantime, stay safe.

Her Final Word

We've seen the beginning and end of the universe.

We've seen what it means to have a scientific temperament.

We've tried to figure out the meaning of life.

We've done a lot, but it's less than what we haven't done. I can't even start to list it now.

Blogging was a journey. Apart from obvious linguistic benefits, it was a journey for me inside my own mind. Introspection, if you will.

But per the title, this is my final word. A journey can't continue when the purpose of the journey is lost.

"And anyone could see that I'm lost, through the seas I've been tossed...."

I have questioned a lot that I thought I knew about myself, enough to make me dizzy. Motivation has been crumbling, and what once gave me happiness now feels like a chore. I'll start up again, but who knows when that'll happen? When it stops feeling like a chore? It could be months before that happens.

A final word, then.

"There's more to see, than can ever be seen, more to do than can ever be done. There's far too much to take in here, more to find than can ever be found."

Happy exploring.

Intelligence and Accepting Fallibility

"Intelligence is not personal, is not the outcome of argument, belief, opinion, or reason. Intelligence comes into being when the brain discovers its fallibility, when it discovers what it is capable of and what it is not."

There's a lot to be said about this.  Intelligence – which is mostly viewed as the amount of "stuff you know" – has a new parameter to consider: fallibility.

Fallibility is the liability to err. For a brain to realize its fallibility is for it to accept that it may have been wrong about some of the beliefs it once held. Even that is not enough. Once the wrong beliefs are sorted, they must be discarded, no matter how valuable they once were.

The recognition of fallibility is a huge and difficult step. It is akin to winning a war and then looking at the destruction and havoc you have wrought to get where you are.  It is the realization of how awful you must have been to those around you back when you had not been aware of your fallibility.

To be sure: being incognizant of one's fallibility is seldom a crime. And recognizing fallibility  does not lead to freedom from fallibility.

The truly "intelligent" thing about realizing fallibility is the weight it puts on your shoulders, so that you are constantly aware of it. It is a far cry from freedom from fallibility, but paradoxically, the two have a lot in common.

With this constant weight on your shoulders, you develop the habit of approaching the world with questions instead of answers, with an open mind embracing all the possibilities which are obscured to a closed mind. In a way, it is a necessary step in reducing conflict and putting your ego aside. You get a new perspective on the world, and the "stuff you know" increases. It then follows that intelligence also increases. That's always a good thing.

The Battle of the Mind

"I wish it was the entire tree that fell on Newton's head instead of just one apple."

A sentence that's supposed to incite laughter in its audience. One may call it a joke.

Because it's so easy, right? To take pride in not understanding science or math. To wish that Newton and others like him died a horrible death before contributing what they contributed so you could be spared from doing some schoolwork.

Oh, and so you wouldn't have to complain about it on inventions that were made possible because of their discoveries. Yeah, heaven forbid that should ever happen.

You know what? It's no use making the argument that science is beautiful, that science is complex, and that the complexity of science is what makes life worth living. So I invite you to consider the society at the time these geniuses put forward their groundbreaking ideas.

"Before the battle of the fist, comes the battle of the mind."

Galileo Galilei, who dared to go against the Church and become a proponent of the heliocentric theory, was put under house arrest.

Giordano Bruno was burned alive for the same reason.

Copernicus was warned against publishing his heliocentric theory on the grounds that it might spur controversy (remember that the Catholic Church was considered authority in his, Galileo's, and Bruno's time).

The presence of germs was known for nearly two centuries before the germ theory of disease was proposed. People didn't know to wash their hands before the seventeenth century.

Socrates was forced to consume poison because he was found guilty of not believing in the ancient Greek gods and of introducing new ideas to the youth of Athens.

Hypatia of Alexandria was a scholar at a time when women of her intellect were feared. "A woman of science? Sound the alarm!"

People of the past were brutal. Contempt for STEM fields today is quite subtle, but still visible. Anti-vaxxers, climate change deniers, creationists, and flat-Earthers are but a few of the manifestations of the outright denial of science.

But there is something that the past and present have in common. Scientists are always fighting a battle of the mind when the people around them are in outright denial of the same math that says that 2+2=4, and the same science that says that humans need water to live.

And believe me when I say, it is not easy fighting a battle of the mind.

So I am led to wonder: Is sentencing a scientist to a horrible fate, a brutal manifestation of taking pride in cussing out the people (the scientists) because of whom we live in a digital age today?

