June 29, 2016 Wednesday

Post attack day 7

Geiger then decided to go more precise.

He had to device an experiment or apparatus which would give him accurate angles of deflection of the alpha particles.

He constructed an air tight glass tube from which air was sucked out.

At one end was a bulb B containing radon-222 (atomic number 86 noble gas), the source of alpha particles.

Using mercury, the radon in the bulb B was pushed up whose end was plugged with mica A.

At the other end of the tube was the fluorescent zinc sulphide screen S.

The microscope that he used to count the scintillations on the screen was affixed with a vernier vertical scale.

This allowed Geiger to precisely measure and calculate the particles' angles of deflection.

The alpha particles emitted from A was narrowed to a beam by a small circular hole at D.

Further at point E he placed metal foils of different metals to see how the scintillating points behave.

He could also vary the velocity of the alpha particles by placing extra sheets of mica or aluminium at A.

From these experiments, Geiger came to the following conditions:

1. The most probable angle of deflection increases with the thickness of material.

2. The most probable angle of deflection is proportional to the atomic mass of the substance.

3. The most probable angle of deflection decreases with the velocity of the alpha particles.

4. The probability that a particle will be deflected by more than 90° is vanishingly small.

This entire experiment with its conclusions was published as a paper titled:
"The scattering of the alpha particles by matter"
In 1910.

Stay tuned to the voice of the storytelling chimpanzee or
login at http://panarrans.blogspot.in/

Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

June 28, 2016 Tuesday

Post attack day 6

In the following year of 1909, Geiger and Marsden published their second experiment.

It was titled:
"On a diffuse reflection of the alpha particles".

For this experiment, the duo devised a small conical glass tube AB containing radium and bismuth-214.

Its open end was sealed with mica (silicate minerals).

This was their alpha particle emitter.

Beneath this conical source of radium they placed a lead plate P (which blocks alpha particles).

Beneath this they placed the fluorescent screen S.

The tube was placed such that the alpha particles could not directly strike the screen (better understandable if you see the schematic diagram).

What do u think they noticed?

A few scintillations on the screen.

How and why?

Some alpha particles would ricochet off air molecules and circumvent the lead plate (this is original particle physics at its classiest!).

Then they placed metal foil (like gold, aluminum etc) at the side of the lead plate right angle to the fluorescent screen.

The alpha particles were pointed at the metal foil.

How did the scintillations change?

The scintillations on the screen increased.

When counted, the scintillations were more with metals such as gold with higher atomic mass than with say aluminium (lower atomic mass).

Never forget my fellow ape, chemistry always ran faster than physics.

Geiger and Marsden did all this in a darkened room counting the number of scintillations.

It was this tedious labour that was providing insights into the fundamental basis of nature.

Nature was giving hints about herself but she was still waiting for more ingenuous experiments before she would reveal her true nature.

We shall continue with these fascinating series of experiments which in our high school is brushed off with one small page or a few paragraphs.

Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.in/

Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

June 27, 2016 Monday

Post attack day 5 

The experiment that Rutherford had designed required working in a darkened lab hours on end and counting tiny scintillations using a microscope.

Rutherford lacked the endurance for this and hence hr delegated this tedious and laborious work to Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden.

The results of the first experiment was published in 1908 titled:
"On the scattering of alpha particles by Matter".

This first experiment was conducted in a glass tube nearly 2 metres long.

At one end of the tube was radium R that was the source of alpha particles.

On the opposite end was a phosphorescent screen Z.

In the middle was a 0.9 mm wide slit S.

A microscope M was used to count the scintillations on the screen and measure their spread.

When Geiger pumped out all the air from the tube, the alpha particles flew unobstructed casting a neat and tight image on the screen.

When some air was allowed in the tube, the tight spot became diffuse due to collision of alpha particles with the air molecules.

Geiger then pumped out the air and placed a gold foil over the slit S at AA.

What do you think Geiger observed?

Take a guess.

Once again the tight spot on the screen became more diffuse just like with the air.

Thus both solid matter and air could scatter alpha particles in an identical manner.

This instrument as you can see could observe deflections of only small angle.

So what did Rutherford plan next?

We will have to wait for the 4.6 billion year old planet to rotate on its tilted axis.

Stay tuned to the voice of storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.in/

Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

June 26, 2016


The famous Rutherford gold foil experiment is actually a series of Geiger-Marsden experiments.

They were performed between 1908 to 1913 by Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden under the guidance of Ernest Rutherford at the University of Manchester.

It was conducted to verify the existing model of atom prevalent at that time which was proposed by the great J. J. Thomson (who turned to be inaccurate).

J J Thomson had proposed:
"... the atoms of the elements consist of a number of negatively electrified corpuscles in a sphere of uniform positive electrification..."

This is popularly known as the plum pudding model.

The Japanese physicist Hantaro Nagaoka had completely rejected this atomic model on the grounds that the opposite charges are impenetrable.

Instead, Nagaoka made 2 predictions how an atom could be:

1. A very massive atomic center

2. Electrons revolving around the electrons bound by electrostatic forces.

Rutherford decided to test it out.

According to his theoretical calculations, at the atomic scale, the concept of "solid matter" is meaningless.

Since alpha particles are tiny submicroscopic, positively charged particles, the alpha particles would not bounce of the atom like a marble.

(Remember, the thin gold foil is roughly 400 atoms thick).

The alpha particles would primarily be affected by the electric fields of atoms in the gold foil.

And as per the Thomson's model, the electrical field of gold atoms would be too weak to deflect a passing very fast moving alpha particles.

In fact, according to their calculations, the deflection should be just 0.000326 radians or 0.0186° (a small fraction of a degree).

This was the kind of precision recording that physicists had begun to expect even in early 1900s.

We shall continue to follow these experiments.

I wish to show you some simple calculations that the Rutherford team performed before starting their experiments.

Stay tuned to the voice of pan narrans or login at
http://panarrans.blogspot.in/

Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

As a worked example, consider an alpha particle passing tangentially to a Thomson gold atom, where it will experience the electric field at its strongest and thus experience the maximum deflection θ. Since the electrons are very light compared to the alpha particle, their influence can be neglected^[6] and the atom can be seen as a heavy sphere of positive charge.

Q_n = positive charge of gold atom = 79 e = 1.266×10⁻¹⁷ C

Q_α = charge of alpha particle = 2 e = 3.204×10⁻¹⁹ C

r = radius of a gold atom = 1.44×10⁻¹⁰ m

v_α = velocity of alpha particle = 1.53×10⁷ m/s

m_α = mass of alpha particle = 6.645×10⁻²⁷ kg

k = Coulomb's constant = 8.998×10⁹ N·m²/C²

Using classical physics, the alpha particle's lateral change in momentum Δp can be approximated using the impulse of force relationship and the Coulomb force expression:

${\displaystyle \Delta p=F\Delta t=k\cdot {\frac {Q_{\alpha }Q_{n}}{r^{2}}}\cdot {\frac {2r}{v_{\alpha }}}}$

${\displaystyle \theta \approx {\frac {\Delta p}{p}}<k\cdot {\frac {2Q_{\alpha }Q_{n}}{m_{\alpha }rv_{\alpha }^{2}}}=8.998\cdot 10^{9}\times {\frac {2\times 3.204\cdot 10^{-19}\times 1.266\cdot 10^{-17}}{6.645\cdot 10^{-27}\times 1.44\cdot 10^{-10}\times (1.53\cdot 10^{7})^{2}}}}$

${\displaystyle \theta <0.000326~\mathrm {rad} ~(\mathrm {or} ~0.0186^{\circ })}$

June 25, 2016 Saturday

Post Attack day 3  

The vicious and violent attack occurred at 7.35 pm 
June 22, 2016 Wednesday

I underwent emergency surgery by Dr. Anshuman Manaswi
at night 1.30 am on June 23, 2016 Thursday

I was discharged from Nanavati Hospital on June 24, 2016 Friday

I started going to my shop from today

I have also started to write my bedtime stories from today



In 1907, Rutherford returned to England (from Canada) to take the chair of physics at the University of Manchester.

He along with the German physicist Hans Geiger (of the famous Geiger counter or the Geiger-Muller tube) developed zinc sulphide scintillation screens.

Zinc sulphide or ZnS acts as a luminescent material when added with minute quantities of impurities like silver or manganese (chemistry really is magic!).

These scintillation screens were the earliest forms of particle detectors.

After he got his Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1908 for "The chemical nature of the Alpha Particles from Radioactive Substances",He teamed up with Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden (also a New Zealander with the same name Ernest).

Ernest Marsden was then merely an undergraduate student under Rutherford, a nobody.

Hans Geiger was a visiting German physicist who had greatly impressed Rutherford.

Rutherford who had earlier discovered that uranium and radium spontaneously emitted alpha particles wanted to measure precisely their mass-to-charge ratio.

Mass-to-charge ratio is a physical quantity that is most widely used in the study of the electrodynamics of charged particles.

But how do u study moving particles which we cannot see even with a microscope?

Physicists have always used indirect means to investigate nature.

Rutherford knew that alpha particles could ionize air molecules.

And if such an ionized air is subjected to an electric field, current will be generated.

On this principle (and not principal), Rutherford and Geiger designed a simple counting device consisting of 2 electrodes in a glass tube.

Each alpha particle that passed through the tube would create a pulse of electricity that could be counted.

This would be the primitive version of what would one day become Geiger counter.

We shall continue to dwell on this fascinating experiment in the nights to come.

You may wonder why I spend so much time on experiments and personalities who conducted them.

Well...To study nature as a body of facts is fundamentally wrong as then it remains no different to the study of a religious book.

Unless we can teach ourselves how we had investigated and how we SHOULD investigate nature, study of science is useless (as is plainly seen from the people around us).

Stay tuned to the voice of pan narrans or login to http://panarrans.blogspot.com/

Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

June 21, 2016 Tuesday

The day before the attack

Also the day when thanks to Monish my friend, I started
actually publishing it online



One of the greatest oddities of the fascinating life of Ernest Rutherford is that he made his greatest contribution to our understanding of nature (its building block to be precise), AFTER he was blessed with the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1908.

At the McGill University in Montreal where he stayed till 1907, he was primarily focused on radioactivity (following Becquerel and Curie).

It was here in 1899 that he coined the terms alpha ray and beta ray.

(Remember mon ami, coining = publishing in a peer reviewed Western scientific journal of Western repute for the first time and accepted by major associations or societies of that field).

Later he began to study thorium (naturally occurring radioactive PRIMORDIAL element having atomic number 90).

The wore primordial needs some explanation.

Primordial elements ate nuclides found on earth that have existed in their current form since BEFORE earth was formed.

They are residues from the Big Bang and from ancient and violent supernova explosions that took place EVEN before the formation of the solar system (mind boggling, isn't it?)!

Thorium was discovered in 1830s.

As I said, chemistry always ran faster than physics.

Biology was the laggard as even such a simple and elegance idea of evolution by natural selection came so so late (relative to say gravity or heliocentric model of solar system).

On studying thorium, Rutherford that a sample of radioactive thorium always took the same amount of time to decay, no matter what size.

Remember the unit of radioactive decay is both Curie (Ci) and Becquerel (Bq).

Thereby he came across and defined the term "half life".

In his Nobel Lecture given on December 11, 1908, Rutherford spoke mostly about radioactivity and recognition of the alpha rays as helium atoms.

From his work and that of Frederick Soddy, you will know how painstaking it was just to prove that alpha rays are essentially helium atoms.

In his Nobel lecture, Rutherford spoke about all the great men and a woman on whose work he had build up his research.

