Daily Times

I had called in sick last week due to back ache. I wanted to sleep the day, wrapped in the folds of a warm quilt. Around midday I had this terrible urge to visit a local café in Gulberg for a certain salad. The urge was overwhelming but it was pummeled into submission by sloth, a strange paralysis that only a loving quilt, a soft bed and pillows positioned appropriately can inspire. As I struggled, I got a call from my colleague who wanted me to accompany him to Mall Road for a personal chore. He also offered me lunch at a famous joint located there. I could not say no. He picked me up and off we went. On our way to Mall Road, he got a call and his appointment was cancelled. In what sounded like a divinely inspired epiphany, he suggested that we go to the same café in Gulberg I had been thinking about the whole morning. And I ended up having the same salad I had been fantasizing about. Coincidence? Maybe. Or perhaps the universe conspired in a strange, inexplicable manner to fulfill my wish. I am sure all of us experience similar things occasionally and move on a little amused. It happens, we say. There is more to this world than meets the eye, to the crushing grind we call life, I say. Consider, Newton turned the world upside down when a measly apple fell on his head. And from that flowed the notion of gravity, one of the four fundamental forces of nature that makes the stars go round.

The movie ‘Solaris’ featuring George Clooney ponders the questions of death and afterlife against the backdrop of a space mission to a mysterious star. The star seems to interact with the inhabitants of the spaceship bringing to life their dead loved ones. Initially these sightings are dismissed as hallucinations though by the end it becomes clear that there is more to the sightings, hinting at the existence of a superior being and life after death. The movie is a hauntingly beautiful study of something as bleak as death, immersing you in a visual and auditory experience that stays with you long after the movie credits have rolled. It is a thrilling ride of a universe that exists far beyond our imagination bringing home in process the stark realization of our tiny stature in the cosmos, the fallibility of our convictions, fed on & fortified by Science, our limited understanding of the expansive reality and our arrogance in face of a sublime structure that continues to elude human comprehension.

Unraveling reality has been the greatest human quest shaped by our utter failure to give meaning to existence, comprehend our raison d’être and make sense of the idea of a supreme being. One of the great pleasures of life is to see yourself drift, slow and steady, in the fields of lavender and marigold. While you ponder the meaning of life, sitting on a sofa, in a room that is fighting a losing war with cold

I was told in school that atoms made up everything. Atoms were in time replaced by the vibrating strings. But before all of this, it was Newton and his model of the universe that held sway. The issue was that it was great at explaining the behavior of massive bodies like stars but completely failed at the sub-atomic level. Human ability to peek into the atom had unveiled a whole new world which Newtonian physics could not grapple with. Quantum Physics complemented the Newtonian framework and allowed humanity to peek into the atom and explain the cosmos bottom up. The search for a grand theory that integrates the two frameworks though remains elusive. Human imagination has now taken another flight and strings have given way to Tetrahedrons. So the smallest indivisible part of this universe, as scientists posit, is a tetrahedron, a three dimensional equilateral triangle. From causality loops to pixelated reality to Golden ratio, this is mind bending theoretical physics. Reality pops into being when we observe and this whole shebang may actually be a 3D projection of an 8 dimensional construct called E8 Lattice.

Some physicists believe the universe is a giant clockwork and everything that happens has a cause. This argument kills the idea of free will and introduces predictability. It may all be clockwork but one with an infinite number of cogs and wheels. I believe my life is a function of infinite number of variables. Some I know, most I don’t. And that Science is slowly unraveling these variables. Perhaps the example of weather can illustrate the complexity we are dealing with. Despite phenomenal advances in computation power and technology, we can’t accurately predict the weather patterns. And then there is the ‘Butterfly Effect’, which means how a butterfly flapping its wings in Lahore can contribute, by way of an inscrutable chain of ’cause and effect’, to a storm in Karachi. The variables are frighteningly innumerable and some are extremely small and interlock in a most mysterious manner. I believe prayer is a variable too and interacts beneficially with other variables in a manner beyond us.

So how did it all come into being and where are we headed? This is a realm inhabited by scientists driven by cold, verifiable facts, philosophers whose notions of reality are profound and confusing in equal measure and finally people of faith whose ‘heartless convictions’ as Lesley Hazleton puts it, lack compassion and doubt, the very forces that drive the human march forward.  Unraveling reality has been the greatest human quest shaped by our utter failure to give meaning to existence, comprehend our raison d’être and make sense of the idea of a supreme being. One of the great pleasures of life is to see yourself drift, slow and steady, in the fields of lavender and marigold. While you ponder the meaning of life, sitting on a sofa, in a room that is fighting a losing war with cold.

The writer has years of experience in both corporate and public sectors

Published in Daily Times, February 18^th 2019.