Scientific Advancement.

Given all that we have discovered about our world till now, it might be very easy to delude oneself into thinking that there's nothing left to explore. Even though I cannot claim to be involved in scientific research at this point, I do like knowing about it, and I fall into this pitfall myself, every few years. Reading some articles (or books, as of now) is like a refreshing snap into reality.

But then I thought up an analogy for scientific advancement – navigating a maze. (Yes, Potterheads can go ahead and think of the Triwizard Tournament maze.)

The end of the maze is a new level of understanding, where all immediate questions are answered (notice the use of immediate). No one has an aerial view of this maze, but this is a maze that humankind created for itself. There is no disguised villain to tell the "Harry" inside each of us where the end is. But the trophy is a Portkey – it takes us to the next scientific quest.

It's a treacherous maze. There are deadly traps that seem like the right way, but aren't; lots of misdirections; and straight–up traps. You could fall into one of these traps and think, "Oh, I've solved it all", only to find a fellow scientist pass by, stomp his foot, and say, "That's the fifth time I've passed through here!", successfully removing you from your high horse (that you climbed accidentally, you promise!).

People spend their lifetimes in this maze, at different paces, falling for different tricks. Many die before reaching a breakthrough, which can be thought of as a sign in the maze that you're going in the right direction (a breakthrough, that is).

There are people who are ahead of everyone else, people who prevent others from going ahead, and people who change course in the middle of the maze. And many die at dead ends (no pun intended).

But given that this maze was made by humans for humans, some even find it a pleasure navigating it.

Happy journey!

A Glimpse into the Master Notebook

(Disclaimer: The Master Notebook is not a proper noun. It is not how I address my notebook. I hold all notebooks in equal regard.)

May 19 marked the completion of one year since this blog has been fully operational. My distant future is uncertain, like the durability of humans in this Universe. But let's enjoy our brief moment in the sun.

I have taken to updating this blog monthly, so I spent all of May 19th debating whether or not to do this – seeing as it's the middle of the month, and all.

I'm going to post a snippet of something I had considered posting on the blog as an article, but reconsidered it for abstract reasons.
Because apparently this is something authors do for their audience.

"Preparing for the SAT Subject Tests made me think about the physics we take for granted. And I was thinking about physics as the plane took off [...].

"There's Bernoulli lift in the takeoff. The air pressure difference pops your ears as you get to cruising altitude. You think about your position in three dimensions. Velocity takes on a whole new meaning.

"Little moments like this make me reaffirm my thoughts. Yes, I want to study astrophysics. I want to see the interplay of theory and practice. I want to cry with awe at the beauty of the world we live in. I love physics.

"People often groan when I point out the physics of everyday life. These are the same people who think physics has no 'practical application.' "

There's more after this, but what comes after this is the reason I won't post the entire thing. I think in harsh words, and that is reflected in my writing, no matter how tactful I try to be.

Well, until June 1, then.

The Greatest of Mysteries

"The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us – there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries."
                     – Carl Sagan, Cosmos

This is an article on what this quote means to me. Not anyone else. I can't and won't speak for anyone else.

It's so easy to pretend, sitting on the couch, that the everyday occurrences throughout the Universe don't affect us. The fact that you can't even look up while in the city (because of light pollution) doesn't help matters. But the Universe isn't "out there". It's just an amplified version of science at everyday scales, though that's not to say that what we're experiencing here on Earth is a dumbed–down version of what we could be experiencing. It would be an error on my part to say so, because Earth is intrinsically connected to the Universe. As are we. But that's just it. It's so easy to forget that this is where we came from, that ultimately, we all come from the same event that created the stars and galaxies.

We are the Cosmos, the Cosmos is us. But our lives have taken us away from it, what it truly is. That is why when we think about it, we feel the kind of exhilaration that doesn't happen everyday at the desk, because the desk came after the Cosmos. In our contemplations, we attempt to connect with the most primal parts of us: the parts that came from the nuclear furnaces of stars, the parts shrouded by our basic needs of survival and, too often to ignore, by our ego and pettiness.

The reality of our place in the Universe can be maintained, however. By stepping outside, at the very least, and traveling into interstellar or intergalactic space, at most. (Yes, I know the impossibility of that. That's why I said "at most".) These are better methods than any to get even an inkling of the significance we hold in the Universe (and even that is close to none).

