The Dimensions of Dreams in Covid Times

The truth of the universe is contained within three dimensions of Time, Space and Motion. Our obsession with finding happiness in these Covid times is what is preventing its attainment. A little fantasy and a few dreams may do the trick for fantasy and reality often overlap.   

“Jack and the Beanstalk" is an English fairy tale. Researchers at Durham, University and Universidade Nova de Lisboa researched to find that the story originated more than five thousand years ago, based on an archaic story form, classified by folklorists at ATU index, as ‘The Boy Who Stole Ogre's Treasure’.

A poor country boy Jack, trades the family cow for a handful of magic beans, which grow into an enormous beanstalk reaching up into the clouds. Jack climbs the beanstalk and finds himself in the castle of an unfriendly giant. The giant senses Jack's presence, is angered and shouts that he will grind Jack’s bones to make his bread.

Jack eventually outwits the giant and retrieves many goods once stolen from his family, including a bag of gold, an enchanted goose that lays golden eggs and a magic golden harp that plays and sings by itself. He then escapes by chopping off the beanstalk. The giant, who is pursuing him, falls to his death. Jack and his family prosper.

What better way could there be, than dreaming into fantasy to beat the Covid blues? ‘Back to the Future’, ‘Excellent Adventure’ to more recent flicks like ‘Arrival’ and ‘Interstellar’ are all sci-fi ‘time travel’ films. They have paradoxes aplenty and offer much to think about. They are equally confusing and fun with the spatial and temporal trapeze, calisthenics and gymnastics at play.

What is time travel? We travel one year between birthdays, between festivals at the same speed. One second per second. Is it possible to experience time passing at a different rate than one second per second? How much fun it would be to travel back in time and meet people and events of an elapsed time period or travel forward in time and meet people and events that are yet to unfold? Can a ‘Wormhole’ or a ‘DeLorean’ do it for us?

We use Space telescopes to see stars and galaxies that are billions and trillions of kms away. It would take a long time for the light from these faraway galaxies to reach us. So, what we view is ‘time lapse’ and what they looked like a long time ago. Can we travel faster than one second per second, so we catch the stars and galaxies as they evolve?

What is time? Albert Einstein more than 100 years ago, defined relativity and said, that time and space are linked together. He further postulated that in our universe, nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. What he meant was that, the faster you travel, the slower you experience time. This is ‘time dilation’, the theory of special relativity.

There are scientific experiments to prove this. Let’s use two clocks set to the exact same time, one on Earth, while the other in an airplane, going in the same direction as Earth’s rotation. After the airplane flies around the world, let’s compare the two clocks. The clock on the fast-moving airplane will be slightly behind the clock on the ground, proving that the clock on the airplane was traveling slightly slower in time than one second per second.

The GPS satellites use this theory to help us figure out how to get to new places or go around the city. They orbit around Earth very quickly at about 14,000 km/hr. slowing down the clocks by a small fraction of a second. Further, they orbit Earth about 20,200 km above the surface where the gravity is weaker. This speed up GPS satellite clocks by a slightly larger fraction of a second. The combined result is that the clocks on GPS satellites move a few micro seconds faster than one second per second. If not corrected, the GPS maps might think our home is nowhere near where it actually is

Time dilation was first seen in the movie ‘Interstellar’ when Matthew McConaughey and his crew land on a planet with an extreme gravitational field caused by a nearby black hole. This intense gravitational influence, slows down time dramatically for the crew on the planet, making one hour on the surface equal to seven years on Earth. By the time he returns to Earth, Matthew McConaughey’s daughter is an old woman while he appears same as when he left it. So much for travelling faster to experience a slowing of time.

The Bhagavad Gita, Bhagavata Purana and Vedas have multiple such examples. One is where the King Kakudmi and his daughter Revati, travelling to different lokas’ in search of a suitable husband and returning to earth in future time, a lapse of thousands of years, only to find that everything has changed. Similarly, King Muchukunda, ancestor of Sri Rama was asked to help the deities in ‘Indra Loka’ in a war with the demons. He fought the war for a long time and when it was time to return, the deities informed him he cannot go back to earth because of time dilation. Even ‘Tripura Rahasya’, a book on ‘Advaita Vedanta’ discusses a chapter on ‘time-travel’ and cites several instances of people travelling to distant worlds and returning to future times. Greek Mythology too is full of such examples. If these were true, they must have had some means of travelling such massive distances and returning back to a future time.

Cracking the light-speed barrier is more complex to travelling faster than sound. An aircraft flying above the speed of sound, such as supersonic or hypersonic jet doesn't change form, though will be subjected to extreme temperature gradients. But an object travelling at light speed would itself be converted to energy, or technically destroyed. Comprehending its travel dynamics in ‘time-space’ (fusing the three dimensions of space and one dimension of time into a single term), would be extremely complex. Since we cannot exceed speed of light in ‘time-space’ concept, why not change ‘time-space’ concept itself by warping or distorting it? Can we then create a time machine to travel hundreds of years into the past or future?

Can we think beyond fantasy and seek some answers? Suppose we build a spaceship that harnesses something really powerful, like a bunch of super-dense matter from a neutron star. This in a way will be able to warp ‘space-time’ enough to briefly pull two distant points together, the way that the edges of the bed sheet would come together if a heavy weight is dropped in the middle. Such warps in ‘space-time’ are known as ‘wormholes’ This is no fantasy for it occurs naturally all the time in outer space, and if only we can build a spaceship which exploits such energy, we can travel enormous distances extremely quickly. 

Would we really want to travel into the past? That might destroy the future. What happens if someone were to go back in time and kill one’s grandfather before the father is conceived? How then will the person be still alive? On the other hand, we would either have to use the intense gravitational acceleration caused by black holes or go into space at close to the speed of light, if we were to travel years into the future. Still only to find that our time has flown away ages back. However, with the technology at our command today, all that we can do is jump a few microseconds into the future. Maybe, that also is the truth of the Universe, for no one from the other world has yet come to invade us. Until then, we can travel by the good old transport systems we have. If they reach us safe in time we live for another day. If they don’t, well, we or our souls can meet in those other worlds.  

To conclude as a tribute to our gypsy spirit, if we were given the magic beans that would grow into a beanstalk, perhaps we would climb up too, albiet cautiously, only to pluck and bring back dreams to plant in our own backyard. Who wants to live interstellar? For, no matter what the quest for speed, it cannot exceed the fastest human heart beat reported to date in a conducted tachyarrhythmia with ventricular rate of 480 beats per minute. The dreams rising and falling like notes on that bed of the heart, no more than 480 times, must be treated as the dimensions of the cosmos or dreams. Afterall, a little dreaming in these times of pandemic did no harm to anyone. Here then we go..

Beset by dreams that materialize don't,

Come back home to your fireplace,

For, how much do you want!

Que sera sera, whatever will be, will be! 

The future is not ours to see.

Do keep dreaming, but don't look for certainty!