Amidst the choices in Life - The Continuation

Please read Part 1 before reading this

“What time is it” she asked.

Time is Eternal. No one knows for how long it existed. But 13.7 billion years ago something happened. Collision of parallel universes which were separated by fourth dimension of space might have caused which we now know as Big Bang. Or a fission of an universe into two might have also caused it. The Big Bang caused space and time in our universe to expand creating the illusion of beginning of time-space. The clock of our universe started ticking at the moment of big bang and has been ever since running. We humans use a 24 hour clock for our convenience based on the rotation of the earth on its own axis which never actually is 24 hours. Our earth sometimes rotates faster and sometimes slower! Thankfully there is uniform sunlight around tropic of cancer throughout the year avoiding another confusion of daylight savings. For now, the sun had created shadows whose sizes were roughly about 1/3^rd of the original objects. Based on which he deduced it was around high noon. Then had a look at the bulky watch he was wearing and said

“11:15”

While he was climbing down the stairs, a tiny string like filament of vibrating energy deep inside his heart was giving him new feeling and fresh smile with each vibration. If only he would not close his eyes at the right time!

Spring 2005

T -7 sec: He had to make a decision NOW. It was like now or never. He was about to make the decision. But.....

T -5 sec: Too close! His mind is trying to figure out all the possible options

T -2 sec: Point of no return is long gone.

T -1 sec: His eyes closed as part of the preparation

T -0 sec: IMPACT!!!

T +1 sec: nothing

T +2 sec: nothing

T +3 sec: He opened his eyes. Lying on the ground, he tried to see if he can move his hands

T +10 sec: By this time there were some people around him. He rolled towards his left and went of his knees and tried to stand up.

T -1 day: In preparation for the next day’s bike ride, he went to buy few stuffs. While riding on his bike he saw helmet shops. He had traveled on that road many times before. But he stopped there this time, took his helmet out and had a look at it. Something inside him told it is not the right fit. So he  parked his bike in front of the shop and went in to buy a new helmet. He was about to realize that it was one of his best decisions.

T - Few hours: It was early morning. Piercing the fog he was racing through the empty streets of the city. He aimed for the roads which took him out of the city. By this time he was in 5^th gear at full throttle

T -5 min: He has been driving for hours now. He stopped just once to have a delicious ‘Idly’ as breakfast. Concrete forest is long gone. Crowded streets are long gone.4 lane highway is long gone. Empty single lane roads are treating him now. A journey of an hour more will take him to his desired destination

T -1 min: He could see next few hundred feet of road had multiple curves and thick forest lies beyond them.

T -10 sec: He saw a sharp curve right ahead of him.

T -7 sec: It was the time of the decision to either slow down or bank the bike a bit to the right to negotiate the curve. He was about to make the decision. But…

T -5 sec: Too close! His mind is trying to figure out all the possible options to escape from the situation

T -1 sec: His bike is already off the road and its tires are already stuck in the sand. Inertia said go! But the lack of firm grip of tires with sand say no! The momentum that he carried was still trying to push him and made bike’s rear tire veer to the left a bit. Since the tires have stopped rotating, there are no gyroscopic forces to help him keep the balance. With the momentum enough to carry him few more feet, he and his bike started tilting towards their left

T - 0 sec: the IMPACT!!   

T +3 Hours: He had reached his destination driving the same bike. But he drove last couple of hours very slowly. He and his bike escaped the impact with minor scratches. Sipping his evening tea, looking at the scratches on the left side of his new helmet lying on the table, he still wondered what made him not to take any decision seconds before he reached the point of no return.

