Only
as far as we imagine…
On a clear night 20,000 years ago a man lay
next to the warming fire and gazed upward; he saw a glittering dome that
contained the world he lived in. Today when I lounge on my balcony and stare up
at a smog-obscured-night-sky, I see an infinite universe, perhaps one of many;
a vast nothingness punctuated by millions of insignificant balls of fire with
finite life spans, around one of which we spend our precariously short
existence. Over the last many thousands of years, we have shattered that
domed-roof over our heads and thrown back its limits into the reaches of
infinity. And all because we dared to imagine, imagine an infinity, imagine a
time even before time.
However, our world is only as big as we can
imagine. Our discoveries will remain contained within the boundaries of our
imagination. If we cannot imagine it, we shall not discover it. The 17th
century philosopher Benedictus Spinoza once said ‘if a triangle could speak, it would say, in
like manner, that God is eminently triangular’. So do we, a carbon-hydrogen-based
life-form think that life is where water is. We go hunting for obscure marks of
water-that-once-flowed on the surface of far away planets. But is that the
limit of possibilities or is that just as far as our imagination can take us?
We are a species capable of unparalleled
imagination. In these last 20,000 years our brain has taken us on journeys
beyond experience; shading our eyes to gaze outward as far as the edges of
universe or peering inward to dissect the minutiae of that brain itself. But
these boundaries were not reached in one leap but in steps, some small, some
giant.
In his book A short history of nearly everything Bill Bryson says, ‘Once in a great while, a few times in
history, a human mind produces an observation so acute and unexpected that
people can’t quite decide which is the more amazing – the fact or the thinking
go it.’ He is talking about Newton, but the same could be said of the other few
times that mankind has taken that giant
step forward. ‘The thinking of it’ is so amazing, so freeing, that like
that first thin stream of water breaching the crack in the dam, it lets the
rest of the river of human knowledge burst through, washing away the remnants
of the dam. Our imagination leaps ahead into the space opened up, suddenly free
and unrestrained, until that is, a new wall is reached.
The history of science is littered with such
‘feats of thinking’. Like when John Snow was faced with a cholera epidemic
decimating 19th century Londoners. London was a vile place full of disease.
Under the ramshackle houses lining the busy streets were cesspits with years of
accumulation of refuse and excrement. Snow focused his attention on one street
where nearly 500 people had died in a matter of two weeks. In an inspired
epidemiological study he identified the commonalities between the patients and
proposed that the source of the disease was contaminated water coming from a
single pump down the street. In a world that believed diseases were either
punishment from the gods or a result of bad air, this required quite a leap of
imagination. The authorities were reluctantly persuaded to disable the pump,
saving hundreds of lives.
James Hutton lived in 18th century
Britain. He trained to be a medical doctor, became a farmer but is now known to
us as the man who founded modern geology. Just as we all do, he too liked a
beautiful landscape of mountains and valley and rivers and lakes. But he went
further to note that although wind and water constantly erodes mountains and
carries the sediments down to the sea and the plains, the world has no dearth
of mountains. That sometimes you can find remains of sea-creatures high up on
the mountains. The Christian faith maintained that earth was created 6000 years
ago and that all change happens by cataclysmic events such as the Great Flood.
Hutton’s imagination came up with another explanation. After years of
painstaking observation and collection of data from various parts of the
Europe, he proposed that the reshaping of earth’s landscape is the result of continuous
but slow incremental change wrought over millions of years. These geological
changes are constantly restructuring the earths crust, moving not just
mountains even continents, thus today’s oceans may become tomorrow’s mountains
and vice versa. In one fell swoop Hutton
pushed the age of earth back from a mere 6,000 years to millions of years.
Most scientific discoveries are made by a
handful of people. Another handful of people are intellectually able to
understand and critique the discovery. The rest of us merely struggle to
interpret the results and how it changes the world as we know it. Nowhere is
this more true than the science of the origins of our universe. In early 20th
century, astronomers began to suspect that we live in an expanding universe. In
the 1920s Edwin Hubble, after whom the Hubble telescope is named, realized that
everywhere you look, galaxies are moving away from us. This led to the idea
that, at the beginning of this expansion all the contents of our universe must
have been concentrated in one place, from where it shot out in all directions,
in other words, in the beginning there was an explosion, the Big Bang. Since we
know how far the galaxies are from us today and also the rate at which they are
receding from us, we can calculate the time at which it all began, around 13-14
billion years ago. In 1940s George Gamow and colleagues imagined that if the
universe did indeed begin with a big bang, there must be residues of the ‘bang’
still reverberating through space. A prediction that was proved correct when in
the 1960s Arno Penzias, Robert Wilson and Robert Dicke in their experiments
encountered an annoying all-pervasive background radiation that wouldn’t go
away. So after 14 billion years our world still resonates with the violence
that began our universe.
Our imagination has carried us far. We have
discovered much. But each discovery births new questions, new wonders, new
boundaries to be breached, new walls to be scaled. As Ralph Sockman said, ‘the
larger the island of knowledge, longer the shorelines of wonder’.
But how much can we discover? Is there a
limit to our knowledge? Do we still live inside a dome in the sky, no matter
how big? Perhaps that dome is not in the sky, rather we carry it around with
us, in our heads. The day we stop imagining, we would have found that dome.
Nature is not an easily read book. It allows us only tiny glimpses of its
secrets, opening only those windows we knock on. As long as we have the zeal to
find a new window to knock, there will be secrets waiting to be
discovered.
Readings:
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson (an excellent
light reading!)
A History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell
Lots and lots of Google!!
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