The existence of the Universe is like a big chemical reaction. Here, we're intermediates, a temporary result of the initial conditions that set our Universe into motion.

"Anyone who does not...Gaze up and see the wonder...Of a dark night sky filled with countless stars loses a sense of their fundamental connectedness to the Universe."
– Dr. Brian Greene

The Concept of Nothingness

Put  simply, nothing is defined as "the absence of something."

Think of the number zero. For the purposes of this article, we'll take it to mean nothing. The absence of something – the absence of numbers.

There's a lot to be said about a number that represents nothing. The entire number system is riding on zero –  is riding on nothing. It defines place values, defines the significance of digits. This one closed loop that has no value of its own.

You can't convert zero into something unless you think additively. Zero can be converted to one easily enough – 0+1=1. Simple math. But that's not how everyday objects work, and we attempt to describe everyday objects. The trouble is, the simplest everyday object can carry a world of abstract ideas within itself.

Think of it like this – A balloon can be filled to occupy a large space, assuming it doesn't burst. It'll grow to twice its size, three times its size, and so on. In fact, that's usually how we compare quantities. This isn't anything new. But this is one of the most notable differences between something and nothing. You can't do this with nothing.

To convert something into more of something, you can multiply it. Mathematically speaking, 5*2=10. If you have five apples and you add five more, you have twice as many apples. But...
0*1=0
0*2=0
0*3=0, and so on.
x*0=0, not x.

Neither can you distribute something amongst nothing.  Every schoolchild knows – division by zero, by nothing, is undefined.

But for all that we have set up around this number, this entity, our knowledge is incomplete, because it is next to impossible to conceive of nothingness. 

All our lives we have been surrounded by something – air, space, anything. Usually when we speak of nothing, we mean "nothing of consequence" or "nothing that pertains to this conversation." In daily use, "nothing" has become a shorthand for this specific kind of nothingness.

But there's a principle in science – there's no such thing as empty space. Essentially, there's no such thing as nothing. Even in the vacuum of of space, there's at least one particle per some thousands of units of volume. And even here on Earth, nothing is not a concrete concept. We have always described nothing in terms of something. So, we may have turned nothing into a function of something. There's something that can be said about that.

In many ways, our language explains our psychological tendencies. I don't have to define a pen in terms of a pencil. I don't have to define heart in terms of the amount of blood it pumps. I could, but it won't be necessary. These objects don't rely on each other for their definitions, the way nothing depends on something. And even this dependence is one-way, because something doesn't have to rely on nothing to define it.

Our trouble with conceptualizing nothing is an explanation for why the Big Bang is not an easy concept to grasp. The math checks out, sure. But if you sit down to think about it long enough, a question does rise – "How can something be created out of nothing?"

Indeed, because here are some ideas the Big Bang model puts forth:
1. There was no space or time when there was a singularity, and one could not come into existence without the other.
2. The singularity itself was infinitely hot and dense, and all that would become our universe was packed into an extremely tiny volume.

You need space to describe where something is, and you need time to tell when something happened. But how do you explain where the Big Bang occurred, when space was nothing? How do you explain what came before the Bang, when you couldn't invoke an idea of time, since time was also nothing?

Space and time are part of something. They are the most fundamental somethings anyone can think of. Their absence creates the most fundamental nothing, the kind of nothing no one can ever dream of. Because we've never experienced or come close to experiencing such a thing.

And the hot and dense part. This is where we know of something coming from nothing.

The "primordial soup" we call the singularity had an immense amount of energy. Energy equates to heat, hence we say the singularity was hot. But the thing is, space wasn't defined; it didn't exist. So all that energy was packed into...well, nothing. Conditions were getting divided by zero, because that was all that did exist. And anything divided by zero not only is undefined, but it is also infinite. All that energy, packed into nothing...it became everything.

There are few places and conditions where our definitions of the everyday world just crumble, become meaningless. The origin of the universe is one of them.

We've done so much with the concepts of zero and nothingness, it is nearly impossible to imagine where we'd be without them. But at the same time, we can't think of them in the same way that we think about everything else, either. What a concept nothing is!

In Defense of Philosophy

I picked philosophy for this post for a few different reasons, two of the main ones being that I have gained some insight into it over the past few months, and that certain people around me don't seem to think much of it. In fact, perhaps discussing philosophy on a blog dedicated to science may come across as a sign of my aptitude being questionable. And this is exactly why philosophy must be defended.

