When I was eight, I asked my mother why shadows exist. We were on the balcony of our Dhaka apartment, the kind where the rust on the railings grows faster than the children. Laundry hung above us like quiet accusations between neighbors. My shadow stretched across the concrete—thin, obedient, pathetic—and I couldn’t understand why it followed me like a debt I didn’t remember incurring. Why does it do that? Why does it grow when I walk away? My mother barely looked up. “Stop overthinking,” she said, as if thinking were something shameful, a habit I should have outgrown. But I couldn’t help it. Something in my wiring was off—a kind of defect that made the world feel unfinished unless I questioned it. Other people lived inside reality; I kept slipping behind it, looking for the mechanism.

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Years later, when I first read Plato’s cave, I recognized myself in the man who won’t stop staring at the fire while everyone else watches the shadows. Most people accept the world as it is handed to them—flat, flickering, uncomplicated. My misfortune was that I kept turning around, looking for the source of the light, interrogating the ropes, the puppets, the hands that held them. To grow up with a mind like mine is to live in a state of permanent disruption: every ordinary moment threatens to become a question. Why does the shadow follow? Why does the light bend? Why do we believe what we believe? It sounds noble on paper, but in practice it makes you the annoying kid teachers sigh at, the friend who can’t let a simple statement rest, the son who questions prayers his parents recite with ease. This is what I mean when I call my brain unfortunate—it refuses to sit quietly in the dark and enjoy the show. It wants to walk toward the fire, even knowing it might burn.

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Maybe that’s why language became my first laboratory. Growing up speaking several tongues, I learned early that each one carried its own physics—its own rules for how reality bends. In Bangla, my native language, the world was small and tender, built from scarcity and monsoon light. Urdu was different. Urdu opened a door into a kind of emotional gravity, a spirituality so dense it felt like stepping into deeper water. Even now, I pity anyone who cannot feel the ache of an Urdu song—Aa jaave dil tera, poora vi na hove—a longing so complete it becomes a prayer. Hindi, when it came, dissolved the boundaries. It carried a belief that divinity was communal, a pulse shared by billions, a single breath threaded through the whole of humanity. And then there was English. English was efficient, sturdy, and everywhere, but I’m afraid it fails to touch the soul, or at least my South Asian version of it. It was the language I learned to survive, to study, to write resumes in. I knew it, but I didn’t feel it.

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This would explain why English pushed me toward philosophy before anything else. It was the only language I could strip down to its bones—no inherited emotion, no cultural weight, no prayers sewn into its vowels. In English, I could think cleanly, even if I couldn’t feel deeply. I used it the same way I later used certain branches of mathematics: competently, even elegantly, but never intuitively. Set theory, real analysis, English idioms—they all lived in the same mental compartment, a place where understanding never quite matured into belief. So when I found myself questioning shadows and truth and meaning, it made sense to do it in a tongue that demanded nothing from me emotionally. For a while, philosophy became the doorway, the place where I could ask forbidden questions without worrying whom they might offend. What is real? What is knowable? What is the self? English was good for these. It never trembled. It never prayed. It simply held the question in its mouth and waited for an answer—or refused to give one.

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Everything changed one Wednesday morning of my freshman year. Fresh off the boat, I sat in a philosophy lecture where we argued about whether time was absolute or an illusion constructed by the mind. The professor paced in slow arcs, asking questions that folded into more questions, each one slipping through the air like smoke: If the present is always vanishing, does it ever exist at all? Can two observers ever inhabit the same moment? I walked out dizzy, carrying more uncertainty than clarity, which was normal for philosophy. But that afternoon, in my physics class, we were covering the exact same idea, the classroom filled with non-determinism and time circularity—except this time it came with equations, diagrams, and a clock moving on a train. No metaphors, no circular debates, no hand-wringing about the nature of the self. Just Lorentz transformations. Just the clean, terrifying certainty that time does in fact stretch and compress depending on how fast you move. I remember sitting there, pencil in hand, reaching a singular realisation—philosophy gave me more questions; physics gave me more answers. It was the same truth, but one version floated and the other landed. For the first time, the language of science felt like the only tongue sturdy enough to carry the weight of my curiosity.

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If you suffer science long enough, you realise mathematics is the one, true language of science. It felt like the only language that didn’t lie to me. Long before I could navigate the complexities of English or the emotional granularity of Urdu, numbers made sense. They didn’t demand faith, only attention. No one, unless you’re living in an Orwellian state, can argue about the truth of two plus two equals four. There was a stability in that, a kind of emotional refuge. The world around me was loud and shifting—politics, religion, identity—everyone arguing about interpretations. But mathematics was the one place where interpretation didn’t matter. You could twist a proof, reframe a theorem, rotate a shape in higher-dimensional space, but the underlying truth stayed put. It was the only tongue that didn’t betray, the only one that didn’t shift under my feet. For someone who grew up constantly questioning the shadows on the cave wall, this certainty felt like mercy.

