I am guessing many of you have never read the Gita, but at least some have felt they should have made an attempt. I’m in the category that tried, made some progress (making notes and all), then quit. Until recently, that is.
A late evening attempt to decipher the Sanskrit text with a friend resulted in a renewed surge of interest, and I decided to just go ahead and finish the project. It’s done now and what follows is my roadmap of the 18 chapters of the Gita – with some shlokas to highlight the path - for those wishing to delve in and explore further.
Chapter 1: Setting the stage. Surveying the armies at Kurukshetra, Arjuna is overcome by grief when he realizes what the war will entail. Good for him.
Standard interpretations speak of this as ‘weakness’ on Arjuna’s part. Au contraire, I find the very human anguish, the questioning of a war which entails the mass slaughter of kinsmen and loved ones for the sake of a kingdom, coming from a man who is expected to be a relentless killing machine, to be one of the brilliant character touches that makes the Mahabharat great. Krishna responds, and the main Gita begins.
Chapter 2: The soul stuff. “As a person casts off old garments and puts on new ones, so the soul leaves one body for another” and “Weapons do not cleave the soul, fire does not burn it, water does not wet it, nor wind make it dry” (Shlokas 22 and 23).
Get the point? Krishna is saying that Arjuna won’t really be killing his loved ones, just destroying their bodies. The soul is the real thing and that’s safe. Of course, if one doesn’t buy the soul stuff, this argument goes for a toss, along with much of the Gita.
Chapter 3: All work and no attachment makes Jack a Karmayogi.To be accurate, this starts off in chapter 2 with the famous“Karmanyevadhikaraste, ma phaleshu kadachana” (Chap 2, Sh 47). Acting without attachment – one of the central principles of the Gita.
To be honest, I find Karmayoga unconvincing. Why would one do anything if one has no interest in the results?
Furthermore, how is one supposed to act? The answer, as per Gita, is to follow ‘swadharma’ – nebulously interpreted as ‘one’s innate nature’ or ‘duty’, it’s never quite clear. “Better is swadharma, though carried out imperfectly, than the dharma of another carried out perfectly”(Sh 35).
Highly unsatisfactory. This suggests that people are born with some kind of innate duty (who dictates what that is?) and one should ‘just stick to it’. More problematically, if you interpret swadharma as ‘duty’, what if that duty conflicts with basic human values like compassion, love, loyalty and so on? This is really Arjuna’s question and Krishna never quite answers it, IMO.
Chapter 4:Krishna to the rescue !! “Yada yada hi dharmasya...” is right here ! (Sh 7 & 8)
The rest is largely a rehash of Karmayoga. Apparently, Arjuna is not convinced first time, and I don’t blame him. Apart from all the swadharma issues there’s the growing problem of “Who should take responsibility for one’s actions?” - very relevant when battle is about to commence. Well, over the past two chapters, there have been growing hints that humans are mere intermediaries and God is the ultimate source of all actions, so the answer is.....
Chapter 5: Blame it all on God!! Or at least, if you do, the responsibility won’t stick to you. “He who works, resigning his actions to God, is not touched by sin, even as a lotus leaf is untouched by water” (Sh 10).
Chapter 6: Introducing Mr. Detachee, aka, the Yogi, “to whom a lump of mud, a stone and a piece of gold are the same”, “who is equal minded among friends and foes” (Sh 8 & 9), “who does not rejoice on obtaining what is pleasant nor sorrow on obtaining what is unpleasant”. Personally speaking, I am more for rejoicing on getting the pleasant and staying calm in the face of the unpleasant, rather than zoning out equally on both. But this picture of the Yogi, devoid of worldly attachments, is a familiar presence in our culture.
The rest of the chapter is about what the Yogi should do – Dhyanayoga, meditation in the grand old style. “Holding the body erect and still, looking fixedly at the point of his nose, serene and fearless, firm in the vow of celibacy, let him sit, his mind turned to Me alone”(Sh 13 & 14). The ultimate goal of all this –“Thus making the self ever harmonized, the yogi experiences the infinite bliss of contact with the Eternal. He who sees Me everywhere and sees all in Me: I am never lost to him nor he lost to Me” (Sh 29 & 30).
