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FROM BHARATA TO INDIA

iUniverse, Inc.

Chapter One

Who are we, where do we come from, where are we going, are the questions that have perpetually obsessed the humanity. Fred Hoyle is credited with coining the term Big Bang during a 1949 radio broadcast which was picked by Georges Lemaitre to explain the origin of the Universe from a primordial hot and dense 'something'. The Big Bang was recreated artificially on 30 March 2010 at CERN headquarters in Geneva and could lead to the discovery of the Higgs boson, also called as the 'God particle', that is believed to have existed when the universe was born. Alexander Friedman calculated that the Universe and Space are expanding, in contrast to the static Universe model advocated by Einstein, but what are they expanding into! Lemaitre further stipulated that the forward expansion model meant that the Universe would eventually contract backwards, bringing all universal into a single, "primeval atom", when time and space will cease exist. The salient features of the Big Bang scenario may be summarized as follows.

Approximately 13.7 billion years ago, our universe was present as an atomic singularity, when space and time did not exist. An ineffable explosion, trillions of degrees in temperature, created not only the fundamental, subatomic particles, and thus matter and energy, but also the time and space. The elementary particles known as quarks began to bond in trios, forming photons, positrons and neutrinos, along with their anti-particles. The density of the Universe in its first moments of life is thought to have been 1094g/cm3, the majority as radiation mixed with ionized plasma. The particles and anti-particles equaled each other as did the neutrons and protons. For each billion pairs of these heavy particles (hadrons), created due to particle-anti-particle collisions, one was spared annihilation to constitute the majority of our universe today. During this creation and annihilation of particles, the universe was undergoing expansion many times the speed of light such that in less than one thousandth of a second it doubled in size at least one hundred times, from an atomic nucleus to 1035 meters in width. At the age of one hundredth of a second, neutrons began to decay on a massive scale which permitted free electrons and protons to combine with other particles. The genesis of matter from energy was made possible by photons materializing into baryons and anti-baryons whose subsequent annihilation transformed them into pure energy. Like water trapped inside a sponge, radiation was so dense (1014g/cm3) that no light was visible; as the temperature dropped to a mere 1013 K the Strong Nuclear, Weak Nuclear, and Electromagnetic interactions were able to exert their force.

As the gas cloud expanded one full second after the initial explosion, and the temperature dropped to ten billion degrees, photons no longer had the energy to disrupt the creation of matter, or to transform energy into matter. After three minutes, at the temperature of one billion degrees, protons and neutrons underwent nucleo-synthesis of deuterium from the bonding of two protons with two neutrons to form helium. The next important phase of expansion occurred thirty minutes later when the creation of photons increased through the annihilation of electron-positron pairs. For the next 300,000 years, the universe expanded further and cooled down to 10,000°K, such that helium nuclei absorbed free floating electrons to form helium atoms. Meanwhile, hydrogen atoms were bonding together and forming lithium such that the density of the universe expanded to the point where light as photons was no longer trapped within matter. Finally, the expansion allowed for light and matter to go their separate ways as radiation became less and less dense and the oldest fossils in the Universe were born. The three possible types of known matter are, cold dark matter, hot dark matter, and baryonic matter, of which the first one is by far the most dominant, the other two types amounting to less than 18% of the total. The cold dark matter neither emits light nor interacts with the normal baryonic matter. It is not yet understood why the Universe has more matter than anti-matter, although when very young the Universe contained equal numbers of baryons and anti-baryons. The Universe is dominated by a mysterious form of energy known as dark energy which permeates space; 72% of the total energy in the Universe is this dark energy.

The first quasars and galaxies were formed about a billion years after the Big Bang. A galaxy is a massive, gravitationally-bound system that consists of stars and stellar remnants, an interstellar medium of gas and dust, and an important but poorly understood component tentatively dubbed the dark matter. Whereas some of the galaxies contain as few as ten million (107) stars the giants ones may contain one trillion (1012), all orbiting around a central mass. Most galaxies in the universe appear to be dwarf galaxies, about one hundredth the size of the Milky Way, containing only a few billion stars, multiple star systems, star clusters, and interstellar clouds. There are probably 125 billion (1.25×1011) galaxies in the observable universe, most 1,000 to 100,000 J in diameter, usually separated by distances of millions of parsecs (or mega-parsecs). Ultra-compact dwarf galaxies have recently been discovered that are only 100 parsecs across. The average separation between galaxies within a cluster is a little over an order of magnitude larger than their diameter. Galaxies have been categorized as elliptical, spiral, irregular, and peculiar, all of which stem from the gravitational pull of the neighboring galaxies. Many dwarf galaxies may orbit a single larger galaxy; the Milky Way has at least a dozen such satellites, with an estimated 300-500 yet to be discovered. The majority of galaxies are organized into a hierarchy of associations called clusters which, in turn, can form super-clusters that are generally arranged into sheets and filaments. The dark matter appears to account for around 90% of the mass of most galaxies and super-massive black holes may exist at the center of many galaxies; the Milky Way galaxy appears to harbor at least one such object within its nucleus. The Sun is one of the stars in the Milky Way galaxy which includes the Earth and all the other objects that orbit the Sun.