Autumn 2005

On a cold rainy day, sitting alone near the window, he is staring at the drizzle outside. Butterflies in the stomach from past two days that made him think he was having a gas problem seems to be something else now. Why does it become very hard to make some life decisions he wondered. May be because ones entire life depends on that particular decision. Thoughts like “what if I am wrong now”, “will I get a better one in future”, “Should I learn from my past”, “what if she says no”, and “what have I gotten myself into” are running through his mind back to back. He had spent hours thinking what to do, but still could not come to a conclusion.  With all the thoughts still running through his mind, he came near the window and leaned towards the window and pressed his forehead against the window while resting his mildly shivering cold palms on the window pane. He tried to recall all the incidents involving her. Once the trip down the memory lane was over in few seconds, he tried to look at the heavens for some help which made tip of his nose touch the cold window surface. He then let all the warm air inside his lungs in one go and took a step back and the mark he left on the window brought a huge smile on his face.  The warm air coming out of his lungs condensed and showed up as mist on the window as soon as it touched cold window surface.  The continuous influx of warm air started expanding the area of the mist on the window. Since his nose was blocking the expansion of the mist above it, the mist expanded on the both sides of the point on which his nose was touching the windows forming a curvy pattern. When he steps backs after letting go all the air in his lungs. What does he see on the window? Voila! A perfect cardioid!  (It does work! Try creating your own cardioid on a window or mirror surface!! ). And inside that tiny shape he saw her beautiful face. His heart had reached its lowest level of entropy. He had made the decision. He was about to realize that it was one of his best decisions. He wrote the name on the mist he had made on the window with his forefinger and picked up his phone to make a call. Only first letter of the name entirely filled the fast fading tiny heart on the window.

Summer 2005

The nonseasonal heavy rains which started couple of minutes ago had washed away his dripping sweat of few minutes. It is all liquid with dynamic viscosity on his face now. The heavy rains has not deterred the tough boys a bit. He stands there, couple of feet in front of the rectangular white metal structure with a height of 8 feet and width of 24 feet. He has both his hands raised above with his palms stretched and slightly bent towards the pole. A ball of about 28 inch circumference with 20 hexagons and 12 pentagons is dropping fast from the sky above him, while his eyes are looking at the 10 people from both teams in front of him. While the ball is falling towards him, minute droplets of rainwater are falling on the ball from a curvy angle, forming a bigger droplet and bouncing back in the air. The ball falls directly on his bent palms and bounces off, stopping its vertical fall and starts its journey towards the right foot of the captain of opposition team slowly reducing its height from the ground while his palms slowly comes to straight position from the bent position. The ball reaches the right foot of the opposition team captain and as soon as it touches his right foot, the captain’s right foot goes back in air while guy in front of the goal post is still shouting something. By pressing his left foot firmly on the ground, the captain from the opposition team gathers all the energy he could and lifts his right foot. The goal keeper realizes what the captain from opposition’s team is about to do and shouts “he is going to take a shot at goal. Don’t allow him to shoot”. Perhaps he is too late. Opposition team’s captain kicks the ball with all the energy he garnered. The ball heads straight towards the goal. The goal keeper is alert enough to lift his arms with his palms spread out to block the ball. The ball bounces off the palms of the goal keeper and goes high in the air. All this happened 5 minutes ago. In the last minute, If the goal keeper decided to not run towards his right, if only the ball did not deflect from goal keeper’s own defender’s knee and bounced towards the left corner of the goal post, and if only the goal keeper had dived towards his left instead of resigning to the fate, goal keeper’s team might have won the match and emerged as champions. Despite being weaker of the two teams on paper.

Feb 2035

Sudden buzzing of loud alarm startled him and woke him up from the trip down the memory lane. But the incident which disturbed him was not a surprise for him. In face he was waiting for it. For years! He always knew this was going to happen. But about a week ago he realized that it is only a matter of weeks. He saw the blinking most important word and decided it was ‘Time’.

To Be Concluded...

Amidst the choices in Life - The Beginning

We get to make choices at almost each and every moment of life. Some choices we make will have lasting impact throughout the journey of our life. Some of the choices we get to choose and others, we have to and some we don’t get to. But no matter what, once we make the choice of a particular moment in life, we almost never get a chance to go back to the same point and start again. Sometimes life throws a choice at you in a platter which we choose to ignore. If only one can know the long term consequences of the choices made.

