My Encounter with God: Part II

In "My Encounter with God: Part I" I wrote that the thought that I would have to prove the existence of God came to my mind in the year 1970. But why was it that the year was 1970, and why was it not instead 1967 or 1968? In my brief biography I have mentioned that I had my first mystical experience either in 1965 or in 1966. Even if it was in the year 1966, still 1970 were too late. So the thought could have come to my mind much earlier. But the old one, who, as per Einstein, did not play dice, knew better than anyone else in the world what would be the right time for putting that thought in my mind. This is because He knew beforehand that in the year 1971 a special event was going to take place on earth that would change our conception about time for ever.

For many centuries people had believed that there was a Being who was spaceless and timeless. For many centuries mystics had repeatedly said that time was an illusion, that time was unreal. But nobody had paid any heed to them; rather they had been laughed at. But in the year 1904 we first got an equation from Lorentz that suggested for the first time that time could really be unreal. In the year 1905 Einstein in his famous Special Theory of Relativity repeated the same equation again. From that equation it appeared that after all there might be something substantial in what the mystics had repeatedly tried to communicate to others about time, that it was unreal, and that it was an illusion. But nobody thought it prudent to build any philosophical system on the basis of this equation, and nobody thought it prudent to attempt to show that God was not after all a creation of man’s imagination. This is because what the equation was showing regarding time was not experimentally verified yet. Yes, it is true that other predictions that the theory of Special Relativity can make were verified earlier.

This theory predicts that there will be length contraction in the direction of the movement of the light. It also predicts that time will run slow in a moving frame of reference with respect to another frame of reference that is at rest; it predicts that the mass of a particle will increase if its velocity is also increased; it predicts the equivalence of mass and energy. All these predictions were verified earlier; even the prediction about time running slow in a moving frame of reference was also verified through muon decay. Muons are introduced in the atmosphere by cosmic rays. These muons move at very high velocity, at about 98% of the speed of light. At this high speed lifetime of muons (2.22 μs in the laboratory) is also increased almost 5 times, because in their own frame of reference time runs much slower as per the special theory of relativity. Thus although muons having a lifetime of only 2.22 μs only are not supposed to reach earth’s surface still they are found abundantly on the surface of the earth due to their relativistic increase of lifetime. If these muons were moving with the speed of light, they could travel a distance of 660m only with their short lifetime of 2.22 μs, and thus they could never reach the surface of the earth. But due to their relativistic increase of lifetime they do actually travel a distance of 10500m from the top of the atmosphere where they are generated to the surface of the earth before decaying. But this is an indirect evidence of time dilation, and there was no direct evidence that the clock actually runs slow in a moving frame of reference.

This direct evidence came in the year 1971 only when in October of that year four cesium atomic beam clocks were flown around the world twice on commercial jet flights, once eastward and once westward (Hafele-Keating experiment). Then the flying clocks were compared with the reference clocks at the U. S. Naval Observatory. As per the combined effects of the theories of special and general relativity the eastward clocks should have lost 40+/-23 nanoseconds whereas the westward clocks should have gained 275+/-21 nanoseconds. And the observation was that the eastward clocks lost 59+/-10 nanoseconds and that the westward clocks gained 273+/-7 nanoseconds, the errors being the corresponding standard deviations. This experiment was the first of its kind, because it showed for the first time that time was slowing down on a clock. If clock runs slow as per the equation of the special theory of relativity at a speed much lower than the speed of light, then as per the same equation time will totally stop at the speed of light, thus showing that a state of timelessness can be reached. For this reason this experiment bears a special significance for the theists of all kinds, because all along they have believed in the existence of a God who is spaceless and timeless, and here science is showing for the first time that it is possible to attain a state of timelessness.

So many of them took this experimental result as a confirmation of their belief in the supernatural, and a floodgate was thus open. First appeared the book “The Tao of Physics” by Fritjof Capra in 1975, and then other books followed. “The Dancing Wu-Li Masters” by Gary Zukov appeared in 1979. Then followed “Mysticism and the New Physics” by Michael Talbot in 1981, “The Eye of Shiva” by Amaury De Reincourt also in 1981, and then “God and the New Physics” by Paul Davies in 1984. The same author wrote another book “The Mind of God” that appeared in 1992. So the old one, knowing well in advance that in the year 1971 such an incident was going to take place on earth, decided that the year 1970 would be the best time for informing me about that which would be my job for the rest of my life, and perhaps due to this reason in 1970 only I got the answer to the burning question that was lurking in my mind at that time: What would I have to do with my own life, when God Himself had appeared to me? But although the Hafele-Keating experiment was performed in the year 1971, and although the Special theory of Relativity was already there from 1905 onwards, and although I was assigned the task of proving the existence of God, still I failed to understand the real significance of both the theory and the experiment before the year 1982-83. But about that later.