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Articles: Devotion | In quest of infinity - 9
- Prof. venkata ramanamurty mallajosyula
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Loving Sai Ram. We resume our joint quest for infinity and before I take you any further, let me look back briefly, to help you appreciate how far we have come. The first stage in our search required us to go back to the time when our Universe was born. How does one go back in Time? We do not have a time-machine that can do that but a simple trick is to look through a telescope. Can one go back in time just by looking? Is that not a crazy idea? So it might seem but actually the idea is not silly, as the figure below would explain.
When one looks through a telescope, one peeps deep into space. The more powerful the telescope, the deeper one can peep. All the light we receive comes from distant objects in space. The farther we look, the earlier the light must have started to reach us now. In turn that means that by looking deep enough, we can catch the light that started its journey towards us a very long time ago, bringing information about the early Universe. Of course, to look deep into space, one needs very powerful telescopes. What it all boils down to is, that the more powerful the telescope the farther back we are looking in Time.
So, the first thing we did was to gaze at the wondrous sky above and admiring what fills it. We saw many things, planets, stars, galaxies, exploding stars and whatnot. We pondered and analysed and learnt how galaxies are born, how stars are born, what makes them shine, how they die, how they are reborn and so on.
We learnt that simply by gazing at the sky and combining those observations with what physicists were discovering in their labs here on earth, some dared to speculate that the Universe was actually born in a Big Bang. That seemed a great idea, and went very well with an earlier discovery due to Hubble [after whom the Hubble Telescope is named] that our Universe is not static but actually expanding.
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