Showing posts with label philosophy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label philosophy. Show all posts

Wednesday, 30 April 2008

Another fine essay by me :)

Do not plagiarize !


My views on God and religion

 

 

The existence of a Higher Being, whom we commonly refer to as God, has always been a highly debated topic. On one hand are the religious people, firmly believing that God is watching over us from the heavens. On the other hand are the nonbelievers, skeptics and rationalists, persistently stating the absence of any concrete evidence to ascertain that God is real. This causes me to ponder upon what Friedrich Nietzsche once said – “Which is it, is man one of God’s blunders or is God one of man’s?”

 

The purpose of religion is to serve as a spiritual medium through which man can aspire to attain nirvana, to unite with the Almighty. Unfortunately though, it has indirectly become a major cause for strife the world over. A large number of people tend to misinterpret the norms of their religion, for the worse. This leads to misunderstanding between people of various faiths and communities. If a religion decrees to its followers to worship and believe in only one God, they turn hostile towards other religions. All the terrorists out there were just like you and me before being brainwashed by certain anti-social individuals into believing that it was their duty to fight, and even slaughter, to appease their God. As Blaise Pascal once remarked – “Men never commit evil so fully and joyfully as when they do it for religious convictions”. What they forget is that their religion also preaches non-violence. In fact, every religion condemns hatred and violence. We fight over our Gods but fail to realize that all of us just have different names for the same universal God.

 

God, to me, is an acronym for Generator Operator Destroyer. I believe God is essentially all the unbalanced energy of the universe – the energy difference between what we do and what we get. And this is why all our deeds, good or bad, come around back to us in a full circle through some form or the other. We learn in high school physics that if we perform positive work on a body, energy gets stored in it, and it loses energy if we do negative work on it. This is somewhat similar to our situation. Do a good turn and you can expect one in return. A simple act of kindness or humanity sows the seeds of goodwill, just like performing positive work on something causes it to gain energy. All the energy of the cosmos is conserved, and all the unbalanced energy between our actions and the consequences we immediately face is what constitutes God – the driving force of the universe. God is the creator, preserver and destroyer of everything in this universe.

 

The world would be so much better and peaceful if instead of fighting over our religions, we learned to live with brotherhood and global harmony. It hardly matters whether or not you believe in God or religion. You might be an extremely religious person or you might be an atheist but, in the end, what really matters is whether you have been a good human being. 


Thursday, 25 October 2007

Faster than light?

The other day i was explaining the relativity theory to a friend. At the speed of light, any object would have infinite mass so would need infinite energy to make it go faster."This means that there is a maximum speed at which anything can travel, and only massless things like light can travel at that speed," I explained.My friend is very bright, and after a little thought he came up with three situations that semmed to contradict Einstein. Is any of them valid?


1. The poles outside barber shops have helical stripes painted round them. If the pole is rotated, its stripes are seen to travel along it. If the rotation is fast enough the stripes should travel faster than light.
2. If you shine a flashlight on a wall, you will see a spot of light. You can make this spot move along the wall by rotating the flashlight. The speed of the spot depends on the distance from the wall and the speed of rotation of the flashlight. If you shine a laser on a target some miles away, the spot of light formed could be made to move faster than the speed of light by rotating the laser.
3. Very small particles, like neutrons, can penetrate matter very easily. Imagine such a particle, travelling at nearly the speed of light, entering a block of glass. The particle is so small that it will not be impeded by the glass, but light is slowed down to about two-thirds of its speed in air. Therefore, the particle would be travelling faster in glass than the light.


My conclusion:
My friend correctly identified three situations in which something travels faster that light. However, none of them contradicts Einstein, whose work could be more correctly summarized as: " The maximum speed at which INFORMATION can travel is represented by the speed of light in a vacuum. "In the first two examples, nothing physical moves faster than light.

The barber's pole stripes only appear to move along the pole.

The spot of light at one end of the sweep is different from the one at the other end as it is made up of different photons. Neither system could be used to carry INFORMATION.
The third example has been observed experimentally. Such particles break the "light barrier" and produce minute photonic flashes equivalent to sonic booms.

Counter