BOOKED

One of the most widely held belief - may be by almost half of the world population - about the creation of world and everything in existence in the universe is something like this: One day a bearded guy who looked somewhat like that guitarist in the 70s rock band Z.Z Top (or that old british guy that I met at Angkor Wat a couple of years ago) found himself quite bored so he decided to create the world. First he made the world and he sat down and get some clod of mud or some kind of plasticine and sculptured all kinds of animals…ardvaarks, dodos, woolly monkeys , dinosaurs, centipedes, rats, cockroaches, tigers, crabs , squids , fish , birds , butterflies and all the rest . Before this I guess he also made all kinds of trees and plants (though not clear if they were made from clods of mud or some other matter) – durian trees, bananas, avocados, sorghum, millet, roses, orchids , juniper berries etc. And after this, he made his masterpiece, the first human as we know it today – a significant detail here: he made a male version first So i guess we know who takes priority eh? And then he made the female partner and they were called Adam and Eve. And the rest , as they say is history. And he did all these within six days and on the seventh day he got tired and had a rest. And I think this guy has been sleeping right through the ages till this day – judging from all the mayhem and havocs his creations had wreaked and continue to do so unabated till this very moment – without as much as a gentle admonishment or direct clear cut intercession from him to get things right. And so we have guys like george bush bullying the world, innocent young girls get raped and tricked into becoming prostitutes, old grandmothers got robbed on the way to the wet markets and the list goes on…and not only that , we have earthquakes, tsunamis , floods and all kinds of ‘natural’ disasters that wipe out the criminals and the innocents amongst us alike…and the worst of all is that he was very unfair in another way. Why doesn’t he make everybody looks like brad pitt and as bright as bill gates or for women folks to look as beautiful as that young naked Japanese girl I saw on the net the other night?…but that’s not the point of this er..musing…

The point is; that is one of the many versions of the theory of creation. It is a very interesting theory, but there are many rival versions which are equally fantastical and imaginative. Some have gone hopelessly out of fashion but some are still alive – albeit clung to by only small isolated less civilized tribes - such as the ‘dreaming’ creation theory of the Australian aborigines to name just one. I personally quite like the theory put forward by Douglas Adam in his great ‘Hitch hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ series. One of the most memorable piece is about that guy who got first prize for creating the fjords in Norway …hmmm

But all of these versions are arguably merely speculations or imaginings of people who probably got high on some toadstools or in the throes of religious mania or trance. None are verifiable or proven either mathematically or scientifically. And here’s the thing. The scientific version of the theory of creation are even more fantastical and stranger than fiction. Take the current theory of creation. It started with pornography. The universe as we know it starts with the ‘big bang’. Before this we have nothing, or if you wish a ‘singularity’ as the scientists termed it, a point of nothingness of infinite density and heat. This nothingness paradoxically contains all the mass and energy of the universe, that suddenly decided to burst out and expand ever since.

So, the scientific theory of creation not only started with porn but also an oxymoron. But the beauty of this theory is that it can be mathematically proven. The expansion of galaxies in the universe can be observed and measured (as indicated by ‘red shift’ of light waves) and from this it can be extrapolated backward to arrive at the point of nothingness –the singularity- at the start. Imagine a child blowing a balloon, it will expand and expand but it started from just a flabby little elastic balloon. And these clever physicists and mathematicians can even calculate when this big bang occurred. 13.7 billion years ago to be exact. The only problem is we don’t know why this nothingness decided to burst forth and expand and become galaxies and stars and planets and why we have frogs, newts, nematodes and people like brad pitts and ugly sods like george bush and dick cheney (although Charles Darwin have heroically postulated a fairly credible explanations on these last issue mentioned – theory of evolution and survival of the fittest and all that).

And that’s only just the beginning. When scientists ponder over the theory about the bearded guy making living things out of clods of mud they decided that well, technically speaking yes but…scientists being very clever people that they are, decide to analyse this and they do the most obvious and logical thing, if we cut something –anything- into smaller and smaller pieces until we can not cut it further what do we find? And here things get very interesting. The jury is still not out as to what is the smallest thing –the fundamental particle- is, but one thing everybody is in agreement is this: Whether it is a human being, a newt, a toad, a durian tree, a piece of wood, a glass of water or a piece of jewellery, EVERYTHING is in fact made of the SAME building block of material. You or I or a cow or a block of wood is actually made of the same thing. At first this building block is thought to be atoms which comprise of neutrons and protons and electrons. But now things have become more complicated.

I was reading an article in a magazine recently about the building of the most powerful ‘particle collider’ , the LCH (Large hadron collider) at Cern Switzerland which will be completed sometimes next year (2007) and the several thousand or so physicists from different countries all over the world just can not wait to start their experiments to answer some of the most interesting questions in the world. On the surface of it, the LCH’s purpose is simple enough. This Structure’s main feature is a huge 27km circumference underground tunnel that will be used to spin ‘particles’ of proton beams in two opposite directions at higher and higher velocity and smashed them literally to oblivion and collect the broken bits and pieces and analyze what they are. And what they are hopefully will answer all these big questions about the nature of the universe.

Apparently the primary and smallest particles –the fundamental particles- are not protons or neutrons or ‘hadrons’ as these particles are termed in general but stranger stuff called quarks, leptons and bosons and some other strange stuff. Quarks for example , there are different versions of these and they have ‘colors’ and have their counterparts ‘antiquarks’ and things get muddier and muddier thereon. Seems like these fundamental particles actually correspond to different versions of STRINGS. Some of these strings are straight and open ended and some are closed loops like rubber bands, And some wiggle this way and some dance that way and thereby produce different fundamental particles which in turn finally produce us human beings, and toads and trees and rocks.

So ladies and gents, we are nothing more than just mere strings ! (so when somebody says someone is pulling strings they aren’t very far from the truth although not the meaning physicists have in mind of course). Little wonder why half of the world prefer to believe the version about the bearded guy sitting there making crocodiles, jelly fish and all that and goes to sleep on the seventh day. Any savage in papua new guinea can buy that.