Feb 2035

With his confident ever smiling face, he decided it was the day. Some kind of cosmic connection in that month he thought. He looked out of the ‘window’ which had covered entire wall. The view did not greet him with anything new this day. There are no trees or greens in his view. There are separate dedicated places for that. His entire view was covered with skyscrapers which were covered with high efficient solar panels. He went near the ‘window’ of his flat in 158^th floor. Now he could see the sky filled with hundreds of floating spherical devices about twice the size of standard football, which are communication devices, more like artificial satellites powered by sunlight. Digital Communication has been most important aspect of the world for years now and there cannot be any delay what so ever. Those devices are carefully designed to handle communication efficiently with absolute zero loss. They can broadcast signals, they can pinpoint a device and send signals directly to the individual device by calculating fastest path which might involve multiple hops between the devices or reflection over the skyscraper’s surface, which itself is made of many such devices or a line of sight delivery. And what kind of signals does these device carry that makes it so important? Almost everything! Powered with 6^th generation communication technology with speeds up to 29 Giga bits per second, the network can be used for simple activities like browsing and casting secure vote during elections. That kind of speed is needed for the data it carries. One can make a call to another individual and see three dimensional projection in the air of the other person while they speak in real time and control the call by touching the projection. One can do all these things with a wearable device on the wrist. The cellphone of yester years have evolved into that wearable device which has the capability to project three dimensional hologram. Of course it monitors an individual’s health and can itself call emergency numbers if needed. It can do lot more! With storage capacity of 6 Petabytes, it can hold entire memory of an individual with access only to the owner of it. Every time the owner wears the device and activates memory sync option, a tiny electrode placed under the bottom of the device gets turned on and uses Electroencephalography to detect signals from brain and will start sending its own messages to get the memory in the brain and the device synced. To make sure the memory in the device is not accessed by wrong person, unique customizable encryption is used. The device throws a series of completely random questions towards the brain and expects unique response for each of the questions. The questions can be as simple as sending some random memories to the brain and ask “are these yours” or to ask to name the secret crush of the owner and to send across his/her image or memory involving him/her to the device. The brain can always choose to skip the question if it does not want to answer. The device can tell about actions taken by the owner in the past and ask for the direct consequences of that action. The owner can set the complexity of encryption he/she wants.  All these to make sure whatever is stored in the device is accessed only by the rightful owner. And what if the device is not satisfied with the answers? It won’t self-destruct in 10 seconds. It will just shutdown. Today, he again accessed his memory and gave the order to ‘show’ it directly from his brain. The device threw a three dimensional projection in air where he can see folder stacked by the years. He can now choose the exact year, the date, the time and the memory and ask the device to project the entire incident exactly the way it happened in his past. Now there is no question of memory fading away! Every single detail is there in the device. And the quality? One can view with 324 Megapixels of data with field of view of 90 degrees. In other words, real time quality.  He now started browsing through the folders and started playing his old memories one by one.

