The 100th anniversary of German-born theoretical physicist Albert Einstein’s birth fell in 1979 and British author Nigel Calder, a scientist himself, decided the best way to celebrate it was to “make relativity simple.”

For someone as ignorant of science as I am, Calder’s book, Einstein’s Universe: The Layperson’s Guide, is a treasure trove for understanding a theory which flabbergasted the world of science and has continued to fascinate ecclesiastical minds till this day.

To make re-reading the book easy, I underlined with red ink the lines that contain the essence of Einstein’s work: the special theory of relativity (1905), which deals with high-speed motion and the general theory of relativity (1915), which deals with gravity. The two theories uncover new truths about time and space — or is it space-time?

For the layman, it is how time ‘behaves’ that appears fascinating and bewildering. It slows down. Yes, it does, at the edge of a black hole. The author informs us that light seems to slow down under gravity “and the slowing of light is linked with the slowing of time.”

The sixth instalment of picking books from a personal library worth re-reading

Calder adds, “The idea that time stands still at the edge of a black hole has to be taken quite literally. A black hole could be used to stretch a person’s life and let him survive thousands of years into the future.” And if the old man — no, he will never age — wants a daily bulletin on Pakistani politics, he will get it every 90 seconds and “he will witness an American presidential election five times a week.”

Can any spaceship ever cover even a fraction of our universe having galaxies whose light has, in some cases, reached our planet after billions of light years? Calder says that someone travelling at the speed of light could cross the entire universe “in no time.”

What he adds then is beyond our comprehension: if you could travel at the speed of light, “your point of departure and your destination seem to be at the same place” and the traveller will think “he arrives at the finishing post at the same moment as he left the start.”

What about the end of it all, and Doomsday? It will be, says Calder, like a film running backwards. Galaxies will rush toward the point of origin. Time lost in expansion will be regained as “negative time.” People will rise from their graves and start “ungrowing and getting unborn.”

As the Holy Quran says in Surah Yaseen: “Qaaloo ya wailana mum ba asna mim marqadena” [They will say ‘Ah! Woe unto us! Who hath raised us up from our beds of repose?’]

In memoriam: Einstein’s Universe was given to me by the late Maisoon Hussein, my colleague at Dawn. Her father died in Iraq under most tragic circumstances and Maisoon never recovered from this tragedy. I also have her book, For Life, Peace and Justice, a collection of her essays. May God bless her in perpetuity!

While Calder’s book steers clear of religion, American scientist Frank J. Tipler takes science and religion along, as the very name of his book makes clear: The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead. “God’s absolute oneness,” he says, “is a mathematical theorem”, which Tipler proves in his Omega Point theory.

Published in 1994, the book raised a storm in the world of science because it says theology is a branch of physics and adds that “physicists can infer by calculation the existence of God and the likelihood of the resurrection of the dead to eternal life in exactly the same way as physicists calculate the properties of the electron.”

Because of the fusion Tipler claims between physics and theology, he repeatedly refers not only to Judeo-Christian and Islamic texts, but also to the holy books of Taoism, Buddhism, Jainism and Hinduism to reinforce his Omega Point theory.

He adds: “Science can now offer precisely the consolations in facing death that religion once offered. Religion is now part of science,” because “physics has now absorbed theology; the divorce between science, between reason and emotion, is over.”

Asserting that immortal life in the Omega Point theory “is exactly the same as it is in the Judeo-Christian and Islamic tradition, Tipler says “death is like a deep dreamless sleep.” He denies any intervening period between death and resurrection and says “the dead will be recreated with the memories they had in the instant before death, and thus it will seem to them that the resurrection occurred immediately after death.”

The resurrected body, Tipler says, “could be vastly improved over our current bodies. The obvious improvement would be the repair of all body defects, such as missing limbs, youth for old age, etc.” He adds: “No subjective time passes between the instant of death and the instant of resurrection, though in the universe as a whole a trillion of years may pass.” This point, he says, is “also emphasised in the [Holy] Quran.”

That time and space are relative and the occurrence of Doomsday “will be in a wink”, as Tipler puts it, reminds us of verse 50 of Surah Qamar. Allama Yusuf Ali translates it thus: “And our command is but a single (Act) like the twinkling of an eye.” Maulana Abdul Majid Daryabadi translates it thus: “And Our commandment shall be but one, as the twinkling of an eye.”

Like many translators, however, Tipler opines that the Holy Quran is beyond translation and that “if rendered in another language, this rendering is necessarily an interpretation, not a translation.”

Even though I refer to the next book also as an evergreen, how deeply I feel grieved, for it tells the story of a land drenched in blood, or at least part of the huge landmass referred to as the Subcontinent.

It is about what the British call the ‘sepoy mutiny’ but what for us of South Asia was a heroic struggle for freedom in 1857. It is told by an author who is neither British nor a ‘native’, but an American: Andrew Ward.

Titled Our Bones Are Scattered: The Cawnpore Massacres and the Indian Mutiny of 1857, the illustrated, 700-page book was written long before Scottish historian William Dalrymple was honest enough to record the brutalities committed by both sides in his classic The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857.

Published in 1996, Ward’s book is more than an account of battles, massacres, duplicity and vendetta. It also brings to life characters on both sides — the men and women who played a major, and often criminal, part in that horrible South Asian summer of 1857.

There was Nana Sahib, based in Cawnpore [Kanpur], who unfurled two flags — Muslim green and Hindu red — to start the ‘mutiny’ in the city and there was this British colonel, James George Smith Neill, who ordered the implementation of what came to be called ‘Neill’s law’: every Indian prisoner must lick a given part of a blood-covered space for a specified number of minutes before being hanged.

Since there was no scaffolding and prisoners were hanged from the branches of a particular tree, there was soon no space left for hanging.

“The [British] women and children were evidently not molested, but at first the rebels seem to go out of their way to humiliate them in little ways. Their scant rations of lentils and chupatties … were served on earthen plates by members of the scavenger class who came in to collect their offal. This was the greatest indignity that the Eastern[er]s could cast upon them and was probably not lost on the caste and status conscious memsahibs.”

From Cawnpore, the book moves to other battlefields and gives us the reasons why the war was lost. There were soldiers, but no generals. The freedom fighters made a fundamental strategic mistake — instead of moving east toward Calcutta, which was the seat of the East India Company, the sepoys moved toward Delhi. This gave a chance to the Company army to advance from the east and crush the rebellion.

Going to Delhi was useless, for Bahadur Shah Zafar, the frail and powerless Mughal emperor to whom the ‘mutineers’ looked for leadership, had never seen a battlefield in his life.

Next: Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography by John TolandThe writer is Dawn’s External Ombudsman and an author

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, June 11th, 2023