Are You Okay?

By Akshay Sharma

1. THE WORLD AFTER

The year 2065, marked itself as THE most important year for human scientific temper and research. Long-drawn attempts to merge quantum mechanics and gravitation were finally made successful with the efforts of more than a thousand scientists and researchers on board. As part of the Dirac Mission, by the year 2054, a larger collider with a circumference of hundred kilometres was wholly assembled. The particle accelerator DCC (Dirac Circular Collider) was named after English theoretical physicist Paul Dirac and was an extension of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at Geneva. This engineering marvel was completed in thirty years by a group of technicians from India, America and Japan. The core idea of building a bigger collider came in two stages. Stage one was to precisely test the nature and properties of Higgs Boson (elementary particle discovered by LHC in 2012) by colliding electrons and positrons, and stage two was to introduce colliding protons to discover the hidden world of Dark Matter particles or WIMP (weakly interacting massive particles). Initial runs with the electron and positron collisions showed the decaying of the Higgs particle to unknown bits with zero spin and no charge. Higgs Boson as hypothesized by the researchers was a gateway for these new particles ‘Nu’. Theoretical calculations of ‘Nu’ showed its interaction with the gravitational field before annihilating into gamma rays. Although consequential compared to all the previous experiments, the result was unable to include some aspects of Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

The historical breakthrough “This is It!”, as aptly phrased by the director of Dirac Mission was achieved on January 25th, 2065 with the data collected by second-stage proton collisions at DCC. Circular collider enabled the protons to accelerate at high energies with their collisions almost replicating the big bang. As protons could cover a larger energy bandwidth, the experimental results finally confirmed the presence of Dark Matter particles which interacted with the space-time continuum.

This staggering achievement was followed by another data which calculated collision’s flux density with respect to time. The wavelength distribution curve for proton collisions matched the distribution curve of a fast radio burst, recorded in 2017. On January 4th, 2064, a year before “This is it!”, the researchers were able to precisely date back the origin of that radio burst, which happened to be the age of our universe. Radio astronomers speculated this signal to be the parent signal (big bang itself), but there were other theories confirming the signal to be amongst many that spilt out during universe’s origin.

All other proposed theories were put aside as soon as the collision’s mathematical data were retrieved. Proton collision was a replica of the fast radio burst ‘pigeon’, generated one-hundredth of a second after the big bang. The discovery also enabled physicists to revisit the proposed idea of Black holes and White Holes by Carlo Rovelli. Rovelli’s work on loop quantum gravity (quanta of space-time) enabled the formation of a black hole resulting from particles interacting at high temperatures, leading to unstable singularity and finally exploding into a white hole. This event which lasted a millisecond inside, as per time dilation would take billions of years from outside (an outside observer). The big bang was one such explosion still in process.

Mathematical calculations of exploding white holes convincingly mapped the distribution curve of ‘Pigeon’, thus confirming the interaction of dark matter particles with the loops of gravity.

This new leap raised a set of intriguing questions for the researchers; Field’s Origin, responsible for creating the subatomic particles before the big bang, and the source of fluctuation (initial push) for these unknown fields that emerged in discrete units. Interestingly, the popularity of this discovery shifted to the question of Einstein-Rosen bridge or wormholes. Loop quantum gravity enabled a pathway between two spaces, connected with an unstable singularity.

2. JOGI AND JOGI

‘Loop structures enabled a pathway between two people, connected with an unstable oneness’ was something Joginder wrote in her diary after her first official meeting with Joginder at Hauz Khas. The year 1985 was charismatic for Joginder Singh ‘Jogi’ who while pursuing his B.Tech from Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, had discovered his fondness and true passion for research in gravitational physics, but more, much more because he found her, his other half ‘the entangled electron’ Joginder Kaur standing outside JNU campus. It took him more than twenty open discussion sessions held at chai adda, Hauz Khas, to properly introduce himself. But the introduction was never a personal one, Jogi informally enrolled himself for a discussion which had the potential to include the details of science and technology while asserting. The topic dealt with the concern of inappropriate funds and amenities provided to other colleges over engineering schools and institutions, ‘Why is the central government biased towards scientific research and temper when no significant result has been achieved in these last five years?’. After a few rounds of brainstorming and heated intellectual arguments, It was Jogi’s turn to participate that evening and unravel some detoured magic. His main purpose was to communicate the idea of entangled half to Joginder, without any hint of a clichéd proposal. Although sincere in his approach, his statements had no relevance whatsoever to the topic being discussed. Jogi maintained a steady eye line towards her corner and began by just putting forward the conjecture ER = EPR (Einstein- Rosen bridge, Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen pair) stating two entangled particles are connected by a wormhole, or naively, related things have a secret pathway. Though off-topic, his sharpness and clarity were highly appreciated by the discussion gang. For Joginder who was a literature student, one thing was clear, this man could surely bind a loop of jargon while proposing interesting facts.

