A brief history of a timely intervention

Kanchan Siddiqui
STATESMAN NEWS SERVICE
Durgapur, Nov. 6 (2004) — This is an exciting brief history of an electrical engineer with a steel major straying into astrophysics. And what happened next. Mr Satyavarapu Naga Parameswara Gupta’s passion for cosmic mysteries had given him the gumption to find some gaping holes (pun entirely unintended) in the findings of Professor Stephen Hawking — even after the master physicist himself “rectified some of his mistakes” recently. And Mr Gupta’s intervention reportedly earned praise from Prof. Hawking himself. Mr Gupta works with SAIL’s Durgapur plant. His positions challenging the theories of Prof. Stephen Hawking and Prof. Roger Penrose were presented at two international conferences in Dublin and London in the past three months. Mr Gupta has contradicted both the Big Bang and Black Hole theories, attributing a dynamic status to the universe, formulated by Prof. Hawking and his one-time collaborator Prof Roger Penrose. Mr Gupta, from Kankinara in Andhra Pradesh, presented his model at the GR-17 (General Relativity) International Science Conference in Dublin held from 18 to 23 July 2004. Both Prof. Hawking and Prof. Penrose attended the conference. According to Mr Gupta: “Prof. Hawking in his Big Bang theory described the supernatural cosmic activities that in the expanding universe show the existence of light-shifted galaxies. But the Big Bang model has failed to rectify the presence of blue-shifted galaxies which are smaller in number compared to the red-shifted galaxies.” Challenging the Penrose version of the expanding universe, Mr Gupta presented his new “line of approach” in Dublin. Prof. Penrose proposed that red-shifted galaxies are expanding at random and blue-shifted galaxies are frequently decreasing to lend space to their red counterparts. Mr Gupta, however, argued that “if the imaginary time axis as proposed by Prof. Hawking is taken into account, then the blue-shifted galaxies would have vanished from the scene due to continuously increasing red-shifted ones. But the Penrose approach fails to take this into account.” In Mr Gupta’s theory, “the imaginary time axis as considered by Prof. Hawking is perpendicular to the present time axis and is not a real ‘thing’ that justifies the Big Bang theory.” Mr Gupta proposed, as an addendum, that the parameters of forces of repulsion in the greater universe be ignored. Mr Gupta’s paper, released by the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Oxfordshire, said: “In this simulation, dynamic universe was tested. It shows gravitating bodies do not collapse due to mutual gravitational forces of attraction. Newtonian gravitational forces with special relativity concepts are sufficient. No Big Bang, no Black Holes, no repulsion forces at any distance.” And he worked all of this out on his laptop with a mere 2.6 GB processor as his lone tool! Adds Mr Gupta: “Even the renewed version of Hawking’s theories have loopholes... they proposed the existence of warm holes, the ‘connecting link’ between the normal universe and baby universes. (But) there are no additional universes, so there’s no question of a ‘connecting link’. I have raised the issue of both Prof. Hawking in his new theory and Prof. Penrose having overlooked the existence of blue-shifted galaxies. I sought clarifications from Prof. Penrose about this sudden shift of postulate during the Dublin conference but he could not satisfy my queries.” The Statesman has e-mailed Prof. Hawking and Prof. Penrose for their comments.