I lay on the roof of my taya's house, enjoying the breeze, that offers some respite from the terrible humid weather that has been torturing the residents of Lahore for the past so many days. I can see wisps of clouds, a mixture of black blue and greyish white studded with 5 bright silver dots, and many other faint silver dots. Its so simple, but its beautiful. It reminds me of so many questions that i've had since i was really small, so many questions that noone has had answers to. These are the questions that i wanted to find answers to, they're questions regarding our universe. Its because of these questions that i've always wanted to be a scientist, a researcher, an explorer, a cosmologist, astronomer, astronaut and so many other things at the same time.
This universe, this world, infact everything around us is so fascinating if we just look at it a little more closely than we normally do. Everything physical, is everything metaphysical. We understand so few things, its surprising. We, the best of God's creations, understand so less.
Anyways, one of the questions that i've always wondered about is that is the universe infinite? Ofcourse, science presents so many different theories, mostly by Stephen Hawkings. It reminds me, i was reading his book, A Brief History of Time, its a fascinating book. But even that didn't answer my question. The actual back ground of my question is this:
once somebody asked me, pointing at a glass of water,
what is this body of water contained in?
I replied, the glass.
What is this glass contained in?
I replied, the house, or the room.
What is this house contained in?
I said, the atmosphere, or the the world.
What is the atmosphere contained in?
I said, our solar system.
What is the solar system contained in?
I said milky way.
What is the milky way contained in?
I said the universe.
What is the universe contained in?
I had no answer. The question opened so many new dimensions of thoughts to me.
Everything mentioned above barring the universe is know to have defined boundaries, or atleast some sense of boundaries, that enables it to be contained inside something. But when it comes to the universe, we're in a dilemma. Human beings cannot comprehend the concept of infinity. To them, to us, the universe does seen to go on for trillions of light years, but how can we imagine it to never come to an end?
And if it does come to an end, because every other material thing, every other creation does, the seas oceans, layers of earth everything comes to an end, then what is the universe contained in? What is outside it? Answering another parallel universe is an option, but then what outside that? It appears to be a stupid question but its been fascinating me for years, i tried to look for answers in my mind, through logic and through science, but science hasn't gotten that far as to go beyond the universe. Actually, as i found out some days ago, we know about droplets in a sea of mystries!
I was reading about the Large Hadron Collider experiment thats started at CERN recently. (finally, the apparatus has been under construction for ages) The report said that the universe is only 4% matter, 23% is dark matter and 73% is dark energy. The latter two, we dont know much about, infact we probably dont know anything about dark energy. So that leaves us with 4% only. Out of which, we have only gotten as far as the moon with manned flights and our satellites are limited to the 7th planet of our solar system only. Our telescopes, have seen andromeda, the nearest galaxy, and a few others that are yet unnamed. But thats it? So out of all the matter in the universe, we know for sure about, what can you say, 0.001% or even less? Thats how much we've understood.
Maybe some people believe the world is nearing the apocalypse anyways so there's no time for such luxuries, but i believe understanding that is very important. Therefore, i've been defending the LHC experiment which has taken up 5 billion pounds, nearly four times its planned budget.
Anyways, coming back to the point, i'm always amazed at the different answers people have presented to the above asked question. Noone knows which one's true, i just hope one day i can find an answer.
Maybe the LHC experiment will help just a little bit in understand the nature of the universe and thus answer my question that what's outside it.
Lets keep our fingers crossed for the two beams of protons :)
3 comments:
The universe itself is finite but as you yourself been pondering, what holds the universe together or where exactly it fits in is beyond the scope of our very limited scientific knowledge.
I myself find these thought-provoking questions to be very fascinating. They challenge your way of orthodox thinking and requires one to rationalize his/her surrounding rather than just being spoon fed with pre-digested theories.
Coming back to the discussion, we understand now that the universe is expanding, accelerating (a fact that we got to knew recently, which by the way is mentioned in the Quran). So, as i said before, yes the content in the universe is finite, but for how long will we keep expanding? Would we be hitting some solid wall eventually? Who knows...
As for LHC, yes indeed it is a breakthrough in scientific ingenuity but the Higgs Boson particle aka the God Particle they theorize seems a little too far fetch but then again, that is my reasoning...
Interesting article!
@exquisite
thanx for visiting :)
you know its these questions and a lot more that seem to have no answers and seem to have a multitude to answers. And yes Quran speaks of so much about the universe and its surprising how late has science realised everything. I was reading an ayat of Surah Baqarah and it spoke of pairs of everything. I suddenly realised oh God this speaks of matter anti matter as well! That we've discovered so recently. But i wasn't surprised. The Quran is from the One who knows all answers, the One who made all questions and answers, so why'd it be surprising that he chose to tell us a few things?
Anyways yeah the Higgs Boson seems a little too good to be true, Haina, but certainly, there's a lot to be discovered apart from that too. Lets wait for the real experiment to begin.
Thanx again :)
indeed an interesting post.
and i was reading about LHC only a few days ago on shysoul's blog that eventually led to exquisite's as well.
science is in the air :p or is it me opening my eyes to smth i used to fascinate a lot about,,,the milky way, black hole and all..dono where that interest went..but with such posts its all coming back
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