Early 1990s

The kid was running. Why? That’s what kids do. And he was not running on the road or playground or footpath. He was running on stone slabs about a feet long which covered gutter to carry waste water. And why would he do that? No reason. He was just having fun. And he was not alone. His friend was also running. And our kid was following his friend. Only few feet separated each other. The kid was blindly following his friend. Suddenly the kid observed a change in the way his friend was running. The kid could not see beyond his friend. The distance between the two was perfect to block the light reflected from what lies beyond his friend by the opaque body of his running friend.  So the kid was seeing the slab available for him to run between him and his friend. His friend changed his stance a bit. Just when the kid was wondering what was happening with his friend, his friend without slowing down a bit, pressing his left foot firmly on the slab, jumped. Just when the kid was about to think his friend has gone crazy, he saw what was waiting for him. By this time his brain had already decided to let go of freeze and flight, and chose to fight. His pupils had already dilated allowing maximum light into his retina from the single point allowing him to concentrate on what lies straight ahead of him at the same time blurring his peripheral vision completely. He would not even be able to recognize face or the expression on it if he sees one at this point. Though he is tired from running fast for past few seconds, sudden adrenaline rush gave him enough energy to make the jump. He had already gathered enough horizontal velocity needed for the jump by virtue of his fast running for past few seconds. Now he had to use fresh adrenaline in his body to get vertical velocity and jump across the missing slabs over the gutter!! The gap was 6 feet long which his friend had already crossed the gap with his jump. Now it was his turn. Just before he reached the start of the gap, he pressed the slab hard putting pressure on it, and thanks to Newton’s third law of motion, the ground pushed him back with equal force. This allowed him to create some vertical velocity. By pushing off the ground and allowing the ground reaction force to become greater than that of the force his foot is putting on the ground, he transferred some of his velocity in vertical direction. Now he has attained both horizontal and vertical velocity. He threw himself as projectile with that push on the ground. While being in midair, he could see his friend continue running after making the jump successfully. With the hope of crossing what seemed like a big gap, the boy made his giant leap.

Some time ago!

Quite far away, the pretty hot guy is still burning and is about to run out of steam. Though relatively cooler than his cousins, he still has a surface temperature of about 3600 K. Throughout his life, rotating at a speed of around 5 km/s and moving around at a speed of around 30 km/s, he was rapidly burning. Under constant pressure from his own gravity, he started his life pushing gravity back by generating energy with fusion of hydrogen atom, which he had in plenty, into Helium. That was way back when he was way younger and hotter. This process of constant fight with gravity went on for few years. Soon enough, he started realizing he is running out of Hydrogen element. But he refused to give up and started fusing the elements further to garner more energy producing newer and heavier elements which started sinking because of the mass and at the same time increase his inner temperature. Before he realized he started expanding because of more and more energy being produced by the fusion of heavier elements. He thought this will go on forever and felt proud of his own never give up spirit till he fused an Iron element. That day, he realized with shock that he cannot fuse Iron any further no matter how much he tried. All his pride came down crashing. The collapse was imminent! By this time he had grown hundreds of times bigger. When most of the elements in his core has turned Iron, the energy produced can no longer resist the pressure of his gravity and the outer layer will start to collapse rapidly. It is only a matter of time, before this collapse and existing energy in the core will cause a supernova. In his last few moments, his journey of 10 million years flashed in front of him. But he knows this is not the end. He himself was born with one such Supernova. He is going to seed more stars out of him and he himself will be a minute neutron star for a very long time. By spewing all the elements inside him including carbon, he will also be responsible for the creation of life itself. A moment after the collapse of the star, large quantities of neutrinos started emerging out which was followed by a Supernova. All this happening just around 500 light years away!

Winter 2005

When he entered the hall, he could see only one seat empty. He quickly went ahead to occupy the last remaining seat. As soon as he sat down, he turned back to see more people entering the hall. They will have to now stand and listen. When he was about to consider himself kind of lucky to get to sit, fragrance of the female perfume grabbed all his attention. He could already feel couple of Flutes and Oboes playing somewhere. He turned towards his left to find her sitting next to him. That added few Violins, both 1 and 2. Along with it, some Violas too. She was looking on the other side talking to someone. Her white dress perfectly matched with her curlyish jet black hairs about a foot and half long which were held together by a black color band. Some Cellos and Double Basses joined the bandwagon. Then he could see her turning towards him slowly, and it was time for some Trumpets, Horns and Trombones to join while she was turning her head. Also there was a Tuba this time. Like the swing of slow moving trebuchet, in slow motion, swung her hairs to the other side of her shoulder when she turned towards him. “Brothers in the blind, please add Timpani, Drums and Tambourine” ordered his mind. Her entire face turned had towards him by now and all he could see were her beautiful eyes, unnaturally made extra black!! There is a billion dollar industry to help girls look more attractive. With his brain being too numb to give any new orders, he let his eyes keep looking at the beautiful black eyes while a full set early romantic orchestra being played somewhere which only he could hear. With the minute changes he observed in her eyes, he felt she is about to blush before she started looking towards her notebook and write something. Who was she! If he were to have the amazing vocals, would have started singing as well. Might have even went on a knee. He felt like the music will last forever. Only thing which could have stopped was the loud shrieking noise of the mike. That brought him back to the present. He thought now it’s time for some phantom theory! er ah Quantum theory!

