The science of time travel and search for God | Hinduism | Muslims | The New Indian Express
The science of time travel and search for God
Science is surely one of God’s little jokes? The holy grail of modern science is determining whether the Big Guy exists. In the process it acquires its own gods. Albert Einstein, for example, who gave time a speeding ticket—the speed of light. If this was ever broken, he said, “You can send a telegram to the past.”
Now physicists at CERN, the European Centre for Nuclear Research have sent a telegram to the future using neutrinos. Who will be science’s next god?
Before Einstein, Newton was the scientific deity who, ironically, used the forbidden fruit to explain objects and motion. Science is today’s bulwark against religion. Before Newton, there were two gods who defined the heavens: Ptolemy and Galileo. In his flawed tome, Almagest, Ptolemy concluded that the earth was the center of the universe. Then Copernicus challenged him with the theory that the earth revolves around the sun. In the early 17th century, the church challenged Copernicus, and later imprisoned supporter Galileo for heresy.
It is man’s nature to try and comprehend the universe, whether by meditating in a Himalayan cave or buzzing atoms around inside a laboratory. Most religions—except Hinduism—fear these unauthorised quests.
In medieval times, the Church was the self-appointed agent of God’s will on earth. It used methods more barbaric than the Taliban’s, to preserve its dogmatic supremacy. Popes ordered massacres of sects like the Cathars and the Templars. The church burnt witches and tortured ‘heretics’ in the Inquisition. Kings quailed at the fear of excommunication. What the church feared was the faith that resides in the human mind, like an atom that may one day spring a surprise with a neutrino—a theotrino, perhaps? Until Darwin proved that evolution was not possible in seven days, freedom of thought was anathema to religion.
The Arabs in the Middle Ages were far superior to their Christian counterparts. Arab astronomers and mathematicians made the uncouth, illiterate knights of Christendom look like barbarians. Unfortunately, temperamental rulers and Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab warped this civilisation and clashed with those who searched for God through other means, like the Sufis for example.
The fakir’s quest is similar to the Hindu sadhu’s: God is everywhere, and everything. He is music, He is dance, He is the Sublime. Ancient Hindu philosophy did not treat science as separate from religion. Hindu thought was inclusive; the healer Charaka, the astronomer Aryabhatta and the mathematician Brahmagupta were as much part of the Vedic ethos as Agastya. The great Bhaskara—whose work on the calculus predates Newton—was taught math by an astrologer. His thesis, the Siddhānta Shiromani, is not just about arithmetic and algebra, but also covers planets and spheres—the fundamentals of astrology. From antiquity, cosmic mysteries were part of Hindu science: architecture has a spiritual aspect, like the Thachu Sastram of Kerala; so does Ayurveda, that celebrates the animistic aspects of botany and the arcana of planetary influences. Divinity wasn’t segmented: science, mythology, mysticism and mathematics together made up God.
If the neutrino experiment is proved, theoretically, time travel would become possible; one that can take mankind to the source of creation and beyond. In the temporal realm of the scientist and the believer, one thing remains infinite: the search for knowledge that is also the search for God.
