I’ve always been fascinated by the cosmos and the endless shroud of mystery surrounding it. Every time I thought about my life and how infinitesimally small it is compared to the world we live in, I felt this sense of divine euphoria take over me. Growing up I asked the usual questions, what’s the meaning of life, how did the universe begin, why did it begin in the first place, where is it headed, can you travel back in time or forward in time, etc. The list is endless and most of it inspired by Star Trek, Star Wars and my personal favorite Back to the Future. There is very little we know about our universe considering its enormity. Some answers I discovered as I aged through my lifetime like the big bang, the singularity that started it, the beginning of time but others are still far away from my consciousness.
What started as an almost
obsessive thinking about the meaning of life led me to formulate some theories
of my own. These are of course, heavily inspired by the movie interstellar and
the science of Kip Thorne, the leading astrophysicist from Caltech who
formulated the equations for the movie. The leading scientists who study the
cosmos have concluded that our universe is most probably one of the many
universes that are created and destroyed. According to them it’s an endless
cycle. The big bang occurs, the universe comes into existence and then
eventually gets swallowed by a black hole and becomes a singularity which
starts the process again.
Ever since I read the statement
about this endless universe cycle, it struck a chord somewhere in my
subconscious. Have I not read something like this long ago, after some
tribulations, the answer came to me. It was an article about Hindu Mythology.
There are three gods in Hindu mythology who rule over all. Brahma the god of
creation, Vishnu the supreme god or protector and Shiva the god of
destruction. According to Hindu
mythology, the universe is cyclically created and destroyed in 8.64 billion
years which according to the mythology is one day in Brahma's life span. Brahma
creates the world and at the end of the day, Shiva destroys it and then the
process repeats itself.
As I began to process this
information, a wave of excitement hit me. I could see this theory forming ahead
of me and maybe finally I had some answers of my own. Time is experienced
differently at places with super high gravity than in relative places like
earth. So in the movie Interstellar, the protagonist who's on a distant planet
close to a black hole spends an hour on the planet while on earth seven years
have passed. We know this is possible and our scientific principles predict
this effect with details. Could it be something similar for god? Does he exist
in an nth plane where the time that he experiences in one day is close to 8.64
billion years? What is this nth plane that I stuck in the middle of the
sentence? Glad you asked. So we know that there could be multiple dimensions to
our universe or multiverse. We as human beings can currently look and feel
three dimensions. A tesseract which is a fancy word for hypercube is a 4-D
object. It’s a cube which has four
dimensions but we can’t visualize it well because we can only see three
dimensions at a time. String theory predicts as many as 11 dimensions to our
universe. Some might be infinitesimally small while some expand across our
universe.
I’m going to reference
Interstellar again here. Towards the end of the movie, the protagonist of the
movie Cooper falls into the Black Hole Gargantua and realizes that somehow he
has entered into this space where he can see time as a dimension. His memories,
his life span are all laid out in front of him. Skipping to the end of the
movie, he concludes that human beings advanced to a higher form of civilization
where they moved or could experience these other dimensions and it was these
humans from the future who somehow helped him to transmit information back to
the past to save humanity. It’s a complicated process but I’ll try to explain
it as we go along here.
Imagine this is the first cycle
of the universe. At a certain point of time, a civilization occurs and
eventually it reaches a Utopian era of science. The science is so advanced that
these people can move into or feel other dimensions. In this age, three people
from this civilization descend into the nth plane. The nth plane extends across
the universe and maybe beyond it. Let’s assume that these three people are
Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. We hear throughout all religions that god is
omnipotent. Because the nth dimensions extends across the universe, it would
make these three people exists everywhere at the same time. It’s difficult to
visualize this since we are used to dealing with three dimensional objects but
it’s theoretically possible. In a 2-D world where space bends in on itself you
would look like the 2-D image of yourself. You would still exist but your space
wouldn't be the same. The concept is similar for an nth dimension plane. I
can’t fathom what it would look like though and believe me I've tried.
After these three people
descended into the nth plane, since time exists for them different to how it
does for us, they can move back and forth into it. So they decided to go to the
beginning of time and create a singularity which eventually turns into the big
bang and starts the universe. For us time is a linear quantity i.e. t=1 sec,
t=2 sec, t=3 sec and so on but in the nth plane, time t=1 and t=n all exist in
parallel. I’ve a strong inclination to say all exist at the same time but time
in the nth dimension is not what it is in our dimension so I’ll try and refrain
from saying that. In the movie interstellar, Cooper realizes that the signals
he witnessed on earth were the same ones that he sent back from the future. We
are used to cause and effect but this is causation without effect. I’m going to
shift into the field of computers here for a second to emphasize my point. In
computer science, there is a programming language called C. To turn a C code
into an executable that you can click on and something shows up on screen, it
requires a software called the compiler. The compiler of C is written in C
itself. Herein lies the paradox. How can you compile the first C program if you
need to create the compiler using C itself? This process is called
bootstrapping. The singularity that started the big bang came into accord
because of the end of the universe it started in the first place, aka the
universe bootstrapped itself.
Okay so I finally had some
answers. I know god exists in the nth dimension, he’s omnipotent and how the
universe came into being. What struck me next was why does god indulge in this
cycle? What’s he getting out of this entire process of creation and
destruction? This question kept me preoccupied for days and then as before it
struck me unexpectedly. The answer being so simple “energy”. Energy can neither
be created nor destroyed. It can only be transformed. God indulges in this
cycle because the energy from destruction has to be transformed into
construction and the process has to repeat itself.
I’m going to round up my
hypothesis with another piece of the puzzle. I kept thinking about how Cooper
in interstellar from the future made contact with his daughter in the past. He
couldn’t move big objects and with considerable strength was able to move the
second hand of a wrist watch. We keep hearing almost universally that god works
in mysterious ways. Could this be the reason? Maybe the only way for him to
contact us from the nth dimension is through influences and smaller things that
combined together lead us to believe in his existence and his workings.
It’s disappointing in a way that
in my lifetime science would not have progressed enough to give us all the
answers we need. The future seems like an exciting place where we would have
discovered interstellar travel, time travel, hyper speeds and the meaning of
life but as of now, I am going to content myself by my own theory. I don’t
consider myself a religious person but I do believe in one true god. He appears
to everyone in a way that we perceive him and hence differently to everyone.
Different cultures, religions and people perceive him in the way they want to.
If I take the word of Stephen Hawking, god isn’t required for the universe but
to imagine life without it would mean that life has no meaning and it’s just
random probabilities and nothing more. That is a depressing thought so I’ll
stick to my theory for now and maybe one day I can convince Stephen Hawking
otherwise.
The first passage when I read, I thought , "hey! that is so similar to what I used to think when I was a kid. This guy looks like my alter ego!!" But I found a few dissimilaries, specially in terms of theories about God. I was 14 I guess, when I kinda started having doubts about God's existence. To me , God is just an idea, a mere explanation to things we could not explain yet to our egotistic mind. Just like in past days we had "surya devata" and "chandra Devata" just because we hadn't explored those planets/stars/satellites(Though some people still believe and fear them :-|). It is just a way to content our curiousity as well as to keep us positive in our hard times.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, I think I should stop here or my comment section will be larger than your post. ;)
By the way it was a nice read! :)