The story so far: Act without attachment, remember that all actions are rooted in God, then focus, focus, focus on God. At this point, the reader may well ask, “So who is this God person anyway?” We’ll see.
Chapter 7: Ok, so let’s talk God.Here goes.
“I am the origin of the universe and its dissolution as well. There is nothing whatsoever higher than I. All that exists is strung on me like gems on a string.” (Sh 6 & 7).
Straight to the point and no mincing words either. That’s pretty much the message in this chapter. But some interesting asides exist.
Firstly, some glimmerings of the concept of Maya which hides the true form of God from the world.“Deluded by the three gunas, the world does not recognise Me who am above them. This divine Maya of mine is hard to overcome.” (Sh 13 & 14)
Secondly, an interesting piece about tolerance of worship for other gods, but emphasizing that they are inferior. This is clearly the period when the existing Vishnu and Shiva cults were taking over from the old Vedic deities.
“Those whose minds are distorted by desires resort to other gods, observing various rites. Whatever form a faithful devotee wishes to worship, I make his faith firm. But temporary are the results of their worship. Those who worship the gods go to them, but My devotees come to Me.” (Sh 20 to 23)
Chapter 8: Not too much going on here, frankly.The main point seems to be “He who utters Aum at the moment of death come to me” (Sh 13) and “having come to Me, they do not get back to rebirth” (Sh 15). The rest is a rehash of chapter 7.
Chapter 9: Panentheism. Distinct from pantheism (no ‘en’), which identifies God and the universe, panentheism is the belief that God pervades the universe, but also transcends it. Here it is, loud and clear.
“By Me is all the universe pervaded in My unmanifested form. All beings abide in Me, but I do not abide in them. My spirit which is the source all beings, sustains them, but does not abide in them. All beings pass into Me at the End, and I send them forth again at the Beginning” (Sh 4 to 7).
The superiority of bhakti to God over Vedic rituals is re-emphasized very explicitly.
“The knowers of the Vedas who drink the soma, pray for the way to heaven. They reach the holy world of Indra and enjoy the pleasures of the gods. Having enjoyed paradise, they return to the world of mortals again. But to those who worship Me alone, I bring attainment of what they have not.” (Sh 20 to 22).
Chapter 10: This is just God going ‘I am the Greatest”, over and over. “Of the Adityas I am Vishnu, of the heavenly lights I am the Sun, .....of the gods I am Indra....... of weapons I am the thunderbolt” and so on and on and on. Finally ends with, “I support this entire universe, pervading it with but a fraction of Myself”. Enuff said.
Chapter 11: Vishwarupa!! The grand climax of the Gita. Arjuna gets to see the Cosmic Form of God.
Imagine that! A mind-blowing, soul-searing, all-encompassing vision of Ultimate Reality, of All That Is or Was or Ever Will Be!!! What could ever be more awesome and humbling, more ecstatic and terrifying, more devastating and transformative than that?! What an absolutely brilliant concept.
Unfortunately, followed up by poor execution. It starts off well enough with, “If the radiance of a thousand suns were to blaze forth at once in the sky, that might resemble the splendour of the Exalted one” (Sh 12), butis followed by a huge overload of anthropomorphic imagery – eyes, hands, stomach, mouths, teeth, garlands and such. Just doesn’t do it for me.
IMO, contemplating the Hubble Ultra Deep Field or zooming into the Mandelbrot set can convey a far better picture of what Vishwarupa might have been like. :-)
Brief Interlude: So, now with the Cosmic Form shown and described, does the Gita end on a high note? Alas, no. Seven more chapters follow. Many of them are just remixes of the old ones, and give the impression of being added on to make the magic number, 18.
