Thought for the Day

Nothing kills a man more patiently and painfully than having to live with being someone, with a constant realisation that he could have been so much more.

Be it the valiant soldier smothered by guilt, who had fought with everything he had but still spends hours evaluating alternate MOs that could have saved his partner. Or the passionate sportsman kicking himself for the rest of his life, calculating where he could have squeezed in that extra millisecond in the deciding moments of that unfortunate final. The helpless man who struggles towards the end of every month, wondering how he can be a better parent, husband and provider. OR the hopeless romantic trying to make sense out of his first brush with infatuation, ruminating why he can be everything he must be, except the man that he wants to be with the girl.

It is difficult beyond reason, the feeling- an all consuming cocktail of regret, anger, despair and guilt- is too much for anyone to live with. There are moments of utter weakness, when you want to submit to the chaos. There are moments of undying despair, where each passing second is a striking reminder of who you are, and much more importantly- who you are not, who you can never be. There are moments of utter madness, where you are willing to trade every last bit of happiness that remain in this God forsaken life of yours for one more try. It pains even more to realize, eventually, how misplaced and irrational the attempts were in the first place.

It does not lie anywhere near your realms of control. Despite all your strength or wisdom, there is nothing you can do to “fix this”. It is like falling in a bottomless pit. It invades your deepest, darkest recesses, places you weren’t even aware existed inside you. It breaks your pride while relentlessly staring at you straight in the eye, proving conclusively beyond doubt that compared to this, wounds that heal themselves are like blessings of physical pain, for the most permanent of scars always lie within.

Sometimes life will spare you to wander amidst possibilities and search for that one tentative link somewhere among the terribly mangled chains of causality that could offer you some sign of hope for a change in circumstances. It is made worse by the following swathes of self loathing. The irony of it breaks you when you realize you have irrevocably been a part of something that can never be undone, in a universe that boasts of its eternal penchant for change.

The presence of that individual is a constant reminder of how you are forever doomed to be just a worthless fraction of what you could have been. There is little escape from this. Those who manage to do so emerge stronger, wiser men who have now lost faith in some (or many) institution(s) held dear to mankind. They are men who manage a silent laugh when people talk about destiny and how good things are always meant to be.

Pain has its own way of teaching you some of life’s most invaluable lessons. It poisons you day in and day out. It changes you in ways that cannot be undone. It makes you stronger, immunizes you for other far worse forms of suffering. You aren’t really better or worse, just someone you never were before, damaged in ways that will never be known to those even closest to you- veiled by smiles and laughs that will always hide much more than they will reveal.

Most of life is having to choose between holding on and letting go. Anything in between is dishonesty, hypocrisy and an ugly compromise. They say time changes everything. It is a lie. Time merely pushes things further into the past, rendering an illusion of change. Choices change things. They are not always nice but they are necessary and you must let go of something in order to move on to something else.

I have always believed that there are no things that are best left unsaid. But there are some that are best left written- words have a kind of indelible permanency which life so does not possess.

The Triumph of Reason

We all go about our daily lives indifferent to the marvel that is life. Studies suggest that based on the initial and boundary conditions of our universe, the odds of intelligent life arising on planet Earth are lower than that of an enormous pile of waste in a junk yard arranging itself to assemble into a Boeing 747! Every once in a while though, some brilliant minds come along and change the way we look at the universe, forever.

Although science was progressing by leaps and bounds under the light of new theories (Quantum Mechanics) and discoveries (elementary particles) in the early part of the 20^th century, we had somehow grown too comfortable with- and hence ignorant of- the most pervasive of all natural forces- gravity. Perhaps it was because of the larger than life image of Isaac Newton, scientific community at large was of the opinion that gravity was understood in its entirety. Proposing that the force which makes an apple fall and the force which keeps planets in motion around the sun are essentially the same was unarguably his life’s work and one of the most elegant ideas of all time.

