God of Big Things

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For several decades I used to teach a Course on Relativity & EM in the Autumn Semester of 4th year for Physics Majors at IIT KGP. The JEE kids were by then having three IIT years under their belts and were bullish, rather...they knew how the System works. The new lateral entry students from Calcutta and its suburbs were eager to take the bulls by their horns. All of them had some Relativity in their tummies.

After cleaning the board, washing hands, sitting down and signing the Registration Forms (largely a formality), taking Roll Call (to pass more time), I used to ask them to name a physical object they see everyday that travels several times the speed of light.

There would be a stunned silence as if they have at last met a genuine crackpot after a lot of struggle to enter IIT.

And I had to ask them to calculate the speed of the star Sirius, about five light-years away, they see going round the Earth everyday in 24 hours, as an example.

And they would feel cheated and protest that Sirius stays where it is; it is the Earth that goes round itself in 24 hours.

And I would ask how do they know it without looking at the Heavens.

They would heave a sigh of relief and shout: Foucault's Pendulum!

And I would ask if the said pendulum works like it does if there were no stars and no nothing in the Heavens except us.

Another silence.

Then I would ask if they heard of Newton's Ice Bucket Experiment. By now they are on their guard. I say I never understood it. And don't even know if it was a Thought Experiment or one of those IV Year Lab's thoughtless experiments.

And I give them Games for the day.

Newton was the Father of Mechanics and his Mechanics became so famous after predicting the entire solar system's gross movements and made the right predictions that God was said to be a Mechanical Engineer. But Newton knew better that there were deeper waters in his Gravity. For instance, if our Sun were to explode suddenly with all its innards flying away in bits and pieces scattered all over the Universe, how soon would the tides in our Hooghly river turn? His answer was: Instantly...Gravity is an action-at-a-distance thing and its influences are felt with infinite speed.

His revolutionary predecessor, Galileo, did his famous experiment with lanterns and decided that speed of light for all practical purposes is infinite. Well, they found it was finite soon enough. And soon they also found, as you know, that it it travels as a wave. Then everyone invented their own Aether, with monstrous but unseen properties. God, the Mechanical Engineer, came up with fantastic models of His Aether, with an intricate web of wheels and gears to explain that light has also all sorts of weird polarizations.

Meanwhile, the Industrial Revolution took place and God had to also know a bit of Thermodynamics. And Entropy. He became a Heat Engineer. But still, Mechanical, because there was what was called the Kinetic Theory of gases and later, solids, too.

Maxwell came up and showed that there is really no immediate need for Aether since light could as well travel in vacuum without all those gears...replaced by fields. And Einstein rubbished Aether altogether.

By now God became a Modern Physicist.

And then the QM thing came up and those fields became quantized and Particles became Fields and Fields became Particles in an incestuous mess.

Then there was a short sane period when God was abandoned and Physicists turned Buddhist. You know, Buddha was agnostic. When asked if God exists, he kept silent. When asked if God doesn't exist, he kept silent. But his Eight-Fold Way was in fashion and esoteric concepts like everything existing in everything else and all of them lifting themselves by their Boot Straps were in vogue during my fragile youth.

Last I heard was that the Universe is filled with Strings and Branes of all sorts, still unseen, because they hide themselves in as many as a couple of dozen dimensions or more the merrier.

God nowadays is that Mathematician able to tackle all those weird integrals in so many dimensions, with a Special Paper on Topology, maybe.

Looks like God also is subject to Darwin's Theory of Evolution, Struggle for His Existence, Natural Selection, and Survival of the Fittest.

We do need a God, no? Despite our Dirac? He looks so cute...


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