Astrophysics and Ramayana

 

Two pages from two books illustrates the soul of Astrophysics and Indian philosophy. Left side is a page from "Black Holes and the Universe" by Igor Novikov and right side is a page from "Sita" by Devdutt Pattanaik. 

We can easily appreciate (not necessarily understand) the mind blowing equations in astrophysics and concepts like, non-euclidean space, closed universe, finite space with no boundaries etc. We are ready to ridicule questions like "Where this space exist?". Has anyone thought that this question is "topologically" same as "Who is the creator of God?". When we talk about "Kurma" incarnation of Vishnu, it is often considered stupid to invoke the world from ocean. But we don't have any hesitation to believe in the ocean of neutrinos existed nowhere.

When I almost finished reading the first book (Black holes ... ) and took the second (Sita), one interesting thought came to my mind. Astrophysics talks about closed universe, and Indian Philosophy talks about Cyclic Time. Are they not same concepts? As per Einstein,"Time is an illusion" and modern science consider time as another dimension of space. When we say time is cyclic, it automatically implies Space is closed. From a moving bus, we can either say trees are moving or bus is moving. Theory of relativity helps us to believe both are correct. Let me extend this to the concept of time. In one viewpoint, we can hold our consciousness still and imagine that the surroundings/universe is changing/evolving. In other viewpoint, we can imagine that the consciousness is moving while unraveling a still Universe. This is like a video player reading data from a tape. None of the data is newly created. Entire data exist always in the tape and the sensor is sensing one incident at a time. We can consider the path traced by our consciousness as time. When Astrophysics tells Space is Closed in first viewpoint, it is same as telling Time is Cyclic in second viewpoint.

It is true, that there is no experimental proof for many of these great thoughts. What about the theories in modern science? Many times the prediction by theories are proved much later. One important thing to remember is that the Universe is not following any theories. We are creating theories to explain the Universe. Imagine how funny it will be, if Universe has to do all complex calculations before moving every photon and colliding particles.

Worlds of Reality

I jumped up in the air and moved my hands to get balance. Slowly pushing the air backward I moved forward about one meter above the ground. I could guide myself in any direction with hands. I was doing it like a natural activity and I was little surprised why others were not able to levitate and fly.


Suddenly I got disturbed and woke up from the dream. Yes, I saw the same dream many times before. But I am not remembering that "remembering" this dream so vividly. As I read "Phantoms in the Brain" [V. S. Ramachandran], I want to give some brain to it. I remember one of my friend mentioned about similar dream in which he was running and suddenly he started flying and he has not realized anything special about it in the dream. Some point in life we were all kids and wanted to fly like birds. May be this why we dream about flying. But what intrigued me is the memory of dreams. This time I woke-up in the middle of dream and suddenly had a flow of memories of the same dream occurred before. It seems like a dream is happening in its own world. Until I woke-up in the middle, there was no connection between that world and the world in which I am writing this blog. At the moment of wake-up, the flying-dream-world is collapsed into blogging-real-world. Probably the so called "Final Realization" is the collapsing of this world into some new world due to some unknown wake-up call. I believe the director of the movie "Inception" had similar dreams and similar thought process.

We all know that we are physically in the bed while dreaming. Then where are these worlds exist? Obviously in the brain. This leads us to the quote by Rene Descartes, "I think, therefore I am". V. S. Ramachandran explains a thought experiment of connecting a brain with some signals produced by a computer imitating our senses. This is similar to the movie Matrix. What will happen? Will the brain create a concept of "I"  and "feel" the world as per the signals send from the computer? All this shows that many great brains agrees the world inside our brain. Now, consider each of the world we talked earlier, as individual circuits in brain, may not be physical but logical. Our senses influence only the real-world-circuitry. We often say "He is in his own world" and that may be literally true.By shaking his shoulder you just short circuited two worlds!

Stephen Hawking goes a step further and explains "the direction of time" itself is a brain activity. There is a principle in Thermodynamics which states that the Entropy, will always increase. In other words, when time goes forward, the disorder in the universe will always increase. As per Hawking, every brain activity will result in an increased disorder in our brain. This increased disorder creates the feeling of time. That means, the Entropy/Disorder is not going to increase in future but we call the state of increased Entropy/Disorder as Future. This theory can explain why the feeling of time is distorted and different in each dream. In some dream, we feel like the world is in slow-motion (Again credits to the movie Inception) and in some other we go backward in time. The disorder inside the brain, as a system, may be increasing always because of our physical and mental activities. But the individual worlds created by each circuitry can have different rate of change of disorder. Even they can share disorder and reduce the disorder in an individual circuitry  making the feeling of going back in time.

Master Zhuang: Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.

Let me know if this Blogging is a dream or not from your comments.