The ocean of knowledge is so deep that the deeper one goes, the deeper it keeps going. It is a bottomless wonder and one can only watch in amazement at the wonders that keep unfolding on the way. As Sir Isaac Newton, the English physicist who propounded the law of gravitation, puts it humbly: "I was like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me." Mankind will have to keep diving into the depths of the great ocean to unravel the secrets of nature. Intellectual giants from Plato to Locke, Copernicus to Galileo, Newton to Darwin, Einstein to Hawking, Marx to Freud, and many others, have already unravelled some of the greatest mysteries of nature or interpreted the human mind and existence. Yet the riddle about how the first pulse of life got ticking on earth still remains to be solved, the mystery about whether life exists on other planets somewhere in the universe still eludes us. These are just two of the most formidable mysteries before mankind today, and the need is to channelize all our energy and resources towards solving them. We shall definitely be able to meet these and many more challenges, provided we don't use our huge stockpiles of nuclear weapons against each other and, in the process, annihilate the entire human race and all forms of life on earth. That would be the most colossal tragedy ever.
(A short extract from the concluding chapter of my forthcoming book)
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