I'm in Huntsville again, which means my days are full of meetings listening to people talk, and my evenings are very quiet. Every evening I make plans to do something new, just to keep myself busy. Last night I drove for hours in my boredom. The roads in Huntsville are very different from the ones in California. They remind me of the open roads to Gangauli; two lane roads with fields of wheat surrounding you on both sides. The weather this week has been unusually pleasant... hot but not humid. More like California's summers. I was driving down these empty quiet roads with my window rolled down. After awhile I heard a very loud sound, I thought it was my engine, so I pulled over and turned off my car. The sound got louder when I turned my car off. It was the sound of thousands of crickets singing in the brush that surrounded me. Aiya, the music of the crickets was so loud it was deafening. I was moved by the shear beauty of it. I thought for a moment this is what God sounds like. As a scientist you understand more about the world around you than most people. What most people consider miracles can easily be explained with simple science. I know in the science community religion is very prominent. That element of the unknown always leads us to believe in a higher power. The sound of the millions of crickets singing could easily be explained as a typical summer night in Alabama... It was the force of the sound that moved me. I felt like I was standing in the center of of an orchestra. I could actually feel the music in my heart.
I know in my past blogs I have spoken about the virtue of silence... today I'm thinking the power of noise.
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William Bragg and his son Lawrence Bragg are very famous physicists for their discovery of X-ray diffraction by crystals for which they shared the Nobel Prize. The younger Bragg was only 25 then and remains the youngest person to have been honored with Nobel Prize. Professor William Bragg was in Australia when his son was a child and he used to walk the latter to the school. On the way to school the child would ask many questions regarding natural phenomena and the father would be able to explain to him most of them. Naturally many questions arose in the mind of the child relating to sound and light . Later on , realizing that many of the children as inquisitive as his son may not have the opportunity to get the answers, William Bragg spoke on these topics in his series of Christmas lectures at Royal Institute in London. These have been published in the form of two very interesting books entitled “THE WORLD OF SOUND” and “THE UNIVERSE OF LIGHT”. In his book William Bragg describes as to how the shrill sound created by Crickets comes from scratching of their legs.
I have not read but have come to know from very reliable sources that old Hindu Scriptures describe the beginning of the world from an environment where there was neither any sound nor any light. The first sound that ended this nothingness was OM. Thus sound itself has been identified with God.
As adults we have too many things on our mind when we are surrounded by people but very original ideas and thoughts come to us in conditions of extreme loneliness. Most of the Hindu Rishis lived in secluded places in the Himalayas to learn about the true nature and purpose of LIFE. So it seems you are on the paths similar to those taken by the great
persons.
I had to make several attempts to post this due to regular failure of the internet connection.
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