Philosophy today is perceived as a field where people ask unnecessary, or often frankly disturbing questions. Who needs to worry about the great why's of existence when you've got upcoming exams, or a really important project at work tomorrow, right?

Not exactly. In many ways, philosophy has helped us shape our world. You'll often hear people talk about the "philosophy" of their work; the motives behind it, or abstract ideas behind it is what they mean when they say it. Abstract ideas...

I use that term to highlight that human ideas are, in fact, quite recondite – they're called human ideas simply because no other species can have them, or understand them. Try explaining trigonometry to a dog, or expressionism to sheep.

Where I'm going with this is that the kind of ideas humans have, what they think, how they think it, and what makes them think – that is what constitutes philosophy. Simply thinking about anything and everything makes you question the things you hitherto took for granted or as a given, and the analysis of how to think makes you understand why and how people can have opinions that conflict your own. That is philosophy, along with how to justify yourself and incorporate other justified beliefs into your mental catalog. And, yes, that does lead to internal conflicts and existential crises. But there are rainbows after rain, and so it is that at the end of such crises you find that you have shed unjust beliefs, strengthened just ones, and have a clearer outlook on life.

Does this sound familiar?

It must, because this is exactly what science does – just with a lot more paperwork and tangible data. And guess what – there's a reason for that, and that reason is history.

For all of human history, we've been trying to figure the world out, asking what's happening, why it's happening, how it's happening. It could have been about natural phenomena. It could have been about human behavior that harms society as a whole. It could have been about why people need other people. Or, you know, it could have been about finding decent places to sleep.

It didn't matter the kind of questions you asked. As soon as language was created, all what, how, and why questions were (messily) grouped into philosophy.

In fact, traced to its roots, the word philosophy is made from two Greek words: phylos to love, and sophie wisdom. And wisdom is not restricted to scientific wisdom.

Then came divisions, as they so often do in our quest to define stuff. Philosophy split into science, politics, linguistics, visual arts, performing arts, and much more. It is worth noting here that the scientific method was first formulated – and implemented – by philosophers.

So, basically, that's the significance of philosophy. It exists where thoughts and ideas exist – which is to say, everywhere. It's not obsolete, and it's not meta–anything. That is my defense.

Hypotheses and Fallacies

I've been sitting on this hypothesis for some time now. It's full of fallacies, but it shows that there is something I know and can think independently about.

So, this is how it goes.

Einstein's theories of relativity explain something called "time dilation" — the idea that time slows down as the object speeds up. It also predicts that no object can go faster than the speed of light.

And in tandem with a hypothesis I was discussing with a friend a few months ago, I tried to think about time travel as a function of speed (yes, think about. Never let it be said that philosophy is dead.). Here are my conclusions:

1. If time slows down as we approach the speed of light, there has to be a point where time stops. Then there are also points where time should start going backwards. This point comes past the speed of light, which is prohibited by the laws of physics. The speed of light is the cosmic speed limit.
2. So, the speed of light is that speed at which time becomes meaningless. Sure, we talk about light taking time to reach other objects in the universe, but that's because it is we who perceive time. From the perspective of light, it means nothing. For photons, there is no such thing as time. Thus why we have one photon in more than one place at the same time, or vice versa. 
3. So, essentially, if we want to travel backwards in time, we have to go faster than the speed of light. Explains why time travel is impossible.
4. If we want to understand the true nature of time – what it is, as opposed to what it does – we have to study it from the perspective of photons. And in a notion akin to relativity of motion through space, the motion of time, in essence, the speed of time on Earth (or anywhere in the universe) can be measured in relation to light.

There are some problems with this, though.

The first is that light itself doesn't always travel at the speed of light. And yet time is meaningless for it even at slower speeds. One could look to the massless nature of photons for a possible solution.

The second is kind of mathematical. We usually quantify change with respect to something. Usually that "something" is time. But when it is the speed of time itself that needs to be measured, what do you measure it with respect to? What property of light? Because the parameters we speak of here are set at zero. And every schoolchild knows that division by zero is undefined.

Well, it's a step in the process of becoming an astrophysicist, at least.

Rigil Kentaurus and Pluto's Re-Classification

Science is a field of constant change. Here, one cannot afford to get used to the current state of affairs, because the current state of affairs changes like the weather.