We shall continue with his fascinating journey for some nights.

I am touched to my core that my best friend has collated all or most of my bed-time stories in a blog:

http://panarrans.blogspot.com/

What can I say!

Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

6/8/2016
If the Bernoulli family of Basel, Switzerland had mathematics running in them, then
The Becquerel family of Paris, France had physics going for them.
Into this wealthy and learned family was born Henri Becquerel in 1852.
It was a time when France was moving from being a Second Republic to Second Empire after the 1848 revolution and 1851 coup by Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte.
Remember mon ami, Europe of those times was far more violent and bloody than today's South Asia.
Henri Becquerel became the third person in his family to occupy the physics chair at Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris.
(You  must visit this wonderful museum if you ever happen to be on the river Seine in Paris.
One entire gallery is devoted to evolution of life on planet earth).
Becquerel was primarily interested in phosphorescence which I had differentiated it from fluorescence  in one of my recent bed-time story as an evidence of atomic theory.
Roentgen had already sent a wave of excitement in the world of physics in 1895-96 with his discovery of x-rays that could penetrate objects.
Becquerel was studying some uranium salts for their "phosphorescent" properties.
He assumed that these uranium salts emit some kind of penetrating radiation AFTER they have been illuminated by bright sunlight.
On February 24, 1896 (when x-rays were getting splashed over the print media) Becquerel presented his findings to the French Academy of Sciences.
What did he present?
Let us keep the excitement for tomorrow.
Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans, narrator of exciting stories of excited atoms.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

6/9/2016
Tasteless cereals
6/9/2016" One wraps a Lumiere (famous brothers) plate with a bromide emulsion in 2 sheets of very thick black paper, such that the plate does not become clouded upon being exposed to the sun for a day (very slow speed films).
One places on the sheet of paper, on the outside, a slab of the phosphorescent substance, and one exposes the whole to the sun for several hours.
When one then develops the photographic plate, one recognizes the silhouette of the phosphorescent substance appears in black on the negative.
If one places between the phosphorescent substance and the plate a piece of money, one sees the image of this on the negative...
One must conclude from these experiments that the phosphorescent substance in question emits rays which pass through the opaque paper and reduces silver salt."
Becquerel still thought that the phenomenon he was observing was phosphorescence which required sunlight to excite the material.
He could not have been more wrong mon ami.
But what happened next?
We shall have to wait for the planet earth to make yet another rotation to get to the bottom of this mysterious phenomenon.
Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans, the chimpanzee who probably started chattering and jabbering some 14 million years ago.
As it was then that our family of the great apes of Hominidae (chimpanzees, bonobos, humans, gorillas and orangutans) branched away from the family of lesser apes or Hylobatidae.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

6/10/2016
Henri Becquerel was experimenting in the wintery month of February in France.
In some of those days sun was seen only intermittently (u have to live "abroad" to really understand this).
Remember, to Becquerel it was the sunlight that was doing the excitation work on his potassium uranyl sulphate crystals that was resulting in the emission of some kind of penetrating rays based on phosphorescence.
So he kept his photographic Lumiere plates along with crystalline crusts of potassium uranyl sulphate in the darkness of his bureau drawer.
That was February 27, 1896 (120 years ago).
There was no sun for several days.
For some reason, on March the 1st, he decided to develop the Lumiere plates which he had kept in the bureau drawer in darkness.
Much to his surprise, the silhouettes he got were very intense.
For the first time then it dawned upon this investigator that this phenomenon was not phosphorescence.
He further conducted similar investigations, but this time with uranium salts that were known to be non phosphorescent.
This clinched the argument that the penetrating rays or radiation was coming from the uranium itself, without any need for excitation by external energy source.
Becquerel inadvertently had discovered what would go on to revolutionize atomic physics.
But mon ami, all these developments that took place in particle physics rested on the discovery of chemical elements starting in 1700s and almost over by 1800s end.
By then, quantitative chemical analysis was already an established and maybe even a classical field (remember the messy titration experiments we were made to do in our high schools?)
The story of 118 elements that makes up everything in our universe, including the  microbes, the mighty stars and galaxies and even your humble storytelling chimpanzee is another fascinating saga that has to be narrated some night.
Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans, the ape that is merely 200,000 years old, a blink in the history of our planet.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape (each word verified and justified).

6/11/2016
Becquerel had merely scratched the surface of something novel and exotic.
His work was to be taken up by a remarkable woman, perhaps the most outstanding since Hypatia.
I hope you have not forgotten this singular mathematician, astronomer and philosopher who lived 1666 years ago in Alexandria and was murdered by a Christian mob of sick zealots.
Marie Curie was born in 1867 Warsaw, Kingdom of Poland under the yolk of the Russian Empire.
Her original name is Maria Salomea Sklodowska.
Her both the parent families were national patriots, loosing all their property and fortunes in seeking national independence  from Russian Empire (think about Indians and the British Empire).
Her father Wladyslaw Sklodowski was a teacher of mathematics and physics, subjects that Maria would ultimately pursue.
She and her 4 elder siblings had a difficult childhood  because their father was fired by his Russian bosses for harbouring pro Polish sentiments.
Because of poverty, Maria lost her mother and eldest sister to the infectious diseases of tuberculosis and typhus (not to be mistaken with typhoid.
Typhus is caused by Rickettsia which is an obligate intracellular parasitic bacteria) at the age of ten.
This loss led Maria to give up her belief in Catholicism and she became an agnostic (her father was, like me, already an atheist).
She finished her schooling from a gymnasium for girls (not to be confused with modern meaning of gymnasium or gym),
But was unable to enroll in a regular institution of higher education.
Can u guess why?
No Sir, not for monetary reasons.
Higher institutions those days simply did not allow women to pursue higher studies.
So to make a living she took a position of a governess and a home tutor first in Warsaw and later in the village of Szczuki (a classical East European name with multiple Zs attached to C and S).
She landed up working with the Zorawskis, a wealthy family related to her father.
Maria was a passionate woman and there she fell in love with their son Kazimierz Zorawski, a man who in future would become an eminent mathematician (he was a student of another great Norwegian professor of mathematics Sophus Lie of the famed Lie algebra).
As it often happens, his parents rejected the very idea of their son marrying to a penniless relative.
It was a tragic loss for both of them.
Even as an old man and a professor of mathematics at Warsaw Polytechnic, he would sit before the statue of Maria Sklodowska which was erected in 1935.
We shall continue this fascinating story of an astounding mind and a passionate women over few nights mon ami for such a person deserves at least this much.
Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
(Just remember, we all would never be here without incest...
In fact a lot of incest).

6/12/2016
Interestingly, at the age of 23, with no prospect of getting admitted into an institute of higher education, Maria started working in a chemical laboratory run by her cousin in Warsaw.
She continued to educate herself by reading books, exchanging letters and making a living by working as a governess.
When she was 23, one of her surviving sister Bronislawa had managed to pursue her medical studies at the Sorbonne, Paris.
Maria, amazingly enough, had helped her sister financially through her medical school (it was a promise made by Maria to Bronislawa when they were very little).
Bronislawa later graduated as a gynecologist and married a fellow physician and political exile Kazimierz Dluski.
In return, the grateful Bronislawa invited Maria to join her in Paris.
Maria left for Paris in late 1891 at the age of 24, living initially with her sister and brother in law before renting a small, dismal, damp attic or garret on top of a house.
Almost immediately she enrolled at the University of Paris or the Sorbonne (metonymy) for physics, chemistry and mathematics (remarkable subjects for a young lady).
Maria lived dismally with meager resources, suffering the cold bleak winters and sometimes even fainting from hunger!
After her college, she tutored in the evenings, barely to sustain her survival.
In 2 years she was awarded a degree in physics and then started working in an industrial laboratory under Professor Gabriel Lippmann (another great mind worth devoting a story on).
It was at this stage of her life that she met Pierre Curie, a Frenchman and a physicist.
Pierre Curie is another remarkable mind who earned his math degree at the age of 16.
In fact, it seems that most people who crossed the life Maria Sklodowska were extraordinary in their own ways.
Let us take this extraordinariness slowly and over few nights.
It is people like these who actually convince  me that we have come a long way from our ancestor Homo habilis who were one of the first members of the genus Homo to appear in East Africa.
Mind you, the separation of genus Homo and Pan is very very blurry and it is simply a matter of nomenclature and human ego.
Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans, the ape with the FOXP2 gene.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

6/13/2016
Some of the greatest friendships have been built on common interests and shared passion.
So it was with Maria Sklodowska and Pierre Curie.
Their mutual passion for sciences, specially chemistry and physics brought them increasingly closer.
Pierre proposed to her but she hesitated as she wanted to return back to Poland.
She even applied for a position at the Krakow University in Poland (today it is the best Polish university).
Yet again she was denied a position simply because she was not a man.
Pierre then convinced her to return back to Paris and pursue her PhD (he himself had got his doctorate recently on his work on magnetism).
In 1895, at the age of 28 Maria Sklodowska married Pierre Curie and thus became Marie Curie as we all know her to be.
Neither of them wanted a religious service (one important aspect of critical thinkers).
Marie Curie wore a dark blue outfit in her wedding instead of a white bridal gown (a total and a proud iconoclast).
This dark blue dress would serve her for many years as a laboratory garb.
Besides the passion for science, they both loved long bicycle trips and journeys to foreign lands which brought them all the more closer.
In Pierre, Marie Curie had found a new love, partner and a scientific collaborator on whom she could depend.
In Marie, Pierre had made his biggest discovery.
With the groundwork been laid, the stage is set to narrate the scientific achievements of this perfect couple and this amazing woman.
Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans, whose ancestors the Homo habilis (the handy man) some 2.5 million years ago survived on dirty leaves and uncooked meat cleaved off carrion using primitive tools.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

6/14/2016
Marie Curie (this is how I will be calling her now), soon thereafter started to work on her thesis.
Inspired by the discoveries of Roentgen and Becquerel, she chose to work on uranium salt and the penetrating rays that it emitted.
She used a device called electrometer which measures electric charge (it is yet another cunning device) in her investigations.
She found that uranium rays caused air around a it to conduct electricity.
Second, this activity of uranium depended solely on the quantity of uranium present.
Based on these findings, she made a tentative hypothesis that the mysterious rays was NOT due to molecular interaction but something coming from the atoms itself.
This was absolutely revolutionary.
From a conceptual point of view, it is her most important contribution to the development of physics.
Now please note mon ami, how a hypothesis differs from a theory.
Hypothesis is a proposed explanation for a phenomenon that cannot satisfactorily be explained with the available scientific theories.
The Curies did not have a dedicated laboratory.
They were conducting all their experiments (which most likely would  appear useless and weird to any ordinary woman even of today's world) in a converted shed next to School of Physics and Chemistry.
The shed was once a medical school dissecting room;
It was poorly ventilated and it even leaked.
These pioneers had no idea of the biological deleterious effects of the uranium radiation.
Her school was not sponsoring her research.
She was buying two uranium minerals, pitchblende or uraninite (uranium dioxide) and torbernite from various metallurgical and mining companies (chemistry was always ahead of physics).
Her electrometer showed that the pitchblende was 4 times more active than uranium and torbernite twice as active.
Then these 2 minerals must contain something else also radiating waves besides uranium!
Marie was not only great thinker, but also streetwise; she was acutely aware of the importance of publishing her discoveries.
Had Becquerel just 2 years ago not presented his discovery to the French Academy of Sciences the day after he made it, credit for discovery of radioactivity and even the Nobel would have gone to the Englishman Silvanus Thompson.
Thus on April 12, 1898 Marie published her first paper at the age of 31 to the academy through her former professor Gabriel Lippmann.
This was to be just the beginning of the many scientific feats that awaited this wonderful mind.
Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

