prabāt

where the mind is without fear...


Nature's tryst with science

I think that it just might be possible that some of God’s secrets, Binyamin, some of them are supposed to remain secret.
- Rabbi Aharon Handalman to his disciple Binyamin
(Dante’s Equation by Jane Jensen)

How do you feel when the love of your life smiles straight into your eyes? Walk into a meditation hall, have you felt your energy dissipate and merge into the serenity of its silence? Now, try walking into a controversial political gathering! Every matter on earth, be it tangible or not radiates an energy – positive or negative. And just as the pebbles thrown on a pond, this energy ripples across merging into the waves of other energies forming a pattern of happiness or distress, calm or clash. And this wave pattern in turn ripples further again.

Jane Jensen picturizes the flights of possibility and the eventualities of this wave with a disillusioned amalgamation of science, philosophy and religion. A scientist, a rabbi and an intelligence operative live and re-live to recount the point of inflection where the limits of science rendezvous the extents of nature.

When the characters in the story get transported into different universes, with each of those universes reflecting the thought-wave patterns of their own “self”, Jane embraces upon the Law of Karma where the universe as we perceive is said to be an effect of ripples instigated by previous thoughts and actions of the individual and of all living beings. Man is ruled by his thought patterns and what he becomes is a result of this ensuing pattern.

The limits of science can be defined and re-defined only by science itself. Today we understand the building blocks of creation, but do things like cloning surpass the limits of science? Are we really trying to play God? Didn’t we, after all, learn the ferocity of the atomic bombs only after wiping out two cities? For once, Jill Talcott, the scientist in the story, steps down from her sorority acknowledging to un-discover her phenomenal discovery.

A few things are the way they are, because they are meant to be that way. But what happens when the course of nature gets altered? As pointed in the story, its hard to point at definitive answers unless we could travel 100 years ahead and find what our present day predilections has lead us to! Some riddles cannot be solved. And well, some better remain unsolved. But where do we draw the line?

Nevertheless, it’s always been a perplexing affair dealing with the idiosyncrasies of consummating the marriage between science and nature.
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