The Evening Bells and a Cosmic Question The aarti bells were ringing faintly from the ghats as I sat by the window, debugging a particularly stubborn memory leak. It was past midnight, the kind of quiet that lets your mind drift beyond the glowing screen. And as often happens, a technical problem, in its own intricate way, reminded me of a much larger, more profound cosmic puzzle: the matter-antimatter asymmetry . Why is there something rather than nothing? Or, more precisely, why is there this something, this universe teeming with stars and people and code, when physics tells us there should be an equal amount of its opposite? Our current understanding of the Big Bang, the universe's fiery beginning, suggests that matter and antimatter should have been created in perfectly equal quantities. Every electron should have had a positron, every proton an antiproton. And when matter meets antimatter, they annihilate each other in a flash of pure energy. If this perfect symmetry held, ...
The Quiet Hum of a Distant Discovery It was late. Past two in the morning, the kind of quiet that settles over our Kolkata flat after a long day of debugging code and sifting through network logs. My client, a small NGO helping rural artisans sell their wares online, had a critical payment gateway bug. I’d just pushed the fix, the kind of fix that makes you sigh with relief. Then, a notification popped up on my personal feed: ‘Astronomers discover a new kind of cosmic object – a black hole ‘star’.’ A black hole star. The words felt like a riddle. A black hole, by its very nature, consumes. A star, by its very nature, radiates. How could these two be one? My mind, usually sifting through IP addresses and encryption protocols, paused. This wasn't about terrestrial networks or digital vulnerabilities. This was about the fundamental nature of existence, seen through a cosmic lens. It’s what astronomy, in its vast, indifferent way, always does to me. It pulls me out of the immediate, ...