Chapter 12: Strong advertisement for bhakti. Devotion to a personal God (Ishwara) is declared at the outset to be superior to contemplation of the impersonal Brahman. And what is the ideal bhakta like ? “He who behaves alike to friend and foe, who is alike in heat and cold, pleasure and pain” (Sh 18)... sounds familiar? Yes ! Mr. Detachee from chapter 6 is back.
Chapter 13: Just Sankhya philosophy – Purush and Prakriti. Prakriti is dynamic and everchanging, ceaselessly bringing forth myriad different forms. Purush just sits around, observing and unobserved, unaffected by anything that happens. Yet, somehow, Purush is supposed to be the better of the two. Possibly because He is the Man.
Chapter 14: More on the three gunas – sattva, rajas, tamas – first seen in chapter 7. Sattva is goodness, rajas is passion, tamas is darkness/ignorance. Most of the chapter is an elaboration on what qualities are associated with each. But towards the end, Arjuna asks, “What are the qualities of one who has risen above the three gunas?” Turns out, this is someone who “regards pain and pleasure alike, treats alike a lump ofmud, a stone and a piece of gold, who...” ok, ok, we got it, we got it. It’s Mr D. again.
Chapter 15:Remember the cosmic tree? It’s this very interesting image of the reality as an inverted tree, with its roots originating in Brahman, its leaves and branches constituting the world. Quite a unique picture, really. (Ok, there’s Yggdrasil of Norse myth, but it’s the right side up). I had no idea the image was in the Gita, so that was interesting.
But what are we told to do? “Cut off this firm rooted tree with the sword of non-attachment”. Uh-oh, it’s the D-word again. The rest of the chapter is about how the Lord dwells in all things and suchlike, but we’ve seen this all before in chapters 7 to 9.
Chapter 16: All about the daivic (divine) and asuric (demonic) natures intrinsic to human beings. The message: Daivic nature, very good, very good, Asuric nature, very bad, very bad.
Chapter 17: Rather artificial classification of diets, forms of worship, types of penance etc as sattvic, rajasic and tamasic. Don’t know why this wasn’t just attached to chapter 14. Sudden digression into the meaning and significance of “Aum Tat Sat” at the end.
Chapter 18: The finale, and a fairly eclectic mix of previous material. The three-way classification of the last chapter goes on for a bit. We have the three kinds of knowledge, three kinds of work, three kinds of understanding and so forth.
Karmayoga and swadharma re-appear, but this time, the dharma is laid out by caste in shlokas 42 – 44. (I really don’t buy that stuff.) A bit of Dhyanayoga pops in. Then, a particularly strong form of ‘God is responsible for all action’ – “The Lord abides in all hearts, driving them as machines” (Sh 61). The implication is that if Arjuna refuses to fight, the will of God will compel him.
And finally, “Fix thy mind on Me, be devoted to Me, prostrate thyself before Me. Abandoning all duties, come to Me alone for shelter. I shall deliver thee from all evils” (Sh 65 & 66).
In conclusion: Thus, ultimately, it is ‘Surrender to Me and do My will’.
How disappointing! So much better would have been, “Use your new knowledge, think carefully and make up your own mind.” Don’t you think so?
Let’s talk about large numbers. Not your humdrum, everyday sort of large number, like the number of stars in the galaxy (about 10^11 or 100,000,000,000) or drops of water in the ocean (about 10^25 or 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000). Not even the somewhat larger numbers like atoms in the visible universe (10^80, I won’t bother to write it out) or the Googol (10^100, not to be confused with Google).
No, today I want to talk about seriously large numbers. A good first try is the Googolplex, or 10^(10^100), that is 1 followed by a googol zeroes. While a googol vastly exceeds the number of atoms in the known universe, a googolplex can’t even be written out in full within the universe, even assuming you could write each zero using only one atom!
Ok, now we’re talking, but this is just the beginning. To represent the sort of numbers I have in mind, we need a new type of notation, called Arrow Notation. Here goes.
