Advice

My first few days in Boulder were nice. I was busy and had enough to do in terms of loitering about and meeting people apart from Univ work that it just did not feel odd. But yesterday, when I woke up, it felt somewhat odd. I woke up quite late to an empty house and a knot in my stomach…

All day, despite being with friends, I felt odd. After all, there’s only so much that friends can do specially since they probably don’t know you’re in an odd state of mind…

In the evening, I talked to my brother and in just a few short words, he told me something that holds true to the point that in no time, I knew that everything will be OK no matter what. He said –

It’s just a matter of time,
When things fall in line
and everything will be fine
and that’s just a rhyme!

For some reason, we forget that there are a lot of people whom we think are not approachable or that we cannot express ourselves to them. But we can and should. There’s always going to be help, from friends or family or even some random stranger writing on a Blog…

It’s tough being in a new place completely on your own, even if it doesn’t hit you immediately or you’re not able to express it properly… But it’s not impossible to pass through it unharmed. Just reach out and get someone to hear you out in any way possible!

A Timed Tragedy

So here I am, with my weekly load of clothes to wash at the Infosys Bangalore Laundry. This service, of course, is the pinnacle of comfort for Bachelors like me who can’t wash a cloth to save the world! But, the realisation of the same is that, just like me, there are thousands of other people who feel similarly comforted by knowing that there’s a Laundry available. This, of course, means that time and machines are at a premium here and there’s a virtual fight being fought to get to a washing machine.

So here I am and I am waiting for a machine to empty out so that I can put my clothes in and let the magic begin. The machine for which I am waiting is going to take about 17 minutes to finish the current wash cycle and then only will the owner of those clothes come and save me from dirty laundry. But what is this? There is another machine in the vicinity and that’s going to take 16 minutes to finish the cycle! What’s even more amazing is that no one has noticed this and there is no queue for that machine. Immediately, the calculations in my mind bring me to the conclusion that 1 minute save is 1 minute invested and I quickly rush to claim this gold mine before anyone else does. Now I sit here primly, waiting for this machine to finish in 16 minutes and lead me to salvation.

They say that the Grass is always greener on the other side. They don’t tell you that on the other side they use paint to make the grass look greener. They say a bird in hand in worth two in the bush. They don’t tell you that the one in hand is tastier than the two in the bush. They tell you that the machine will finish the wash in 16 minutes, while it takes 25 minutes to do the task!

As you may have guessed, as the minutes passed by, I realised that the ‘new’ machine I had invested my time in is taking longer to complete the cycle than the one I left. The time now is 9 minutes on my machine and 4 on the other. It seems, almost, that the machine I will soon be using has ‘more seconds per second’, that is, it is spending more than a second to do a second’s task. Impossible isn’t it?? After all, they’re both the same machines and run on the same power! Then how can two machines be in any way different when they simply are not?!

I guess there really is no explanation for this. I guess my machine was indeed taking more ‘seconds per second’ than any other in the Landry. The final truth is that I spent more time doing laundry that day than I usually do. That indeed, was a very strange tragedy of time!

The Fifth Dimension

I hereby declare that I have come to understand that the fifth dimension after the length, width and breadth of an object and the presence of it in time, is Energy.

Now, how do I come to this conclusion? By understanding that there is nothing within the first four dimensions which can explain the presence of mass and the effects of forces such as gravity on an object.

Let us imagine an area in space, far off from any matter, the presence of which would affect our to-be object’s presence (not tough to assume since there are large swathes in our Universe which are empty).

Now let us say there exists time in that area (hey, time exists in our Universe doesn’t it??).

Now, the emptiness of the space will not change in any manner possible after any amount of time simply because there’s nothing to change there.

Next, let us say that there exists a cube with negligible dimensions, just a set of thin, very, very thin wires forming just the outline of a cube and not it’s body or walls which exists for only a small period of time, say a second. Obviously, the cube is here now, but gone the next second. This shows that the cube must exist in time in order to exist at all!

This we say that the wire frame cube now exists for a long period of time, say a few million years, just so that we can observe it.

Hence, we are now looking at our wire frame cube just float in the universe with nothing else anywhere near it to affect it at all. We also see that if, theoretically, the mass of each wire in the frame is nil, making then perfect lines along the x-,y- and z- planes, the wire exists in space and in time, but it does nothing.

Why isn’t that a very boring cube? It does nothing and hardly even exists!

But here we introduce Energy. The frame now has energy and by virtue of it having energy, it can move around, spin and do the Hula…

But more importantly, since the cube has energy, it’s wires need a place to store that energy and that location is defined in mass. Therefore, mass is but a derivative of Energy and since it is underivable using any other dimension, it is derived from Energy.

Now let us consider one more idea. Let us replace our wire frame with nothingness. There’s nothing in that bit of space where we are looking. Does time exist? Yes, it does. Do the first three dimensions exist? Indeed, they do and that can be proven by the presence of any object in that space.

Does energy exist in that space? Let us put a single ray of sunlight there, a single wave of light which does not require any medium to travel. Does this wave have any energy? Yes. Does it exist in time? Yes, it travels at, well, the speed of light. Does it have any spatial dimension? In other words, does it have a precise shape in any of the first three dimensions? Nope! This wave does not have a fixed shape in the spatial dimensions and changes over time. This is an example of pure Energy, with no mass. But is it the perfect example? No. Why not? Because at any given moment of time, if the wave is fixed, frozen and looked at, it has a direction, thereby meaning that it has a spatial dimension too.

So what is the best example of pure energy which exists in time but not space?

Is it a magnetic field?

Is it a gravitational field?

Is it Superman?

I don’t know, keep looking…