SOMETHING big happened on Aug 14, and we missed it. On that August Wednesday, ripples from beyond our Milky Way reached Earth, bringing to us the message of an event that happened 900 million years ago.
Literally, a blast from the past. Scientists manning the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory in the United States and the European Gravitational Observatory in Italy detected the primal ripple in the fabric of space-time through a trio of detectors.
The cause: a black hole going head to head with a neutron star. A collision of the cosmic kind. This is the first-ever detection of such an event by earthlings. If you are wondering why it took that long to reach us, just think how far away the galactical knock happened: 8,550 million trillion kilometres away from Earth.
How could we have missed the cosmic ripples of this proportion? Granted it was no Big Bang, but a cosmic bang nevertheless. We have a hypothesis: a large portion of the Malaysian public’s reading habit has declined into disorder. Interestingly, cosmologists call it entropy. Have our scientists’ interest entropied too? There was not even a cackle from our men of science, let alone a media event.
But cosmologists and laymen in Europe and the US were bathing in euphoria. It was a big excitement down under, too.
Professor Susan Scott from the Australian National University’s Research School of Physics announced in a Aug 19 press statement marked by a sparkle that media release normally lacks: a black hole had swallowed a neutron star like a Pac-man! There was no such release for our media to share the ebullience with our readers.
Whatever the reason, Malaysians are such a bad reading public. We throw down the gauntlet. Prove us wrong. But first, let us go and make a visit. To the newspaper vendors. See them newspapers of varied mastheads lying like chloroformed patients upon operating tables? Undisturbed, unread? Copy that for our magazines. Call it a national lethargy for things literary.
Yet surveys crow about the average Malaysian reading 12 books per year. We think this not to be the case. Just listen to the conversations in the social media and you will come away not only unimpressed but disappointed. Disturbed for certain. A decimated 1.2 book per year is more like it.
Speed reading website, iris, tells us that we are not wrong. Read the posting titled, How Many Books Does the Average Person Read? and you will discover the Malaysian shame. Want to know which countries read the most?
India tops the list with 10.2 hours per week. Is this why Amartya Sen called his book The Argumentative Indian? If you must know, Sen’s tome extols the virtues of the Indian tradition of public debate.
The Thais are not doing badly either: they are a comfortable second with 9.2 hours of reading per week. Two other neighbours who have produced some notable writers — the Philippines and Indonesia — have good reading habits as well: 7.3 and 6.00 respectively. Surprisingly, Singapore isn’t listed. Unsurprisingly, Malaysia isn’t either. Well, with 1.2 books a year we should forget about causing even a ripple.