“Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.”
Goethe
“केवल जानना पर्याप्त नहीं है, हमें अवश्य ही प्रयोग भी करना चाहिए। केवल इच्छा करना पर्याप्त नहीं है, बल्कि हमें कार्य करना भी चाहिए।”
गोएथ
Monday, June 20, 2022
Quote of the Day June 20, 2022
Current Affairs-June 19, 2022
INDIA
– Govt. reserves 10% vacancies for recruitment in CAPFs (Central Armed Police Forces) and Assam Rifles for Agniveers
– Gujarat: PM participates in ‘Gujarat Gaurav Abhiyan’ in Vadodara; launches schemes worth Rs 21,000 crore
– Gujarat: PM inaugurates redeveloped Kalika Mata temple in Pavagadh
– Ex-Supreme Court judge Ranjana Desai is new Chairperson of Press Council of India
– EAM S. Jaishankar with his Vietnamese counterpart Bui Thanh Son launch joint logo for celebration of 50 Years of bilateral Diplomatic Relations
– Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan inaugurates National Yoga Olympiad 2022 in New Delhi
ECONOMY & CORPORATE
– India and European Union re-launch negotiations for India-EU free trade agreement
WORLD
– Sustainable Gastronomy Day observed on June 18
– International Day for Countering Hate Speech observed on June 18
– Global dirty money watchdog FATF (Financial Action Task Force) keeps Pakistan on ‘grey list’
– French screen icon Jean-Louis Trintignant dies aged 91
– Urdu scholar-litterateur Gopi Chand Narang dies in US at 91
SPORTS
– Sourav Kothari clinches Pacific International Billiards Championship in Melbourne
Current Affairs-June 20, 2022
INDIA
– IAF releases details on Agnipath recruitment scheme; process to begin from June 24
– New Delhi: Pragati Maidan Integrated Transit Corridor to cut commute time by 15 mins
– Polio Immunisation 2022 starts in 11 states & UTs across country
– Aadhaar number to be linked to voters list
ECONOMY & CORPORATE
– Govt. to implement Employees’ State Insurance Scheme in entire country by year-end
– Govt. tags IT assets of ICICI Bank, HDFC Bank and UPI managing entity NPCI as ‘critical information infrastructure
– RBI unveils “Payments Vision 2025” with a core theme of ‘E-Payments for Everyone, Everywhere, Everytime’ (4Es)
WORLD
– International Day for the Elimination of Sexual Violence in Conflict observed on June 19
– World Sickle Cell Awareness Day observed on June 19
– British journalist Dom Phillips confirmed dead in Brazil; he and his guide had gone missing on a book research trip in the Amazon
SPORTS
– 2022 Indonesia Open badminton in Jakarta Winners — Men’s singles: Denmark’s Viktor Axelsen, Women’s singles: Chinese Taipei’s Tai Tzu-ying, Men’s doubles: China’s Liu Yuchen & Ou Xuanyi, Women’s doubles: Japan’s Nami Matsuyama & Chiharu Shida and Mixed doubles: China’s Zheng Siwei & Huang Yaqiong.
– Basketball: Golden State Warriors defeat Golden State Warriors to win NBA Finals crown in Boston
– Women’s weightlifting: Bindyarani Devi improves upon her National records in 55kg
– Sunil Chhetri becomes joint fifth highest goalscorer in international football history with 84 goals
– B. Aishwarya creates new national record in women’s triple jump: 14.14m
– Neeraj Chopra wins gold in javelin with throw of 86.69m at the Kuortane Games in Finland
– Torch relay for 44th Chess Olympiad launched by PM at Indira Gandhi Stadium in New Delhi
– Former athlete Hari Chand dies at 69; won gold in 5000m & 10,000m at Bangkok Asian Games in 1978
UNHCR 2022 Global Trends Report
Findings of the report
- The report noted that, 100 million people were forced to go back to their homes in 2021, due to violence, war in Ukraine, food insecurity, human rights abuses, climate crisis, and other emergencies from Africa to Afghanistan.