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But certainty is a fragile thing. The deeper I went into mathematics, the more it began to resemble the very metaphysics I thought I’d left behind. No one warns you how theological math can feel when you’re sixteen and discovering the golden ratio for the first time. Or when you zoom into a Mandelbrot set and watch the universe fold into itself, spiraling toward infinity with a precision that feels suspiciously like intention. Fractals unnerved me. They were too perfect, too recursive, too alive for a world supposedly built on randomness. If you’ve ever looked closely—at the veins on the back of your hand, at the way branches split from a trunk, at the jagged path a lightning bolt claws through the sky—you start to see the same geometry repeating itself, like the universe is tracing a pattern it refuses to forget. The same signature, stamped everywhere. And how do you look at that, how do you witness a design that echoes from your smallest capillaries to the structure of storm clouds, and still insist the world is accidental? It felt dishonest to deny that something intentional was happening. 

Even the physicists I admired carried a quiet obsession with some imagined “God equation,” a single expression that could stitch together gravity, quantum fields, and the beginning of time itself. They couldn’t fully ignore that eerie symmetry. It was strange, almost funny: the more I learned, the more the clean certainty of numbers began to look like scripture dressed in symbols. 

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And instead of running, I leaned toward it.

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That confusion is what finally led me to confidently pursue a life in physics—a discipline audacious enough to thread the divine and the measurable into the same fabric. Mathematics could describe the structure of a thing, but physics insisted on touching it, testing it, breaking it open. It was the first field that didn’t force me to choose between the language of truth and the language of wonder. I remember opening my first modern physics textbook and feeling something shift the way it had in that time-dilation lecture. Here were concepts that felt like poetry and yet they were anchored in equations that left no room for metaphor. Physics didn’t ask me to abandon the spiritual hunger I’d grown up with; it simply offered a different altar. In its pages, the world was no longer divided between the rational and the mystical. They were the same thing viewed from different distances, like zooming in and out of a fractal. For a kid who had spent years trying to reconcile the shadow and the fire, the myth and the math, this felt like the closest thing to home.

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I didn’t understand Ramanujan until much later. In high school, his line—“An equation means nothing to me if it does not express a thought of God”—sounded like a poet trying to make mathematics romantic. I assumed he was being dramatic, the way prodigies often are, gilding their genius with mysticism. But when I started learning how spacetime bends, when I saw how mass curves the geometry around it and how light obediently follows that curve, I began to understand what he meant. There was something unnervingly intimate about the idea that the universe could be written down. Equations weren’t just tools—they were revelations. They exposed the skeleton of reality, the underlying architecture holding everything in place. And standing at a chalkboard, tracing out geodesics on a warped grid, I felt something unfamiliar: a reverence that didn’t resemble the prayers of my childhood but echoed them all the same. It was the first time science felt like scripture.

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In the past three years, I’ve met enough physicists to realize they all seem to fall into two camps: those at war with God and those hopelessly in love. The divide isn’t about religion so much as temperament. The first group, the ones at war, speak in sharp, efficient sentences. They believe the universe is a machine, elegant only in its indifference, and that invoking divinity is a sign of intellectual laziness. They carry a kind of pride in their disbelief, almost as if disproving God were an ongoing research project. The second group, the ones in love with the divine, sound like mystics who ended up in labs by accident. They talk about symmetries the way poets talk about desire, and when they discuss the early universe, it feels less like a lecture and more like a devotional chant. What surprised me wasn’t the existence of these camps, but how naturally physicists self-select into them—as if deciphering nature eventually forces you to choose a side. 

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I wish I could tell you where I stand in that spectrum—warrior or lover—but the truth is I don’t remember where I began. Before I moved to an English-speaking country, faith was something ambient, like humidity in Dhaka—you didn’t notice it until you left. My childhood was threaded with Quranic recitations drifting through open windows, the quiet discipline of evening prayers, the casual certainty that the universe was authored by someone who cared. But living in English blurred that memory. It’s a language that thinks in straight lines, that strips metaphors down to facts, that rewards skepticism over surrender. Somewhere between learning to write lab reports and learning to explain myself in office hours, my theology became a half-forgotten echo—something I used to believe but couldn’t articulate anymore. I didn’t reject God; I simply misplaced Him in translation. And so when I meet physicists on either end of the spectrum, arguing about whether the universe sings or whether it is cold and silent, I feel like a bystander in a debate about a childhood friend whose face I can’t fully recall. I’m not sure if I’m losing faith or simply learning a different vocabulary for it.

