Wednesday, December 28, 2005 

A Textbook Case of Digression.

The radius of an atom is of the order of a few angstroms (1 angstrom = a billionth part of 10cms). Saying that it is of the order of a few angstroms doesn’t really give a good picture of how small an atom really is. To get around problems such as these, where in the reader is to be familiarized about a subject with particular emphasis on certain selected traits of the same, a figure of speech called ‘simile’ has been successfully employed by many, and unsuccessfully employed by many more, authors. A simile is an effort saving device that works by striking the human brain with sudden surprise, forcing it to stall, stutter and reexamine the worthiness of language as a means of communication. Here are a few similes that totally defy logic and appeal to those vestigial parts of our brains that we have as-is inherited from our primate ancestors (which reason and science dictate to be almost all the parts of our brains), parts which are believed to have helped them to have indulged in activities that have off late come to be known as creative pursuits. I’ll start with the one that left me inactive for the better part of two minutes, which ironically, also happens to be the one I like the most (of the sixteen that I looked up on wikipedia).

“Death lies on her, like an untimely frost”
— William Shakesphere

[Dear Mr. Shakesphere, I wish you told me how you came up with shit like that. I also wish you translated it all into English before dying.]

“Woo the moon like the tide”
— Vladimir Mayakovsky

[Dear Mr. Mayakovsky, I understand that you were busy with the Russian revolution and all. Nevertheless, I feel obliged to inform you that two hundred years before you were born, a particular gentleman of the name of Isaac Newton deduced that it is the moon that woos the tide (and not the other way around) after being bonked on the head by an apple.]

“Jubilant as a flag unfurled”
— Dorothy Parker

[Dear Ms. Parker, I wish you took time out of your writing to do some basic reading. Please understand that flags - are nothing but dyed fabric and are incapable of feelings … even when unfurled.]

“A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle”
– Irina Dunn

[Dear Ms. Dunn, I see that you are not normal. I do agree with you on that ‘women are like fishes’ thingie. In fact, the last time I checked, some people had succeeded in not just crossing them but also in getting their offspring to star in a movie. I think you’d enjoy watching it more than whom it was intended for.]

I am so inspired right now by this Dunn lady that I think I’ll make a simile or two myself. Brace yourself!

“A woman like a fish without a man is like a bicycle”
- m8al

“A bicycle without a woman is like a fish without a man”
- m8al


OK. There is no way I can continue this post with any pretensions of seriousness. So I think I’ll postpone it for the time being and rename this from “My take on life Part 2: More Infinitesimals” to well … whatever is written up there. By the way I’ve often observed that when I am tickled to the extent of laughter, few join me in it. Most of the few are people diagnosed with abnormal psychological conditions. So, if you find this senseless mockery of humanity’s greats anywhere close to funny please use a defibrillator on your wet temples immediately and call the closest asylum for assistance.

18:56 | |

Tuesday, December 27, 2005 

My take on life Part 1: The Infinitesimals

If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is:
Infinite.
-William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Clichéd ideas are not necessarily ideas that do not deserve a second look. May be these are ideas that have been presented for a second look more often than once and have, in due course of time, become clichéd. More relevant here, is my notion that clichés are an unassuming and quiet a safe way to start.

The dimensions involved in this cliché are beyond your imagination, and mine. That which is beyond human imagination is only barely with in the limits of human methods of quantification. But as always they have tried and they came up with some numbers. I have used the numbers.

There are an estimated 125 billion galaxies each with billions of stars. The Milky Way is one out of these 125 billion. Two-thirds of the way from the center of this galaxy is an ordinary star which if not for the accident of life on one of its planets would have faded… from ordinary, to oblivion. It might not be that fortunate now.

Then there is the Earth – home to a bewildering variety of life forms, tens of millions of species, some still thriving, most extinct, one of them ours –Homo sapiens.

A few of the over six and a half billion homo sapiens live on the planet, the rest manage to survive… all of them in the same world, yet each in its own world… six and a half billion human brains - collecting facts, churning numbers, feeling emotions, moving limbs, reacting, over reacting, interacting, communicating, misunderstanding, fighting, dying…. one of them my own and one of them yours.

They say the universe is over 10 billion years old, our Earth 4.5 billion years old. They say there’s been a Big Bang and they say there might be a Big Crunch. Thankfully, they accept that they cannot, while working under assumptions that are considered reasonable in this day and age, deduce anything about the state of matter and energy before the Big Bang or after the Big Crunch (if there is one).

[If the universe does not end in a Big Crunch it will, according to the second law of Thermodynamics definitely end in a gradual heat death… a state of maximum entropy. But will time end if the universe “dies”? Will time cease to exist if there are no clocks to tick? I don’t think so. I believe that time is as an infinite entity. I believe that one cannot link the beginning or end of time to the presence or absence of matter. But it is only a belief. I also believe that space is infinite.]

They have found no reasonable bound on space yet nor is any one expecting to find one. Whether space ever ends is as yet an unanswered question and probably will remain so for a long time to come. Here is the catch: assuming that the universe is ‘x’ billion years old, we will not be able to see beyond ‘x’ billion light years, for nothing travels faster than light (or so says Einstein). In other words, the limit of the distance that can be directly observed by us is the age of the universe times the speed of light. In effect, the longer we manage to survive the farther we’ll be able to see. If time is infinite and if we do manage to survive forever (without finding a way around our current speed limit) we might find that space too is infinite in its extent.

Without going into whether or not (cutting the crap that is … ) the extents of space and time are truly infinite I’ll limit myself to making the point that with respect to dimensions that effect us and are influenced by us, they can be approximated to be so.

Math speak: the fraction of space occupied by any finite body in an infinite extent of space is zero (same goes for time as well).

So, there you have it in a nutshell - In the larger scheme of things you and I, Gandhi and Kennedy, the whole planet and the solar system, for that matter any entity occupying finite space and time are all reduced to mere zeros. Well if not zeros in an infinite universe then infinitesimals in a universe that approaches infinite dimensions of space and time. We are the infinitesimals. A conclusion each one of us has consciously or unconsciously, made and ignored, for the conclusion is as unsettling as it is fascinating.

That our existential realm is infinitesimal is information that I, in spite of repeatedly being able to establish its veracity, have never really been able to accept. Something in side me stirs in protest whenever my mind tries to internalise the knowledge of our 'infinitesimal-ness'. It is as if I've been programmed to look away from the obvious, to turn a deaf ear to voices of reason, screaming at me from the farthest reaches of the cosmos. I try to live in ignorance and bliss but I fail. I try to forget, I can't. The human mind is a bitch of the most unreliable kind - it forgets what it should not and delves on what it should be forgetting.

21:51 | |