| August 25, 2007 | Saturday | Sha’aban 11, 1428 |
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A sense of wonder
AS POLITICS in Pakistan heats up, I have a confession to make to readers: I am bored stiff. Will BB return or not? Is there a deal between her and Musharraf? Is Nawaz Sharif returning? Will Musharraf take off his uniform? I’m afraid that all too often, these pressing but puerile questions leave me cold.
And yet, columnists are supposed to pontificate on the intricate dance steps of the great and the good who populate the political floor. Newspapers and TV channels are full of the sage analyses and comments of those of us who have chosen to join the chattering classes. But at the end of the day, all our endless words go unheeded. As I.H. Burney, the late and much-missed editor of Outlook, once told me: “Yaar, don’t take the stuff you write too seriously. Remember, our articles will be used to wrap paans next week.”
I think we need to get away from the overheated political speculation rife in our dailies and on our TV screens every once in a while. I was on the beach in Sri Lanka last week when the electricity went off one night as I was reading on the porch of our small cabana. Instantly, the large garden was plunged into darkness, and as I looked up, I could see the stars shining brilliantly through the canopy of trees. The odd firefly flitted past.
Without the light pollution from large population centres obscuring it, the sky is a stunningly bright panorama.
Living in cities, we have lost the sense of wonder inspired by the immensity of the universe. An entire generation has grown up without seeing the magic of the Milky Way. Ultimately, we lose the sense of humility nature inculcates in those who gaze upon its huge diversity and its power.
While in Sri Lanka, I got the exciting news that two German scientists had made microwave photons travel faster than light. Science fiction devotees will agree that faster than light (or FTL) travel is the holy grail of cosmologists and dreamers alike. All my life, I have railed silently against the tyranny of Einstein’s physical constant C, or the speed of light, as the ultimate limiting factor in the universe.
One would have thought the speed of light at 186,000 miles per second would be fast enough for mankind. But consider that even at this brisk pace, it takes a radio signal 20 minutes to reach Mars when the planet is at its closest point to Earth. The nearest solar system to ours is 20 light years away. In other words, even travelling close to light-speed, we would need over 20 years to get there.
Apart from the speed constraint, FTL travel has other problems. Einstein’s theory of relativity decrees that as matter accelerates, it becomes more massive; at the speed of light it would have infinite mass, a physical impossibility. But time is the real barrier: according to Einstein (and corroborated by many of his successors), if we were to break the light barrier, we would travel into the past. This would set up many temporal anomalies, as the past could be changed, leading to a different present and future.
To overcome these paradoxes, science fiction writers and cosmologists have come up with ingenious theories. Star Trek fans will recall expressions like ‘subspace’ and ‘hyperspace’. Then there are wormholes that supposedly connect distant sectors of space. Some theorists have posited ‘ripples in spacetime’ to speculate that these anomalies could be used for FTL travel without breaching Einstein’s causality principle.
Concepts like ‘quantum entanglement’ that theoretically permit sub-atomic particles to move across a gap make me recall the familiar command from Star Trek: “Three to beam up!”
Andrew Bender, an American physicist, has written a book called SlipString Drive in which he has outlined an FTL spaceship. This is based on the controversial Membrane Theory of Gravity on which the author bases ‘gravitationally isolated space’ through which his FTL craft would fly.
So why does the possibility of FTL travel excite me so much? I was six years old when the year 1950 rolled around, and I still recall some adults speculating on what the millennium would bring 50 years hence. My young brain began its own feverish guessing games, and the one thing I was sure of was that we would have colonised the solar system by the year 2000.
One of the abiding disappointments in my life is that we have not even been able to establish a permanent base on the moon so far.
When I was a little older, a large part of my reading was science fiction by writers like Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and Ray Bradbury. As far as I was concerned, space travel was just around the corner. But wars and unimaginative politicians kept interfering with my dream.
Every so often, the whole concept of space travel is questioned by economists who would rather see space agency budgets diverted to other causes. The common refrain is: “With so many problems on earth, why should we spend billions on the space station now under construction?”
I suspect that if these people had been around in the past, we would not have the pyramids, the Great Wall of China, or the Taj Mahal to inspire us today. The truth is that even if money had not been spent on these and other splendid monuments, we would still have poverty with us today. Even very rich countries have been unable to eradicate human misery from their midst.
Surely it is our sense of curiosity, and our ability to overcome complex problems, that sets us apart from other forms of life. But ultimately, it was the profit motive that drove the great maritime explorations throughout history.
What is beginning to emerge now is space travel financed by entrepreneurs who seek to charge passengers for the experience of orbital flight.
To be sure, from here to interstellar flight is a very long journey. But many visionaries are now focussing on cracking this final barrier. Who knows, perhaps I will see at least the theoretical solution emerging in my lifetime.
For curious readers who would like to learn more about FTL, one website is www.stardrive.org. For more fanatical devotees, there is www.crank.net. May the force be with you.
