Sunday, 8 April 2012

DEFENCE EXPENDTURES ON NEIGHBOURS COMPARED.

PPP indicates Purchasing Power Parity.
CHINA.
Defence Expenditure------ 4.30% of its GDP or USD 485 billion.
GDP PPP---------------------11.29 trillion USD


INDIA.
Defence Expenditure------- 2.50% of its GDP or USD 112 billion.
India GDP PPP----------------4.463 trillion USD


PAKISTAN
Defence Expenditure------- 3.00% of its GDP or USD 15 billion.
Pakistan GDP PPP----------- 0.488 trillion USD


Based on these figures our neighbour Pakistan should be extremely worried about us. Their expenditure on defence is some 9 times less than ours because their per capita incomes are lesser and also because of its lesser population which is 1/6th of ours. This is despite their higher expenditure on defence GDP wise.

China is spending 4 times more than us on defence.

Sunday, 1 April 2012

GIST OF A FEW MORE UPANISHADS

I feel that we should know about the Upanishads irrespective of whether we believe in God or not.

In one of my earlier posts I have given the gist of the Ishavyasopanishad with an intention of giving the rest 9 of the principal Upanishads later. I am worried that giving them all together would tax the person who reads them and that is reason why I am giving them in installments.

I am giving the gist of 3 more Upanishads below:

KENOPANISHAD.
The power behind every activity of nature and of man is the power of Brahman. To realize this truth is to be immortal.
KATHOPANISHAD.
The secret of immortality is to be found in purification of the heart, in meditation, in realization of the identity of the Self within and the Brahman without. For immortality is simply union with God.
PRASNAOPANISHAD.
Man is composed of such elements as vital breath, deeds, thought, and the senses. All of them deriving their being from the Self. In the Self, they ultimately disappear, even as the waters of a river disappear into the sea.

BIG BANG THEORY-FORMATION OF THE UNIVERSE.

Our Sun is an average star in the Universe. 10,000 crore such stars make the Milky Way Galaxy which is just an average galaxy. There are again 10,000 crore such galaxies in the known Universe. The known Universe has a diameter of about 1200 to 1500 crore light years. We are prefixing it with known because we do not know what lies beyond this. Perhaps a vast empty area with properties unknown to us, and then maybe another Universe, and so on. Even if our science develops for another million years still we would not be able to fathom the secrets of this cosmic whole.

What is the origin of the known Universe? Most of the Cosmologists have accepted the Big Bang theory as the most plausible explanation for the formation of the Universe. This was propounded by the Belgian Physicist and a Roman Catholic Priest Georges Lemaitre in 1927. As per this theory the entire matter in the Universe is concentrated as one single mass a long time ago. At that point of time there was neither space nor time and we cannot even imagine what is outside this mass. Space and time are relative concepts and when the entire Universe is in a single mass, then they cannot be measured at all and cease to have any meaning.

As such large amount of matter together gives rise to high gravitational attraction; all the matter got attracted towards its center. As the mass shrunk on account of this huge gravitational forces an enormous amount of heat was generated. This went on increasing to a point when the entire mass exploded and started scattering in all the directions. At that time the temperature of this mass was about 4,00,000 crore degrees Celsius. Comparatively our Sun’s core has a temperature of about 5 crore degrees Celsius. Atoms started forming only 377,000 years after the Big Bang which is estimated to have occurred some 14 billion years ago. Scientists have estimated the time when that single mass exploded by simply projecting back the possibility of an explosion and counting back from now.

There is an indirect proof for the explosion of the primeval atom (what else can we call it?) and it is known as Microwave Background Radiation. American radio astronomers Penzias and Wilson found in 1964 that a microwave radiation not corresponding to any star or a galaxy or an object is found in all directions of the Universe with the same wavelength and frequency. This relates to a certain homogenous temperature throughout the Universe which can be extrapolated to the Big Bang.