6/15/2016
After this publication, Marie went through the periodic table.
She found that the only known elements known to emit mysterious rays were uranium and thorium (just published 2 months earlier by Gerhard Schmidt).
Marie was certain that there was something new in the pitchblende ore akin to Bismuth.
Why similar to Bismuth?
Marie and Pierre had started their arduous and painstaking analytical work of separation and fractionation.
Marie would process as much as 20 kilos of ore per day, first clearing away debris and pine needles and later boiling and stirring them with a rod as big her.
She found that closer she fractionated closer to Bismuth, the stronger the radioactivity she got.
She named the new element Polonium (on her homeland Poland) whose atomic number is 84 (that of Bismuth is 83).
After another few months of insufferable work, they came across another very active substance that was chemically very similar to Barium.
They named it radium from the word ray.
Radium has the atomic number 88 and lies in the second group (vertical row) of the periodic table called alkaline earth metals having 2 electrons in the outermost shell (remember electron configuration?).
Between 1898 and 1902, the Curies published a total of 32 scientific papers, almost all original (a remarkable feat)!
1903 brought to them all the glories that a scientist can hope for:
1. Marie received her doctorate
2. She was made the first woman faculty member of Ecole Normale Superieure (French grande ecole, a higher education establishment like the Royal College).
3. Invitation to speak at the Royal Institution where yet again she was prevented from speaking
(I hope you know why. She did not carry a pair of testicles and a penis).
4. Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on radioactivity (shared with Becquerel).
And if you think this is the end of the story, you could not possibly me more wrong.
This is where the twists and turns begin to start.
Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans, the narrator of the lives of few rare apes.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

6/16/2016
The Curies were called to go to Stockholm to receive the prize in person and deliver the routine speech.
Both declined as they were busy with their work and Pierre being an extremely private idealistic person who disliked pomp and ceremonies (again a hallmark of great man).
By now, they had reproduced (like any ape would) and that too twice.
They had two daughters Irene and Eve.
It all seemed so perfect when tragedy struck.
Just 3 years from all the heady successes, in 1906 Pierre was run over by a horse-drawn wagon in Paris and killed (basically a road traffic accident).
 Marie was devastated and completely broken down.
When offered pension this tough and courageous lady declined:
I am 38 and able to support myself (and 2 daughters) was her reply.
She was given the chair of the department of physics at the Sorbonne which was originally meant for Pierre.
Marie also had definite ideas about upbringing and education of children.
She took the view that scientific subjects should be taught at an early age but not following a rigid curriculum (exactamente my view).
She organized a private school of 10 children (including her own) with the parents themselves (her circle of friends as we know were all professors and scientists) acting as teachers.
Games, physical activities and travel was also stressed as it was necessary for children to develop freely.
For Irene the elder daughter, it was these years that laid the foundation for her future in research.
In 1910, Marie succeeded in isolating radium (which was earlier only theorized) and defined the international standard for radioactive emissions rightfully named after her ( 1 Curie or Ci = 3.7 x 10^10 decays per second).
In 1911, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (overcoming a stupid "scandal" of her love affair with the physicist Paul Langevin, another great mind), bestowed upon her the honor for the second time.
She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry and remains alone with Linus Pauling as Nobel laureates in 2 fields.
Oddly enough, soon after the award she was hospitalized with depression and renal disease.
There is more to come on this incredible woman and a fantastic mind.
Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans, the ape who can work with fine instruments and can type as well.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

6/17/2016
After 1911, when Europe broke out into madness of butchery and bloodshed, Marie Curie after a quick study of radiology and anatomy (What a woman!), set up France's first military radiology center at the front lines.
She became the director of the Red Cross Radiology Service helping in set up of over 200 radiological units and training other women as aids.
She even tried to donate her Nobel Prize gold medals to the wat effort but the French National Bank refused to accept them.
To my mind, the greatest acceptance of her intellect came when she was invited to the First (1911) and the Fifth (1927) Solvay Conferences.
This landmark conference was started by the industrialist Ernest Solvay in 1911 which became the turning point for physics.
It was an all elite white boys club which included stellar luminaries like Max Planck, Ernest Rutherford, Henri Poincaré (of the famous Poincaré conjecture which my greatest friend introduced this average ape to), and of course, our dear old Albert Einstein (then only 32 years old).
The only exception was this slight, very humble lady, who alone among these giants, had won Nobel Prizes in 2 separate scientific disciplines!
In 1921, after the first bloody world war, when she visited or rather toured the United States to raise funds for research (America by then had started to be the wealthy nation as we know it to be), the US President Warren Harding received her at the White House to present her with the 1 gram of radium collected in the United States.
Yet, inspite of her fame, she remained honest and lived a simple life.
She did not patent the radium isolating process.
She gave much of her prize money to friends, family, students and research associates.
In fact, both Pierre and Marie would often refuse awards and medals.
Albert Einstein has said that she was probably the only person who could not be corrupted by fame.
In 1995 her remains (she died of aplastic anemia in 1934 and interred in a cemetery in Sceaux), and that if her husband's were transferred to Pantheon in Paris.
Pantheon was originally meant to celebrate gods, but thankfully wisdom of rational thinking prevailed, and now it serves as a secular mausoleum celebrating distinguished French citizens.
Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans, the chimpanzee who will now explore the lives of fantastic people around Marie Curie.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.


6/18/2016
Marie Curie's death was not the end.
Her elder daughter Irene would continue her legacy, not merely in genetic terms which nearly every living thing on this planet does, but conceptually as well.
She was 10 years old when Marie and Pierre realized that their daughter had obvious mathematical talent.
So they planned for a more challenging environment for her education.
Marie Curie gathered some of the most distinguished French scholars including Paul Langevin who would become her future lover.
This she called "The Cooperative".
The curriculum of The Cooperative (where professors educated one another's children in their respective homes) was not only principles of science and scientific research but also diverse subjects such as Chinese and sculpture.
Great emphasis was placed on self expression and play.
This is the top notch and most elite form of education that a child can be gifted with.
Marie saw to it that her 2 daughters got that which, to my mind, makes her the greatest mother ever.
Later of course, Irene reentered a more orthodox education at the faculty of science at the Sorbonne.
After the world war I (where she worked with her mother as a nurse radiographer and where both were exposed to large doses of radiation), she returned to study at the Radium Institute that had been built by her parents.
She got her doctorate in 1925 at the age of 28.
She met her life partner in a young chemical engineer who she was asked to teach precise laboratory techniques for radio chemical research.
She married Frederic Joliot and together they began to study atomic nuclei (fascinating couple indeed)!
By then, in 1897, the great J.J. Thomson had discovered the electrons.
But atoms were still considered as solid spherical particles as proposed by John Dalton in 1805 or so.
We shall take up the work of Irene Joliot-Curie and her husband in the following bed-time story.
Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans, the ape with catarrhine nose (Greek kata - down and rhin - nose, meaning nostrils facing down instead of sideways).
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin catarrhine ape.

6/19/2016
Irene Joliot-Curie and her husband Frederic Joliot-Curie began to build on the work of Marie and Pierre Curie.
This couple for sake of experimentation decide to bombard naturally available elements with alpha particles.
Alpha particles consist of 2 protons and 2 neutrons;
They are Helium atoms albeit without its 2 electrons.
Alpha particles were discovered by another remarkable scientific pezzonovante Ernest Rutherford in 1900 or so.
To their surprise, the Joliot-Curie couple found that such bombardments caused aluminum to turn into unstable isotope of phosphorus.
Similarly boron could be transformed to radioactive nitrogen and radioactive silicon from magnesium.
This was an alchemist's dream come true (even the great Newton had tried his hand on it) of turning one element into another.
They in fact had gone one step further and had discovered induced or man-made radioactivity.
This discovery stimulated people like Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner (woman) and Fritz Strassmann (all were Germans who opposed the persecution of Jews by the Nazi regime) to discover nuclear fission.
For this, the Joliot-Curie couple were bestowed the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1935 which brought them fame and recognition.
Thus the Curie family shared 5 Nobel Prizes among themselves!
Irene's younger sister Eve did not choose a career as a scientist but rather worked as a journalist (her husband incredibly was awarded Nobel Peace Prize for his work with UNICEF).
She authored her mother's biography "Madame Curie".
She sometimes joked that she bought shame on her family.
"There were 5 Nobel Prizes in my family, 2 for my mother, one for my father, one for sister and brother-in-law and one for my husband.
Only I was not successful..."
This shame I can understand.
Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans (just to let you know, that the Great Ape Project argues that the nonhuman great apes are persons and deserve basic human rights).
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

5/30/2016
Now just see how elegantly we exploit the atoms to our advantage.
Just one medical example for tonight.
This is another example why the atomic theory is not "just a theory";
the way most of us put it so derogatorily.
The atomic theory currently envisages the central nucleus to be surrounded by a cloud of electronic probability at certain energy levels.
These electrons if bombarded with an electromagnetic wave can absorb certain energy and leap to higher levels or shells.
At higher levels they lack stability and tend to Falk back to their original levels.
In doing so they emit the absorbed energy.
This released energy is always less than the absorbed energy following the critical law of conservation of energy.
Hence the wavelength of the reemitted energy is always longer than the absorbed energy (wavelength is inversely related to energy).
This phenomenon of energy release by the falling of excited electrons from higher unstable levels to lower stable levels is called:
1. Fluorescence if it happens immediately.
and...
2. Phosphorescence if it happens after a significant delay from the time of absorption.
Now looks how this basic physics and atomic theory helps us in my practice to make a living.
I use a water soluble crystalline substance called Fluorescein and inject into a patient's vein.
Once it reaches the retinal vessels, I excite it with with a light of 465 to 490 nanometers wavelength.
The electrons get excited but soon immediately start falling back to their original levels releasing a radiation of slightly longer wavelength of 520 to 530 nanometers.
This I photograph using a special camera and I get the status of blood vessels!
This is atomic theory in action!
Stay tuned to the voice of the Pan narrans.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

5/31/2016
Just as Ernst Abbe published his resolution limit of a microscope in Jena, German Empire a man named Otto Schott in the same city had invented a special type of glass.
This was the borosilicate glass.
Now this new glass is highly tolerant to heat and substantially resistant to sudden temperature change and chemicals.
Otto Schott shared his discovery with Ernst Abbe which became the catalyst for a long professional relationship between the two.
If this was not good enough, in comes another man who had opened up a lens making shop in 1840s in the same city of Jena.
This shop started specializing in making microscopes in 1847.
His first microscopes were just single lens microscopes intended for dissecting work.
He managed to sell 23 of them in the very first year even in those primitive dark days.
Do you by any chance happen to know his name?
Yes Sir, he was none other than Carl Zeiss himself!
In 1872, he hired Ernst Abbe and later Otto Schott.
These three joined together to lay the foundation not only of the company Carl Zeiss AG but also modern optics.
Today I get my roti (Indian bread) literally under their light.
Stay tuned to the enlightening voice of Pan narrans.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

