Black Hole

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I also found something else in Bologna, when I studied there in the seventies: an encounter with that spirit of my generation, a generation that was intent on changing everything, that dreamed of inventing new ways of thinking, of living together and of loving. The university was occupied for several months by politically engaged students. I got involved with the friends of Radio Alice, the independent radio station that had become the voice of the student revolt. The authors try to describe the spacetime by something called Penrose diagrams. I think I did a good job understanding it to some extent. But when it came to quantum entanglement in the last chapters, I kind of gave up. Because the equations involved with those chapters were more complex than the rest. AIDS had not yet reared its ugly head. The worst sexually transmitted disease you could get was herpes. That sounded awful. Eruptions of repulsive festering sores...and there was NO CURE! Once you got it, you had it for life. I’m fascinated and interested.....but I also know I didn’t do 99.9 % of the things people my age were doing. governed, was at least sovereign, and therefore free, and had a state where even though the ruler was a Muslim, Hindus nonetheless enjoyed positions in the highest echelons of government (p. 242).

In a further extract, “Copernicus and Bologna”, Rovelli writes about the value of a university educationthe key elements of the rhetoric of Hindu-Muslim fraternity that would ring out so loudly in the days of the Swadeshi movement…This was not the fraternity premised on the abstract citizen-subject, grounded in homogenous and equal citizenship, and then handed down as the liberal ideal of civic nationalism, most exemplarily since the French Revolution. Rather it was based on Hindus and Muslims constituting distinct communities that were nonetheless bound by the solidarity of naturalized kinship (p. 249). It is the most interesting, well-posed question in modern physics,” he says, looking like a decade-older version of Mark Ruffalo’s Bruce Banner in the Avengers movies. “So interesting that I was ready to devote my life to trying to understand it.”

During the age of this nationalist thought-world, from the 1870s to the 1910s, many Muslim writers wrote in Bengali; like Mir Musharraf Hussein, who wrote novels, plays, and verse, in particular, the three-part Bishad-Sindhu (Ocean of Sorrows) about the Battle of Karbala, and Ismail Hossain Shiraji, who traveled to Turkey during the Balkan Wars, wrote travelogues about Turkey in Bengali as well as seditious anti-colonial literature. These writers were certainly also affected by the newly ascendant discourses of nation and community. Though not a particularly visible or remarkable part of the vernacular-educated Bengali middle-class literati, these writers also grappled with issues of sovereignty, in particular through idealized connections with the Islamic world as well as Islamic literary and ethical themes in Bengali that had been present in the language since at least the 17th century CE. Given that the Muslim portion of Siraj’s identity was crucial for the stereotype of him as a tyrant, why not include any assessment of Muslim Bengali writing during the age of nationalist thought? Chatterjee mentions how by 1940, ‘the Muslim public in Calcutta was being mobilized for entirely new political futures’ (p. 323), but without any sense of the exclusions that were discursively operating in the thought-worlds of Bengali letters at the time. Inputting an awareness of the exclusions operating at discursive levels would allow readers a sense of the texture of how hegemonic ideas generate force and power. These questions reflect on the larger issue of how hegemony is understood in this work, for the broader audience of scholars of modern politics and political thought. Is hegemony always already given and does it not have a history? What happens to the contingent moments of the construction of the hegemonic ideas in the making of ‘imperial practices’? I was a teenager from 1974 - 1981. I wore ugly clothes and listened to some great music. And yes, I still have my mood ring.This ex- cheerleader was a straight arrow slow poke... yet no matter what identity one related to ( None for me - just confused)....

While saying this, I think the authors try their best to convey these complex ideas to the layman. I have read considerable amount of books about the universe and this is the hardest so far. But even though this it's hard to read, I think we can see through these theories from a mathematical point of view. Because at the end of the day it's all about maths. This is the ultimate vindication of research for research’s sake: two of the biggest problems in science and technology have turned out to be intimately related. The challenge of building a quantum computer is very similar to the challenge of writing down the correct theory of quantum gravity. This is one reason why it is vital that we continue to support the most esoteric scientific endeavours. Nobody could have predicted such a link. The story is set in one summer post-high-school-graduation from a Seattle high school in the late seventies, when Burns himself would have been graduating from a Seattle high school. Four characters take center stage, Chris, Rob, Keith and Eliza, though a once bullied boy named Dave also plays a central role. In the story young people begin to develop physical abnormalities as a result of developing sexual desire for someone, or actually having sex with someone. Some critics thought Burns might have been making a commentary on the AIDS crisis (as in: Just say no to sex, kids, or it will screw you up forever!), but Burns himself said it was more generally about adolescence than just sexual awakening. This transition to adulthood as Burns depicts it is infused with lots of drug use/hallucinations, and nightmares; while friendship is important in the story, it is mainly a tale of desire, fears, confusion and what happens if you are in any sense different as you pass from childhood to adulthood. The social distortion is matched by visual images of distorted bodies, though images of the natural world—the sky, trees, ocean--and physical beauty (including bodies) are also present and at some points--not all--restorative.

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As astrophysicist Neil Degrasse Tyson once described the process: “While you're getting stretched, you're getting squeezed—extruded through the fabric of space like toothpaste through a tube.” Quantum mechanics implies that the whole space is filled with pairs of virtual particles and antiparticles, which are constantly materializing in pairs, separating, and then coming together again and annihilating each other. I guess I just expected more..? This was very strange and very boring and the plot never really went anywhere. Some of the images were very creepy and terrifying which is what I wanted from this but the story was not compelling at all, and I found myself skimming most of the story. The ending wasn’t satisfying at all either (if that’s even considered an ending really...?) I don't usually read graphic novels -- especially not gruesome graphic novels about teenagers with bizarre sexually transmitted deformities. But I loved this! Well, "loved" might be the wrong term, but I thought it was incredibly compelling. Chatterjee’s exposure of these debates and tracing of the origins of nationalist thought are detailed and nuanced. But there are two areas in his presentation that cry out for more expansion. One, though he mentions without any notes or references that ‘Muslim critics had often complained about the unfair portrayal of Siraj in Nabinchandra’s Palasir yuddha’ (p. 242), he devotes not a single line to any Muslim Bengali writers, critics, or political figures who had a stake in this entire debate. It is not incumbent upon Chatterjee to offer an analysis of each and every text and/or community that produced responses to these sorts of discourses, but a history of discourse without any grappling with the social markers on the ground leaves readers wondering about the historicity of these moments. When discussing how such a nationalist and idealized form of India’s past came to occupy these writers through the figure of Siraj, Chatterjee does not discuss how this very form potentially excluded Muslims from taking an active role in the nationalist imagination in this particular way. As Chatterjee states, Nabin Chandra Sen provided