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Re: questions
>Dhruba Chakravorty wrote:
>Dear Pradipbabu:
>Thank you for the kind words. I tend to think that we should not try to
>tailor our answers to suit the assumed levels of familiarity of the
>questioner with Hindu Scriptures, but always try to give the best
>answers we can think of. I have two reasons for that. Firstly,
>there are many more readers than questioners, and many of them are highly
>informed. Secondly, I am often unable to judge the intent or knowledge
>of the questioner.
>I should give you an example of the second. Remember there was somebody
>with an western name who asked whether Hindus think of God as fearsome?
>Several of us , including myself wrote that God is the embodiment of love
>to Hindus and not the embodiment of fear. That is the message Sri Krishna
>gave to Arjuna in the SBG, in Chapter 11, as Arjuna was scared by His
>"dangstrAkarAlAni bhayAnakAni" image, but God asked him not to be afraid
>of that before he changed into His Krishna form again.
>The other day, I was going through the homepages, and found that
>questioner's homepage (I believe). He had already made up his mind about
>what he wanted to write, and ignored what we think about it. He has
>included a description of the fearsome Rudra as the example of how Hindus
>fear God.
>You indicated that science thinks that creation came out of nothingness.
>I do not believe it to be so. Scientists hypothesize that the subatomic
>particles pre-existed either as quanitized energy or as particles. The
>assembly and arrangement of these generated elements and bodies of
>objects. Some of the elements combined to form amino acids and small,
>perhaps catalytic ribonucleic acids, that created the macromolecules found
>in living organisms. However, scientists stop shy of talking about how
>life was created and as Fernandez Moran put it, you can put together all
>components of a bacterial cell to make it look like a bacterium, but it
>will not live.
>In a gross physical way, the famous big bang theory suggests that the
>world was a compact mass at one time long ago, that has disintegrated
>with a big bang, and since then has been expanding, that is, the
>omponents are spreading in all directions.
>With best regards,
Dear Dhrubababu:
By "compact mass" you mean that at time t=0 there is a singularity. A
singularity can not be defined and is actually a problem with the theory. The
density is infinite at the beginning!! A theory that predicts an infinite
density just can not be right. I have attended lectures on this issue by John
Dobson who has asked the Cambridge University Professor Steven Hawking about
it. Dobson is an astronomer famous for inventing the Dobson mount for
telescopes and is the founder of the "Sidewalk Astronomers". Dobson said that
he asked Prof Hawking how everything can come out of nothing as suggested by
the Big Bang theory. Hawking said that this is the current conclusion of
science. Actually Hawking thinks that the singularity will go away if the
quantum theory of gravity is used. In his best seller "The beginning of Time"
he postulates a universe that has no beginning and no end. This is clearly
different from the Big Bang Theory and closer to Hindu philosophy. Hindu
philosophy says that the Universe may be thought of as a transformation of a
small part of Brahman. This seems to me to be transformation and not creation
from nothing as suggested by the big bang theory.
Why did Hawking and Dobson say that the big bang theory suggests that
the universe was created from nothing. This can be understood as follows. Even
if you believe there was a singularity at time t=0, there is still the
question where did the singularity come from? According to the current Big
Bang Theory the singularity is a fluctuation from the vacuum state. The Vacuum
state is empty by definition. At one instant there was nothing. At the next
instance there is this infinte mass. Thus if you believe this picture then the
universe is the ultimate free lunch. It is created from nothing. Some
scientists are working to avoid this unpleasant fact. One such attempt is the
one described by Hawking in his book.
You have mentioned how life appeared. I did not really refer to life
in my previous post. As you have said that science does not really know how
life or rather consciousness has appeared on earth.
With best regards and Happy new year
Pradip