6/1/2016
Ernst Abbe's contribution to my life and my profession and my survival is not merely limited to his defining of numerical aperture
 (NA = n sin theta) and discovering the resolution limit of microscope (diffraction).
Once he teamed up with Carl Zeiss and Otto Schott, the private enterprise and the spirit on entrepreneurship spurred his mind to higher goals.
He became the research director and the brain behind innovation at the Zeiss Optical Works as it was called then, at the age of 26.
Just 26!
By age of 28, he had invented the apochromatic lens or apo.
Apo consist of 3 lenses of special shapes which bring light of three different frequencies to a common focus.
Apo dramatically reduce both the chromatic and spherical aberrations, thereby remarkably improving the imaging of all our optical devices.
By the age of 30, he had invented Abbe condenser.
Now what is a condenser?
It is essentially a light concentrator.
They are located in almost all compound microscopes (optical or electron) close to the light source.
The condenser is composed of 2 lenses along with an iris diaphragm.
Robert Koch, the great microbe hunter on whom I did a 3 part bed-time story had complained to Abbe about the quality of his poor photography of the bugs.
Abbe provided a good quality condenser to Koch (one great mind helping another).
Then again, in another year, at the age of 31 he designed the first refractometer which hr described in a booklet published in 1874.
Now what is a refractometer I wonder?
It is a device that measures the index of refraction using Snell's law which we had all studied in high school.
This is a remarkably cunning device that I use nearly everyday.
It uses a light source from LED and directs it to a prism where the light undergoes refraction.
Now the machine "knows" the refractive index of the prism.
When a sample say another lens is tested, depending on it's refractive index, it will bend the light further exceeding the critical angle and making light undergo total internal reflection.
A sensor can sense the difference between the light refracted and light totally internally reflected.
This data is enough to calculate the refractive index of the tested lens or the human eye.
Quite a cunning machine from this mind of a brain labelled as Ernst Abbe.
Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans, the story telling chimpanzee.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

6/2/2016
By the age of 36, in 1886, Ernst Abbe was made a partner at the Zeiss Optical Works and began to share in the considerable profits this shop was making.
Yet he continued to work on quality objectives, not only for microscopes but also for telescopes.
He formulated the Abbe sine condition, a mathematical equation used widely in optics.
It is a condition that must be fulfilled by a lens or an optical system in order to produce sharp images of off-axis as well as on-axis objects.
The Abbe sine condition along with Fourier optics (again pure mathematics which rule our lives) form very powerful calculations which later gave rise to phase contrast microscopes and still later electron microscopes.
So monumental was Abbe's contributions to optics, lens design and microscopy that Abbe shared the 1953 Nobel Prize for physics with Frits Zernike.
I hope u remember the Dutch Fritz Zernike and his orthogonal polynomials on a unit disc which he used to describe the HOA (higher order aberrations).
Ernst Abbe besides his pioneering work in optics was also at the forefront of labor reform.
At Zeiss he introduced the eight-hour work day ( he could never forget his father had slogged 14 hours every day).
He created a pension fund and a discharge compensation fund for his employees.
He set up and endowed the Carl Zeiss Foundation for research in science.
He made it a point that the success of an employee was based solely on their ability and performance, not on their origin, religion or political views.
Such are the momentous contributions of this single man and yet so little is known of him even by us "learned doctors" who thrive on his legacy.
Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans, the storytelling ape.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

6/2/2016
Ha ha ha

6/3/2016

6/3/2016
Just like me, the vacuum tube or the Lenard tube as it was then known, had many lovers.
One of them was yet another German who went by the name of Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen born in 1845 in the German Confederation.
Just to let you know, the idea of nation states as we presently are used to, is a fairly recent one.
One of the chief characteristic of a nation state is the attitude towards its territory: it is sacred and nontransferable.
Besides this, nation states tend to use the state as an instrument of national unity, using homogeneity in social norms, economic policies and cultural life.
It is generally agreed that nation states arose as late as 1800s primarily in Europe.
They were an inadvertent byproduct of the intellectual discoveries that were started to be made in 1400s on political economy, capitalism, mercantilism, cartography and political geography.
Before them, there used to be multiethnic empires like we know so well in South Asia, the Austrian Empire, Kingdom of France, Kingdom of Hungary, Dynasties of China, the Russian Empire, the Ottoman Empire and of course, our dear good old British Empire.
The German Confederation was something in between an Empire and a nation state (u must recall that it was formed after the demise of the Holy Roman Empire following the destructive Thirty Year's War).
In such a transient Confederation was born this man who too began to fiddle around with Lenard tubes after obtaining his Ph.D. from the University of Zurich (in Switzerland which itself is even now a Confederation officially known as Confoederatio Helvetica in Latin or the Swiss Confederation).
It is important to digress in storytelling to give a panoramic view of the historical events.
This was crucial part of the Shakespearian plays in the form of the theatre and stage setup.
We shall continue with the story of this German.
Why did Europeans and specially the Germans contributed so much to fundamental science and our understanding of nature still perplexes me.
But I am glad they did.
Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

6/4/2016
Wilhelm Roentgen by the age of 45 had become a professor of physics at the University of Giessen.
Just like anyone of us, he wanted to flee away to America as by then, science, specially electronics was shifting away to west from the continent.
He had got an appointment at Columbia University in New York City.
He had purchased his transatlantic tickets and was about to set sail when the madness of the World War 1 broke out in 1914.
Following that he was forced to remain in Munich for the rest of his life.
In 1895 when he was 50 years old he was experimenting with the  Lenard tubes.
Yet another German Philipp Lenard had discovered the cathode rays as early as in 1888 by devising small metallic windows  in the vacuum tubes which came to be known as Lenard windows.
Having made these windows, the rays were made to pass into another chamber completely evacuated and then detect the rays and their intensity by the glow on paper sheets coated with phosphorescent materials like barium platinocyanide.
Roentgen went one step further.
He had a feeling that these rays could penetrate even intact think glass without having these Lenard windows.
So he feverishly decided to test his idea.
This time he used a Crookes tube which had much thicker glass than Lenard.
This had no holes and he covered it light tight with a black cardboard box.
He darkened the room completely (not difficult in those days specially in wintery Europe).
As he powered his Crookes tube with a Ruhmkorff coil (an induction coil or an electrical transformer), he noticed a faint shimmering a few feet away from the tube.
Just like a ghostly apparition.
He was puzzled.
When he struck a match, he saw the shimmering came at the spot where the barium platinocyanide screen was located.
He repeated his experiments for the worry that his fellow colleagues may mock his remarkable findings.
He worked diligently making notes, describing what objects and how thick were transparent to these strange rays.
Finally, he discovered that photographic plates were sensitive to these rays and he could record his evidence.
Repeatable and verifiable evidence is the most powerful tool of science.
The very first picture that he took using these unknown rays was that of his wife's hand.
The rest as they say is history.
Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

6/5/2016
Wilhelm Roentgen published his findings in three original papers.
The first one was published on 28 December, 1895 titled:
"On a new kind of rays".
Hardly eye catching.
Today Roentgen is considered the father of medical radiology.
In 1901, he was awarded the very first Nobel Prize in Physics.
The question that keeps haunting me is this:
Why do men like these dedicate their entire life in search of truth by probing and experimenting the nature?
Is it money?
Is it fame?
Was it their poverty and desperation that drove them?
I do not think so.
Wilhelm Roentgen donated his entire award money to the University of Wurzburg.
Unlike many American investigators like Edison, he did not take out patents on his discoveries.
(He had inherited 2 million Reichsmarks after his father's death).
With the inflation setting in Germany after its defeat in World War I, he later fell into bankruptcy.
He died in 1923 from carcinoma of intestine in utter penury.
Today if u happen to visit Germany, do go to Wurzburg in northern Bavaria where a non profit organization maintains his laboratory and provided guided tours to the Roentgen Memorial Site.
Besides his experiments, this memorial gives a wonderful insight into the particle physics of late 1800s.
Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

6/6/2016
Phillip Lenard is a very interesting character in German physics.
He was born in 1862 in the Kingdom of Hungary but died in Germany in 1947.
(You can see how fragile and meaningless political borders are).
Like so many, he worked on vacuum tubes and was bestowed the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1905 for his research on cathode rays.
He worked under bid scientific pezzonovante like Robert Bunsen, Lorand Eotvos (inventor of torsion balance which Coulomb used to discover the law) and Hermann von Helmholtz.
He gave a pretty accurate description of cathode rays describing them as quanta of electricity with a negative charge.
Interestingly, just like me, he became obsessed with so called Deutsche Physik or German Physics.
In his book published in 1933 under the Nazi regime titled:
"Great Men in Science, a History of Scientific Progress",
he chose to ignore Einstein and Curie labelling them condescendingly as Jewish Physics.
This nationalistic jingoism specially ran high after the loss in the World War I and bitter humiliation imposed on Germany at the Treaty of Versailles of 1919.
Lenard enjoyed a huge support under the Nazi rule as they in turn had found an eminent scientist to carry out their "Final Solution".
So u see mon ami, how sometimes very smart and learned men can go astray.
As much as I admire Germans for producing the finest minds in mathematics and physics, it is these same people who in hypnotic unison hailed Hitler like mindless robots.
These very people did nothing as they let their regime conduct systematic and efficient pogrom of their neighbours, their professors, their storekeepers...
People who were there friends just days ago.
Imagine such stupidity and criminal torpidity coming from the society which probably most of us invariably and unknowingly consider the elite of the planet earth!
Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans, the thoughtful chimpanzee.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

6/7/2016

6/7/2016
How to make a swing

6/7/2016
Much before the vacuum tubes and much before we understood electricity and atoms, we had invented the induction coil or the spark coil.
The credit for inventing this device often goes to a German called Heinrich Ruhmkorff born in Hanover, Germany in 1803.
To be more accurate, Ruhmkorff first patented and commercialized it.
Its true inventor was an Irish priest Father Nicholas Callan who was very much inspired with men like
1. Alessandro Volta
2. Luigi Galvani and
3. Michael Faraday
Callan invented the first coil way back in 1834.
Just like the refractometer, it is a devilishly cunning device.
From a low voltage direct current u can get a high voltage alternating current just by coiling insulated copper wire 2 times around a common iron core.
This cunning devise works from the fundamental laws of electromagnetism that a current flowing through a wire generates magnetic field.
And a changing magnetic field (magnetic flux) generates electric current;
 (Faraday's law of induction which was later neatly written out in the form of mathematical equations by James Clerk Maxwell).
In this device the primary copper coil creates a magnetic field.
Magnetic field is a form of stored energy.
When the current is broken, the magnetic field collapses which induces current in the second coil.
Because of large number of turns in the secondary coil, this secondary voltage pulse is many thousands of volts leading to an electric spark.
Ruhmkorff greatly improved this device after lot of experimentations.
It was so successful commercially that Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, the Emperor of the Second French Empire (no nation state, only empires) awarded him 50,000 francs in 1858.
Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans, the story telling chimpanzee.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

6/7/2016
Ruhmkorff induction coil

5/23/2016

So how exactly is a PCR done?

The sample of interest is first heated to 95°C.

This is done to denature the double stranded DNA to single stranded DNA (bonds are broken).

Then specific known synthetic DNA strands that are 15 to 20 nucleotides long are added to this soup of single stranded DNA.

These are called primers and during this time temperature is lowered to allow or facilitate complementary bonding (if complimentary sequence to the primers exist in the separated DNA strands).

This is the basis for the high specificity of PCR.

If the primers find their compliments, they are called annealed primers.

Then an enzyme called DNA polymerase is added and the temperature of the machine (Thermocyler) is raised to 72°C.

DNA was originally isolated from the bacterium Thermus aquaticus and is thermostable.

This is the step of actual photocopying.

