Book Review: Code Name God

To be frank when I was told to read this book, the name was the first thing that struck my mind. I am not the religious kind and I dont want to read some book speaking about God and the religious path to see and feel him. But looking a little below, when I read, Spiritual Odyssey of a Man of Science, I knew I had to read it. He is the person who was the co-inventor of LASIK, a Laser surgery performed to correct your vision.

The first thing I recollect about a book after reading it is what defines the book for me. In this case, it was the resolve of a teenager, born in abject poverty in a caste-ridden society, to break through the shackles of hunger and poverty. With just a crumb of bread available to eat due to the famine of 1943 in Bengal, to becoming a multi-millionaire, Mani Bhaumik's journey of triumph is truly inspiring. His life is replete with acquaintances with eminent personalities, two of them being, Mahatma Gandhi and Satyendranath Bose (after whom the Bose-Einstein Condensate is named) and how they influenced his thoughts.
But to think of the book as a victory of richness of poverty and hunger would be incorrect. The facet that makes it different from other success stories is how the author realises what he had with him even when he had no worldly possessions and what he truly missed when he got everything he ever wanted. Spirituality is something which is ingrained into the mind of a person born into a religious family. But soon he loses the course drifting farther and farther away from it, craving for material possessions. There are different methods to become spiritual, but to find spirituality through Science was completely new reading for me.
Mani Bhaumik has used the latest developments in the field of Quantum Field Theory to explain how he perceives God. Quantum Field Theory earlier showed us that there were 4 basic Fields/Forces

1. Electro-magnetic Forces


2. Gravitational Force


3. Strong Nuclear Forces - force which keeps the protons and neutrons inside a nucleus and


4. Weak Nuclear Forces - force which cause nuclear decay

It was however difficult to find correlation between all these 4 forces. But lately some discoveries have shown that at extremely high temperatures or at sizes as close to Planck's Dimensions (10 X -34) all the 4 forces unite and are a single force - i.e they can no longer be distinguished as separate forces. This is what he calls as the Primary Source, as this is the source that has made Life possible. The fact that at the minutely basic level we all are made up of that single primary source can be equated by the Hindu philosophy of Aham Brahmaasmi.
It is the author's travel from spirituality to a void and back which makes the book a thrilling read. You just cannot put it down.