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RTA-RITU - An Exhibition on Cosmic Order and Cycle of Seasons

THE ORDERED COSMOS

Fifteen billion years ago, our Universe arose in a vast eruption. Out of the radiant fire ball were born the elements and the particles that from, our galaxy, the Milky Way and the arth. As the earth cooled, waters began washing large parts of the landmass and mountains rose and gave rise to valleys allowing the waters to flow into springs, lakes and oceans. The land, the waters, the animals, the plants, emanated from a cosmic birth in which all the particles were held together in a miraculous gravitational embrace. The nuclear fires inside the stars synthesized the heavier elements and the gravitational pull layered them into spheres, with iron at the core, and some of these elements found their way into the earth’s body. Centuries of petrification caused sea creatures to transmute into fossils. With the emergence of humans, in the Universe came a life from that could understand the mysteries of life.

  Gravity appears to be the fountainhead for generating the Cosmic Order that we see in the Universe today. Of the four forces of nature gravity has the longest range therefore acts over enormously large distances. The shape and form of objects ranging from stars and galaxies to black holes, is governed by the laws of gravitation. Gravity is peculiar in one fundamental way. It is well known that left to itself, matter will rearrange itself so as to maximize its entropy. Thus an irregularly distributed gas will rapidly homogenize into a uniform distribution in thermodynamic equilibrium with its surroundings. Gravity on the other hand, leads to an opposite tendency, one that can be described as ‘anti-thermo- dynamic’. Thus minor irregularities grow and tend to become more pronounced under the action of gravity, permitting the gradual emergence of Cosmic Order from a virtually featureless initial state. This property, known as ‘gravitational instability', is responsible for the formation of all the large objects we see in the Universe today. According to this principle the largescale patterns we see (stars, galaxies, clusters and superclusters), arose out of tiny fluctuations in the primordial distribution of matter at the time of the Big Bang several billion years ago. These small fluctuations (one part in a hundred thousand) have been successfully mapped by the COBE satellite and provide us with a clue to the texture of the Universe during its infancy only a few million years after the Big Bang. (The present Universe is at least 10 billion years old.)

Solar Flare

Galaxy

Inside Saturn Rings

New Born Star

Surface

Fossil

Plant

Animal Life

Marine Life

Virus

The Uranium atoms

The invisible organisation of energy in the atoms

Gravitational instability amplifies small fluctuations leading to the formation of patterns that closely resemble the pattern of alternately light and dark regions that one sees in the brightness of light in a pool of water. Such patterns, called ‘caustics’ are found both in computer generated ‘N-body’ simulations of the Universe and in the honeycomb like pattern made by super-clusters and voids in the real Universe.

A related aspect of cosmic order is that ranging from the smallest atoms to the largest galaxies nothing appears to be at rest in the Universe. Our Earth, together with the rest of the nine planets in our solar system,” moves around the Sun. The Sun moves in the plane of the Milky Way galaxy completing one rotation roughly every 100 million years.

Kirukuchi pattern in micro particles

 Pictures taken by the COBE satellite spectacularly demonstrate that our Milky Way too is moving with a velocity of 600 km/set in the direction of the Hydra-Centaurus Supercluster of galaxies. This motion is not unique to our galaxy but is shared by several of its neighbours. In fact observations of galaxies in the eighties showed that many of them in our neighbourhood were participating in a 'bulk flow' towards a region a hundred million light years distant which has appropriately much of the Universe is participating in giant flows which are suprimposed on the smooth overall expansion of Universe governed by Einstein's theory of space-time and gravitation.

Varun Sahani

Snow crystals

The elegant symmetry of a cobweb

Snow crystals

Marine Symmetry

Islamic pattern

SYMMETRY AND ASYMMETRY

The Similar and the Like would not need harmony; the Dissimilar and Unlike, however, had necessariiy to be united by harmony, if it were to endure in the Cosmos.

Philolaos

If all the cosmic forces were just one kind of force, the Universe would have a certain elegance and purity, but it would be hopelessly boring. Nothing could live, nothing could change. If on the other hand, there were too many basic particles and forces, and too little uniformity, then nothing could be durable, nothing could evolve in a systematic way. The perfect symmetry had to be broken, but not extravagantly. in nature, a broken symmetry implied a perfect symmetry which was violated in a precise way. The breaking occurred according to laws just as strict as those which established the symmetry in the first place. Thus, perfect symmetry was not destroyed but hidden. In all the art examples and architecture that embodies the human love of symmetry, the traditional patterns of the Moslem world most aptly capture this delicate notion of broken symmetry. Even the flowerbeds of Moghul India confined living plants, in all their natural variability, within rigorously geometrical outlines that represented the order and stability of the Universe, or of God.

Calder 1977: pgs. 180.81

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