"GOOD MORNING Dad, but isn’t it much early for a wake-up call?" I answered the morning call my father had placed, for me to check-out from my dreams.
Sunday morning and a messy weather with tears from the sky always brings out the laziest part of me, and more on that, I’d slept merely 2 hours ago after a late night function at our college.
"Early?", Dad responded like I’d asked for an iPhone. "So you expect to wake up at 10."
"No, but it’s just 6 o’clock and today is SUNDAY."
"So what? I still woke up at 5 thinking what you are doing with your life. Have you ever thought about this?"
Always, I wanted to say but didn’t. This is the only thing I do anyway. Think.
"Guys like you always go on wasting time and end up with nothing in hand. Useless. Don’t you need to study the courses? The competition for jobs is only getting vaster everyday and here, Mr. Lots-of-Honor is just sleeping like hell. Sometimes I feel you don’t have the potential for anything in life", my father said being disgusted by me as always.
"Ok, I’m going to study now", I said as I don’t have any other options.
He hung-up the call with a last Hmmm, which I took as a Have-a-nice-day wish. Sometimes monosyllable word means more than a full phrase. Even the first word humans uttered was just a monosyllabic ‘Duh’. And for ‘Hmm’, ask the meaning from any guy in a relationship, because girls have their own set of monosyllables for their moods.
So with that duh and hmm I stood rubbing my eyes. My father has already killed my sleep. I took the matchbox and lit a cigarette, as they say, 'har fikra ko dhuye mein udata chala ja'.
After a minute of silence thinking, I scowl with frustration at myself and kicked at the bookshelf. ‘Damn! - Do I really don’t have the potential?’
A book fell down. The Theory of Relativity – Albert Einstein.
That book proved to be the Newton’s apple for me at that moment.
Sometimes instead of smoking the frustration out of our guts, we should our self fly with the smoke.
The book has been there from two weeks but I was not getting time to read it. Today something complex got triggered and I started flipping the pages. I read the preface signed by the one I adore like God, Albert Einstein himself. I went on forgetting every frustration and every other wish for days.
Suddenly it has caught me like the pitchers’ plant and time arrow seemed to stop just for me and the relativity. And here I am exploring the universe through the pages.
So here starts the real journey.
From our childhood to adolescence, we have seen things from the prospect of Sir Isaac Newton. Force which is basically a push or pull exerted by a body is obtained by the change in its momentum with respect to time on another body. Momentum is mass in motion of the body. Energy is the ability of that force to displace something or we can say the property of the object which can be converted into other forms. Isn’t it like the potential my father was talking about?
Sure. Everything in our social life also works the same. The three laws of motion go in accordance with the motion of our life. Everyone is just a mass and everyone’s got Inertia to do and stay in their safe zones in whatever they are doing. This could be like my urge to sit idle and think or like someone’s urge to do drugs or like doing the regular job you do same as the donkey without a complain. These are their state of motion and they will certainly tend to stay in the same until like Newton said, some external force is applied against their will. This force could be the effort of someone else trying to bring you on the better right path or sometimes might be on the wrong one instead. Now it all depends on the strength of our opposite acting force that which path we will choose.
Isn’t it quite interesting? Oh! I’m already feeling like a box on the table. Our nurturing years of life was all governed on these principles and we still missed the relations. It is quite simply because sometimes for few people it gets boring by the use of excessive equations and math. But what about visualizing the things in brain, like creating your own cartoon with characters coming out from a science or math book? For example, to consider a chemical equation, get a little naughty and name some cartoon couple by the name of your chemicals and mate them. Hence, you got the result.
Whenever a math seems boring with equations, try to bring the geometry in it.
But then this society will name you in big words like schizophrenic, hypothesizer, psychic or directly dyslexic.
Then don’t worry. People have a mouth so they will use it in any situation. Everyone is unique and everyone has their own world of dreams and imagination. And remember-Knowledge is limited but imagination travels to infinity. Even Einstein was a dyslexic in his school life. And no mediocre 9-5 working person has done great. So, we just have to pack our guts, let our self free and jump in imagination to fly with the smoke. And since, smoke always rises up anyhow finding a low concentration region to fill, so will you.