This realization hits hard when one thinks of Pluto's "re-classification". In 2006, the IAU - International Astronomical Union - laid down an official definition for planets:

1. It orbits a star (as opposed to a planet, in which case you're thinking about a satellite)
2. It's large enough for its gravity to pull it into a round shape (so it looks more like Earth and less like a potato, in which case it's an asteroid)
3. Does not share its orbit with anyone else (so it's the only object in its orbit and surrounding areas. If it isn't, it's probably leftover debris from the formation of the solar system.)

By this definition, Earth is a planet. But Pluto is not. Pluto does not have its path cleared of Uranus and Neptune, so it's classified as a dwarf planet.

As I understand it, there are still people out there who aren't over this revelation. It took me a while to get over my devastation, too (I was eight years old when I found out). At first, I handed myself over to the authority, thinking, "That's what the adults say, so it must be true." But now, I have a better explanation for my acceptance.

This is science. At the basic level, we try our best to describe the world around us. And for a while, we didn't even know how to define a planet. And now we do, and we find a conflict with what we'd always done and what we should have been doing. So we changed ourselves accordingly.

So what does Rigil Kentaurus have to do with this?

Well, the closest star to the Sun is Proxima Centauri, 4.23 light years away. A binary star system lies just ahead, what we've been calling Alpha Centauri. Only now, its name has been officially changed to Rigil Kentaurus by the IAU.

The IAU has its own rules for star nomenclature, which I'd like to argue be taught in high school with organic compound nomenclature, if not in place of it. The rules are complicated, but I don't doubt fun to learn about.

In the meantime, I will welcome the name Rigil Kentaurus with open arms and hope the name change won't be as controversial as Pluto's "demotion". The two events have a lot in common, I think.

On Curiosity, the Sequel

The incidents that happened to me eight years ago made me promise myself that I would never discourage anyone who approaches me with questions - be it my cousins or my juniors. I'm always happy to help - that is, if one is willing to accept my help.

One bus ride home from school, I sat with some fourth graders and we were discussing vegetarianism, when one of them asked, "Who defined vegetarianism and non-vegetarianism? Was it God?" How easily children accept dogma.

Well, from there to the rest of the long bus ride, we were discussing some pretty heavy stuff...for a fourth grader, at least. But I'm glad we were able to discuss frankly with no inhibitions something that was supposed to be taken for granted. And I could tell I had given those kids something to think about. And the rest of the way home, I marveled at the world we've been able to create around us. 

The next day, as I had hoped, the girl, the fourth grader, had more questions, which I was, again, happy to answer. And the day after that, I encouraged her to keep questioning and finding answers. I told her to hunt me down if she had to. But I have a feeling she'll find out what she has to, with or without my help.

It's one step towards fulfilling the promise I've made to myself. 

As the tagline for Discovery Science says, "Question Everything."

The Orionids: Thoughts

This event had been a few months in the making. It started with a Facebook post and ended spectacularly.

Also, I'm considering crossing this off my bucket list. Not sure.

Along with a spectacular display, I also had the opportunity to understand and question two main ideas. I'll get to that later.

So. The Orionids. Appropriate for the first meteor shower of my life, because Orion is the first constellation I learned to identify. And also because I had to skip school to view it. So we know what I'd choose, given the choice between attending school and witnessing an astronomical event for the first time in my life. Is it even a choice? And a fair one at that?

But I digress.

Leading up to the days before the meteor shower, I told my friends what I'd be doing pre-dawn at the peak of the meteor shower. The problem - "What is a meteor?" Because the common term for a meteor is shooting star, and that upsets me. Because it's not a star, precisely. If it were, we'd be burned to a crisp "over and over and over again" (Imagine Dragons reference).

I'm not suggesting we stop using the term. That's not my business. But I will express my frustration at having to explain what a meteor is using that phrase to someone who I expected better from.

It might just be me, but I question how anyone cannot possibly know what a meteor is. But heck. C'est la vie. But do know that I will use scientific terminology as best and much as I can if my interlocutor is around my age or older. So I've addressed the first of my ideas.

The second idea I understood more fully was that of why it's so easy to believe a supernatural being is out there, looking out for us. It's a beautiful lie, but that's just it. It's a lie.

