I was having a chat with a physicist a while ago about celestial objects and the universe. He mentioned that there are an “estimated” 70 thousand billion billion stars ( yes, it is billion billion and not a typo) in the universe and our sun is just one of them. We have many more billions of planets, meteorites, asteroids and what not. And he also said that more stars are constantly being created from hydrogen getting closer to each other and collapsing on its own gravity. It sounded very interesting and certainly convincing given the fact that we actually can picture them using telescopes on earth and with telescopes that go farther into the solar system.
I came back home thinking about this, and thought for a very long time. My human mind found it very difficult to comprehend the idea of an infinite universe with no ending. Somehow, i wasn’t able to convince myself with the fact that the whole universe evolved from a “big bang” magically without no reason or significance and then because a few chemicals coincidentally came together when a lightning struck, life came into picture, which evolved to be today’s humans!! I would be forced to think it is far from just an accident. Same way, i wasn’t convinced that this universe consists of billions and billions of objects just scattered around with virtually no end.
while thinking on this topic at work, a weird theory came into my mind. Consider a sinusoidal signal (Click here if you don’t know what a sinusoidal signal is). To explain my point, I would define a sinusoidal signal or a sine wave to be something that would repeat itself with literally no end. If i had to plot a pure sinusoidal signal in a graph sheet with respect to time, i would end up plotting it for ages, drawing the same thing over and over again. So, when engineers deal with sinusoidal signals, they transform it on to a different domain called frequency domain and the same sinusoidal signal which was endless in the time domain represents itself as a simple single line in the frequency domain.
So, the question that came to my mind was what if we are looking at the universe from the wrong domain. Probably as humans, we are limited or trained to think and understand only in this wrong domain.We probably view everything in time and wonder why things are vast and never ending. So if we grow and transform ourselves to look at the universe from a different domain, would it appear as a simple box with every thing neatly arranged and very clearly labelled?
Science wouldn’t encourage this thought but would spirituality give a hand here? And, assuming that is the case, could it be spirituality that might elevate us and provide us the ability to understand the other domain? Wouldn’t it be just amazing if the whole concept of life and the universe looks fathomable from that domain? Could that be the reason that spiritual leaders just give up all the worldly stuff, because they don’t mean anything from that different domain?
A weird thought. That’s all!
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I think it’s true that the universe is far too complex for our human minds to understand.
It’s a lot of fun to speculate about though. For me, I think the universe is not necessarily “endless,” but it is ever expanding. In other words, if we were ever able to travel to the current end of the universe, it would have already expanded further out by the time we’d reach it.
As for what the end of the universe consists of, as I said, it’s just not possible for our human minds to comprehend!
sounds interesting… coincides with a TED video I saw recently…http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/sean_carroll_on_the_arrow_of_time.html
well, will spirituality provide us the ability…. ??? I am not sure about that.. but Spirituality will definitely say – ” Mysteries are there to be lived not to be understood”… or maybe we will come to know about all these if we explore… An adventure into spirituality…
An expedition within ourself .. whatever we may call…
It does sound interesting, doesn’t it? I know i might be completely wrong, but thought it is an interesting alternate to the definition of life as we know it!!!