After the session was over, everyone got up. Fresh smile flashed on his face after the new revelation. Height also matches!!          

“What time is it” she asked.

13.7 billion years! Yes. Big bang happened 13.7 billion years ago. That’s when Time started. Before that nothing was supposed to have existed including the Time itself. The clock started ticking at the moment of big bang and has been ever since running. We humans use a 24 hour clock for our convenience based on the rotation of the earth on its own axis which never actually is 24 hours. Our earth sometimes rotates faster and sometimes slower! Thankfully there is uniform sunlight around tropic of cancer throughout the year avoiding another confusion of daylight savings. For now, the sun had created shadows whose sizes were roughly about 1/3^rd of the original objects. Based on which he deduced it was around high noon. Then had a look at the bulky watch he was wearing and said

“11:15”

Particles are particles. They hop from place to place with a particular probability. Probability that a particle which is at some place, will be at some different place later is given by a very simple rule, uses a quantity called ‘Action’, which depends on the Mass of the particle, the Time and the Distance and may be some external factors. Quite a few factors had to be in place for him to be at the ‘right’ place at the ‘right’ time.

Much against the basic laws of physics, his heart was slowly moving from the state of high entropy to the state of low entropy. Movement from high to low never seems to be good, or is it?

The long day which never seemed to get over to him, was finally over. He was gazing at the night sky which hardly had any clouds. Normally he would be thrilled to identify the stars or constellation. But this time, all his eyes saw were some white specks in the dark sky. Gazing at the sky was always fun he thought. But that day, it was different. He was kind of looking at nothing. Confused with the events that happened earlier in the day, he continued to look at that dark night sky. Perhaps he waiting for some kind of signal, some indication from the heavens. And it was about to arrive. From the edge of the sky, he was able to see a small bright object move. A shooting star! Perhaps that was the sign. He recalled reading somewhere about wishes coming true if is made on seeing a shooting star. With or without his knowledge, he folded his hands and brought it to praying position. Magically he was also on his knees.  Something told his heart that the wish will be in effect at the moment the star disappears. So he had to time the wish perfectly. His fingers from both hands had crossed and held each other tightly by now. He could still see the bright object moving and could feel his heartbeat increasing each moment. By this time, the star had crossed half way across the sky. He is now holding his breath and waiting for the right moment. For the maximum effect, he had decided to close his eyes while making the wish. His eye lids were already prepared and waiting for the go ahead signal from the brain and his heart was prepared to throw a picture at the eyes as soon they close. While he was still watching the sky, the bright object slowly traversed entire length of the visible sky and disappeared at the end of the horizon. His tightly closed his eyes in despair and muttered in frustration releasing the breath he had been holding for past few seconds in one go “International Space Station!!!” He did not realize that as soon as he closed his eyes, an object appeared in the middle of the night sky and started to move at high speed. While the speed of the object increased, its brightness also increased and it also left a bright visible tail along the path it traced. Within couple of seconds, the shooting star got burnt completely and both the object and its tail disappeared from the sky. Perhaps someone else’s eyes were open when his were closed. And then he opened his eyes found the night sky exactly the way it was before he closed his eyes. Almost! But when he observed more, a hunter caught his attention amongst cluster of stars in the dark sky. And there was visibly more activity in the reddish star near hunter’s right shoulder compared to rest of the stars in that cluster. As though something is about to happen. He continued to stare at the particular star and wondered what is so unusual about that particular star.

To Be Continued........... Part 2