Peeping into god's bag of tricks.

 This is a piece I wrote in my previous blog during my internship at RWTH Aachen 2019. Re-published.

The world is a pretty crazy place,a whirlwind of stuff happening across a wide spectrum of time and length scales. To the unequipped mind this would certainly be a handful to comprehend. The last thing that someone could think up in all of these phenomena is a common underlying structure, which fortunately or unfortunately is the case. 

I feel sad for people who were born into this world with the capacity to think, reason and perceive their environment but were never exposed to the beauty that nature conceals within itself. A lifetime of not understanding the world that we are living in. Well one might also be tempted to ask if this life of ignorance is a bliss in disguise?

Truth be told the world is a pretty scary place, what we don't understand scares us. We were too comfortable to not look behind the curtains for a long long time in human evolution. The one thing that fed off the human need for abstraction of nature and the repulsion towards its intricate workings was religion. They offered theological explanations to the worldly affairs. This mechanism of understanding the world has been purely spiritual and religious, much throughout the history of mankind. This ability to explain the world and make sense of it is one of the fundamental necessities that a human faces. The existential problem. The nature of reality and the purpose of life.

This necessities were further exploited by religious institutions which made sure that an alternate thinking didn't exist that was non-conformist with its existing ideals. This laid as a bottleneck to the open thinking and exploration which probably has put mankind couple of centuries back in scientific development. This imposition of religious ideals where done through structured propaganda, strict control over education and systematic prosecution of extreme ideas in the root. The list of such events go a long way starting from Galileo to Turing.

But great minds have been able to fend off such temptations, they were able to hold off against the curtains of ignorance that religion offered the masses. It is to these great minds we owe our increased quality of life and the intellectual faculties endowed upon the current generation.

If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants. -Sir Isaac Newton

The above quote summarizes a lot about the way science is done and how the snowballing effect of scientific work done over the centuries contribute to how we perceive our universe now.

My first encounter with the beauty of nature and its intrinsic workings was spurned by attending a science camp conducted by IISc bangalore for KVPY scholars in my high school. In the camp, world renowned scientists were present.They gave lectures and interacted with the students. Frankly, I understood shit in the lectures and me being uncomfortable out of my comfort zone didn't go around and network with anyone new. But one thing left a deep impression in me, the passion that these people had for their subject and the admiration they had for the unknown. I could see a adventurer in each one of these scientist taking the ship called "mankind" to unsailed waters wary of the dangers and excitement of hidden treasures . 

This deep impression continued with me during my preparation for JEE where towards to the end I could finally connect the dots in mathematics,physics and chemistry into a symphony of humanity's struggle of figuring out this universe. This was quite a revelation for me. The thing that caught my heart the most was the power of mathematical formulation of predicting and describe physical phenomena. Starting from there I fortunate to talk to people really passionate about the sciences and who are willing to give their life to push the boundaries of human knowledge. 

After spending a brief stint flirting with the idea of a future in business and consulting ( Which I very much like ! More on my obsession with such stuff in a later post ! :) ) , I have come back to focusing mainly on research as my immediate future after a very fruitful internship at RWTH Aachen under Prof. Dmitry Chigrin in the field non-equilibrium thermodynamics. 

Anyway, whatever happens to me and wherever I end up being I won't let the scientist inside me go. I will always strive to wade into unsailed waters and will try to put together the pieces in this puzzle called life!

Its a humbling experience to have a shot at god's bag of tricks.You quickly realize that you are insignificant. A lonely speck of dust in this vastness. - Sreejith Santhosh, circa 2019