The Special Theory of Relativity
This world is very much complicated and has certain laws which are above everything. The foremost law of nature is-Change!
Everything, which is in a way now, could change to another way still seeming correctly to the inhabitants. Earlier we were living in a world explained by Newton. But then came the literary rockstar, Einstein and explained the whole (almost) thing with some changes from the traditional way.
Newton said that every object has a uniform motion for a frame of reference, which means an object is moving (or appears to) with a certain velocity just relative to the observer.
Light is the most superior thing made by the universe. It is the supreme and everything else changes and tends for it. And we know that it always travels with a constant speed of (c) 3.0x108 meters/second. This is also the first postulate of the special theory of relativity.
Now take this. If I am driving my car with a speed A and someone fired a bullet on me from back that will appear to me coming with a speed B, but its real speed will be (A+B). [Real means for everyone at rest]
Now if that someone fired a laser (light ray) at me, it will surely appear to come at the speed of light (c). And according to that relative motion, the real speed of the laser would have been (A+c). But this just violates the supremacy of light’s speed being constant and is also not correct.
Then there came Einstein, in rescue of the physics at that point and stated like a brat that the pacing of time around that point has to slow down by a factor so that the new real speed is also actually equal to c for everyone else. This is generally called as the time dilation, which will later come as the time travelling factor in this story further.
The second postulate of the theory is that every law of physics governing nature will be same for everything.
Now, our legend, Einstein deducted an equation based on these theories and put in front of the world the revolutionary idea of giving birth to the atom bomb.
Deriving from his postulates and earlier stated equations he derived the famous mass-energy equivalence equation –
E = mc2
He revolutionized the world by joining every matter with energy. Thus, leading to the making of atom bomb and the demise which followed it.
But this equation just not stays at that. It reaches far beyond to humanity and gave a numerous meanings to everything and everyone.
By the time I completed understanding the theory up to here, I’d got the ultimate answer to the question my father has asked.
E represents the energy associated with any matter, which we measure in Joules (J). Joule is an SI unit of measurement for energy and is measured as kilograms x meters squared per second squared [kg m2/s2]. All this essentially means is that a joule of energy is equal to the force used to move a specific object 1 meter in the same direction as force in a second.
m represents the mass of that matter, measured in kilograms (kg).
c represents the universal speed of light, which is taken in vacuum as 3.0 x 108m/s in the SI units.
Now, I weigh roughly 60 kg. Let’s plug the values into the equation and see just what we get:
E=mc2 => E = (60kg)(3.00 x 108m/s)2 => 5.4 x 1018 J
That looks like this: 5,400,000,000,000,000,000 Joules of energy.
This is an incredibly large amount of energy. Let’s convert this in something we can relate to.
I was thinking what could we take and something hit my thoughts.
‘What about TNT?’
Well, TNT explosives are commonly measured in kiloton and 1 kiloton of TNT has about 4.18 x 1012 J or 4,180,000,000,000 Joules of energy.
Now that I got a specific conversion ratio, I did the boring part of calculation and found out that:
BOOM!
I am equal to about 1,291,866 kilotons of TNT.
This is the massive power of Einstein’s equation via the special theory of relativity.
One human being is roughly the equivalence of 1.3 MILLION kilotons of TNT worth of energy.
The atom bomb that destroyed Nagasaki in Japan during World War II was devastating. We all know that, it leveled a city in seconds and brought the War in Pacific to a close. That bomb was approximately of only 21 kilotons of explosives. So that means that I, one human being, have 62,000 times more explosive energy in me than a bomb that destroyed an entire city… and the same goes for every human being.
‘It was some way real and after thinking a lot it seems logical too because we humans are the deadliest weapon our self. Humans can be like the bomb with a brain.’ I wondered.
With so much pressure on my brain that day I felt drowsy at only 11 o’clock of night, which was a very big achievement for an insomniac like me.
Somehow, I had a happy point to end that day.
So next time, when my father is going to ask that, have I got real potential, I would just snap this on him and say,
"You have no idea."