The night of the meteor shower, I went to the terrace to get adjusted to the dark ahead of my family. The night sky I beheld was gorgeous. In fact, it was so gorgeous it was scary. I felt so small and vulnerable, like "one cosmic swipe and I'm dead." It wasn't the most scared or awed I've ever felt, but it definitely gave me a feel for why one might like to hold on to the idea of a benevolent force that keeps them alive. I've felt the need to express my gratitude, too. And it's sad that my existence probably doesn't - no, it definitely doesn't - count for anything in the lifetime of the Universe. But that doesn't hinder me. I exist, and the Universe has to deal with it. (You see? I'm talking about the universe as a living entity.)

Well, in conclusion, the Orionids themselves were a sight to behold. And the experience of waiting for it and finally watching it has me questioning and rethinking a lot of stuff.

Vulnerability, the Sequel

Turns out a cold can hamper the motivation to write an article. Heads up to aspiring bloggers.

But a sequel of more morbid thoughts was promised, and so it will be delivered. Ready or not, let's do this.

So, congratulations! You've survived asteroids, supernovae, and the death of our star. Let's see what's in store now.

5. The galaxy collission between the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies. While this won't happen for another five billion years, its consequences for Earth will be disastrous. She will be flung out of the new galaxy and will be lucky if another star pulls her into orbit atound itself. Or else...

6. Say that happens. But we'll still be under threat from supernovas and star deaths. But we've covered that, so let's get hypothetical for a bit. Say a black hole gets in the vicinity of Earth. Yeah, we'll be torn to bits and witness every second of it. Frenemies, those suckers are.

7. Venturing near a black hole is highly improbable. But say we, by some stroke of luck, get to be alive for the end of the Universe, the Big Chill. All the stars and black holes have disappeared. Literally nothing remains. But now, 10^35 years later, matter loses all of its meaning. Protons themselves start to decay. The human race, the only ones alive, start to disintegrate.

8. All of this won't even matter if a quantum fluctuation starts overwriting the univserse. Think of it as a Big Bang within a Big Bang. And the laws inside this new universe don't allow anything outside it to exist. So, yeah. Bye-bye, humans.

Thinking about this stuff puts one thing in perspective. We talk of "forever" and "immortality". But how long will that even last? Can we even conceptualize these words, or does the universe strip them of its meaning? How much do we really know, or have we really seen?

Vulnerability.

Basically this post highlights the ways in which we could die. Happy thoughts. If you're reading this in the morning, Hi! Enjoy your day.

Let's jot down the ways you and I and everything can be destroyed. Let's tear apart this house of cards. And not worry about the mess we make. Again, happy thoughts.

This list starts from stuff that we find easy to imagine, to stuff that will take an infinite time to happen. But these have a very real chance of happening nonetheless. Some stuff I cooked up from my morbid imagination. Good luck figuring out which is which.

So, here goes: 

1. An asteroid larger than 1.6 km across strikes Earth. This could create a mass extinction similar to the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. Unless…we stop it first.   
2. A massive solar flare tarnishes all our satellite technology, and sends the digital age back to square one. Or negative infinity…    
3. The sun becomes a red giant and engulfs the Earth. In 5 billion years. The Earth will be charred, and so will humans, unless we become spacefarers.    
4. A supernova ravages Earth from just a few dozen light years. We won’t even know what hit us. Betelgeuse is pretty close…

Now, the next few will destroy humanity assuming we’ve braved the aforementioned disasters. And no amount of hope and prayer will save us. But they will have to wait. I think this enough to ponder, though we haven’t even gotten to the good stuff yet.

Perfection is Overrated.

If you haven't picked up on it already, I have a bit of an obsession with the origin of the universe. So here's another aspect of it.

In his documentary Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking, professor Hawking says three powerful words: Perfection doesn't exist. (What did you think it was?) It's easy enough to see that in real life, but a better way to say it on our level is that perfection is highly subjective. And in my case, it is also overrated. Let me explain.

We think our beautiful universe is perfect (kudos to you if you don't). But the reality is far from it. Heck, the things we think are so beautiful and awesome - the Pillars of Creation, the Whirlpool Galaxy, the Horsehead Nebula, to name a few - are results of a deep imperfection in the making of our universe. Which brings us back to the mother of all beginnings.

With the moment of creation came a huge (and I mean huge) burst of energy; energy that would later be converted to matter (oops.  Spoiler alert.). But this energy was uniformly distributed. It would take 10^-35 seconds to get closer to the composition of the present-day universe.

After that moment, the Universe started expanding  faster than the speed of light (no, it does not violate any laws of physics). This expansion rendered the energy distribution of the universe uneven: dense in some places, not so much in others. The denser places became the matter we see today.