30 to 40 of such cycles when repeated over and over can lead to more than 10^10 amplifications of the starting DNA material which is a colossal number.

End products of PCR assay are seen by subjecting then to electrophoresis on a 2% agarose gel and then staining with dyes like ethidium bromide.

I have been very lucky to have learnt and perform this neat trick at the Wilmer Eye Institute.

Stay tuned to the voice of this storytelling chimpanzee.

Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin apes constituted out of the same genetic code as any bacteria.

5/24/2016

Most people are aware that correction of myopia surgically is done using a specific type of laser called an Excimer (EXited DIMER).

In this procedure, this particular laser removed minute bits of middle layer of the cornea called the stroma.

This tissue destruction is fancifully called ablation. (Doctors and scientists adore fanciful technical terms to add to the sophistication when none is needed).

But even many learned eye doctors would not be aware of tissue sparing Lasik procedure.

How does it differ from the conventional older Excimer stroma ablation?

Well...

The older machines made cylindrical punches of 2 mm diameter circles.

As you can imagine, this left a lot of irregular untreated areas between adjacent laser punches.

To smoothen these irregular left over tissues in order to prevent higher order aberrations (remember the Dutch mathematician Zernike?), these stromal tissues had to be removed.

So not only the amount that was needed to correct the myopia was removed, but also additional planar tissue were removed.

Modern Excimer ablation machines use Gaussian profile (Man, this mathematician Gauss is everywhere) ablations of smaller diameter.

The amount of tissue removed is dramatically reduced.

Today, ablation of about 13 microns of stroma is good enough to correct 1 diopter in the central 6.5 mm optic zone of cornea.

Lots of tissue spared these days by us tissue destroyers.

Stay tuned to the voice of the story telling chimpanzee.

Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape evolved with stroma containing collagen matrix in the eyes and everywhere else.

5/25/2016

As we saw earlier, Davisson and Germer were perplexed with the data they were getting from the pattern of electron scattering from the nickel surface.

Yet, they went ahead and published these diffraction curves in the journal Science in 1923.

Even as late as 1926, they had no clue on why they were getting this data.

Those were the ages where the world was still ruled by nationalism, wars, colonialism and racism. 

This also reminds me of Wilson and Penzias who were unable to make the sense of the noise they were getting in the background.

In an extraordinary similarity to the CMB story, Davisson happened to attend a meeting at Oxford in the summer of 1926.

Davisson was surprised to hear Max Born at the lecture using his diffraction curves and data as a confirmation of the de Broglie hypothesis!

What a fascinating moment!

This set his heart beat racing!

Returning to the United States, Davisson made modifications to the tube design and detector mounting.

Then he started applying different voltages to the electron gun, imparting different kinetic energies and momentum to the accelerating electrons.

He got a peak on the detector at an angle theta = 50°, at voltage of 54 V, giving electrons a kinetic energy of 54 eV. 

This he could now explain.

The nickel crystal surface acted like a 3-D diffraction grating.

The angle of maximum constructive interference from an array is given by the Bragg's law (student of Sir J. J. Thomson).

The experimental outcome of Davisson and Germer matched with the predictions and mathematical equations made by de Broglie and Bragg (whose equation I will be sending shortly).

This was the first direct evidence confirming de Broglie's hypothesis.

Davisson's attention to detail, Bell Labs resources for conducting research, expertise of his colleague Germer and luck, all contributed to this experimental success.

Stay tuned to the voice of the storytelling chimpanzee.

Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

5/26/2016

William Henry Bragg was born in England in the year of 1862.

England by then was a full fledged colonial superpower thanks to the industrial revolution and its naval might. (Remember the Battle of Trafalgar of 1805?).

 (Always remember, those who control the sea trading routes shall rule the world like today's America does and today's China trying to).

At the age of 23 in 1885 William Henry Bragg was appointed the Elder Professor of Mathematics and Experimental Physics in the University of Adelaide.

(Remember that Australia by 1750s was in the pocket of the British Empire even as the empire was losing its North American colonies if you recall my stories on the American Revolution).

Bragg was a skilled mathematician and he had a limited knowledge of physics.

But he was a great lecturer encouraging both the students and teachers.

His interest in physics developed when in 1895 he was visited by Ernest Rutherford, en route from New Zealand to Cambridge; 

This was the commencement of a lifelong friendship.

Friendships are more often built on shared interests and love of subjects and ideas rather than on personalities as I have myself learnt from the few rare precious friends that I managed to make in my life inspite of my taciturn disposition.

Bragg was strongly impressed with the discovery of Wilhelm Roentgen.

On May 29, 1896 at Adelaide, he called the local doctors and gave them a demonstration of "X-rays to reveal structures that were otherwise invisible".

He had used a Crookes tube (remember?) attached to an induction coil and a battery.

Electric spark generated short bursts of X-rays.

Guess what was the subject of the test?

His hand.

Which revealed an old injury to one of his fingers sustained when using a chopping machine on his father's farm in Cumbria, England.

Stay tuned to this story of a very fascinating Englishman in Australia.

Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

5/27/2016

While in Adelaide, William Henry Bragg reproduced.

Along came William Lawrence Bragg, his son in the year of 1890.

Bragg junior showed an early interest in science and mathematics.

At the age of 5, Bragg junior fell from his tricycle and broke his arm.

His father, Bragg the senior, who was deeply impressed with Roentgen's experiments used the newly discovered X-rays and his experimental equipment to examine the broken arm.

This is the first recorded medical use of X-rays in Australia.

Both father and son returned to England in 1909 where Bragg senior occupied the Cavendish chair of physics in University of Leeds.

Bragg junior entered the Trinity College, Cambridge in the same year receiving a major scholarship in mathematics.

After initially excelling in mathematics, Bragg junior shifted to physics in the later years.

By 1912, when Bragg senior was 50 years old and Bragg junior was merely 22 years of age, both father and son began to work together on a very new field of X-ray crystallography.

Must have been amazing (working next to your own genetically coded product on the same project)!

(Just for your information, their work on proteins and DNA proved critical for the discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953 by Francis Crick and James Watson).

This father and son duo proposed the Bragg formulation of X-ray diffraction in response to their discovery that the crystalline solids produced surprising patterns of reflected X-rays.

More about it later.

Stay tuned to the voice of the storytelling chimpanzee whose DNA was discovered thanks to these unknown X-rays.

Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

5/28/2016

On November 11, 1912 (the year Republic of China came to be and Titanic sank), William Lawrence Bragg aka Bragg junior, then just 22 years old made a presentation at the Cambridge Philosophical Society.

He explained the results of his X-ray scattering experiments by a crystal.

He did so by proposing a model of crystal as a set of discrete parallel planes separated by a unit distance d.

Now if 2 rays of x-rays are incident at an angle theta, they will have a path difference of 2dsin theta. (U can derive it by simple geometry).

The important thing that I must tell is that the wavelengths of X-rays, and waves of neutrons or electrons are comparable with inter-atomic distance which is around 150 picometre or pm.

Most atoms are between 62 and 520 pm in diameter.

A typical carbon-carbon single covalent bond is 154 pm long.

Wavelengths of X-rays are in the range of 10 to 10,000 pm.

This makes neutrons and x-rays (essentially photons) an excellent tool for probing or investigating atoms.

Now what this Bragg junior stated in that meet is that these 2 rays with a path difference of 2dsin theta will undergo constructive interference if and only if the path difference is either equal to the wavelength or an integer multiple of it.

Now see how mathematics can convert all this to an elegant equation of pithy.

2d sin theta = n lambda

n is a positive integer

all other terms already explained.

Of course, in a real crystal the effect of the constructive (or destructive) interference gets intensified because of the cumulative effect of reflection in successive crystallographic planes of the crystalline lattice.

For this, both father and son were jointly awarded the Nobel prize in physics in 1915 (when the madness and mayhem of the first world war was in full fury).

This has been the only father-son team to jointly win this prestigious award.

Stay tuned to the voice of this storytelling chimpanzee.

Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape quite oblivious to his world and happenings of picometre.

5/29/2016

Ernst Abbe was born in 1840 in Germany, the year British Empire pocketed New Zealand and was raging opium war against Qing Empire in China.

His father was a poor man and his schooling was supported by his father's employer.

By the time he finished his schooling, both his scientific talent and strong will power had become obvious.

Despite financial constraints, his father supported his higher education at the University of Jenna and Göttingen (world ranking 100).

While at school, he was influenced by the great mathematician Bernhard Riemann.

At the age of 30 in 1870, he was accepted as an associate professor of experimental physics, mechanics and mathematics at the University of Jenna.

In 1873, just 3 years later, he defined the term:

Numerical aperture (number without any dimension that characterizes range of angles of an optical system).

He also discovered that there is a limit of resolution for any optical system that is defined by the wavelength of wave.

As we saw in the last night bed-time story, to study atoms we need rays of very small length (in picometres).

To study smaller and smaller objects, we need to use light or waves of shorter and shorter wavelength.

A light with a wavelength lambda, travelling in a medium of refractive index n, and converging to a spot with angle theta will make a spit size of radius d such that:

d = lambda/2nsin theta

The term n sin theta is called the numerical aperture (NA).

Hence d = lambda/2NA

In modern optics like our  microscopes, the NA can reach about 1.4 to 1.6.

So the Abbe limit becomes lambda/2.8

Which for a green light of wavelength 500 nm would be 250 nm or 0.25 microns.

This resolution is enough to see most biological cells (1 to 100 microns) but definitely not the atoms (60 to 500 picometre diameter).

This should make u think on the relative sizes of atoms and cells.

Stay tuned to the voice of this storytelling chimpanzee.  

Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

4/21/2016

One can never write on electricity, magnetism, electromagnetism, electrochemistry, electromagnetic induction, electrolysis and modern electronics without invoking the name of perhaps the greatest experimental scientist ever; the one and only Michael Faraday.

He was born to a man who was a humble apprentice to a village blacksmith in 1791.

Furthermore, the England he was born in was worse than any third world country of today.

Napoleon was waging his crazy fanatical wars in Europe and had even planned to invade England in 1805.

The defeat in the Battle of Trafalgar (naval engagement) in 1805 ended his dreams of making English French.

The housing of the working class was appalling, not very different to our Bombay slums.

There were no building regulations and builders built as they pleased trying to cram as many houses as possible onto every piece of land.

The toilets were usually cesspits which were infrequently empties and sometimes overflowed.

The urine and sewage would seep into the ground into well from which people drank.

The poor were treated as harshly as possible to dissuade them from taking any help from the state.

The industrial revolution in the beginning brought much suffering and misery.

Children and women were made to work very long hours (12 hours a day or longer) in the newly built textile factories.

Trade unions were illegal and workers were not allowed to demand higher wages.

It would only be in the middle of 1800s that England would start building up its empire by conquering South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Burma (India was already conquered for exploitation by then).

In such a miserable country and to such a lowly family was Faraday born that he managed to get the most basic school education.

By and large he educated himself by becoming an apprentice to George Riebau, a bookseller and bookbinder in Blandford Street, London at a childish age of 14.

It was this bookbinder Riebau who had arranged, through one of his customers, for Faraday tickets to hear Humphrey Davy lecture on chemistry at the Royal Institution.

My dear fellow cousin apes, I urge you to cherish and nurture books, specially on science and mathematics, but also on literature, poetry and what not.

May be one of you will give rise to a Faraday in the remotest and the most parched village of the worst of the third world country.

Good night mon ami.

4/22/2016

Generally speaking (meaning exceptions aside), the greatest of the scientists and mathematicians are very poor Messiah of science and scientific method.