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Maybe that’s why my research feels less like a career path and more like a reconciliation. I work at the intersection of computation and cosmology, trying to refine algorithms that can localize gravitational-wave sources faster and more accurately. On paper, it sounds clinical—signal processing, coordinate transformations, likelihood surfaces—but in practice, it feels strangely intimate. These waves are ripples in spacetime, faint distortions produced by black holes colliding in the dark billions of years ago. By the time they reach Earth, they’re quieter than the hum of an insect’s wing, a whisper stretched across the fabric of existence. I spend hours parsing through those whispers, teasing out patterns in noise, forcing my code to listen more carefully than any human ear can. And in those moments, with the screen glowing in front of me and the universe murmuring through a CSV file, I feel the same tension I felt as a child tracing the edge of my shadow: a harmony between order and chaos, between the measurable and the unknowable. It’s hard not to wonder if this is what prayer feels like when translated into data.

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Sometimes I think growing up amid scarcity prepared me for this kind of work—this habit of searching for meaning in the faintest signal. When you’re raised in a place where nothing is guaranteed, you learn to read the world through subtleties: the way rain sounds before it breaks, the tone in your father’s voice before news arrives, the quiet adjustments families make to hide how close they are to the edge. Abstraction was never an escape for me; it was a survival tactic. And physics, with all its precision and poetry, became the cleanest extension of that instinct. It offered a language that didn’t collapse under pressure, a logic that held even when everything else felt precarious. Maybe I’m still that kid in Dhaka, interrogating shadows on the balcony. Or maybe I’m trying to rebuild a sense of faith—one equation, one dataset, one cosmic whisper at a time. Physics is the only place where my questions don’t feel like burdens. It’s the one language that holds me without demanding certainty in return.

 

And yet, the more time I spend with these cosmic murmurs, the less convinced I am that I need to choose between divinity and data at all. Gravitational waves are violent in origin—black holes spiraling into each other, tearing the fabric of spacetime—but what reaches us is gentle, almost tender. There’s something profoundly human about that: the universe unleashing unimaginable chaos, and all we receive is a soft tremor, a trace of what once was. It feels like a metaphor for every question I’ve ever asked about God, truth, or purpose. Maybe the divine isn’t in the catastrophe or the certainty, but in the faintest echoes that survive them. Maybe understanding the universe was never about declaring allegiance to faith or reason, but learning to hold both without letting either break you. When I watch my code converge on a sky map, I don’t feel closer to an answer. I feel closer to the question itself. And somehow, that’s enough.

People assume that studying the universe will eventually force you into certainty—that enough equations, enough conferences, enough late nights staring at sky maps will shove you toward either belief or disbelief. My friends ask me technical things: How do detectors work? What do black holes really look like? How fast are these waves traveling? But those aren’t the questions that concern me. I’m still asking why we bother listening to the universe at all. Why humans, fragile as moth wings, insist on decoding signals from stars that died before we were born. Why we’re compelled to translate silence into meaning. Some of my professors answer by rejecting the divine; others answer by embracing it. I’m learning to live in the middle, suspended between two interpretations of the same phenomenon. I don’t know if that makes me confused or honest. Maybe both. Maybe neither. All I know is that physics hasn’t given me conclusions—it has only sharpened the questions. And I’m starting to think that might be the point. Not knowing isn’t a failure; it’s a place to stand. A place to keep listening.

I sometimes think back to that balcony in Dhaka—the rusted railing, the late afternoon light, my shadow stretching out like a question I wasn’t old enough to articulate. I didn’t know then that I would spend my life chasing the mechanics of that shadow, or that the languages I grew up speaking would one day fracture into different ways of seeing the world. Bangla taught me tenderness; Urdu taught me longing; Hindi taught me collective breath; English taught me distance. Physics absorbed all of them and handed me something stranger: a language that is neither emotional nor indifferent, neither divine nor godless, but something in between. A language that lets me examine the fire without pretending the shadows don’t matter. I don’t have a conclusion—not about God, not about certainty, not about the universe. What I have is a question that keeps following me, stretching and shrinking as I move through the world, like that first shadow on the concrete. 

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And maybe that’s enough. 

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Maybe the point was never to solve the universe, but to learn how to stand inside its flickering light and keep asking why it insists on being this way.