By Mohammad Al-Mahdi
On October the 10th, about a week ago, I received an email which was about the 2020 noble prize. The mail contained all the important information about the winners of this year’s noble prize and the contributions that they had made to their respective fields. After reading the mail several times, I finally ended at the last section which was about physics. It was clear to tell, by the title, what the research includes. Of the three noble prize winners for Physics, two of them were awarded for discovering the massive mysterious object (also known as black hole) which is located at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. The black hole, as we are told, is also responsible for galaxies’ unique movement. The third person was honored for explaining the black hole formation with claiming that it is a strong prediction of general theory of relativity. By reading the news thoroughly, I finally stopped at the last item that was about other related researches of Sir Roger Penrose. One sentence especially attracted my attention which I would like to quote: “We have a universe that expands and expands, and all mass decays away, and in this crazy theory of mine, that remote future becomes the Big Bang of another aeon”.
A strange feeling passed through my veins when I tried to decipher the sentence. Why the theory proposed by Penrose was so familiar to me. What was the reason for feeling so uncomfortable? And suddenly a Sean got created in front of me, as I remember the words, which my soul uttered at that moment. “It was not Sir Roger Penrose; I had first thought about this theory”.
A year ago when I was in my high school, roaming in a mall I found a book shop. The store contains all the type of books, from science fiction to research guides, from New York Times best sellers to classics. And there I found a book which I must mention because this was the book that led me to formulate my own theories. The book was Stephan Hawkins’s Brief answers to the Big Questions. I wanted to buy the book but it was very expensive. And I didn’t have enough money. But later I bought it from an old book shop (as my friend suggested me to buy it from there). I forgot about the book by keeping it in my hand bag, but it finally revealed its secrets when I came home after my exams. The lockdown was underway because of Covid-19 and I got mush time to spend on my studies and research. During my research, I finally came to the second chapter of the book, which was about how it all began and how it will all come to an end. By reading the chapter, I at last built a concept, which as we will see, was similar to Sir Roger Penrose theory.
If the universe is expanding and is getting cooler day by day, at least it will take about billions of years to cool down completely. But the question which was continuously perturbing my intellect was what after the cooling of the universe? And as I tried to remember the uncertainty principle, a plethora of such ideas surrounds my mind. What if the uncertainty again develops because of the decay of particles, and if the decaying of particles continue, then we can predict that the atmosphere that came to existence is comparable to environment that we had before the Big Bang, that we all know is very uncertain. And if it will appear, the first conclusion which anyone can give was a next Bang.
At that time it felt very awkward and irrational to me to conclude things in such a way. Without any calculations and without studying science in depth, it was very hard to propose such a conjecture because the hypothesis (at that time) was totally based on logic. And finally I dropped my whole research related to the topic. But after the news of this theory being proposed by Roger Penrose, I feel much comfortable and honored of my ways of thinking. Sir Roger Penrose had established a great field after propounding this theory and also proving it by genius calculations. This new theory will indeed generate many new explanations about the universe, about the cosmos and about this world.
The Covid-19 brought to us many new ways to conduct our way of living. There were many people who lost their jobs, families, and there are many who had achieved something. There are peoples who were playing politics and were using the poor for their cause, and there were poor people who were misled to believe that the politicians were fighting their struggle. The pandemic played a very important role this year, in every ones lives and is still playing. But if someone asks me about the pandemic and lockdowns, what alters it brings in my life; I will say just one thing. ‘It helped me think’.