Monday, March 15, 2010

Whats out there and who are we? (more appropriately who am I?)

Quite some time since I wrote. My posts are almost always preceded by long discussions with Vishak.

The questions like where are we (I), what is our (my) relation to this universe, is it really an universe or a multiverse, do spatial dimensions higher than 3 exists and if so how can we perceive it, does spirituality gives answers or is science the ultimate way to find answers to these questions: really really intriguing.

Lets think about the time and length scales which we can perceive through our 5 senses. Human time scale can be taken to be the lifetime (I do not know what I was doing before I was born or What I will be doing after my death? Actually the 'I' does not make any sense in this context). Length scale may be the circumference of the earth (which we can travel without much difficulty. The definition of length scale is some what difficult). Almost all the time, our scales are not even this big. We just think about the next moment or may be next day or may be an year or ten. The thought is almost always about ourself or a small group comprising our parents and others and may be the society.

But all these thoughts break down and cease to make any sense when the time and length scales are increased by an order of magnitude. Light from the star which is seen today started from the star millions of light years ago. To know whether the star exists today we need to wait for another million light years. In a sense the light from the star is like history.

We live on earth, surviving because of sun and there exists billions and billions of sun like stars in just our galaxy Milky way. There are billions of galaxies and apparently group of galaxies make a universe. We are still not sure whether there is only one (universe) or there is a multiverse. Millions of earth like planets might exists and it can sustain intelligent forms of life like humans. We perceive this universe to be 3 dimensional space or in a more complete sense 4 dimensional space time fabric. We do not know whether there are more dimensions and we do not know ways to find out. What if there is a life form in some corner of the universe, where intelligent life forms have the ability to perceive 100 dimensions!!!!!!!!!!

These are a few questions which are intriguing. When we start to think about these questions, the unreal things like human emotions (manifestation of chemical activities in brain), love, possessiveness etc. does not make any sense. Questions like "Is Vinnai thandi varuvaya a good movie or not?" is bull .... The more we start to think in this direction the closer we can get to the answer.

3 comments:

rajasekar Paramasivam said...

Very good post,Sir. It is ______ (I will fill the blank at the last,let us discuss about the topic.) I have started to believe that a single person,for that matter even a long chain of many generations, could not be able to propel the intelligence of human brain to the so-called final place; It has to be a step-by-step process for sure, say we push it a distance today for our child,then our child will push it still furthur for their child to continue(ithu enna perumaya? kadamai).Having said this,what would one need to go on with this selfless journey? does he need a pure intellectual incitement? not exactly because he is already in the pursuit of intellect only; but,for sure, he needs an entertainment which is intellectual; And your post is intellectually entertaining.

Sagittarius said...

If you look into the time evolution of the nature of your posts, you are exponentially moving away from the "BSNL-Airtel" group...just an observation...by the way, we will not be able (or, at least we are not able) to perceive the 4 dimensional space-time...rather we are capable of perceiving only the projection of events in the space-time onto our 3D space...[I am not able to make this statement of "will not be able" with confidence because of one aspect of the above fact]

My views said...

fine fine I agree. Lets sort it out at the next random trip