The Greeks coined the term "galaxias ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII])", or "kyklos galaktikos", for our Milky Way galaxy, meaning "milky circle", according to their own mythology wherein Zeus placed his son Heracles, born of a mortal woman, on Hera's breast while she was asleep, so that the baby could drink her divine milk and thus become immortal. Hera woke up to find that she was nursing an unknown baby so she pushed the baby away and a jet of her milk sprayed the night sky, producing the Milky Way. The Greek philosopher Democritus (450-370 BC) proposed that the Milky Way might consist of distant stars but Aristotle (384-322 BC) believed that the Milky Way was caused by:

"The ignition of the fiery exhalation of some stars which were large, numerous and close together" and that the "ignition takes place in the upper part of the atmosphere, in the region of the world which is continuous with the heavenly motions".

No other scripture or mythology comes as close to the Big Bang model of the Universe as the Creation Hymn in Rigveda, revealed to the Great Rishis during their super-conscious meditation, which excels in the abstract ideation by seeking the origin of the universe in a primary principle, not related to either a deity, the Greek logos, or the Unmoved Mover. The Song of Creation to the Unknown God states "Truth is one (though) the wise call it by many names".

1. Then there was not non-existent nor existent: there was no realm of air, no sky beyond it. What covered it, and where? And what gave shelter? Was water there, unfathomed depth of water?

2. Death was not then, nor was there aught immortal: no sign was there, the day's and night's divider.

That one thing, breathless, breathed by its own nature: apart from it was nothing whatsoever.

3. Darkness there was: at first concealed in darkness, this all was indiscriminate chaos.

All that existed then was void and formless: By the great power of warmth was born that unit.

4. Thereafter rose desire in the beginning. Desire the primal seed and germ of spirit.

Sages who searched with their hearts' thought discovered the existent's kinship with the non-existent.

5. Transversely was their severing line extended: what was above it then and what below it?

There were begetters; there were mighty farads, free action here and energy up yonder.

6. Who verily knows and who can here declare it, when it was born and whence comes this creation?

The gods are later than this world's production. Who knows then when it first came into being?

7. He, the first origin of this creation, whether he formed it all or did not form it,

Whose eye controls this world in highest heaven, he verily knows it, or perhaps he knows not. (Hymn 129, book X, Rigveda, Griffith translation).

The orthodox Christians and Jews take the Hebrew text of Genesis as a literal, historical, fact and reject cosmological evolution altogether. They hold that the Heavens, Earth, and life on Earth were created by direct acts of God in six 24 hour days, sometime between 5,700 and 10,000 years ago. In 1650 CE, Archbishop Ussher published a chronology which dated the creation to the night preceding 23 October, 4004 BC, much like other Biblically oriented estimates such as that of Bede (3952 BC). God planted the Garden of Eden for the habitation of an original human couple (Adam and Eve) but as a result of the subsequent Fall of Man, humanity was forced to work hard for food, childbirth became painful, and physical death entered the world. Adam and Eve were the universal ancestors of the entire human race produced by intermarriage among their progeny. A Biblical flood, variously dated anywhere between 2350 BC and 7000 BC, is supposed to have killed all humans on Earth with the exception of Noah, his sons and their wives. The whole human race today is therefore believed to descend from this single family of a homogeneous gene pool. This idea has been rejected altogether by modern population genetics (chapter 5).

