Rangarajan talks about mysteries of the Universe

Rangarajan talks about mysteries of the Universe
by Medha Sharma

A guest lecture was taken by Raghuvaran Rangarajan, a Physics Prof at Ahmedabad University on the occasion of Teacher’s Day with the joint collaboration of Physics Department and Astronomy Club of Bennett University. His specialization is in dark matter anti matter, asymmetry of the universe and the cosmic background. Through the session the attendees were able to realize how we were such tiny parts of the universe and our entity and existence is so meniscal.

The lecture began with him raising a rather non scientific question about how religion and science coincide at some point. “There is relevance and importance of the gods and prophets that we believe in, that is why I still wonder that Gallileo was persecuted by the catholic church for trying to argue that sun was at the center and the earth revolves around it. The major development after the 17th century was Einstein developing General Theory of Relativity. All of these were looked down by religion at first but were aspects that affect everyday life”

Transporting everyone in the world of space and beyond Dr Rangarajan spoke about how the Theory of Relativity affects objects in space and in our own galaxy. He spoke about the major scientific developments in a systematic format “how Einstein’s theory about the presence of matter in space modified the space was radical and so progressive that people of his era could not decipher it”.

While Astronomical developments have taken place rapidly, what is astounding is that the foreground for these developments have remained the same, there has been a time when people would decipher the time, weather and navigation by looking at start positioning till today where GPS works with the help of satellites maneuvering 30,000 ft the earth success.

The discussion ranged to a variety of aspects from Kepler’s Planetary Motion to Newtonian Gravity. There was a room to ask and know how distinct each of these school of thoughts was and if Newton’s Laws of Gravity are wrong then why is it taught in school?

Rangarajan said, “We are at the edge of our galaxy which is humongous and, in the centre, there is black hole, so while the nature of the black hole is understood we still don’t know how many black holes there.” The importance of General Relativity, Superclusters and Big Bang was some of the hot topics. The space is mysterious so while we were able to answer questions like is the Universe static or not, we still can’t answer if there was the existence of time before Big Bang but what is important is that discussions about mysteries lead to curiosity and ultimately discoveries.

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