Ckk65

cerita kedaikopi #65
28-02-2001

Hollow and shallow...
" I am in a hurry. Can I get a quick dinner?", I asked my wife as I entered my house's main entrance. " Where are you going? It is almost 8pm already",said my wife. I seldom go out night, except on something important. At my age, I prefer to stay home at night to catch up with my readings. "I promised my friends to attend a stargazing event at UPM",I explained to my wife. "Stargazing is alright; I hope it is not girlsgazing!", teased my wife. "Come on, I am too old for that and I have seen enough girls already;now I want to see the stars for a change", I joked with my wife. That reminded me of my student days at the university when my friends and me used to play with the theodolite. Instead of looking at the wooden staff to take down the levels,we switched it around to look at the girls passing by during our survey practicals. Of course,I did not tell this mischievous behavior to my wife and kids..

A few minutes before that I got a call from my friend reminding me of a stargazing event I promised to attend at UPM last week. I was dead tired that day because I finished some business discussion around 7:45pm. If it is not for my desire to see the heavenly bodies that decorated the sky that night, I would call it a day and take a rest at home. My interest in astronomy begins when I read the famous book A Brief History of Time by Prof. Stephens Hawkings of Cambridge University. In 1997,when I was in London I took my family to visit Cambridge and of course I did not miss the opportunity to show my family the Cosmology Centre at Cambridge University.During another visit to The Dome when it was under construction in 1999, I stopped for a morning breakfast at the Greenwich Park Cafe (Tel No: 0171-6307888) and managed to see the Observartory where the Prime Meridian passes through (GMT+0). I really regretted for not taking the opportunity to walk along the Longititude zero. This is another excuse for me to visit London again, not to mention I also missed the chance to see the Enigma machine located at Bletchley Park during my trip in April, 2000. By the way,Enigma is the name of a German machine that the British used to decypher German war codes during the WW11.
(For those of you who wish to explore more on longitude,please read a book entitled Longitude by Dava Sobel. Another book called Station X will tell you more about the codebreakers during WW11)
Sorry, I got carried away by my memory of my London trips. Now,let me fly back home to UPM, Serdang where I attended the stargazing event. My first time looking at the telescope was at Masjid Negara where I saw the lunar eclipse. Even though this is the second time I look at the sky using telescopes,it still fascinated me. The first immediate lesson that I got is that what I see with my naked eyes is not the true picture, especilly Saturn. Second lesson is that what I saw is not in real time.The light from planets and the stars have taken a few minutes or a few hours or a few years before it reaches us.To me, it is more virtual than real.In order to make any definitive conclusions, we need more information, knowledge and the use of technology to enable us to study and learn more about the heavenly bodies. As an example, the world was made to believe that the earth was the centre of universe a few centuries ago...and we can make a similar mistake again if we are not careful.

If the mistake can happen in astronomy,it can also happen in other sciencetific fields like medicine, engineering etc. Somehow, I feel there are still gaps and missing pieces in human knowledge to understand ourselves and the world they live in. May be it is wiser to qualify our limited knowledge prior to making in serious sciencetific conclusions. On the other hand , I admitted to myself that my knowledge on astronomy is almost zero.
Sometimes I wondered why most sciencetific discoveries are done by Western people and we have very few indeed from the Eastern people? I think it is due to our attitude towards knowledge and our mindset. We are so eager to recite the relevant verses in the Quran about Allah's creation of heavenly bodies but we failed miserably in the understanding of sunattullah.Very little effort has gone beyond recitation and interpretation of relevant verses in the Quran by muslims as compared to non-muslims. In fact, I dare say that most of my knowledge is shallow and hollow.We tend to be complacent with whatever little information/knowledge that we have; and worse if we pretend to know more than we really know.In this aspect, I hope you are better than me; if not we better start reading and learning again in whatever fields of our interests....