Joginder Kaur purposely spoke less in these discussions and debates, but whenever she did, her arguments and statements were extremely articulate. She would observe people and their behaviour, enlisting imaginary characteristic features to compile a narrative around them. Being articulate was carried in her mannerisms and etiquette as well. Jogi had the intuition of her code of conduct, so he waited for another ten lengthy discussions at chai adda before offering her a ride back to the JNU campus. There was a selfish reason she agreed to this ride back without any hesitation as for the past three months, Joginder was unable to pen down a narrative which could remotely shed light on his behaviour.

‘Introspection might lead to sanity, but most certainly to madness’, the quote which rang in her ears whenever Jogi was around. Even after those multiple rides and chai discussions, she was unable to decipher his real self and intent. Jogi spoke with such enthusiasm and colour about the threads weaving the natural laws and cosmos that she almost got silently frustrated and started meeting him more often. What felt superfluous in the beginning, transfigured itself to an honest and surreal experience. After a year of their less romantic and more investigative dating, she started observing some unusual patterns around her whenever they met. A sort of conspicuous alignment of things, people and shapes, appeared and disappeared while they discussed literature, science and life ahead. Joginder Kaur was a realist by nature, so she never mentioned these non-empirical thrusts. Upon deciding to commit to these experiences, her faith took a diverging route. From being an atheist to accepting agnosticism after meeting Jogi, her relentless urge to sketch a narrative was effortlessly drawing her to holy shrines, a practice she continued till their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary.

3. GRAVITATIONAL WAVES DETECTED BY LIGO

A COUPLE DISAPPEARED IN CHANDIGARH

Local news channel ‘Tricity Darshan’ could grab hold of two eyewitnesses who had spotted the couple vanishing, directly from their still-in-motion Bajaj Chetak. CCTV cameras fixed on MHC’s (Modern Housing Complex) residential building also gave them the needed footage that this bizarre event really did happen. The fruit vendor and the hawker clearly stated that they saw the couple disappearing in thin air. Tricity Darshan tried selling the details of this unusual event to an influential broadcaster, thinking it would create a ripple all across the globe, but the popular news channel was occupied reporting potential war threats from neighbouring countries.

The enigmatic streak of future war news was broken by a piece of more relevant information regarding the detection of gravitational waves by LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Waves Observatory) on February 12th, 2016. The world wide web went berserk with this finding as the signal ‘chirp’ had reached earth after travelling a distance of 1.3 billion light-years, an event resulting from the collision of two massive black holes. The press announcement was made five months after the actual detection of the signal. During that period, groups of scientists were ruling out other possibilities which could lead to this minuscule clue, the signal lasted over 0.2 seconds.

The detection was confirmed on February 12th, 2016, but the signal arrived within the earth’s atmosphere on September 14th, 2015, the day Jogi and Joginder completed twenty-five years of a cryptic married life.

4. JOGI TUITION CENTRE – PHYSICS, CHEMISTRY, MATH & BIOLOGY (if needed)

- “Why are gravitational waves...these ripples in space-time so obscure a phenomenon Sir?”

