The Infinite Book..
I am reading this book now-a-days – “The Infinite Book” by John Barrow. Pretty interesting book about the concept of Infinity in general – in mathematics, astronomy, religion, and elsewhere… Infinity is a pretty intriguing concept. I remember my school days when I was told that division by zero results in Infinity. Back then I understood infinity by knowing that the number that this division slowly approaches to is too large to write or comprehend. This book talks about all kinds of infinities though.. even the prospect of living forever!
But, honestly I think it is pretty frustrating to speculate and come up with all these theories, while being almost stranded by the harsh realities of our limits, and not having any direct way to verify any of these. I mean everyone from Archimedes, Bruno, Copernicus to Einstein and more, came up with models, theories, mathematics, observations in all kinds of spectral regions to somehow explain what surrounds us. But it is horrendously unfortunate that you can not verify any of this – yet.
Ordinarily people don’t care much about the Universe, they don’t have to.. and what would they achieve by doing that? It is instead a smarter choice to concentrate on the day-to-day life of wealth, power and happiness while you are alive.
Time and again, though I find it sad to know deep down, that I am an immensely insignificant creature, on this insignificant planet, of this insignificant star called by us – the Sun, when there is a Universe of immeasurable proportions and mysteries out there.
- Just consider this, this home of ours – the Earth – is about 4.5 billion years old! And humans haven’t been around for more than a million years maybe? Out of that, only a few hundred years with some real consciousness about a world outside the Earth.
- You see the sky is full of Stars, but the nearest Star is at a distance of about 25 trillion miles! The Voyager spacecrafts which are out of our Solar System, cover an astounding 290 million miles/yr at a speed of 35,000 miles/hr! They will still need upwards of about 80,000 years to get to that first neighbor! And human life is a meager 80 yrs, give or take a few?
- The maximum time spent by a human in space is hardly a year maybe? And that astronaut might still be suffering from the harmful biological effects of staying up there for so long..
Granted, a 100 years ago, we didn’t know how to fly and now we have flown almost 11 billion miles away from this rock. There is hope, but not for me though 
It is time I realized there is not going to be anything, that is significant enough to experience in my lifetime.
I guess this whole consciousness that humans have been gifted with, is sad sometimes. It makes you helpless beyond a certain point.. Think about this for example, if Universe came into existence because of some Big Bang.. and it kept expanding.. The question remains why was there so much void already? I mean, what is this void.. is there anything beyond this limitless expanse?
Mathematics has introduced several weird theoretical entities such as Black holes, Warm holes, dark matter, negative matter to explain things we do not understand.. but none of them have been verified. Some of them seem to have shown their effects but effects don’t necessarily prove the cause. These may very well be some mysteries that man hasn’t understood yet.
So is that where God comes into picture? Who is He then? I mean what will such a being be, who oversees such an enormous structure? Think of what we see God as, here on Earth and try to understand, based on these few facts about the Universe, how much we underestimate Him..
I mean, I could go on and on, about how intrigued I felt after reading this book and I still wouldn’t have explained clearly what is it that I really felt… so let’s just leave it at that.