Arrow Notation:
If a and b are positive integers, a^b is just defined as ab.
where the (n-1) arrows operation is executed (b-1) times. The arrow operations are executed from right to left.
Let’s illustrate by example. It’s easy to check that a^^..n arrows ..^^ 2 is just a^2 for any n and any a. The smallest value of b which gives us something interesting is 3.
So, to start off:
3^3 = 33 = 27
3^^3 = 3^3^3 = 327 = 7,625,597, 484, 987
Ok, so that’s one of our garden variety large numbers. The ^^ operation, known as the ‘tower’ operation quickly gives us much bigger numbers.
For example, 3^^4 = 3^3^3^3 = 3^7,625,597,484,987, which is a number with about 3.5 trillion digits. 3^^5 would be 3^(3^7,625,597,484,987), which means if you wrote it out in base 3, the number of digits would be 3^7,625,597,484,987 !! And so on...
But now let’s get serious. How about adding yet another arrow?
3^^^3 = 3^^(3^^3) = 3^^7,625,597, 484, 987
How big is this? Well, when we look at 3^^3, 3^^4 and 3^^5, we see the incredible impact of increasing the number to the right of the ^^ by 1. Well, we’ve just increased it by about 7.6 trillion, so it’s impossible to imagine not only the number itself, but even the number of digits in the number, or even the number of digits of the number of digits of the number , or even....hmmm, running into some serious linguistic limitations here, but you get the idea.
But ok, let’s quit trying to imagine and just add one more arrow. Let’s look at 3^^^^3
3^^^^3 = 3^^^3^^^3 = 3^^3^^......3^^3
where the ^^ operation is done 3^^^3 times.
Take another quick read through the part where I describe 3^^^3. Now take a very deep breath.
Imagine you are doing the evaluation of the right hand side in the expression above. Remember it’s done from right to left.
So, at step 1, you get 3^^3 which is kid-stuff.
But at step 2, you already have 3^^(3^^3) which is our mind-cracking 3^^^3 !!! Now, you just have to continue for another (3^^^3 – 3) steps....
If you’re really feeling masochistic, you can try working out 3^^^^^3, but by now I hope you’ve realized the effect of adding just one extra arrow. So, I’ll go ahead instead and mention the biggest number ever used in a mathematical proof.
Graham’s Number
First brought to attention in 1977, the number was used by the mathematician Ronald Graham working in a field called Ramsey theory. Ramsey theory deals with problems of the form, “How many elements must a set have for a certain property to occur.”
So, for example, suppose you have a gathering where any two people either know each other or don’t. How many people must there be, so that you always have either three people who all know each other or three people who all don’t know each other ? The answer in this case is 6. (Prove it!).
If you make the property more complex, the size of the set increases correspondingly. Graham showed that for his problem, the desired property is always satisfied if the set has at least Graham’s number of elements.
So, what is this number? Let’s define a sequence as follows.
G1 = 3^^^^3, our humongous old friend.
Now let G2 = 3^^...^^3
where - and read this bit very carefully – the number of arrows is G1 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (What I really feel like doing is adding at least a googol exclamation marks here, or maybe a googolplex.)
G3 = 3^^...^^3 where the number of arrows is G2.
Still hanging on? Ok then, so we define G3, G4, G5 etc in the same style. Graham’s number is G64.
Infinity
So, finally, we come to the biggest of them all. “Nonsense!”, interjects the mathematician, “Infinity is not a number at all. It’s an abstract concept and a pretty tricky one at that.”
Of course, of course. But when we mere mortals think of Infinity, we do tend to think of something very, very big which goes on and on and on and on.
How big? Well, the ancients used to mention things like “stars in the heavens”, “drops of water in the ocean”, “grains of sand in the desert” etc to convey a sense of infinity. But as we saw right at the start, these concepts are easily tamed with standard mathematical notation, and turn out to be all too finite and very manageable.
If we go beyond and introduce arrow notation, we can quickly write down numbers which completely drown the imagination all the way up to Graham’s number (and way beyond of course.)