Take for example Newton.

A total reclusive devoted completely to his studies with very little or no cravings for social interactions.

As usual, people have diagnosed him with Asperger's.

I am very skeptical since I too have been diagnosed the same by a few.

His landmark book:

Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica

Is a series of definitions, axioms, description of his experiments;

Hardly a stuff to entice a lay person of late 1600s.

Take another example Darwin.

He had established and was certain that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestors.

By 1837 he had very well formulated his ideas but refrained from publishing his original and seminal work for two decades!!

Can you wonder why?

So as not to offend people and specially his wife, a diehard believer of a silly Adam and Eve story.

Hardly a person to inspire confidence into young minds to do science.

On the other hand, there exists and have existed eloquent and thrilling expositors of science like Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov, Neil de Grass Tyson who dazzle young minds when they speak or write on science.

Yet these men have contributed little original or significant to our scientific knowledge.

Michael Faraday was a rare prodigy who straddled both these worlds with a remarkable and painless serenity.

From 1827 onwards, he started delivering his famous Christmas lectures at the Royal Institution in London for the general public.

The lectures were joyful, juvenile and demonstrative.

Faraday on his art of lecturing wrote:

"A flame should be lighted at the commencement and kept alive with unremitting splendour to the end."

I hope I can achieve a fraction of this for my friend through my bed-time stories.

Stay tuned to the voice of Faraday wannabe.

Good night mon ami and my fellow kin ape.

4/23/2016

In a perfect world, I would expect James Clerk Maxwell to be a household name.

I would expect a father to be talking to his children the far reaching affects the work of Maxwell head not only to the physical sciences but the world at large.

Maxwell was everything which Michael Faraday was not.

Born in 1831 to an advocate of comfortable means at 14 Indian Street, Edinburgh, Scotland he was a single son who received almost perfect education and devoted attention of his parents.

Moreover, he was born in England which was soon becoming a mighty colonial power gobbling away all the lands that came into its way.

By 1850s, the British Empire was the largest and richest empire in the world.

Interestingly, Ireland was the first serious attempt by the British Crown and Parliament to begin the process of colonization.

The colonies would become a source of cheapest labour ever for capitalism. 

The slave trade was a very strong factor that made capitalism "work".

The colonies also provided resources for the capitalism and the same colonies provided a market for trade to flourish.

So convenient.

All these factors cemented the emergence of capitalism and Britain's preeminence as a world power.

Have u ever stopped to think why Capitalism has failed to show its charm in all over Central and South Americas, whole of Africa and East Europe and Russia, and of course our dear old South Asia?

South Asia which has cheap labour, lots of young men and yet... 

The magic of capitalism fails to surface.

Always question what is taken for granted.

I am sorry I digressed from Maxwell.

But hell...

It is my story.

Let me tell it the way I want to.

Let me set the rules which is simply this:

"There are no rules."

Yet, in the end I wish to point at the irony that the criticism of capitalism is coming from an ape engaged in running a private eye shop setting his own rates to cure desperate people in misery.

Stay tuned to the voice of introspection.

Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

4/24/2016

In 1707 the Mughal empire was at its peak under the reign of Aurangzeb.

It included  almost whole of current India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and parts of Afghanistan.

But by 1761, it had weakened considerably by the rise of the local powers who began to assert their independence.

What or who were these local powers?

Let me name them:

1. The province of Bengal under the governorship of Murshid Quli Khan from 1717.

2. The autonomous kingdom of Hyderabad founded in 1724 by Chin Qulich Khan.

3. The third state which freed itself from the shackles of the crumbling Mughal empire was the state of Awadh (current Uttar Pradesh and Haryana) under the governorship of Saadat Khan.

4. The Marathas were rebelling against the Mughals and was initially founded as a small kingdom by Shivaji in early 1700s.

5. The Sikhs under the 10th guru, Guru Gobind Singh in 1699 transformed themselves into a military organization by establishing the brotherhood of Khalsa.

(Guru Nanak started Sikhism in 1480s when Babur was founding the Mughal empire).

6. The Jat kingdom of Bharatpur in the Delhi-Mathura region under Suraj Mal. (The Jat state collapsed in 1763).

7. The Afghan state (small one) founded by Ali Muhammad Khan in Rohilkand near the Himalayas. 

(The Afghans operated as fluid ethnic group of mercenary soldiers in the military labor market of North India).

8. The principality of Rajput kingdoms around Marwar under Raj Singh

9. The principality of Mysore or Travancore under Hyder Ali in 1761 and later his son Tipu Sultan.

So the Indian subcontinent in mid or late 1700s was a hodge podge of working Mughal empire along with political powers dispersed all over.

Was this not the perfect stage for all the European powers like Dutch, Portuguese, French and British already butchering and slaughtering each other to look for resources outside their tiny countries.

And they had guns and steel and thanks to men like Cunaeus and Musschenbroek, Coulomb, Ampere, Galvani, Volta, Oersted, Ohm and many more, they were on their way to developing powerful technologies.

Our fates were sealed.

(Though it terrifies me even more to think or imagine if the British had not come and these 9 powers were battling it out by themselves).

Do u see how so many thousands of chance events have went on to lead to our being here.

Chance events rule our lives and we silly apes find it extremely hard to digest it;

or in order to digest it we create gods to give ourselves false comfort that we have some control over our lives.

Stay tuned to the voice which explores history in an enchanting manner.

Good night mon ami and my fellow helpless cousin apes.

4/25/2016

Misdirected advice

4/25/2016

James Clerk Maxwell was fascinated with geometry at an early age.

At the age of 13, he won his school's (prestigious Edinburgh Academy) mathematical medal.

He wrote his first scientific paper at the age of 14.

(Mine first came at a suspended age of 37).

In it he described the mechanical means of drawing mathematical curves with a piece of twine, and the properties of ellipses, Cartesian ovals and other curves.

(A whole story could be done on the subject of Cartesian ovals.

Just to interest an ophthalmologist, Cartesian ovals are used in lens designing).

His paper "Oval curves" was presented to the Royal Society of Edinburgh by his professor James Forbes as Maxwell was deemed too young to present it by himself.

Maxwell was extremely fortunate in that his mother recognized the potential of her son and both his parents took over in educating this brilliant mind at home.

At the age of 16 in 1847 Maxwell joined the University of Edinburgh.

After the classes he would immerse himself in private study.

He would experiment with chemical, magnetic and electric apparatuses, focussing primarily on the properties of polarized light.

At the age of 18, Maxwell came out with two papers that were presented at the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

One was on the equilibrium of elastic solids. In this process he discovered photoelasticity (another top for bed-time story).

The other paper was "Rolling Curves".

Once again he was considered too young to stand at the rostrum and present it himself.

His tutor delivered it for him.

The most amazing about Maxwell was that his country or his society was backing his each and every contribution.

Most other societies at that time were not favourable for accommodating or nourishing such great minds.

No wonder the greatest of the great from India like C.V. Raman, Chandrashekhar, Ramanujan to name a few, had to leave India.

I am sorry to say, but the trend continues till this date where even today original thinking and creativity can easily be crushed and remain unrewarded and unappreciated in our society.

Specially if it concerns fundamental research like mathematics and basic sciences.

Stay tuned to the voice on greatest of minds that have arisen from the family of Hominidae or the great apes.

Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

4/25/2016

Souless is priceless.

Time to turn in.

With Alan Turing.

4/26/2016

No match

4/26/2016

In 1860 at the age of 29, the young Scotsman eventually moved to King's College in London.

Between 1861 and 1862 Maxwell published a paper in four parts titled:

On Physical Lines of Force.

Pretty ordinary name I dare say.

In it, he proposed a generalized model of Faraday's experiments.

(He would meet Faraday at the Royal Institution Lectures.

Faraday was 40 years his senior.)

He showed through 20 differential equations using 20 variables how electricity and magnetism could be or are related.

It was another forgotten brilliant mind Oliver Heaviside who reduced these 20 differential equations to just 4 using just 4 variables:

B  magnetic flux

E electrical field

J electric current density (current per unit area)

Rho Charge density (charge per unit length or surface area or volume)

Maxwell had expressed his 20 equations in the algebra of quaternions.

Oliver Heaviside however presented these equations (beside reducing them to 4) in modern vector format using the nabla operator devised by William Rowan Hamilton.

Maxwell used a concept called "sea of molecular vortices" thus implying a medium in which there occurs transverse undulations of electric and magnetic phenomena.

Maxwell was in fact making an analogy of electric and magnetic phenomena with sound.

As you can see, if you scrutinize the paper deeply, there were some things which he got wrong.

But it was what he got right changed the way we perceived reality for ever.

He was predicting an oscillating electromagnetic wave.

He was predicting its speed.

And the speed of these waves was approximately the same as that of the light!

 In one of his lectures at King's college he commented:

"We can scarcely avoid the conclusion that light consist of transverse undulations of the same medium which is the cause of electric and magnetic phenomena".

That, mon ami, was history being made.

This paper ranks along with outstanding and landmark papers in science like Einstein's Annus Mirabilis (extraordinary year) papers and Newton's Principia Mathematica.

These men are the few on whose shoulders we can sit and claim that we have risen higher than our fellow cousin apes.

Rest of us live just as other great apes do.

Eat, breed and die.

Good night mon ami and my fellow humble ape.

4/27/2016

Maxwell had used a very strange mathematics in his original 20 equations in his 4 part papers of 1861-62.

This mathematics is called the quaternions.

Now quaternions are a number system very different from what we have been taught.

This unique system of mathematics has been devised by an Irishman William Rowan Hamilton who was born in the filthy and primitive Dublin of 1805 (few years after Faraday).

 Now just look how a mathematician ape thinks.

This ape was wondering how to represent complex numbers in a three dimensional plane.

Isn't it crazy?

How would attacking this problem help him acquire wealth and power to seduce a female ape and breed?

Yet, this is what mathematicians are.

And in a poor overpopulated society, they are a burden with no utility value.

Yet, the Trinity college at Dublin had developed enough to support and fund such a mind (to feed him, house him and enable him to breed).

But what are complex numbers?

A complex number is any number that can be expressed in the form:

a + bi where

a and b are the real numbers and I is the imaginary unit that satisfies the equation:

i^2 = - 1

To represent a complex number on a three dimensional plane was done.

He actually failed in this mission.

However, in working with four dimensions he created the quaternions.

It was on the 16th of October 1843 as he was walking on the stony Brougham bridge in Dublin that in a flash of genius he discovered the fundamental formula for quaternion multiplication

i^2 = j^2 = k^2 = ijk = - 1

Hamilton promptly carved this equation using a penknife into the side of this bridge.

Today the carving has been eroded by the elements of weather and time.

But a plaque on the underside of this bridge still stands to mark that spark of intuitive genius.

Stay tuned to the voice of fascinating numbers which have been dulled and sullied by rote education.

Good night mon ami and my fellow ape.

4/28/2016

Heinrich Hertz was born in 1857 which was now the German Confederation.

These were loose association of 39 German speaking countries trying to forge out from the already weakened Roman Catholic Empire.

He was a very bright boy who took a strong liking towards sciences and languages.

At the age of 29 in the year 1879 he began to pursue his PhD from the University of Berlin under the great Hermann Von Helmholtz.

(Helmholtz has made great contributions to my own field of ophthalmology, optics and visual science).

Helmholtz suggested that Hertz should do a doctoral dissertation on testing Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism.

If you have been reading my bed-time stories scrupulously, you would know that Maxwell's papers were largely theoretical.