Creationism asserts that the native Americans, Australian aborigines, as also all other races, arose from the migration of people, speaking a single language, after the construction of the Tower of Babel in Babylon in the 3rd millennium BC, at the beginning of Nimrod's kingdom. Genealogies in Genesis mention Egypt, Gamer, Sheba, Canaan, and Sidon, who are said to have founded the cities and civilizations that bear their names. Prior to the fall of man, there was no predatory or carnivorous activity amongst animals, and no death, as all animals and humans subsisted on an entirely vegetarian diet. Venoms and poisons were used either for digestion or miraculously bestowed upon animals by either God or the devil at the time of the fall. The belief that the universe appeared as the work of a rational Creator was held by many founders of modern science, such as Scaliger, Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton, John Lightfoot, Copernicus, Faraday, Galileo, Maxwell, Boyle, Pascal and Nicolas Steno, all of whom followed the empirical method of Francis Bacon (1561-1626 CE), but which has now been abandoned by the mainstream science.

Chapter Two

The discovery of radioactivity permitted an assessment of the antiquity of the mother Earth. The universe was already 9 billion years old when the Earth started to assemble from cosmic dust and debris about 4.54 billion (4.54 × 10⁹ years ± 1%) years ago and the process was largely over within 10-20 million years, as determined by radiometric dating of meteorites, the oldest known terrestrial and lunar samples. The Solar System (including the Earth) was formed from a large, rotating, cloud of interstellar dust and gas called the solar nebula, composed of hydrogen and helium, produced during the Big Bang, as well as heavier elements ejected by supernovas. The Sun is about 4.57 billion years old, some 30 million years older than the earth. The nuclear fusion of hydrogen into helium soon began and, after contraction, a Tauri star ignited to create the Sun.

The Earth is part of some 100 billion stars in an archipelago of galaxies, the closest to the Milky Way being two million light years away. The Proto-Earth grew by accretion until the inner part of the proto-planet was hot enough to melt the heavy, siderophile metals. Only 10 million years after birth, the heavy densities of liquid metals made them sink to the Earth's center, resulting in the metallic core 3750 miles wide, consisting of iron and nickel, and responsible for the Earth's magnetic field. The crust is of diverse composition and varies from twelve to thirty miles in depth on land and only four miles under the sea. The core was separated from the crust by a mantle of iron and magnesium. During the accretion of material to the proto-planet, a cloud of gaseous silica must have surrounded the Earth, to condense afterwards as solid rocks on the surface.

The Moon was formed during a giant impact of the proto-Earth with another proto-planet, sometimes named Theia, thought to have been a little smaller than the current planet Mars. It could also have been formed by accretion of matter about 150 million kilometers from both the Sun and the Earth. The radiometric images show that the Earth had existed already for at least 10 million years before the impact, after the Earth's primitive mantle and core had already been differentiated. The impact released a gigantic amount of energy, causing both the Earth and Moon to be completely molten such that the Earth's mantle was a large magma ocean. The impact is also thought to have changed Earth's axis to produce the large 23.5° axial tilt which is responsible for the seasons; it may also have sped up Earth's rotation.

Throughout the history of the Earth, land masses have come together to form super continents which eventually broke up, only to reunite again. About 1000 to 830 million years ago, most continental mass was united into the supercontinent Rodinia which was probably not the first supercontinent to be formed. After the breakup of Rodinia about 800 million years ago, the supercontinent Pannotia was formed some 600 million years ago, only to break apart a short 50 million years later, at the end of the Proterozoic, into Laurentia, Baltica, Siberia and Gondwana. Laurentia and Baltica collided between 450 and 400 million years ago to form Laurussia whose traces can still be found in Scandinavia, Scotland and the northern Appalachians. During the Devonian, 416-359 million years ago, Gondwana and Siberia began to move towards Laurussia and collided with it during the Carboniferous period (359-299 million years ago), leading to the formation of the last supercontinent named Pangaea in the late Paleozoic, more than 250 million years ago (Figure 1).

Pangaea consisted of two smaller supercontinents joined at the hip near the Equator: Laurussia (North America, Greenland, Europe and much of Asia) and Gondwanaland (South America, Africa, India, Madagascar, Australia and Antarctica). Pangaea started to fragment 250 million years ago, in the age of dinosaurs, and by 180 Ma it had broken up into Laurasia and Gondwana. Pangaea is still dispersing but 250 million years hence the land masses will come together again. The Gondwana junction marks the 550 million old suture where India, Madagascar, Sri Lanka, East Antarctica and Australia were once joined together, near the modern Kanyakumari. The formation of Pangaea, coupled with the removal of carbon dioxide from air by plants, triggered the great Gondwana ice age which lasted for millions of years as Gondwanaland joined the northern land mass at the close of the Devonian (Figure 1).

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from FROM BHARATA TO INDIA by M. K. AGARWAL Copyright © 2012 by M. K. Agarwal. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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