However, compared to Infinity, there is no difference between Graham’s number and zero.
In fact, think about the sequence G1, G2, etc, where Graham’s number if G64. If we take the “Graham’s number”-th number in this sequence (!!!) and subtract it from Infinity, it makes, not a small difference, not a tiny, puny, minute difference, but absolutely no difference whatsoever.
I am planning to read the Mahabharat. All of it. You can, too. A complete and unabridged translation of the Sanskrit original is available at http://www.sacred-texts.com/hin/maha/index.htm
In addition, I have a copy of Kaliprasanna Singha’s translation in Bengali. I remember seeing it first in my grandfather’s house when I was about 9. It seemed inconceivable that anybody could finish reading even a chapter of that humongous tome, let alone the entirety. My grandfather, it seemed, had done this, proving once again that he was the smartest man in the world, ever.
Now, over two decades later I have a copy of my own. I estimate that if it was written out in the same style as, say, the US hardbound edition of the Harry Potter series, it would be about 5000 pages. Now that’s big, but nowhere near infinite. The HP series itself is a total of about 2500 pages, and children routinely read it all. So, it’s eminently possible to read the entire Mahabharat from start to finish! How cool is that?
So, I’m reading the Mahabharat and I must admit it’s a lot tougher going than Rowling’s work or Tolkien’s, because, boy, this book needed an editor!!!
To begin with there’s an incredible amount of fluff, and descriptions tend to be overly detailed and highly formulaic. If I have to read yet another description of warriors fighting ‘like passionate bull elephants during mating season’, I swear I’m going to throw the book at somebody’s head (and severely sprain a muscle in the process). Every time a deity or rishi or even a minor dignitary enters the scene, be prepared for a mile-long stava (‘oratory of praise’) elevating him all the way to Param-Brahma. And if anybody starts lamenting, especially Draupadi, you might as well head for the hills, or at least skip the next several pages.
Secondly, the narrative is highly nonlinear. There’s no “Once upon a time there were five brothers.....”. The Mahabharata is more like the Arabian nights. People start telling a story, and the characters in the story start telling each other another story, and on it goes. Then, all of a sudden, somebody gets beheaded or something and you're like, "Wait, wait, wait, what?? Which level of the loop was I on???"
Then there’s the whole blasted habit of giving away the ending. Happens all the time in the war chapters. For example, right at the outset of Karnaparva, Sanjay goes, "And so after two days of valiant fighting, the mighty Karna was slain by Arjuna..." . Dhritarashtra promptly faints away in shock, and I'm going, "Damn you, that was supposed to come at the END." Then they revive the old King, and Sanjay goes, "So, as I was saying, after Drona died, Duryodhana made Karna the new senapati...." and so on. Honestly, those ancients had NO concept of slowly building up the tension to a big climax!!
It makes more sense if you remember that the epic was designed for listening in real time. So, during an endless stava or lamentation sequence, you could let your mind wander or run a small errand. Whereas maybe an ending-giveaway was a way of saying, “Hey, don’t go to the bathroom now. Big action scene coming up!” But for a modern reader, it can be rather frustrating.
So, then why bother, you may ask? Why not just read one of the dozens of abridged versions available in the market?
Well, I already have. In fact, if you can read Bengali, I will highly, highly recommend Upendrakishore Raychaudhuri’s (he was Satyajit Ray’s grandfather) version for children. I knew it as ‘CCheleder Mahabharat’ (Mahabharat for Boys), but apparently its been PC-ly renamed ‘CChotoder Mahabharat” (Mahabharat for Youngsters). The book is a gem – very entertainingly written and very faithful to the original as I am finding.
Part of my motivation is a reality check – one constantly hears that something or the other is ‘written in the Mahabharat’, I want to see if that’s really so.
