When I think about writing Our Physics So Far, I remember how difficult it was to leave certain questions alone. I would read something, try to understand it, and find myself thinking about it long after I had closed the book. I wrote Our Physics So Far at sixteen, when I was learning enough to realize how much I did not understand, and wanted to share the things that fascinated me.

 

Consciousness was one of the first questions to trouble me in that way. The neuroscience chapter in A. P. J. Abdul Kalam and Srijan Singh’s Reignited had made me curious about the human brain. But knowing that billions of nerve cells exchanged signals did not explain how we could have feelings, emotions and a sense of being alive. I could not find a clean answer to that question in textbooks, or anywhere for that matter. Discovering that scientists were struggling with the same question made it even harder to stop thinking about. David Eagleman’s The Brain was important to me during that time. It introduced to me consciousness as an emergent property: something that could arise when relatively simple parts interacted in complex ways. I found that idea appealing, even though I still had many questions. Reading Michio Kaku’s The Future of the Mind then got me seriously interested in physics. I wanted to understand the brain, but I also wanted to understand the matter it was made of and the universe in which it existed. Physics seemed to offer a way to explore those questions at a more fundamental level, and possibly in a more unified way.

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Soon, I was staying awake well after midnight reading popular science books on physics. Time, entropy, black holes and quantum mechanics gave me more to think about than I could possibly take in. I loved reading how physicists had struggled with these ideas, disagreed with one another and changed our understanding of the world. Physics felt much like a detective story to me. There was evidence to examine and something to figure out, except that the mystery was the universe itself. Quantum mechanics particularly fascinated me. Reading about quantum mechanics had made me want to learn more than its popular explanations, and I asked my school teachers to help. I was in ninth standard then. My physics and chemistry teachers spent over a month teaching me about quantum operators, wave functions and Schrödinger’s equation during recess. I am forever grateful that they took my interest seriously and made time for it.

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At some point, I began writing notes, partly to organize what I was learning. And soon, my laptop was full of hundreds of Word files. I decided to bring them together into a book on quantum mechanics, initially about 50 pages long. Then I kept adding things: particle physics, radioactivity, relativistic quantum mechanics, special and general relativity, and eventually chaos theory. The manuscript grew to roughly 450 pages. There was a problem, though. I had never intended it to be a textbook, and it was not one. Yet it contained too much technical material to be accessible to a broad audience. I had enjoyed putting it together, but I wanted someone else to be able to read it without needing all the background I had gathered along the way. I wanted it to be a popular science book on the journey of physics, because reading such books had encouraged me to keep reading and ask questions I might otherwise never have considered. I wanted to communicate something of that excitement myself. So I returned to the material with a clearer idea of the book I wanted to write: a journey through what we understood about the universe, how we had come to understand it, and the questions we still could not answer.

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I often think about my grandfather, who had asked me about Einstein’s theory of gravity. He had no degree in science, but he was the first person from his village to earn a Master’s degree. His humble background, initial struggle and the way he established himself eventually have always awed and inspired me. We spent a lot of time together, talking mostly about life, ethics and philosophy. I regret that we did not discuss physics more deeply. He was a curious, old person with a genuine interest in science, and I wish we had discussed physics more.

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So, that is the audience I wanted to reach. There were already many popular science books by authors far more qualified than myself, but I still wanted to explain what I had learned to someone who was curious. The rather ambitious subtitle - A Journey through Spacetime, Consciousness and the Fundamental Nature of Reality - reflected that wish. The book starts with cosmology and classical physics, then moves into relativity and quantum mechanics, then particle physics and the quest for a theory of quantum gravity. Then, the book shifts to chaos theory, emergence, consciousness, neuroscience and metaphysics. (I know the range is not completely sensible, but in my defense I was only sixteen when I wrote the book!) 

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During the writing, I was fortunate enough to interview Edward Witten about some of the questions confronting modern physics. His answers became part of the book. After a lot of struggle through the thickets of spacetime, consciousness, metaphysics and publishing, Our Physics So Far was finally published!

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I kept learning afterwards, of course. When I reread the original edition, I found explanations that needed work and material that needed updating. Some developments were new; others had happened earlier, but I had only learned about them after publication. There were also arguments about consciousness and metaphysics that I now thought were flawed. To be honest, I had put the original edition together rather hastily in places. Yes, it was difficult to look at something I had worked so hard on and recognize those problems. But they were there, and I wanted to correct them. So I researched further, improved the explanations, reconsidered what deserves a place in the book, and finally put together a revised edition of Our Physics So Far. In the revised edition, I removed unnecessary, unsupported speculation and tried to keep the discussions as scientific as possible. This new edition contains most of the original material, including the interview with Witten, and can be read without the first edition. But for me, revising it was also part of learning physics. I had to look again at ideas I had once accepted and admit that I no longer agreed with some of them.

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But yes, the revised edition is not perfect either. When I open it today, part of me wants to write a third edition. But more than four years have passed since its publication. In that time, I earned an undergraduate degree in physics, studied the subject more technically, and became more involved in research. I also wrote a new book - The City of Equilibrium - where I tried something different. So perhaps there will be no third edition of Our Physics So Far. Some passages now strike me as naive, some make me smile, and others make me grateful that I do not have to sit in front of my readers when they read them! Still, holding the physical copy in my hands feels worth it. My understanding has changed, and will continue to change, but I recognize the curiosity in those pages. I wanted to understand how the universe worked and share what I was discovering. And I am glad I did.

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- Arpan