Ruchira's Ramblings

It has been a while since I’ve blogged. Apologies to you, and to myself as well for not writing. I have been planning this piece for a while, and it has been so long that I have probably forgotten what I was going to say. But then, this is a ramble, really, so it doesn’t matter in the end. A few weeks ago, I came across an article about the first phase of a major radio sky survey using Low Frequency Array telescope, revealing “hundreds and thousands of previously undetected galaxies.” Without going into technical details, seeing as I am not a sciencebro , here’s a figure: “their radio signals have traveled billions of light years before reaching earth,” (one light year is 5.8 trillion miles)- which just blows the mind, really. The actual article shared on Twitter had a highly entertaining comment thread, with people talking about mass, infinity and multiverses. All of it reminded me of Philip Pullman’s ‘His Dark Materials’ trilogy. For all its subversions, politics, imagina...

Before  the beginning was the  night . And the night was without boundaries and the night was without  end . In the beginning was  time . The relentless beat in which things could happen, in which everything could  become , dust could coalesce, matter could  exist . In that coming together, the  universe  was possible,  all  versions of it.  In  it, people could dream and die. In it, stars  burned  and  flared  and  went out. -       Neil Gaiman, Overture-04, A Madness of Stars Where did we come from? I remember once watching a documentary about circles. It began somewhere in Venice, with children skipping with circles they use in the circus. Taking that circle as a starting point, film proceeded to increase the diameter of the circle tenfolds. And so with each increase, the circle held Venice, and Europe, and Earth. Within a few leaps, it had reached the boundaries of the kno...