But what really drives me is the sheer feel of reading the massive old epic. It’s not like reading a novel at all. Apart from the main plotline, the Mahabharat contains tons of other stories. Virtually every ancient Indian story you’ve heard of is present somewhere or the other – ‘Shakuntala-Dushyanta’, ‘Nala-Damayanti’, ‘Kacha-Devayani’, a condensed version of the Ramayan and much, much more. And often in the most unexpected of places – for example, the story of Shiva, Parvati and the birth of Kartika suddenly shows up before the final battle between Bhima and Duryodhana. Add to all this a huge dollop of philosophical discourse, political advice, social directives and whimsical folk tales thrown in almost at random and you have the big, bewildering mishmash that is the Mahabharat. Reading the great epic is a lot like walking the ways of an ancient city – you wander around pondering the well-known sights, and all of a sudden you are in a dingy little alleyway which leads to an exquisite garden, tucked away where you least expect it. It’s an experience you shouldn’t miss.
P.S: If you want to try the Mahabharat project yourself and want some company, some of us have set up a discussion blog at http://groups.google.com/group/mahabharata-discussion All are welcome.
“Ten to twenty billion years ago, something happened. The Big Bang, the event that started our Universe. Why it happened is the biggest mystery we know. That it happened is reasonably clear”. Thus wrote Carl Sagan in 1980.
Now nearly three decades later, we know that it happened not “ten to twenty billion years ago”, but more like 13.7 billion years give or take 200 million. And we’re beginning to home in on why it happened.
For the cosmologically uninitiated, the Big Bang is the colossal explosion which started our Universe. It’s not really your garden variety explosion - it happened everywhere at the same time and space itself began to expand and has been expanding ever since. (Expanding into what ? Wrong question! Space just expands. There need not be anything outside for it to expand into.). As a bonus, all the matter and energy in the Universe came into existence at the Big Bang. Must have been really something to see (for the picosecond before your retina evaporated.) Ok then, so what caused the Big Bang? Answer: Gravity.
“Now hang on”, you say, “gravity is an attractive force. It makes everything collapse and clump together. The Big Bang was an explosion. Am I missing something here?”
We-e-ell, you see, there’s gravity and gravity. Our usual type of gravity, the type that foils your attempts at spontaneous levitation, is caused by our everyday type of matter. But make that matter sufficiently weird, and gravity can push things apart with enough OOOMPH to satisfy the most ardent anti-gravity aficionado.
Let me elaborate. Our best model of gravity today is Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. What GTR says is that the gravitational force generated by an object is proportional to its mass/energy. This is pretty much what we know, the heavier the body, the more the gravity. But there’s also something else – the pressure of the system also contributes.
To illustrate, if you have a spring, then its mass will create a gravitational attraction. If you squeeze the spring, its pressure increases and so does the pull of its gravity. Now here’s the crux – if you stretch the spring, the pressure term becomes negative and the gravitational pull decreases. And if you stretch it enough, the negative pressure term can totally overwhelm the effect of the spring’s mass, and the gravitational field will repel rather than attract. A sufficiently stretched spring is an anti-gravity machine!
Unfortunately, any real spring will rip into pieces long before anti-gravity sets in. But there does exist a substance which can act like our hyper-stretched theoretical spring. What is it? Nothingness.
No, I haven’t suddenly gone Zen on you. If you remove all our usual matter and energy, the empty space that remains (which would qualify as nothing for most people) might still have an ‘energy’. The details are technical, but the gist is, this weird ‘vacuum energy’ generates a ferocious burst of antigravity, the Bang of the Big Bang. In the space of 10^(-35) seconds the nascent universe expands by a factor of at least 10^30, and the rest is history.
But wait, first let’s give a sense of those numbers. 10^30 is one followed by thirty zeroes. That’s like blowing up a virus to the size of our galaxy! And how fast did this happen? Well, if a blink of an eye was scaled down to 10^(-35) seconds, then the lifetime of our universe would be one hundred millionth of a nanosecond. Unimaginable doesn’t even begin to describe it.
