Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Parallel Universe: Science or Myth

Coincidence. This is one aspect of life that occurs at a time when we least expect it. With literal meaning of luck, accident, chance and so on, coincidence can hit you any time.

One of the recent coincidences in my life came while reading books that are totally in different context altogether - Micheal Crichton’s Timeline and Ramayana.

Micheal Crichton – One of my favourite authors, I like and dislike equally. All his works starts with a bang, looses the plot in between and in the end completes without making any mark. I was reading his Timeline novel and all his talk about theories of parallel universe. It kindled my curiosity to know more about it. Obviously next step is google it out and end up in howstuffworks website and get a hang of parallel universe.

These theories were formulated by people whom we have heard of in schools like Heisenberg, Borh and are closely related to Quantum Physics where Einstein is the King.

As I understood, in very crude way, “At quantum or sub-atomic level (whatever level is, that is not our problem), a particle can exist in any of the all possible state. This gives the possibility of particles both living and non-living as we see, exists in a different state, somewhere else.”

What ever it is, I decided I am in state Karnataka and decided to stop these and go no further. As usual, the book was abandoned in between.

After few days I start with Ramayana – first of the two Hindu mythologies. What make me think of reading Ramayana, may be only Ram knows. This book of Ramayana I was reading is a Tamil version called Chakravarti Thirumagan an abridged version based out of voluminous Ramayana written by Kambar.

It was all going fine for the first few days of reading, till one day, I stumbled across parallel universe again. But this time in a place where I least expected it to be – in Ramayana.

The book goes this way,

Sage Viswamithra gets humiliated by other sages and Devendras while helping king named Trisang. Viswamithra goes into such a rage that, with his powers, he starts creating his own universe, starting from heavenly bodies, stars to sages, rishis and Devendras. So, as the book goes, Viswamithra has indeed created a parallel universe.

Now, we have a set of scholarly people who tried to convince people, parallel universe is possible and we have a mythological reference which says parallel universe was indeed created. Neither can be proved nor disapproved.

So, Parallel Universe - is it a science or myth! Coincidence has made these seemingly random events creating fuzzy thoughts...