- “Dekho aisa hai!! pehli baat, aap football ground jitne swimming pool ke ek taraf khade ho...hainji!! aur doosri taraf se kisi ne! ek sikka andar paani mein phainka....jab tak us disturbance ne, us wave ne aap tak pahunchna hai tab tak toh woh mar jayegi....par phir bhi kuch pahunchi, toh humne yahan se bata diya ki sikka paanch ka tha ki dus ka....ye samajh aaya? ....aur doosra baat, abhi tak saara khel electromagnetic waves ka hai....saari technology, ye saare aapke phone, laptop, gadgets sab kuch....par agar gravitational waves mil jaati hain toh ek nayi technology shuru ho jayegi...samjhe!...par mushkil ye hai ki us disturbance ka yahan tak pahunchna highly unlikely hai.... big bang jitna bada event koi ho, toh jaake signal hum pakad paayeinge”

(Imagine you are standing on one side of a swimming pool with the dimensions of a football ground. On the other end, a coin is thrown inside the pool. The disturbances (vibrations) created by the coin in water will die out by the time it reaches your end. But somehow, a few tiny disturbances did manage to reach you and you were able to determine the denomination of that coin!

The kind of world we strive in is dominated by the technological dependence on Electromagnetic waves. If the gravitational waves are discovered, it will be a reboot for the scientific hardware.

The obscurity lies in the detection of the strength of this ripple because the chances are too low that it would reach earth. Disturbances like that can only be caused by an event as significant as the big bang)

Jogi’s students were always curious about such non-syllabus questions because they knew he would answer them willingly. His was the only tuition centre in the area where all engineering entrance subjects were taught by the same man. At times he would also teach biology to students who had opted for medical entrance. Starting a tuition centre was Lucky’s idea (few years into their cryptic relationship, Joginder got updated to Lucky) after Jogi left the lecturer post at Panjab University, Chandigarh. His initial plan was to pursue research in Gravitational physics from Caltech, U.S. (California Institute of Technology) and be part of the LIGO experiment, but the attacks of 9/11 halted all the visa applications from this part of the world.

They got actively involved in designing the courses for students who were preparing for engineering entrances and other competitive examinations. Their working hours were fixed from morning eleven till evening six. Classes never commenced before eleven or exceeded a minute after six, and Lucky ensured they did not.

5. TIME ANAMOLY AT 7:20 PM

Over the years, the coordinative reflexes between Jogi and Lucky had acquired an unprecedented smoothness. Their friends and family joked about them possessing two different bodies but the same cognitive mind. The key observers were their students at the tuition centre who firmly believed that Jogi Sir and Mam spoke to each other over telepathy, for them there were no natural pauses in their actions and reactions as if the lines were pre-rehearsed.

This fluidity in their behaviour was neither a threshold of marital saturation nor was it a fluke. The idea to sketch a narrative around Jogi had pushed Lucky to observe his life with utmost attentiveness and care. Those unusual patterns which were less apparent earlier, now, were pretty obvious to her. Repetition was the main symptom of being able to perceive these anomalies. Things, words, people, insects, dust particles, conversations, and all empirical information went through a conclusive pattern. If mapped carefully, the alignment would either be in a shape of an ellipsoid, a sphere or a disfigured cone. Independently, these forms would cease or dissolve because the spatial arrangements were a by-product of their togetherness.

During these years when Lucky these strange occurrences, her body also started showing signs of unpredictable challenges. Lethargy dawned upon her at the age of thirty-five which was the outcome of unbearable abdominal cramps. Her pelvic examination located multiple fibroids in her Uterus, medium-sized, bigger than a strawberry. Her Gynaecologist started her treatment by putting her on hormone agonists to obstruct the creation of oestrogen and progesterone. With no sign of relief, Lucky went through the surgical process of removing the fibroids. The number of these lime-shaped tumours was making myomectomy difficult for the surgeons. A subtotal hysterectomy was the only way to get her back all smiling and thoroughly healthy, all days of the month.

A year after her Uterus was removed, Lucky observed a malfunctioning defect in the wall clock. The needle indicating seconds was moving with an arhythmic pulse. After a week of this irregular pulsation, she tried tweaking the knobs in the course of divergence. This irregularity was confined within a specific time interval which lasted for four minutes, from 7:20 to 7:24 PM, otherwise it worked meticulously throughout the day. To carefully examine and confirm the anomaly, a digital clock was put to test. A similar kind of asymmetry was registered with the moving digits eating up a few numbers in between. For the count of sixty, five numbers would randomly vanish resulting in non-uniformity of the pulse (the tempo of time).