In fact, Maxwell was largely converting Faraday's experimental data into mathematical equations.

Yet, from those equations, he was coming to earth shattering conclusions and making testable predictions.

This, mon ami, you must realize is what makes scientific truth so special.

Let not post modern cultural relativists fool you into believing that there can be multiple cultural or religious versions of truth.

Once again I digress... But at times it is essential.

Helmholtz meanwhile being a scientific pezzonovante had proposed the Berlin Prize problem that year at the Prussian Academy of Sciences, Berlin (today it houses the Berlin State Library).

This award would be bestowed to anyone who could experimentally prove an electromagnetic effect in the polarization and depolarization of insulators, something predicted by Maxwell's theory.

Helmholtz in fact wanted Hertz to win the prize.

But Hertz did not know how to build an apparatus that would enable him to perform this experiment.

He gave this problem a rest and instead began to work on electromagnetic induction.

Let us take a break now mon ami as did Hertz.

Stay tuned to the voice of great experiments.

Good night mon ami and my fellow experimental ape.

(Yes, we all learn our way through this big bad world by trial and error).

And trust me on this one;

This is one hell of a bad world if not hell itself.

4/28/2016

Hah

Good one

4/29/2016

The protector in the closet

4/29/2016

Ever since Faraday had discovered the induction, several induction coils came into play.

The induction coil is a type of electrical transformer used to produce high voltage pulse from a low voltage DC.

We had left last night with Hertz getting stuck.

In 1886 while experimenting with with a pair of Reiss spirals (spirally wound conductors with metal balls at their ends) he noticed that discharging a Leyden jar into one of these coils would produce a spark in the other coil.

This was the spark he needed to set up the apparatus required to clinch the Berlin prize of Helmholtz.

He set up this induction coil that would be the generator of his electromagnetic waves.

Then he constructed a receiver which was a near circular metallic ring, their ends separated by a few millimeters.

This would be the world's first half wave dipole antenna.

His assistant switched on the transmitter or the induction coil.

Hertz himself holding the circular metallic ring edged closer towards the receiver observing carefully the separated ends under a magnifying lens. 

The room was kept dark.

At a distance of about 2 meters, sparks began to jump across the gap between the ends of the receiver's conductors.

And Hertz knew exactly why this was happening.

His first half wave dipole antenna was receiving power from a radio or an electromagnetic wave.

How the power in the antenna is generated by an electromagnetic wave is a whole new topic for bed-time story.

When Hertz reported this Helmholtz, the reply was:

Bravo!

4/29/2016

Between 1886 and 1889 between the age of 29 to 32, Hertz would go on to conduct a series of experiments.

He wrote to his father:

"I an working like a factory hand repeating my every step a thousand times over.

I spend hours on end drilling one hole after another."

This meticulous and voluminous scientist never even remotely understand the significance of his work.

This is what he had to say on his radio wave experiments:

"It is of no use whatsoever [...] this is just an experiment that proves Maestro Maxwell was right.

We have these mysterious electromagnetic waves that we cannot see with the naked eye. But they are there."

Asked about the ramifications of his discoveries, Hertz replied,:

"Nothing, I guess."

Sometimes the greatest of the great apes are too humble to see the significance of what they did.

Stay tuned to this awesome frequency of discovery and reeducation.

Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

4/29/2016

Must be a pun I guess

Though not certemente

4/30/2016

Some animals don't have to go to school

4/30/2016

When an electric current passes through a conductor, heat is generated.

The heat (H) generated is proportional to the square of the current I.

H ~ I^2 . R. t

R is the resistance

t is time

This awesome relationship was discovered independently by two great men:

Heinrich Lenz - a Russian of Baltic German ethnicity born in 1804 in Estonia which was then under the Russian Empire.

and

James Prescott Joule - an Englishman born in the United Kingdom of 1818 which was on its way to becoming a powerful colonial power.

Just to let you know, the Russian Empire has been one of the largest empires in the world history, stretching over three continents.

In terms of landmass, it has only been surpassed by the British and Mongol empires.

Yet, like India today, the Russian empire was predominantly a rural society (80% Russians were peasants) spread over vast spaces.

The empire, just like today's Russia, was in a continuous state of financial crisis.

While revenues rose, the expenses always grew more rapidly. 

(This reminds me of today's America and India whose both central and state governments are forever in debt.

Debt from or to whom?

To the future.

So any child born in America or India is born with a debt on his or her shoulders... Along with scarcity of water, space, jobs, seats in good colleges and resources in general).

The empire was spending excessively on its large and glorious army, super large and complex bureaucracy and a splendid court to rival Paris and London.

The empire was living far beyond its means while the United Kingdom kept on scavenging for territories and resources around the world.

Again I digress.

But digressing is a luxury I have since I am not educating for exams, college seats and entrance exams which is a tyranny in the name of education.

Stay tuned to the voice of learning from history.

The lesson that men will always screw up.

Good night mon ami and my fellow apes who live within their means.

5/1/2016

Ask an eye doctor what is the normal pupillary diameter, and they will rush to scream out 2 mm (photopic) to 4 mm (mesopic).

But ask him the question:

"What is the cause of blurry vision in a dilated pupil?" and you will see head scratching and eyes looking skyward.

The fact is that our eyes are a highly flawed spherocylindrical optical devises that instead of generating a sharp focal point generate a conoid of Sturm.

The propagation of light in biological optics is often studied using the principal of wavefronts (besides ray diagrams).

These wavefronts are obtained using both Maxwell's equations and Huygens principal (a full topic for a bed-time story).

When light passes through our pupils and lens, the wavefronts generated are full of lower order and higher order aberrations.

The lower order aberrations include the common refractive errors like myopia, hyperopia and astigmatism which are nearly universal in us apes.

The higher order aberrations are much subtle and are calculated using the mathematics of Zernicke polynomials (a whole topic for a bed-time story series).

Besides these, there are some specific aberrations that are caused by the fundamental properties of light or in fact, any electromagnetic wave as demonstrated and proved by the brilliant Heinrich Hertz.

They are:

1. Spherical aberration in which light from the periphery of a biconvex lens comes to focus before the central rays.

2. Chromatic aberration in which light of different colours or wavelength comes to focus at different points.

3. Diffraction (as shown by Young and a whole new topic you know for what...) which is bending of light or any electromagnetic wave at edges.

So armed with knowledge, let me pose another question:

Why did the nature select our pupil size to be in the range of 2 to 4 mm?

Let me give you a hint.

Nothing in biology makes sense unless except in the light of evolution. (Theodosius Dobzhansky).

I shall probably answer it soon but the point is to make you think.

Stay tuned to the voice of evolutionary biology and optics.

Good night mon ami and my fellow evolved cousin ape.

5/1/2016

Just a small correction. 

Theodosius Dobzhansky's exact words were:

Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.

5/2/2016

Optically speaking, pupil is the eye's aperture and iris is the aperture stop.

Nearly all animals with eyes have evolved pupil, though of varying shapes depending on the type of evolutionary pressures their environment and life style demands.

Pupil besides regulating the light quantum entering the eye is a powerful tool of minimizing the optical aberrations, specially the higher order aberrations (HOA) like spherical aberration.

As the pupil dilates, more and more of the rays coming from the peripheral lens come into play.

This shifts the focus forward as the rays refract far more from periphery than in the center.

Myopia is nothing but focusing of rays from the lens in front of the macula (of retina).

What makes the pupil size even more critical is that the spherical aberration increases as the fourth power of the pupillary diameter.

So doubling of pupil size even from 2 to 4 mm increases spherical aberration 16 times.

You can imagine the havoc in the visual acuity caused by our iatrogenic pharmacological dilation.

But what happens when pupil becomes small or smaller?

That should be good right?

You would expect greater depth of focus as in a camera (meaning more objects lying at various distances from eye staying in focus).

True. It happens.

But this gain is offset by diffraction which sets in as soon as the pupil slit size becomes comparable to the wavelengths of light.

In fact, all optical systems including the eye have a fundamental limitation to their resolving power due to diffraction.

(This limit is given by

d = lambda/2n sin theta)

This a complete topic by itself.

So nature has found this golden mean.

Of course you do realize that when I say nature had "found" or "selected" or "chosen", it is just me anthropomorphising nature.

Nature is indifferent to our living or dying, least of all well being.

So, in the African savannahs, those apes which had the pupil sizes of 2 to 4 mm statistically survived, mated and bred better than those with outlying pupil sizes.

Stay tuned.

Time to hit the bed mon ami and give my evolved retina some rest.

5/2/2016

This is by far the best repartee!

Most impressive

5/3/2016

A sweet little boy looking for a special Valentine bouquet

5/3/2016

The greatest fundamental breakthroughs in the world of electronics happened in primitive Europe which was constantly involved in warfare.

Later the reign of progress was taken over by the United Kingdom with astonishing discoveries.

Remember, always remember, that these advancements were made by a handful few; the masses on the other hand were involved solely in eating, mating, breeding.

Now the engine of progress would shift further west across the Atlantic.

In 1750s, the United States or the North America (there was no US, Canada or Mexico then), was essentially a colony of three European powers France, Great Britain and Spain.

When the Europeans first came to the Americas in 1600s, they brought in horses, cattle and hogs.

Also came with them the germs of small pox and measles to which the Native Americans had no immunity.

The germs did for Europeans what normally guns and steel do - wipe out the whole of native population paving way for the settlement of white man.

But even as the white men settled along the east coast, often known as New England, they began to exploit each other.

They were the colonies of Britain just like India and again provided the empire with tremendous resources to boost capitalism (This is generally how capitalism works. Its unseen cost is never spoken or explained).

So in 1775, the Thirteen Colonies on the east coast of North America rebelled against the British rule.

Unlike our peaceful Gandhi, American Revolutionary war or the war of Independence was a protracted world war of 8 long years from 1775 to 1783.

France, Spain, Netherlands and the Kingdom of Mysore in India became allies of the United States of America which the Thirteen Colonies began to call themselves.

Great Britain had German auxiliaries and some Native allies.

This world war claimed over 120,000 lives over 8 years 4 months and 15 days.

So it was in 1783 that a nation was forged which would take the science of electronics to unprecedented heights.

Remember my fellow apes, no one will serve you your rights and dignity on a platter.

You will have to battle it out and earn it in ways more than one.

Stay tuned to the voice of dignity and earned respect.

Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

5/4/2016

Interestingly enough, commercial telegraph happened to be launched nearly simultaneously both in England and the United States, a newly born nation.

In the year 1837, William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone patented a telegraph system which used a number of needles on board.

These needles could point to letters of the alphabet.

By the way, Sir Charles Wheatstone is popularly known to all of us through his Wheatstone bridge, a devise used to measure an unknown electric resistance.

In the United States, it was Samuel Morse who had independently developed and patented an electrical telegraph in the same year of 1837.

With the invention of telegraph arose the need for codes and encryption.

Let me briefly tell you what these terms mean:

1. Encoding is done to transform data so that it can be properly and

safely consumed by a different type of system.

Example: Binary data being sent over an email.

The goal is not secrecy.

2. Encryption is the transformation of data to keep it secret.

It uses a key which is kept secret.

3. Hashing is done to preserve the integrity of data.

Its characteristics are:

Same input should always produce same output.

Multiple disparate inputs does not produce same output.

4. Obfuscation is transforming a data to make it harder to understand or to be replicated or to be reverse engineered.

The sophistication and cat and mouse game will only get tougher.

Stay tuned to the voice of decoding the nature of reality.

Good night mon ami and my fellow genetically coded apes.