Albert Einstein was a little known clerk working in a Swiss patent office. Surfing through all the path breaking discoveries during his day job, he realized that although we could measure this force with great accuracy, it was quite embarrassing that we had no idea as to HOW it actually works. How is it that the sun grabs hold of the earth across vast empty space, eternally confining it in a periodic motion around itself?

In 1905, after publishing his work on Brownian motion, photoelectric effect and what we now recognize as the Special Theory of Relativity, Einstein decided to go after this missing piece of the puzzle, something which had apparently eluded even the father of gravity himself. It took him 10 years to perfect the math that would go into the most beautiful idea of all time- the theory of General Relativity.

Einstein blew everyone away by suggesting that gravity isn’t really a force and that time was the 4^th dimension of our universe. Put together with the known 3, it stitches the entire universe together in a 4 dimensional spacetime continuum. Everything exists and happens in the spacetime continuum. Anything that has mass curves spacetime causing objects in its vicinity to move in a predictable manner. Instead of being a property of a body, gravity is in fact a property of the universe itself. Any mass curves spacetime and curved spacetime tells mass how to move!

A 2D representation of spacetime continuum- the relativistic view of gravity.

From time travel to worm holes, this simple idea has had ground breaking implications. It completely changed our understanding of time and the universe at large. Since 1915/16, it has been verified by countless experiments and observations with far greater precision than that produced by Newton’s theory of gravity. One such implication was the existence of gravitational waves.

Much like electromagnetic waves which could transmit radiation (the only other force understood at that time), Einstein posited the existence of gravitational waves. He proposed that when two heavy objects (like super massive black holes or stars) interact, gravitational waves would be generated. These waves, not much unlike ripples in a pond, would travel unobstructed throughout spacetime at the speed of light. However, unlike visible part of the EM spectrum, they would not just be invisible but also too weak to be detected. This was until now.

On 11^th February 2016, a team of scientists working at LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational Waves Observatory) in USA confirmed the existence of these waves nearly 100 years after Albert Einstein had first theorized about their existence. They did this by stationing two laser beam apparatuses 3000 miles apart. These 8 km long ‘L’ shaped apparatuses fired laser beams and recorded an interference pattern at the moment of impact. Under the influence of gravitational waves coming from a distant binary star system (two super massive stars slowly collapsing into each other and losing energy by the emission of gravitational waves), these 2 observatories recorded a characteristic shift in their patterns (much like ripples on water cause a cork to bob up and down, only here the disturbance is in fractions of atomic diameter) which was matched at the two laboratories and confirmed.

A schematic representation of the LIGO observatory.

LIGO scientists estimated that the black holes for this event were about 29 and 36 times the mass of the sun, and the event took place 1.3 billion years ago. About 3 times the mass of the sun was converted into gravitational waves in a fraction of a second—with a peak power output about 50 times that of the whole visible universe. The detector in Louisiana had recorded the event 7 milliseconds before the one in Washington. Scientists are now advancing on to Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA)- a space based gravitational wave detector to repeat the experiment far away from earthly disturbances.

There are infinite human endeavours but none other quite captures my imagination as the pursuit of truth, the undying efforts of a lone race trying to make sense of a world no less magical than any of our imaginations. It is an endless quest that often breaches the realms of science, venturing into the philosophical, fiddling with the theological and at times- evoking the metaphysical. Its enormous mysteries give purpose to our existence, for even in my thoughts; I dread the day we all come to know all that is worth knowing.

It is the purest and sincerest curiosity, unadulterated by arrogance or authority, for everyone at some time in our lives would have found ourselves gazing at the horizon, questioning how it all came to be. In case you haven’t, take an evening out of your hurried lives, lay back on your arm chair, look up at the night sky and wonder how, wonder why. If you are calm and it is quiet enough, you will be humbled by the sheer vastness of it. The insignificance of your troubles and worries, the utter foolishness of war and violence, everyone you've ever loved, everyone who has ever lived, everything that we have done to this world- all meager inconsequential happenings on a pale blue dot going around a little known star lying in a trivial corner of one among billions of galaxies...

We are all miracles in a wonderland walking through our lives searching for magic.