Quantum of solace

I was mesmerised by the exploits of Srinivasa Ramanujan, the Indian mathematical genius who died at 32

I was in seventh grade when my mother got me my first Reader’s Digest and I got hooked. Real life stories of narrow escapes, of courage in the face of adversity, were fascinating for a young mind. One particularly fond memory is of the day when I came across a piece titled, “Srinivasa Ramanujan”. I was mesmerised by the exploits of the mathematical genius from India who died at 32. His rise as a poor clerk from a remote hamlet in South India to the forefront of the world of mathematics at Cambridge as a gifted genius had me smitten. His contribution to the number theory is seen as among the finest, most original research ever done. Ramanujan’s life was brief but grand in every sense of the word having all the trappings of a great, unrequited romance. I was doing my Masters in the UK in 2007 when a friend got me a biography of Ramanujan which explored in detail his intricate and profound contribution to the number theory. I could not make much sense of it but my love for the mystery hidden in the folds of numbers, symmetries in nature, was born. I embraced the idea of some magnificent truth, supremely larger than the rational bits of mundane science, a sublime whole endlessly more beautiful than the parts.

Science has taken humanity on an odyssey of discovering, unfurling nature. Take for instance, the Fibonacci sequence, an astounding series of numbers wherein every number is the sum of the preceding two numbers. The Fibonacci sequence is not just a flight of fancy but is something that actually exists in nature. In the branching of trees, arrangement of leaves on a stem, the fruitlets of a pineapple, an uncurling fern and the arrangement of petals on yellow chamomile. Perhaps the most haunting ode to the spirit of discovery is the theory of relativity by the man with tousled hair, Einstein. Legend has it that he conceived relativity in the greatest of leaps of human imagination and without a scintilla of experimental data. And now we have the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the largest, most complex, most expensive machine ever built, probing the Lilliputian world of sub-atomic particles. It recreates conditions at the time of the Big Bang by smashing high speed particles with one another in a 27-kilometre-long subterranean tunnel straddling Switzerland and France.

My mouth salivates at the idea of surfing the mind of God. Imagine answers to questions like the structure of space and time, the validity of string theory that posits a universe made of smaller entities called strings and not atoms. LHC is striving to marry quantum physics with Newtonian physics, to arrive at the grandest theory of all, the theory of everything. Then there are the puzzling issues of dark matter and dark energy making up 90 per cent of our universe. Not to forget the minor issue of having a multiverse universe wherein each universe is a two-dimensional membrane called ‘brane’, floating on top of the other. X-Files propelled Moulder and Scully to superstardom for their smouldering chemistry. It also won over millions for its endearing depiction of a world where the fundamentals of science coexist with the unexplained and the mysterious, bringing colour to the grey world of scientific blacks and whites.

This brings me to the wonderful quantum entanglement, the spookiest addition to all that is mysterious. As reported in NYT, scientists claim to have experimentally proven the most striking claim of quantum theory — that objects/atoms separated by huge distances can still instantaneously affect one another’s behaviour without any mediating connection whatsoever. The finding has hammered a nail in one of the bedrock principles of standard physics known as ‘locality’, which says that an object is directly influenced only by its immediate surroundings. Einstein had famously rejected the notion that the universe could behave in such a random, strange manner, describing it as akin to God playing dice. We are now a step closer to ‘quantum internet’, that is, teleporting information without a medium. Quantum entanglement brings romance and mystery to the world pandering to the most primal human desire of embracing the existence of a Supreme Being and that there are forces unbeknown to us all. 

Published in The Express Tribune, November 16^th, 2015.

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