Universe is
a weird place to live in. It sure is pretty interesting and fascinating, duh !
But weird, nonetheless. What's ever more weirder are the questions we ask about
it. Isn’t it weird when someone says they don’t believe in miracles?
For god’s
sake, you live on a blue planet that is mostly covered with water which
revolves around a hot ball of fire and then there is a moon that causes the
ocean waves to go up and all the way down and you
say you don’t believe in miracles?! Damn, you!
Be it a boon or bane but we, humans, have the
ability to think and act and most importantly, question everything- yeah,
literally everything. We want to know why the planets revolve the way they do.
We want to know why we are the only evolved species and why we’re the only
species that has the ability to think rationally.
So I thought
I’d let you people know how there is, what there is , out there. So buckle up,
we are going to have a small race against time now.
The world we
live in today is much different from what it used to be billions of years ago.
Millions of years ago all the planets, stars, galaxies, Nebula are used to be
much closer to each other than they are now. That compactness – everything
being close to each other- caused so much heat. So many billions years ago,
earth was nothing but just a hot ball filled with gases and rocks. Life wasn’t
possible on earth then. But as the centuries passed, it cooled down. The
cooling down process went on for many more centuries. When the earth cooled
enough, the fundamental and atomic particles started to fuse, thus forming life
on the planet.
But being
humans, knowing just about the life on earth wasn’t enough. So we asked, how
did the earth come into existence in the first place?
Well to
answer that, we need to dig in a little deeper. Universe as we know it is
forever expanding at an increasing rate. That suggests, we’re closer to other objects
now than we’ll ever be after 10 years. This very thought gave birth to a number
of scientific theories. One such widely used and highly accepted theory is “The Big Bang”
theory.
If the
universe is expanding at an increasing rate, then after some billion years ,
all the cosmos will be infinitely far away from each other. Think of it this
way, if you marked two dots on an elastic band and started stretching it, the
points that were 1cm apart are now 2cms apart and points that were 10cms apart
are now 20. This means the further away you are from a galaxy the further away
you’ll get as the time passes.
Now, let’s
reverse engineer this and turn the time backwards. Yesterday we were more closer to
the neighbor galaxy than we are today. Day before yesterday we were even more
closer to the same than we were yesterday. If we turn back time to when it was
zero, this stops- just like the damn you give about your girlfriend’s interests
after certain time stop, the compression stops, the time itself stops- because
by that time, we would’ve pulled the boundaries of the universe too close, it
would become infinitely dense to squeeze it any further. This was the point where the
universe was nothing but just a dot- infinitely dense and a tremendously hot
dot. All the planets, stars, cosmos, celestial objects, everything that we know
of were present in that very dot , squeezed and held against each other.
This time wrap happened about 14 billion years
ago ( 13.82 billion years to be more precise).This exact point was where time and space didn’t have any meaning
because there was no such thing as time nor there was anything called as space.
The heat was
so tremendous it caused the dot to burst and expand. Everything lashed out of
it even before the clock finished one click. This sudden expansion of space is
called ‘The Big Bang’ and this was the point where time itself has begun along
with the space. The Big bang was not the
explosion of space, it was rather the expansion of space itself.
It is
believed that the Big bang is what caused the universe to burst into existence.
This means that the Universe is expanding into itself. There is no such thing
as outside the universe. The universe is all there is.
But if
someone asked me where that dot existed in the first place for the expansion to
even happen if the space itself began after the big bang, well that’s something
we don’t know, yet.
However,
modern theories suggest that there might exist multiverse of universes out there-
still a hypothesis, there is no evident proof.
Does that
mean only universe is not the only universe? Does that mean there are parallel
universes? How do we know there are other universes if we haven’t even
completely explored our own universe? What actually caused the universe to
expand? How did a universe come out of nothing?
These are
the questions that are giving many scientists and physicists sleepless nights. But
one thing, however, is true that we have come a long way from thinking that
earth is nothing but just a flat land to developing telescopes and sending extravagant spacecrafts into the outer space. We all want to know the answers and that
very spark to know it all will get us there one day, hopefully. But one thing
is certain. The answers to all these questions are going to be very bizarre and they may even seem preposterous. We know we want it to happen that way. Moreover, what’s the fun to
end the movie without the big twist ??
