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...

Okay, let's get this bit over with first. Google serves cookies to analyse traffic to this site. Information about your use of this site is shared with Google for that purpose. There, I said it. And that's all I know. I do have a third party sharing tool that also analyses site traffic, but that's about it. I don't know who subscribes to my blog or who reads it (unless they tell me about it, or you know, like/share/comment- that's a hint) & I personally have nothing to do with your data. Now can we move on? The following bit of rambling writing grew out of a poem that grew out of a CNN tweet  of an article about the biggest ever black hole that has been discovered so far: "Astronomers have found the fastest-growing black hole ever seen in the universe. " I am not a science person, but there are two topics that I have always been interested in- the first being evolution and the second being space. One reason for that would be my par...

What's in a name, you say? In Kalimpong I overheard a little girl complaining about the name of the mountain to her father. "What kind of name is Kanchenjungha? I don't like it." "And what do you think the mountain should be named?" "Megha Mountain. Because it touches the clouds." A while later, as her parents called after her, I realized she had given the mountain her own name. We were leaving, so I didn't get around to asking them, but I have questions. Did she mean to claim the world as her own, or did she want to become the world? Or did she, as a child, recognize that she was , in fact the world- she was the mountain in the horizon and the clouds kissing its snowy peaks? Kanchenjungha is a Tibetan name, by the way, meaning 'the five treasures of the snow', named after its five high peaks. The mountain is worshipped by the people of Darjeeling and Sikkim. And mankind has long worshipped the immens...

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...