Deffered Live - Days of Future Past

3rd March 2014: It was 3:30 am IST when the Thai Airways flight from Kolkata to Bangkok was cruising gently at approximately 33000 feet. The excitement of the much awaited Hong Kong trip was not allowing me to sleep; but at the same time, physical exhaustion of that entire day was rendering me inactive. In this state, I started to look outside the window. As the plane was much above of the polluted and humid air below, the stars were looking really bright. Looking at those stars, the following chain of thoughts started playing in my mind.

All those beautiful stars that I was looking were actually gigantic exploding fireballs that exist millions and billions of miles away. To represent such huge distances, scientists use a unit we call as a 'Light Year' i.e. distance that light travels in one complete year. This means that the light of any star that I was looking at, must have traveled for years across the cosmos to reach my eyes. In other words, I was looking at the past state of the star. Should the star explode at this very moment, it will take years to know about the explosion as the light emitted from the explosion of the star would take a finite amount of time to reach our planet. This logically leads to a conclusion that the the deeper we gaze into the skies, the more backward in time we are looking at. This logical conclusion motivated me to do a thought experiment.

Suppose we have a loop of optical fibre. For the sake of simplicity, the radius of this circular loop is 7 light years.
=> Total length of the fibre = Circumference of the loop = 2*pi*r = 2*(22/7)*7 = 44 light years.
=> Light will take 44 years to reach from one end of the fibre to its other end.
This means, if I place a web camera at point A, record my live interview and transmit it today in 2015 AD, then I can see the live footage of my interview at point B in the year 2059 !!! This is because the live footage of my interview took 44 years to travel all the way through this loop to reach point B (receiving end).
Of course, this is a project that is way beyond the human capability and can be attempted only by super-civilizations/superior aliens.
However, there are special places in the cosmos where this project can be executed by humans. One among such places is a "Photon Sphere" of a black hole.

 Photon sphere in an imaginary circular path around a black hole, where light particles i.e. photons orbit around the black hole. At this point the light is not sucked into that impenetrable blackness but it cannot totally escape either. Theoretically speaking, at this point in space, if a man is able to remain stationary, then he could see the back of this own head instantaneously. This is because the light getting reflected from the back of the person's head would travel all the way to reach the person's eyes.
My chain of thoughts got interrupted as the plane started its descent to Suvarnabhumi International Airport, Bangkok. No doubt this was disappointing that none of my thought experiments were practically feasible and I was in a state of semi-dream for the past couple of hours. But watching the rising Sun gave me a hope that these sci-fi thoughts could some day make it to be the script of another award winning Christopher Nolan movie... Till then Cheers !!! ;) :D :D

A Nightmare To Remember

29th August 2007: The meticulous revision of previous day's Chemistry lectures was over. For the past couple of hours I was absorbed in Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and its physical implications. Now it was the time for my dinner break. With mundane TV serials and totally unrealistic Reality Shows, I preferred to have my dinner while having a glance on Concepts of Physics book by Prof. H.C.Verma. It was during my IIT-JEE entrance exam preparation year that I started losing interest in watching TV. At least, the Concepts that Prof H.C.Verma presented were much more realistic and fruitful than some absurd news item in TV.

I opened up Chapter 47 - Theory of Relativity and started munching bits of my roti dipped in a tasty curry. The first few pages provided me enough time and company to finish the dinner. But the beauty of the topic aroused an insatiable hunger for knowledge. After keeping my plate on the wash basin, I returned to the very page I left. As I kept on reading, the physical exhaustion of the hectic day started taking its toll and I started feeling drowy. "If we move at a speed greater than the speed of light, then we would end up in a world where the effect would always precede the cause. In such a world, a bird would die before it is shot. A man would die before he is born. However, there are theoretical particles known as Tachyons which travel faster than light..." - These were the last few lines that I remember before everything faded into oblivion.

Everything was dark. At a very far away distance, I was able to see the blue earth revolving around an explosive Sun. I was in space.With home in my mind I started to run towards the beautiful blue planet Earth. However, the faster I tried to run, the farther it receded away from me. My run towards home seemed like a never ending journey. Even the Sun, Moon, stars and other planets were moving away from me. When I glanced at my wrist watch, it was running backwards.

I had become "The Tachyon" - A theoretical particle with infinite energy that can travel faster than light but it can never be slowed down.

The horror of this amazing moment was that not even Albert Einstein's famous equations had the power to bring me back home. In this morbid state I started feeling hopeless and helpless; when God sent me an angel with a WAKE UP call. When I opened my eyes, the first thing I saw was my mother's beautiful face. Her caring voice was telling me to "tie the mosquito net before finally retiring to bed". Perhaps, she didn't realize, that her casual words were feeling like a soothing balm.

After all these years, when I recollect the forgotten memories and laugh about the whole episode with Maa, I realize that even God salutes the Mother... For she has the power to convert a "Tachyon" to a normal human being... ;) :D :D