.... HOW I WONDER WHAT YOU ARE..

 

.... HOW I WONDER WHAT YOU ARE...🔭🔭

The quest to unravel the secrets of the universe was so eloquently conveyed in the ever-green nursery rhyme "Twinkle twinkle little star..." by poet Jane Taylor.   Ever since, as a young child, I heard this recited by my kindergarten teacher, I had been curiously gazing at the night sky.  The child's curious mind never had stopped asking for answers. Partly this, and partly, at my dad’s insistence, the habit of reading and listening to news around the world, got me hooked to the mesmerising endeavours of humankind to explore the heavens.

The equations describing laws that govern how nature works always made me wonder about what kind of   an intuitive meaning could be attached to it. That led me to spend more time understanding them. It often led to experiencing a feeling of great euphoria when I managed to unravel some of this, occasionally. Mathematics and physics became more of a passion and less of lessons to be learnt and answers reproduced. This, however, left me less competent to survive the exams in any commendable way but did imbibe in me an everlasting desire to enquire into the unknown. An earning that led me to realise the beauty of mathematics and how nature express herself through them.

 

Realities of a carrier in Physics or rather the lack of one, as available to an ordinary middle-class student, way back in the mid-seventies, led me to pursue other avenues. But the emptiness, deep inside, of not being able to probe and understand the universe remained.  The huge developments in the field of Classical mechanics, Theory of Relativity, Quantum physics, the String theory, the quest for the Unification theory, to name the most profound, that enabled humankind to fathom a little bit of what is happening, seemed out of reach for me.

Then, sometime in the nineties, I managed to find time to be familiar with astronomy, both theoretical and observational. Only as an amateur. An accidental meeting with a gentleman who manufactured telescopes led me to buy a low-end one. As always, I self-taught myself and learnt the rudiments of operating it and spend long hours gazing through it. Mostly an attempt to search out, at least physically or visually, what one could not understand as yet.

The sheer beauty and the magnificence of the secrets buried deep inside space made me realise how insignificant humans are, how fragile living beings were, in this vast sea of emptiness and matter. All mundane aspects of existence, of life's constant struggle, ceased to be of much less relevance compared to the quest to understand why and how

the universe works.

The advent of the internet was a game changer for me. I soon realised that my yearning to understand the laws of nature and her hidden secrets could be realised. Over the years, this unimaginably reachable world, of the world wide web and the search engines, provided me with ample opportunities to satisfy my craving.

I went through series of courses, conducted by famous physicists, mathematicians from world renowned universities, at practically no cost.  It’s been a decade now and I have managed to get rudimentary knowledge of theoretical physics. My leisure time is all this and no more.

 I was lucky to be able to spend several hours at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, Washington DC, the Ontario Science centre, Toronto and, earlier, Science Museum, London which provided an amazing experience of actually seeing real space vehicles and technology.

Though limitations of my mental faculties, and now age, will never allow me to reach any significant level of understanding or do serious work in the field, I am satisfied that I have made an attempt to learn and understand and got to be familiar with several fields relevant to this quest. I realise, as do most of those in the field, both experts and armatures, that the more you seem to know, you realise that you need to know much more. Nature's secrets are not easily revealed.

Modern machines like the Large hadron collider, (LHC) or the LIGO (Laser interferometer gravitational wave observatory), to name a few,  exploring the deep end of matter (former) and the universe (latter), are steadily expanding our knowledge. As daunting the challenges are, as frustrating the slow progress is, the stronger is humankind's thirst to seek the unknown. For me now, that is the only real purpose of existence. In my small little way. As long as my mental faculties allow me.  

“One cannot understand…the universality of nature, the relationship of things, without an understanding of mathematics. There is no other way to do it.” -Richard Feynman