“Ninety per cent of most magic merely consists of knowing one extra fact.”—Terry Pratchett
There are, according to most estimates, around a million physicists in the world. A significant number of them, let’s be generous and say over half, are theoretical physicists, who truly understand the general theory of relativity, quantum mechanics, the Higgs boson particle and the Standard Model of particle physics. Fewer still know what to look for when they are looking for Dark Matter. Yet, a small portion of lay readers continue to be fascinated by these ideas. We read last week about what could be a breakthrough towards getting evidence of Dark Matter (colloquially, “the stuff that makes gravity work”), with the same bated breath as when, in 2012, the God Particle (Higgs boson) was finally detected by the Large Hadron Collider.
It is in this space that we can let our imaginations run wild. Like our ancestors with their mythologies, we make narratives to move from the little we know to all that we don’t. From Isaac Asimov’s Foundation and Robot series, on the nature of machines, people and how societies decay to Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, which uses the idea of Dark Matter and multiverses to talk about consciousness and the oppressions of politics and religion that seek to control our creative impulses — the true Utopian tales come from writers who see the future as the broadening of the human potential. They are at the other end of the spectrum from figures like Plato or Orwell, who write of a future that is a polemical extension of the worst of the present.
There may be just a million physicists in the world. But Interstellar grossed around $770 million at the box office, and millions continue to watch it on OTT platforms. They include children who just like the stories of science. Some of them may grow up to illuminate Dark Matter.
The writer is Deputy Associate Editor, The Indian Express. aakash.joshi@expressindia.com