- There were 23.7 million new internal displacements worldwide, due to disasters. It shows the decrease of seven million, or by 23 per cent, as compared to the last year.
- On Earth, 1 in every 78 people is now displaced.
- Largest displacement, 6 million, occurred in China in 2021 due to disasters, followed by the Philippines (5.7 million) and India (4.9 million).
- Most of the disaster displacements were temporary.
- Majority of internally displaced persons returned to their home areas. However, 5.9 million people across the world remained displaced at the end of 2021 due to disasters.
People moving back to homes
According to UNHCR, the number of people who were forced to flee their homes has increased in past decade. It stands at the highest level since records started. By 2021 end, number of people displaced by war, persecution, violence, and human rights abuses was 89.3 million, which has increased by 8% and has doubled as compared to figure 10 years ago.
Displacement amid Russian Invasion of Ukraine
Russian invasion of Ukraine has caused the fastest and largest forced displacement crises after World War II from Africa to Afghanistan and beyond. It has pushed the figure over 100 million.
Displacement in India
In India, around five million people were internally displaced due to disasters and climate change in 2021.
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)
UNHCR is a United Nations agency, that was set up to aid and protect refugees, stateless people and forcibly displaced communities. The body assist them in their voluntary repatriation, resettlement or local integration. Headquarter of UNHCR is in Geneva, Switzerland.
Current Affairs-June 18, 2022
INDIA
– Govt. extends upper age limit for Agnipath recruitment scheme from 21 to 23 years
– SC on UP demolitions: Authorities should strictly follow due process
– Nearly 5 mn in India displaced due to climate change, disasters in 2021: UN
– External Affairs Minister Dr. S. Jaishankar addresses Ministerial Session of the Delhi Dialogue -12
– SCO approves the Plan for conduct of the Joint Border Operation Friendship Border 2022
– ‘Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav’: 75 Sea beaches to be cleaned from 3rd July to 17th Sept
– Law and Justice Minister Kiren Rijiju meets Mongolian president Ukhnaagiin Khürelsükh in Ulaanbaatar
ECONOMY & CORPORATE
– Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal terms World Trade Organisation’s 12th Ministerial Conference in Geneva as successful; claims India received 100 percent success
– Union Minister Nitin Gadkari proposes setting up of Innovation Bank for new ideas, research findings, technologies to focus on quality in infrastructure development
– Forex reserves down
– Indians’ funds in Swiss banks jump 50% to 3.83 billion Swiss francs (over Rs 30,500 crore) in 2021; customer deposits up too
WORLD
– World Day to Combat Desertification and Drought observed on June 17, theme: “Rising up from drought together”
– China launches its third aircraft carrier named Fujian
– UK approves extradition of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to US
– EU Commission backs candidate status for Ukraine
– China blocks India, US bid to designate Pak-based Abdul Rehman Makki as global terrorist by UN
– 110th Session of the International Labour Conference held in Geneva
– Russia’s Gazprom cuts gas supply to Germany
– Mongolia’s Khuvsgul lake added to UNESCO World Network of Biosphere Reserves
SPORTS
– England hit world record one-day international score of 498-4 against the Netherlands in Amstelveen
The Big Bang Theory
Philosophers and scholars over centuries have devoted their time contemplating space to find answers to one of the most important questions of human existence – how did the universe evolve and come into being and what might be its future? Our understanding of the cosmos has advanced significantly over time, but every insight has thrown up new questions and new mysteries.The prevalent belief is that the universe came into being nearly 13.8 billion years ago with a massive explosion widely known as the “Big Bang”. This is also the most acknowledged notion of our existence and the evolution of our universe.