Imagine if this hadn't happened, if the aforementioned "inflation" hadn't messed with the energy distribution. If the universe had remained...perfect. In equilibrium, and gravity would never be allowed to take over. Here are three more powerful and scarier words to describe what would happen:  We wouldn't exist.

 Basically, this entire post can be summed up in one sentence: if the universe was perfect, we wouldn't exist. So why do we go nuts for some weird form of perfection which, in the end, only makes sense to us? Why do that word, its usage, its synonyms and antonyms even exist in our languages and our minds?

 This is deep. This is rhetorical, and I fail to present an answer. All I know for certain is that perfection is overrated.

The End of Knowledge

What are some of the biggest questions out there?

Some that come to mind right off the bat are -
How did it all begin?
Can we see it all begin?
Are we alone? Are there life forms somewhere else?
Is our universe unique?
What's for dinner tonight, Mom?

(Okay, maybe not that last one. But I had you for a moment there, didn't I? What is for dinner tonight, anyway? Mom!)

Anyway!

Some questions we don't know the answer to today. But we're fairly certain we will have them in the near or distant future. The real question is: what happens then?

There'll be a day when we know the cure to cancer. There will be a day we can control pollution effectively. And there will be a day when we know what the M Theory, the Theory of Everything, is. But what will remain then? Will we have finally reached the point where there's nothing left to explore?

I feel like the answer is no. In an earlier post, I had said that one scientific breakthrough may answer some questions, but pave the way for ten times as many questions that now need to be answered.  As of now, I can't really say (neither can anyone else, I suppose) what those questions will be. But I do have two hypotheses for whether we will reach the end of knowledge.

The first hypothesis is that we'll be extinct before we get there. The human race is clever; maybe clever enough to outlast a global catastrophe. But there are only so many things we can escape. We can't escape the death of our star, or any star. We can't escape quasars or gamma ray bursts.  We certainly can't escape the upcoming galaxy collision between the Milky Way and Andromeda. Humans are just too small to control these events. Even if we do survive the next 5 billion years, we will meet these catastrophes. Every species has its end.

 My second hypothesis is that any discoveries we will make, like the Theory of Everything, will be appropriate only for a certain time (a concept similar to, if not the same as, model dependent realism). Which means a new theory will have to be formulated. So we may see some things through to the end, but some things we may just die before seeing.

The end result is: we'll die, or keep finding things to explore. There is no end to knowledge, nor are humans a species suited to "sitting tight, holing up, waiting for answers".

Poetry in Motion...Sort Of

It is a fact well accepted by me that my prose is better than my poetry. But once in a blue moon, I come up with something that has to be addressed poetically. So here goes nothing:

It was an explosion.
Nay, it was an expansion.
It was the birth,
In which was also written death.

It was the start of a story still in writing.
A story which could just as easily not have existed.
A species would later on term this "contingency",
A species, a member of which writes this today.

To witness it would have been agony.
To witness it would be a feat.
To witness it one would have to transcend reality.
To witness it is to witness everything.

Everything was brought into existence by it.
Everything which could easily not exist today.
Everything then is everything now.
And everything everywhere is a function of how.

Every sunrise, every sunset.
Every star to ever adorn the night sky.
Every galaxy to be a home to some wonder in this expanse.
Every species to ever marvel at the beauty around her.

It is a glass bowl waiting to shatter.
It is a glass bowl which could have shattered.
It is a glass bowl which will shatter.
It is a cosmic house of cards; one false step collapses it all.

All was written in it.
All was born with it.
All will die with it.
All is fundamentally bound to it.

Well, I can see why I don't wax poetic often.

The Origin of Everything, Part Two

You think a nuclear war is violent? Well, being witness to the Big Bang would give you nightmares for the rest of your life. (Of course, one could make the case that nuclear war is more destructive than the Big Bang, and vice versa for the latter. But let's just talk about the energy released in the moment of creation.)

 The Creation of Matter

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say you know Einstein's equation, E=mc². It's very elegant. It describes a lot - nuclear fusion in the sun, nuclear fission in our nuclear power plants, the power of our hydrogen, atom, and nuclear bombs, and also...how matter was created in the early universe.

E=mc² explains all of these in facets. You can use various aspects of it to describe phenomena, from why we can't go faster than the speed of light, to what happened in the early universe. And to explain that, I'm going to have to use the facet of E=mc² that says that all matter is essentially a condensed form of energy. It's an abstract concept, so I request you to bear with me.

