Utter emptiness. A lacuna, an oblivion of nothingness like no other. Or so we think, for nothing is certain about this place. If we can call it a place. If we can go back to before it happened. But how do you define time here? And then it happens. A blink is too long of an interval to describe it. Before you know it, there’s everything. If you were there you wouldn’t fit. If you did fit, you wouldn’t be able to see. Assuming none of the other myriad problems are our concern. After all, we neglect air resistance and higher-order terms. Soon, you have enough room growing around you, the region clears up and stuff gets moving around you. You have space to move about and so does light, meaning you can finally see. Before you know it, all the good stuff is over. The only major artifact of this fantastic event is a tiny whine which was mistaken for pigeon droppings.

The cosmic microwave background radiation
The cosmic microwave background radiation, 1

It takes a good long while for any new magical changes to occur. Large chunks rise and fall, no one, the wiser. Balls of fire swell and shrink. If no one heard the tree fall in the forest, did it make a sound?

Time goes on. More chunks and more balls of fire.

A million is much larger than you think. Errors in the million are colossal. Quantities which demand such extravagant errors are extravagant themselves. With our logarithmic minds already having lost track of these scales, what are three more zeros at the end? We flash by a few of these with nothing of interest happening. A violent collision gifted us the Selene, and we’re still not close to all that much happening.

The Giant Impact Hypothesis
The Giant Impact Hypothesis, 1

We have some chemical magic to create biology, and Charles Darwin will help us catapult a couple more eons with his theory. From despicable bottom feeders to the chosen ones, rose our race. After spending some time in the doldrums, we finally reach our time. By drowning ourselves in this delusion of grandeur, we shall proceed to create more chaos in this uniformity. A drop of ink in the vast ocean. Without having survival to worry about unlike other creatures, we sat down to think. And think we did. We had eccentric Greek graybeards, who could only do so much despite being ahead of their time. Hidden away within their separate geographical barriers lay the diligent Chinese and the intelligent Indians who shed light, the value of which would take a very long time to be realized. However, the moment where we started to catch fire was much later. The self-proclaimed center of our world, the most powerful conquerors were in a transition. Here, they gave birth to the scientific method and hence the scientific revolution. We had begun.

A flurry of discoveries and developments well documented by many others across the world leaves little that remains to be said. The spark from the flint had become a wildfire and the hunger fueled by our megalomania gave us things we would never have imagined when we evolved into being. Lord Kelvin once said that physics was done for. Everything we’d ever hoped to discover or find was found, we’d only have to measure things more precisely for the sake of it. He couldn’t be further from the truth. With Max Planck playing spoilsport and opening up a whole new world, it turns out that we have much left to find.

A timeline we don’t want to be in
A timeline we don’t want to be in

Chances are you’ve heard of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics and alternate timelines. We accommodate a different universe where any other course of action which could have taken place takes place. Think of a different course of action for everything you’ve done today. What if you stretch it out to your life? What about the lives of others? What if we didn’t exist? Well, we’re stuck in this Universe where we don’t have a choice :P It is remarkable that despite the overwhelming number of possible universes we could be in, we have ended up in this one. We are, indeed, very lucky.

The advent of computers has accelerated everything. The white horse we were riding on has become a tidal wave. Physics has been revolutionized by the data wave. Massive amounts of observational data are changing the way we formulate theories. The image of the black hole taken by the EHT had PETABYTES of data, all for one lovely image. Seriously, I can see stuff around me better without my spectacles. We are but a feather in this data storm. To understand the large, we’d have to understand the small. We’d also want to mess around with simulations of quantum activity, to speed up the very thing we’re using to simulate our stuff right now. A positive feedback loop!

M87*, the first image of a black hole taken by the EHT Collaboration
M87*, the first image of a black hole taken by the EHT Collaboration, 1

In this rapidly changing world, we are stuck in a relentless rat race where everyone refuses to yield. The past keeps haunting the future, and all we ever want is a little peace and quiet. In this fast lane, our vision is tunneled. A young man went to the wise vizier for advice. The vizier gave him a spoon with some oil and told him to walk around the palace and get back to him without dropping the oil. Our focus narrows to the drops of oil on our spoon, we refuse to look at the gardens, the pillars and the architecture. Let’s take our foot off the gas to appreciate the true elegance behind the world. It is not bland monotony; there is something deeper and incredible in all that we’ve achieved. Here, at the blog of the Physics Association of BITS Pilani, we strive to slow down the speed of this world and share a slice of the swanky innovations while also showing you the splendid past in the world of physics. We sit in the cockpit to decide which of the many worlds we want to enter now and we hope you will join us on our roller coaster. After all, you can put the oil into a vial while you’re flying around and put it back on the spoon when you catch up with the vizier again. We promise we won’t tell him!

  1. Images from Wikimedia Commons ↩ ↩2 ↩3