I like magnetism. It draws me closer to objects, people, and at times, exhilarating visions of a tomorrow filled with the warm companionship of the sun, visions of gently swaying skirts, and the promise of a yellow flower that stubbornly pushes against lead sheets of white while aspiring for the skies.

F or reasons unknown,   Sir Joseph Larmor, an Irish mathematician was also an ardent devotee of magnetism. He proposed in 1919 that magnetism was generated spontaneously by the swirling of molten iron inside our planet. In the decades that followed, his theory was cast to the recesses of these very insides, till in the winter of 2007, two French scientists used rapidly swirling liquid sodium inside a cylindrical tank to simulate magnetism in a responsive planet, one where pigs had wings and taxes were optional.

Hypothesis : An electric current flowing in a wire creates a magnetic field around it. Similarly, a magnet in motion will generate an electric current in a neighboring wire. Wires are easy. Planets are difficult.  

T here would be nothing better to experience than a journey to the center of the earth. It is a journey of 4,800 miles and slightly more than the distance between New York and Rome. A self respecting cruise ship would be able to complete this journey in two days. However, I strongly recommend undertaking this journey by yourself with nothing more than a small boat, a compass and a map of New Zealand, should you get to the other side.

D rop. Drop Drop.

At all times, sacrifice speed at the altar of solitude.   You could then throw a quarter in a stream of molten iron, and experience the comforting gurgle that a bicycle wheel makes when it passes through a puddle. Only this time around, your efforts would produce a richer sound that would bear the resonance common to the advice, wishes and confessions of the souls that hover in the hallways of our churches. Do not fear the heat! Frequently, ominously dark and all absorbing caverns will reflect nothing more than a warm glow on your face, which you will immediately use to remove your notepad and write poetry. This poetry would not be for the sun or even for the hummingbird in the sky. Nor, in the stillness of the dark, would it bear the possibility of being carried from one place to another. This is a poem that would elevate your being to encompass all existence. These will be the best words that you would have ever written.   Sir Joseph Larmar would approve.

H owever, Sir Larmar was never able to explain why the earth's magnetic field reverses itself every one hundred thousand years. He was never able to ascertain whether the field reduces to zero at any point in this process causing the earth's protective magnetosphere to collapse, allowing the sun to reduce bath soaked Archimedes and his fellow beings to a crisp, red-hot nothingness at the moment of their Eureka.   It is a scary thought. In an electromagnetic age, will our airplanes know where to land? Will we envy the victims of Chernobyl? Will I have the footprints of a swallow on my windowsill in the peak of winter?  

A t these times, when the sun has turned off its light, I look to you for comfort. A slight moment of anticipation, and then I make a journey into a region of darkness that lies beyond pleasure and pain, and where the nothingness is so absolute, so as to render everything to be true.  

Conclusion: I'm sticking with you.

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© COPYRIGHT 2002-2012 Arun Krishnan