the lazy blogger and Cosmos
Well, it has been a while that i have embarked on yet another blogging adventure. Not to say that i didnt do lot of reading; i have and here is what i have learnt: 'blogging is fun; and to read blogs is like reading the person'. Latest in the cramming world of blog is my uncle from Singapore (http://subbukanna.blogspot.com/). There is not much here, but well, for a yester-generation man to take steps and join the blogger revolution is an event worth welcome.
What i have been doing these days worth mention - i have been getting a lot into cosmology lately. Ever since my childhood days, the universe has always been a puzzle to me. I've always been curious on the questiosn like why are we (humans) here? is there a god? if there is, where did he come from? if god can be created (come from somewhere), then how can he/she be god? etc etc. I remember starring into the dark skies into the stars wondering the magnificence of the universe, the stars, and more importantly, the depths human kind is willing to push to satiate the curiosity around these things.
The theory of relativity, in particular, amazes me. Here i am, conditioned by 24 years of observation and reading that time doesnt vary by observer - and theory says dont look at time as a constant. I am supposed to imagine a 4 dimensional space-time (3 for space, and 4th one for time) system and map the universe based on that. But simple truth is that we all observe this practically, but dont pay much importance to this thought - for e.g., if the Sun were to die (just disappear) this very minute, we will not come to see the void until after 8 minutes. Let us say that we have a friend in Mercury - this friend would say that the Sun died at 8am, while i would say that the Sun actually died at 8:05am (if it takes 3 minutes for the light to get to Mercury). The sun we witness now is 8 minutes older than the real sun because it takes that much time for the light to travel to the earth. Which actually means when we look at the night sky, we are starring at a very very old universe.
Even within the earth, my folks at India are 1330 hours ahead of me, which means when they are celebrating my birthday on Jan 7th midnight, i am stacking up food at lunch on Jan 7. Time is relative - and is relative to space. For human beings on the earth, time is recorded by what position the earth is relative to the Sun (that describes the day of the year), and what is the Sun's position in the sky (that defines the time of the day). But if i were to live in the Sun, i would call it preposterous to calculate my time based on that, and instead would use the time the Sun takes to revolve in the galaxy.
Too much thinking, huh? Well, there is a saying that a learned man realizes the truth that the world is filled with infinite knowledge, and i am getting to see that in reality. if every human being in the world were to take a subject and do a PhD in it, even then i dont think we will be able to cover up all the knowledge in the universe. There are thousand completely difference subjects, ranging from cosmology to physcology to software to geology to medicine to business to arts to biology and the list will go on. Even the art of learning to master the piano is a life time work; study of the migrationary behavior of whales, that is another life time subject.
Nature is supposed to be producing 'superior' beings, and i bet the current generation is more intelligent than the previous one, and the next generation will be more intelligent, but intelligent doesnt necessarily mean doing the right thing. Motivated by money, hordes of engineers in India (i belong to that category myself) are spending their intelligence in information technology, while research areas like Civil engineering, Mechanical engineering, and research subjects like cosmology, and medicine are lacking these intelligent people because these subjects are supposedly 'rough rides' for an equivalent paycheck. The question being posed is - what do you want? a lifetime of research on the migration of birds or quick bucks at a flourishing IT startup??the answer seems quite obvious; it is basic human nature. But, this could challenge the growth of human research if everyone were to think of it that way. After all, if research were to stop, we would all perish.