As if this wasn’t enough, we have every reason to believe that the expansion went on way beyond this. A consequence is, our observable universe is miniscule compared to the actual universe. To picture this, imagine the entire Universe to be the surface of a giant balloon studded with galaxies. The observable universe, which is what we can see, from the Earth to the most distant galaxies spotted by our telescopes, would be like a patch drawn on the balloon. The diameter of that patch would be about 90 billion light years, which is about 10^27 metres. Now the question is, “What is the circumference of the entire balloon?” A possible estimate is, 10^(10^12) metres. Yes, you read that right. One followed by a trillion zeroes!!!
Usually astronomers like to convey the scale of things with analogies like, “Suppose the earth was the size of an orange, then the Sun would be...” etc. So, let me try to convey the size of the whole Universe. Shrink the Universe by a factor of 10^40. The observable universe, with all its hundreds of billions of galaxies is now the size of an atomic nucleus. Now repeat the procedure 25 billion times. At this point, the Universe has the same size as our observable universe... or an atomic nucleus if we’ve scaled down one too many times by accident! Does it really matter? Now let’s go back to the beginning, before that miniscule speck of vacuum energy expanded to incomprehensible size. On the smallest of scales, quantum physics rules, which implies roughly that “nothing ever sits still”. So, even on the tiniest scales, the vacuum energy cannot be uniform- it is perpetually roiled by quantum fluctuations which ensure that its values are never quite the same everywhere. What do these elusive quantum fluctuations look like? Take a look below.
What you saw was a map of our universe on the largest scales we can see. The reddish foam-like structure represents clusters of galaxies strewn across space with vast voids in between. The gigantic cosmic expansion stretches the quantum fluctuations out from submicroscopic scales to cosmic ones - resulting in a froth-like clustering of galaxies as far as we can see. The largest structures we see in the visible universe are quantum fluctuations stretched across the heavens.
And finally the grand slam. The universe contains an enormous amount of matter and energy. At least a hundred billion galaxies with a hundred billion stars each. Where did all this come from? The traditional answer is, “From the Infinite and Eternal Mind of God”.
But we’ll try for something much humbler – by starting with a glass falling from your hand. The glass gains kinetic energy from the earth’s gravitational field, which then gets converted to sound, heat and a mess on the floor. A rather more spectacular example is a supernova. A giant star at the end of its life collapses under its own gravity. The energy gained from the gravitational field converts into a cataclysmic explosion which blows the star apart and temporarily outshines an entire galaxy. This is all with our familiar matter and energy.
A speck of vacuum will also gain a gigantic amount of energy from its own gravitational field. But instead of collapsing while doing so, it blows apart in a Big Bang. At the end of this blast of expansion, the energy gained at gravity’s expense is let loose in a flood of radiation and matter that makes up everything you see and much more. So, there we go - you don’t need a hundred billion galaxies worth of material to start off the universe. Just a tiny seed of vacuum energy and the rest will follow.
At this point, it’s a case of ‘almost, but not quite’. After all, where did that seed come from? Nobody knows, but here’s a possibility. Start off with truly empty space – so empty, it’s even devoid of vacuum energy. Now, remember those pesky quantum fluctuations? They’re always around, wriggling, wiggling, flickering and jittering. So, even if you assume that the vacuum energy of empty space is zero, it’s never quite so. The value keeps fluctuating up and down, here and there. Given enough time, somewhere, on some miniscule, submicroscopic domain, a fleeting fluctuation will exceed a critical threshold, and.... BANG!!!
So, at the end of things (or is it the beginning?), think of Space. From the endless voids between the galaxies and the yawning gulfs separating the stars therein to the emptiness within an atom, space pervades everything. Think of the fact that every bit of that space, every minute, infinitesimal bit – so small that an atom looks is a galaxy in comparison – has the potential to blossom into an entire Universe of stars and galaxies, life and mind. Maybe it is happening somewhere right now. Maybe, even as you read this sentence, a billion, trillion, zillion Universes are exploding into existence....
