We spend most of our time in mundane things like eating, sleeping, gossiping, watching movies and may be hanging out with friends. Some of us indulge ourselves in the comforts of this world. Yet some others cherish fighting under misguided principles and blind faith. We see news of cities getting destroyed with strife and terror. Others lead a much simpler life of waking up everyday, going to work, coming back, spend time with family and going to sleep. It feels so strange even to imagine that we are but a puny figment in the vast unimaginable universe? Lucky ones amongst us may live up to a hundred years. Our planet itself has been around for a 4.5 billion years and our life-time can be approximated to a zero when compared to it. The age of universe is 13.7 billion years !!

Recently I read the book "The Theory of Everything - by Stephen Hawking" and it took me into a world of stars, galaxies and black holes. There are a lot of things in the book which make you wonder who created this marvellous universe? The whole of the universe grew by a factor of 100 billion trillion trillion in 10 to the power of -32 seconds !! A gargantuan rate which we never can contemplate. A lot has happened in those nano nano nano seconds (dont know how to phrase such a miniscule number !). Within the first 100 seconds, the temperature of the universe cooled down to about a Billion Kelvin !! Aint kiddin :)

There are so many unanswered questions. What was the cause of the big bang? What used to exist before the big bang? Even if the velocity with which the particles flew away from each other was a billionth of a fraction lower than what it was, the whole of matter would have collapsed due to gravity. Who ensured that the velocity was just sufficient for the universe to continually expand and not contract? Why should gravity make things get attracted to each other rather then repel them from one another? The second law of Thermodynamics seems to run the whole universe. This law states that the Entropy (or disorder) of a system always tends to increase. That is why a tea cup gets shattered into a thousand shards rather than the thousand shards getting united to a single cup. The direction of Time was set to the direction of Entropy ensuring that we never see things like shards joing to a form a cup. Who set these directions? Since time moves forward, we see our past clearly. If only it was the otherway round, we would have taken birth (or got undeathed?!) from the graves and got younger everyday and go back finally in to the wombs of our mothers. Chandrashekar Limit decides the amount of mass a dying Star should shed so that it doesnt collapse into itself. And stars do exactly this, shed the right amount of mass in order to survive longer. Blackholes...now this is another big fascinating area where even time slows down. Are all these the works of GOD, even so, who created GOD in the first place?

Sometimes, when I think about these questions, it makes me feel that the whole world might be conspiring against me by hiding the answers to the questions. Am I a part of one big experiment that God is conducting? It gets very creepy to even think about it. 'Experiment' reminds of the HGTHG, in which in earth, the second most intelligent beings are actually humans, the first being 'rats' which are actually using humans as experiment objects which we never realise !!!

Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy has humorous answers to each of the intriguing questions. The creatures (not people!) in that book create a super duper computer ("Deep Thought") which is feeded the Ultimate Question. After about 4 million years to compute the answer and another 3 million years to check the answer, the comuter finally comes up with a numerical answer of "42" !!!!! When the creatures, who got flabberghasted, ask Deep Thought what the Ultimate Question was in the first place, it says it has no capacity to provide the question but that it will design a yet powerful computer to find the "Ultimate Question". This supercomputer turns out to be our dear planet Earth. And after 10 million years of waiting just before the Ultimate Question was getting unveiled, one fine day, earth just gets bulldozed by some species called "Vogons" because earth was a hindrance to their plans of an inter-galactical expressway !!

For now, I dont know the ultimate question but will suffice myself with the answer "42" !