6. ARE YOU OKAY?

The absurdness of time anomaly and contortions of spatial arrangements were never revealed to Jogi. For the last twenty-five years, Lucky had been completing the narrative confidentially. The information gathered had started taking shape into figures and pathways. Meanwhile, Lucky had also educated herself about the fundamental rules and laws that govern Universe’s timeline. Compiling notes for Jogi’s tuition classes had equipped her well.

Her exuberance and involvement with this secretive research rose exponentially at the beginning of the year 2015. She started collating the final volume of all her enquiries with such exultation that it came across as a distractive infuriating rage. Since they got married, this was the only time Jogi felt that something was wrong with her. As per his analysis, which he kept to himself, lucky was going through a late trauma of uterus removal. Instead of pointing out the potential reason directly, Jogi started calling his tuition students ‘our kids’ while asking her to compile notes and test papers, “apne bacchon ke liye woh multiple choice ke print outs lene hai” (we need to get the print outs of those multiple choice questionnaires for our kids). Lucky responded gaily to all his efforts, in fact she was happy to see the kind of bond he had developed with his students.

Jogi didn’t disturb her quest until the point she started skipping her meals and night sleep. Because he always considered her to be the sorted one in the relationship, he vehemently approached her with the question, “Are You Okay?”, she instantly replied “Absolutely! and I have a surprise for you for our anniversary” and continued working on her research. Interestingly, Jogi felt calmer after her reply.

7. LUCKY’S WORK

“The scrambling sets off from his end, random information mixed up to collapse within its own rationality. The unstable chaos, though full of probabilities, settles in and opens up quickly on my side” - 10th August 1991

“Swirling conversations, repetitive numbers, shades of brown, flickering tube light, all shifted at the pulse of two claps. He barged in every time at the pulse of three” - 9th October 1993

“Equal number of coffee grains in both the cups with the same symmetrical placement. He poured boiling water up to the brim. The froth maintained the initial symmetry even after the randomness introduced by energetic water molecules. The information of the design stayed intact” – 5th December 1997

“Tarpaulin was constantly slipping from one end. I did loosen up the grip from my end so he could make use of the extra available sheet. The effort tore the entire fabric, leaving behind shreds with intertwined loops” – 7th July 2000

“ellipses are more potent than circles. Smoke rings of incense and his mathematical doodling, both have a common layout of an ellipse”

– 23rd February 2001

“Our truly timed complimentary replies are awe-entertaining for the observers” - 2nd January 2003

“My thoughts condense into his actions. Transmission follows smearing and a focal point. If the thought images are sent smeared on the edges, an imaginary conical apparatus, as of now, pushes it to the vertex (expecting a similar shape on his end). Manifestation of the thoughts takes a period of ten hours or longer” - 20th June 2005

“Clocks are machines obeying time. The demented interval of four minutes splits the incoming light into grains of discrete sparks. The space between those scintillations smudges the exterior view. The only incident from the very beginning which felt out of hand” - 13th May 2006

“Initially those smudged spaces felt mystical in nature but they aren’t. They appear to be blotched in the fabric. These spaces can contort the object for a short span of time” - 20th May 2006

“Braiding the unknown web over the scaffolding of our living web. The process of event formation is dominated by these unknown threads. The invisible area infuses randomness into our available information thus creating possibilities and expansion” - 1st November 2009

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“If being sentient is intrinsic to life forms, being responsive is intrinsic to patterns” – 14th September 2010

8. 2011 -2015

Space-time anomalies were a by-product of their togetherness. The compiled volumes would have been incomplete without Jogi’s involvement. Lucky decided to present her generations-long narrative collection on their wedding anniversary. The work had evolved from written references to equations and graphs. Her excitement had surged after the discovery of Higgs Boson in 2012. Lucky’s last volume included work which Jogi would not have ignored.

She had managed to include the data which he would have understood clearly.

9. DISAPPEARANCE 14th SEPTEMBER 2015

Gravitation waves took them at 7:24 PM....

By Akshay Sharma