Expression is foremost important
to me, because, somehow for me, there is always an urge to express the world
deep within and the world outside. Although, what is outside and what’s deep
within seem to be unrelated at times, but if we really look at it closely,
there is no difference: they both sway in the soup of oceanic cosmos, sharing
the atoms, and forces that bind them together.
I see science no different than
any other art form, it has a symmetrical inherent beauty to it, in homogeneity
at large scales, be it Mega Parsecs for cosmologists, or kilometres to
engineers or nanoscales for experimental physicists or mathematical congruence
for theoretical physicists, there is indeed, a link that connects them
altogether. Not in a frivolous momentary spark of excitement of some random
magic in a haphazard manner that is disarrayed and unpredictable, but that,
which is orderly with small deviations, and at times, if deviations are large,
they happen to expose another pattern, which went unnoticed before. For me,
science holds meaning in this very sense. It brings us closer to understanding
reality and of nature’s symmetry: a beauty, which is hard to express. It’s that
feeling, when you look at the bright stars gleaming in night sky, imagine about
their types, think about its life cycle, think about how the difference in
solar masses would lead some stars like our sun to red giants, some as pulsars,
some as neutron stars and some as black holes and as you realize you are
looking back in time too, and think about how matter actually was created in
the stellar core and we are stardust (in Sagan's words), you get that get that
eerie tinge of exhilaration mixed with humility.
Now your thinking can process to
take up different lines of thoughts e.g. if you notice twinkling stars, you
think about atmospheric refraction or the standard measurement of luminosity of
stars, but atmosphere, reminds you of the mixture of gases like nitrogen,
oxygen etc, but that reminds you of the creation of matter from the time of big
bang, and how the deuterium bottleneck
problem took years for universe to first cool down so that it was
energetically stable and so on the formation of other elements, but then when
you think of atmosphere you could also be reminded of the different types of
clouds, their altitudes, azure sky (Rayleigh scattering at work) and golden sun
having wavelengths in our visible range, and think about how flooded your
vision would be if you could see other EM waves, but then you also get reminded
of billions of neutrinos passing through you that go unnoticed because they are
weakly interacting particles, but then neutrino reminds you about its
postulation by Pauli to its recent detection and the budding neutrino
astronomy, which also reminds you about the existence of gravitational waves
and LIGO’s attempts to determine it, and wondering about our reach in
understanding the universe, you start swaying into the NASA missions over the
past 55 years and think about voyager that now sails in interstellar space or
curiosity rover exploring the Gale Crater of Mars and somehow these thoughts
just don’t seem to seize.
It’s like you encounter physics
almost everywhere or rather, the science of working of things, be it the
friction burns on skin after too many pirouettes in dance or the Bessel
function and a damping wave of a ripple in water, or the simple air we breathe,
the dust particles in it, causing diffusion of light, air also being medium for
sound to travel and this further on
extends to working mechanism of the body i.e. the vibrations in the ear drum,
the electrical neuron signals, involuntary and voluntary muscles in action, and
process of death and birth of cells working in perfect sync. But then again,
this makes you further wonder about the atoms, neutrons, meson exchange, quarks
and speculate on vibrating virtual particles, to a point where string theory
doesn't seem all that bizarre. And finally, you think about the computer and
the keyboard via which you are writing this essay, the RAM at work and internet
that revolutionized the working of the world. Also, thinking how NVRAMS by
multiferroic materials' research would be the upcoming next big thing, and the
heavy researches in spintronics taking place.
With this seemingly endless
parallel trail of thoughts zipping across my mind, I have somehow tried my best
to form a coherent passage (realizing now how James Burke in his Connections
series actually made those connections). Thus, I've tried to explain how I feel
about science, its ubiquitous presence and why it just can’t be ignored.
It is an expression, of nature in
deterministic and probabilistic ways, from macro to micro scales, an expression
of us all, of streams of consciousness afloat in mathematical simplistic
realms, which help in determination and experimentation: an exciting and
intriguing odyssey of ours, who were born curious. Science assimilates the
meaning of "being". Of nature, and its wonders...