There are some nights where your brain feels like it is on hyper drive - won't let you have a moment's rest. There's just so much flurry up there that you feel like you have to get up and make sense of it all before you get a good night's sleep. I don't know the technical term for it. But you have thoughts and thoughts and thoughts...an onlooker will see you get restless, always changing positions. It's not very pleasant.

In some sense, that was what was happening in the early universe. There was an extreme amount of energy all over the place. The universe could not calm down. And because of this, particles could not be made. Rest could not be had. If a particle was made, it would be destroyed. It would have nothing to coalesce with.

Of course, the situation changed. Maybe the universe had milk and cookies, because it calmed down. It started cooling. And as it cooled, it allowed the formation of particles.

 Think about that for a second. This is the beginning of the universe. You know the law of conservation of matter - "Matter can neither be created nor be destroyed, it can only change from one form to another"? Do you know what it implies? The atoms in you, in me, in that bookshelf to my right, and the most distant star are all nearly 13,820,000,000 years old. They just have a long history of being in lots of chemical reactions.

"What can come out of a man looking up at the night sky?" They said. 

Constants

When I was in elementary school and first learned of the Big Bang, I hypothesized a tiny little solar system and tiny stars inside something like a sun. And I imagined the Big Bang like the hatching of an egg. Like that fiery ball just spit everything out and that’s the way it’s been since. I was wrong in some respects, and right in some.

Because, essentially, the “cosmic egg” did contain the ingredients for everything. Matter was only one of the things that the Big Bang spit out. It also spit out the four fundamental forces, dark matter, dark energy – you name it. And what that means is that it also defined the physics, chemistry, math, and biology that we study today.

My physics textbook for this year has this question (which I’m paraphrasing) –

“Physicist P.A.M. Dirac was playing around with some physical constants (like the speed of light and the universal gravitational constant) when he arrived at a quantity whose unit was time. And this quantity was roughly equal to the age of the universe. What does this tell you about the constancy of these quantities?”

The answer seems to jump out – that these constants have remained constant for 13.82 billion years. They were literally born with the Big Bang.

This post and the last don’t really do justice to the story of creation. Maybe there’ll be posts sprinkled throughout this blog in the future regarding this subject. Till then, ponder over this: We’re a more integral part of this universe than we ever imagined. 

The Origin of Everything, Part One

The night sky directly above our heads holds many secrets (of course, they wouldn't have to stay secret if it weren't for light pollution). It was looking up that jump started our creative thinking.  And, indeed, The question that incites the greatest curiosity is -  how did it all begin?

Like the flat Earth hypothesis, and the geocentric model of our solar system, it was at first thought that the Milky Way was the only galaxy in the universe and that the universe was static. It has no beginning and will have no end.

Then in the 1920s, Edwin Hubble shook this belief by -  you guessed it - looking up. So groundbreaking was his discovery that we named a space telescope after him. And, heck, even the space telescope is as famous as he is. See, what Hubble saw was that there were some flecks of light that one could simply not call 'stars'. What Hubble realized was that these flecks were entire galaxies,  just like the Milky Way.

I'd like to pause for a moment here, to explain the chain that continues even today.

 We've gone from being only one planet to realizing there are seven (formerly eight) others, and further, that there are many other planets.  We've gone from a flat Earth belief to a round Earth theory.  We've made the leap from a geocentric model of the universe to a heliocentric model of the universe, and now Hubble was on the verge of adding one more tier to the metaphorical cake.

Hubble not only told us that we are in one galaxy among many, but also that these galaxies are moving away from or toward us. This was a major discovery, because it meant that the belief that the universe was static now had to be scrapped. Something had to be hypothesized to explain the movement of these galaxies. And so the Big Bang hypothesis was, well...hypothesized.

Like many theories, The Big Bang theory was not easily accepted.  In fact, the name itself was an attempt to ridicule it, given by Fred Hoyle. And today it's the most accepted  theory for the origin of the universe.

Think about it this way: if galaxies are flying farther apart, something is pushing them apart (seeing as galaxies can't move on their own). That means that space itself is expanding. Further, it means that space was once much smaller than this.  We call this starting point a "singularity".

So, the Big Bang theory states that the universe was, essentially, born out of a singularity that started expansion 13.82 billion years ago,  and it still hasn't stopped. What came out of it and how it affects us today will be a topic for the next article.