The genesis of the Big Bang theory can be traced to eminent scientist Edwin Hubble who not only discovered that there are galaxies other than the Milky Way but also that we live in an ever-expanding universe in which all galaxies are moving away – the farther the galaxy, the faster it is receding! These profound implications about the universe were also proposed by Georges Lemaître, a Belgian cosmologist and Catholic priest, who is considered as the father of the Big Bang theory.
The universe is continuously expanding. If we retrogress that back in time, in the past the universe was smaller and as we reach time equal to zero, all visible universe collapses down to an infinitely small volume of infinite density and infinite temperature. This is what physicists term as singularity or primeval atom. There was no space and no time and then there was a Big Bang. Although during an explosion debris fly out and spread unevenly at different distances from the blast centre, Big Bang shot out the same amount of material, over the same distance in all directions giving birth to a homogenous universe in space and time. Thus what happened was neither big nor with a bang. What triggered this, we may never know as singularity and laws of physics as we know them don’t mix.
What we do know is that after the Big Bang, space started to expand and cool down at a speed faster than light. The period when this happened is identified as the inflation period. It is hard to ascertain what caused inflation but it only lasted for a very short time. Then the universe continued to coast and is still expanding.
As the universe continued to expand and became cooler, energy started getting converted to matter, antimatter, particles and radiation. The first matter to be formed were fundamental particles like quarks and bosons which condensed creating protons and neutrons. The formation of atoms took a long time as electrons which are fundamental to the structure of an atom could not coalesce with the ions and were involved in incessant collisions with photons, the particles that make light. When finally, atoms and elements like hydrogen and helium were formed, the universe became transparent from its earlier opaque appearance.
Gravity pulled together clumps of matter and in about 100 million years got dense and hot enough to start nuclear fusion with the birth of the first stars. In another 600 million years, galaxies were formed followed by planets and the solar system. The Universe as we see it started taking shape.
Scientists do have compelling empirical evidence of the Big Bang in the form of Cosmic Microwave Background radiations (CMB) which were discovered in 1965. When the universe had cooled enough to form atoms, a huge amount of light was liberated into space and it has been travelling through the universe ever since unabated and these primordial photons can be seen as CMB. CMB is thus the light that was released into the universe 380,000 years after Big Bang. It was 3000 degrees Celsius when released and now is only 2.7 degrees above absolute zero due to continuous expansion.
Cosmologists have been eagerly measuring CMB with higher and higher precision which fits with the concept of the Big Bang. By using equations of general relativity and nuclear physics we have calculated how much helium, beryllium and lithium should have been formed and we find that the results are consistent with the quantities actually found in the universe. Moreover, experiments carried out by accelerating protons to the speed of light in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN have successfully produced quarks, gluon plasma that existed shortly after the Big Bang. These observations serve as a persuasive argument in favour of the Big Bang.
To sum up, the Big Bang theory does not explain the exact, precise moment of creation, it explains things after the moment of creation of the Universe. However, there are many missing pieces too. We do not have the faintest idea about what happened in the first moments of the Big Bang. After the Big Bang both matter and antimatter were created. As the universe cooled, and expanded, matter and antimatter should have destroyed each other. This would have left us with a universe without any galaxies, stars, planets or life which clearly is not the case. Thus, there was somehow an imbalance between matter and antimatter which we do not comprehend.
We have also known for some time now that 5/6th of all the matter in the universe is dark matter, but we have no inkling about what it exactly is. Space is not only expanding, it is accelerating. It is as if you throw a ball upwards, the ball not only continues to go up but its speed increases instead of slowing and finally falling down. This observation is credited to dark energy and we don’t know why it exists or what it is.
Science offers a fascinating and solid narrative for stories around the creation of the universe but it is not complete. Exploring the unknown and pushing back the frontier of our current ignorance is what science is all about and this expedition for the search of truth shall continue. Unravelling the mystery of the universe continues to be an interesting saga.
By Rachna Arora
Source: Indian Express, 9/06/22
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