The day was beautiful. I visited Baden-Baden and the city is just beautiful. Tucked away in Germany’s Black Forest, Baden-Baden is a sight to capture with its charming architecture and vibrant gardens. As twilight descends, the city transforms into a mesmerizing dreamscape. But that’s not the main thing I feel enchanted about.
A video I watched about the galaxy and the spacetime captivated my freely floating thoughts. We are in intergalactic space. We are lost between two neighboring galaxies: Andromade and Milky way. The underlying geometry of the universe is a hot topic of interest for scientists since a long time. Around us space is almost perfectly empty. ‘Almost’ is intentionally mentioned, because there is still an invisble fabric of universe all around us, the spacetime. This fabric is not made of straight lines, but rahter it is asubtly distorted by the gravitation pull of massive celestial objects like galaxies, stars and dark matter.
The curved spacetime influences the traectories and motions of astronomical bodies. Andromeda and Milky way are slowly moving towards each other, thnanks to their mutual gravitational attraction, and is destined to merge billion years from now. And then there is the expansion of the universe as well. 13.8 billion years ago this universe was just beginning to form and the big bang was the initial point. Now as a whole, the universe is constantly expanding, carrying galaxies away from each other.
Mass of the sun curves spacetime, and fabric of the cosmos bends towards sun, taking in everything with it. The orbit is just another name for this curved fabric that keeps objects spinning around its axis until they hit a star or something else to orbit them away from us (maybe). More dramatically, the cores of massive stars that have exhausted their nuclear fuel can undergo catastrophic gravitational collapse, crushing matter into infinitesimally small volumes and warping spacetime to such an extreme degree that not even light can escape - turning into black holes. I would’ve loved to speak more of black holes, like the accretion disks of superheated matter, the macabre “spaghettification” of objects torn apart by tidal force, and the sheer destruction of the universe itself that is what happens when the stars themselves are blackholes. But I feel too dumb to talk about it.
I have a massive interest and curiosity about the working principles of the universe and the laws of nature. I am hooked by also how brain is functioning. But I feel dumb about them, I lack a lot of knowledge to even figure out how it might be functioning. Learning these concepts require an intense and repetitive assembly of knowledge on the topic over time. It is not terrifically important to accumulate these knowledge, but I am just curious and want to find more about it.