Black Hole

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In the houses we were sharing, we nourished the adolescent dream of starting from zero, of remaking the world from scratch, of reshaping it into something different and more just. A naive enough dream, no doubt, always destined to encounter the inertia of the quotidian; always likely to suffer great disappointment. But it was the same dream that Copernicus had encountered in Italy at the beginning of the Renaissance. The dream not only of Leonardo and of Einstein but also of Robespierre, Gandhi and Washington: absolute dreams that often catapult us against a wall, that are frequently misdirected – but without which we would have none of what is best in our world today. The more accurately you know the positions of particles, the less accurately you can know their speeds, and vice versa" The best discovery in this whole matter, I guess, is; "During most of the life of a normal star, over many billions of years, it will support itself against its own gravity by thermal pressure, caused by nuclear processes which convert hydrogen into helium."

I thank Neilesh Bose for his appreciative review and have no quarrel with his evaluation. However, he raises three points at the end of his review to which I would like to respond. Though the texts Chatterjee interprets are certainly multi-faceted and deserving of close readings, do any alternative reading strategies uncover underlying discursive elements that went into the making of those texts? In his section ‘One the poetic and historical imagination’, he offers a wonderfully detailed analysis of representations of Siraj-ud-daulah in the writings of Bengali Hindus, like Nabin Chandra Sen, and his play Palasir yuddha, first published in 1875, produced in the 1870s and also in the 1890s. In this play, Siraj appears as a cutthroat tyrant, probably due to the English and English-inflected sources about him that Sen received. This depiction received a critique about 20 years later by Akshaykumar Maitreya, who countered Nabin Chandra Sen’s depictions of Siraj by using varieties of new evidence from the period. Maitreya showed him as a ‘absolutist ruler fighting to defend the sovereignty of the state, which he believed was the precondition for peace and prosperity in the kingdom’ (p. 245). This move not only showed sympathy and humanity for Siraj, countering Orientalist and stereotypical constructions of Muslim rulers, but created the ‘foundations of nationalist anticolonial historiography’ (p. 243). Chatterjee then discusses the ‘dramatic national popular,’ worked out by playwrights and theater artists in the wake of these debates, as led by Girishchandra Ghosh in the first two decades of the 20th century.

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In this bleak graphic novel, set in the seventies, Seattle area teens have to deal with all the usual angst ridden issues of their age group - peer pressure, popularity, sex, isolation - AND - a strange, uncurable STD that causes not only eruptions of repulsive festering sores, but lumps, shedding skin, gaping wounds that talk, and tails. Kind of makes herpes seem like a walk in the park. Galison continues: “What Hawking realised was that this was in fundamental contradiction with something essential to what physicists believed, which was that if you knew the state of the world at a given moment, you could figure out what it was like in the past. If you knew what was in the present, you could predict the future. This is not possible in Einstein’s theory, but then Einstein’s theory does not take quantum effects into account. Quantum mechanics permits matter to escape from its dark trap.

While saying this, I think the authors try their best to convey these complex ideas to the layman. I have read considerable amount of books about the universe and this is the hardest so far. But even though this it's hard to read, I think we can see through these theories from a mathematical point of view. Because at the end of the day it's all about maths. All these questions are exciting, and we all want to know their answers. But the point is, are these questions answered in this book? Stephen Hawking takes you on this virtual tour where he talks about different topics, combines philosophies and scientific explanations, and does everything. But he doesn’t answer all these questions directly. So you won’t get a ready-made answer to all these questions. As astrophysicist Neil Degrasse Tyson once described the process: “While you're getting stretched, you're getting squeezed—extruded through the fabric of space like toothpaste through a tube.” This graphic novel is so weird and twisted . . . yet, at the same time, makes so much sense. The first image below is just a taste of what you are getting into if you give this a try.There's something here about being shunned by society because of appearances etc but it's such a done to death theme that it didn't really land here. It was weird and disturbing but ultimately the message was a bit lost I think. It’s always tempting to bask in the self-congratulatory delusion that if I just really concentrate on something hard enough I’d be able to understand it. But this book proved me wrong from the very first spacetime Penrose diagram that slowly sent my protesting brain over the event horizon and to the singularity while being simultaneously vaporized and spaghettified.