5/5/2016

Little do we eye doctors realize how strongly we are dependent on complicated mathematics (it may well be that the term simple mathematics is an oxymoron) and the works of mathematicians for our income and livelihood.

One of them is a very little known man by the name Philipp Ludwig von Seidel, born in the German empire in 1896.

You would recall this from my bed-time stories that this was a brief interlude phase after the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806 and the German November Revolution of 1918 with the creation of Weimar Republic or the German Reich.

Seidel as a mathematician is known for his work in uniform convergence.

It was based on a proof published by Cauchy that a convergent sum of continuous functions is always continuous.

The proof turned out to be incorrect though the topic became of immense interest for the leading mathematicians since then.

More important for me as a eye doctor, Seidel decomposed the first order monochromatic aberrations into 5:

1. Spherical aberration: difference in focal lengths between paraxial rays and marginal rays emerging after refracting from lens.

2. Coma:

A defect by which points appear as comet-like asymmetrical patches.

Its magnitude is again determined mathematically using the optical sine theorem.

3. Astigmatism:

Wherein the image of a point forms focal lines at the sagittal and tangential foci.

4. Curvature of a field:

Which arises when the image instead of lying on a flat plane falls on a curved surface.

Example images falling on our retinas.

5. Distortion:

Which can be barrel or pincushion type.

These are the five Seidel aberrations based on series expansions (more mathematics) which plague the workings of every optical devise including the eyes of apes and non apes.

This is a fascinating topic and I have to keep coming back to it.

Stay tuned to the voice of least distortion.

Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

5/6/2016

Frits Zernike was born in the Amsterdam, Netherlands of 1888 to Carl and Antje, both teachers of mathematics.

His father though a teacher of mathematics had a strong passion for physics which he infected his son with (religion too works in the same way).

The tiny European nations of 1880s were surging ahead with imperialism.

I believe it was a natural outcome of industrialization and capitalism and thereby the default need for resources, cheap labour and markets.

(Though imperialism is as old as humanity itself.

We can safely be called the imperialistic apes).

Zernike studied chemistry (his major), mathematics and physics at the University of Amsterdam.

By the age of 32 he had become a full professor of theoretical physics at the University of Groningen which ranks 75 in the world today.

(Number one being Harvard).

His main interest was physical optics on topics like spectral lines, diffraction, aberrations of optical imaging systems and coherence.

For reasons unknown to me, he was also working on pure mathematics on a subject called polynomials.

We have all solved polynomial equations which involve variables and coefficients like:

x^2 - 4x + 7 or

x^3 = 27

and drawn graphs for polynomial functions like

The graph for the function 

f(x) = 0 

is the x axis

Zernike worked on polynomials that were orthogonal on a unit disc (disc around point P where the set of points from P is less than 1).

Quite remarkably, this abstract mathematics of orthogonal polynomials on a unit disc seemed to describe the wavefront data of optical systems quite well (much better than Seidel's representation).

Since the 1960s, Zernike's polynomials are widely used in optical design, optical metrology and image analysis.

Of course, as an eye doctor we are not required to know the mathematics or even basic polynomials except for passing exams, I will give a brief picture of how Zernike represented the optical aberrations through his orthogonal polynomials on unit disc.

Stay tuned to the voice of polynomials.

Good night mon ami and my fellow ape who has risen to do mathematics higher than addition.

5/6/2016

Dobroi nochi veliki vrach!

5/6/2016

Zernike's orthogonal polynomials

5/7/2016

The class bully for a friend

5/7/2016

One of the big leaps in the world of electronics after telegraphy was the invention of the vacuum tubes.

If telegraphy was the control of electromagnetic waves by the upright ape, vacuum tube would be the control of electric current itself.

One oddity of this vacuum tube or the electron tube is its discovery preceded the detection of electron itself.

Quite a few people contributed to the origination of this revolutionary devise.

John Ambrose Fleming

William Crookes

Nikola Tesla

Thomas Edison

Eugen Goldstein

Johann Wilhelm Hittorf

to name a few.

They all worked on it in 1860s and 1870s, an era of inventions upon inventions, seminal discoveries after discoveries.

A vacuum tube is based on a phenomenon called thermionic emission.

In 1873, Frederick Guthrie, a scientific writer noticed that a red hot negatively charged iron sphere would loose its charge as if somehow discharging it into thin air.

This did not happen if the sphere had a positive charge.

Thomas Edison in 1880 while working with his lamp filaments and bulbs discovered that if he added a positively charged filament and heated another filament by an external power source, he could get a significant current.

The more he heated the negatively charged filament, the more the current.

Like a true American, he filed a patent for this voltage regulating device without even knowing why it behaved so.

The US patent 307,031 was given to this device on November 15, 1883 and it would be the first US patent for an electronic devise.

The Thirteen Colonies that on July 4, 1776 had declared themselves to be the sovereign nation of the United States of America was now really coming of age.

This vacuum tube is a fascinating topic as it offered multiple ways to manipulate an electric current and more has to written on it.

Stay tuned to the voice of a bright lamp.

Good night mon ami and my fellow ape who controls electric current every day of his life.

5/8/2016

So what exactly is a vacuum tube?

Well, the simplest tube is a glass tube from which air has been sucked out.

One one end is a heating filament which on getting heated up electrically from external source starts emitting electron.

This is due to thermionic emission as discovered by Edison but who himself had no good explanation then.

On the opposite is a plate which is maintained at a positive charge once again by an external source.

So u see, to operate a vacuum tube you need 2 power sources.

When it operates, the electron discharged from the heated filament starts to flow towards the positive charged plate.

This simple vacuum tube is called a diode as it has just 2 elements.

This simple device can convert an alternating current to a direct current and hence as a rectifier (you can watch on YouTube how simple it is).

This simplest vacuum tube or the diode was patented by John Ambrose Fleming in 1904.

If you add a grid between these two elements, you get a triode.

Now, if this grid in between will have a positive charge, it would attract more electrons and hence triode can be used an amplifier of electric currents.

Fitting in 2 grids would result in tetrodes and 3 grids in pentodes capable of more sophisticated manipulation of currents.

But keeping the vacuum inside the glass bulb was paramount.

Why so?

Well...

Gases (other than inert) would get ionized due to electrons bombardment would in turn affect or rather disrupt this linear unidirectional flow of electrons.

Now just imagine, with this simple devise in your hand, could you ever have thought of building a computer?

Forget computer.

Even a machine capable of making logical decisions?

But what is logic?

What is computer?

Who did thought of it?

Could a homosexual atheist who was NOT god fearing have thought or conceived of such a machine?

Behind this simple vacuum tube lies a story exciting and fascinating and tragic that must be to narrated very carefully and delicately mon ami.

By the way, thanks to my very best mom ami, I have seen with my very own eyes this wonderful history of computing who actually was gracious enough to have walked and talked this average ape through all the exhibits at Mountain View, California.

As you can see, it was not in vain.

Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans, the storytelling chimpanzee.

Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

5/9/2016

Nobody has described love better than our learned Hobbes

5/9/2016

Thomas Flowers also known as Tommy was born in December of 1905 to a bricklayer (meaning nobody).

While undertaking an apprenticeship in mechanical engineering, he took evening classes at the University of London in electrical engineering.

In 1904 the phones were connected by manual switchboard exchanges.

Manual means humans particularly young women stuffing the plugs in and out on the switchboard connecting one speaker to another.

It was Tommy who explored the use of electronics for telephone exchanges and by 1939 was convinced that an all-electronic system was possible.

It was also being realized that these vacuum tubes can be used as switches and thus making electronic computing possible.

Then came the dreaded world war 2 with Hitler unleashing his highly efficient and ruthless Wehrmacht all over the Europe, Soviet Union and Britain.

 This Wehrmacht was communicating and coordinating among themselves using Lorenz SZ cipher machines that were developed by an electrical and electronics firm called C. Lorenz AG.

Flowers first contact with the wartime codebreaking effort came in February 1941 when his director was asked for help by Alan Turing who was then working at the government's Bletchley Park 50 miles north west of London in Buckinghamshire.

Flowers was convinced that he could build an electronic system using these same humble vacuum tubes and a paper tape.

This colossal idea turned out to be the Colossus, the first programmable electronic digital computer.

In fact, Colossus was not one but a series of computers that were built between 1943-45 by the British codebreakers.

All this from a son of a bricklayer who pursued his degree of electrical engineering in the evening classes.

This is a ape who fills me both with pride and humility at the same time.

Stay tuned to the voice of Pans narrans, the story telling chimpanzee.

Chimpanzees have been classified under the genus Pan just like humans have been put under the genus Homo.

Both come under the same family Hominidae.

I disagree.

We both should have shared the same genus as well.

Good night mon ami and my fellow 24-hour computer holding ape.

5/10/2016

We saw Tommy Flowers build a computing machine with vacuum tubes or the diodes.

But what did he exactly build?

What did these vacuum tubes do?

At the very heart of the theory of computing or the computer science lies logic.

Yes, mathematical logic and more.

 (something I strongly intuit that is lacking in the brain of human apes).

The two men who lie at the core of the devices that you are holding are:

1. Alonzo Church an American mathematician and logician born in 1903 in Washington D.C.

2. Alan Turing an English mathematician, logician and a theoretical biologist born in London in 1912.

Both of them were strongly and deeply interested in the work of Kurt Gödel (he and Einstein became good friends at the Institute for Advanced Study {IAS} at Princeton).

Thus you see mon ami, at the heart of the devices that you hold is electronics.

But still deeper to electronics lie the mathematics of men like Kurt Gödel that shook the very edifice on mathematics stood in early 1900s.

Just at the age of 25, Gödel published his two incompleteness theorems.

In these papers he proved that for any logical system powerful enough to characterize arithmetic will contain statements that can neither be proven true not false within that system.

This can be supposed to be Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle of mathematics.

It set a fundamental limitations on what mathematics can prove or how rigorous it can be.

It also has direct application to theoretical issues relating to the feasibility of proving the completeness and correctness of software.

I shall slow down as this is heady stuff.

It is actually a shocker to anybody who cares even a teeny weeny bit on the logical foundations of mathematics.

The term Q.E.D. or quod erat demonstrandum (which is what had to be proven) just got a bit more elusive.

Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans, the storytelling chimpanzee.

Good night mon ami and my fellow story listening ape.

5/10/2016

Hah

5/11/2016

Coming home to a hungry tiger

"How can dead dumb vacuum tubes achieve logic when millions of neurons in a brain generally do not?"

Well...

It once again boils down to arithmetics, algebra and a man born to a shoemaker in 1815.

His name is George Boole.

A self taught man, by the age of 16 he was the breadwinner for his parents and three younger siblings (makes me crawl under ground) by teaching at a high school in Doncaster in South Yorkshire, England.

By the age of 19 he had established his own school (What a guy!) in those dark ages.

He started studying algebra on his own.

In 1854 at the age of 39 he published a monograph titled:

"An investigation of the Laws of Thought on which are founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities."

This manuscript contained the starting elements of algebraic logic though it is very different from the modern Boolean algebra.

Yet, for the first time in human history, he was giving a mathematical foundation to logic.

Boole had reduced the 4 propositional forms of Aristotle's logic to formulas in the form of equations.

His work yet in the abstract setting was worked upon by men like Jevons, Schroeder, Huntington etc until the modern conception was achieved.

It was Claude Shannon, an American who as a 21 year old M.S. student at MIT in 1937 wrote his thesis showing that electrical circuits could be made to perform the logic of Boolean algebra.

By the way, Alan Turing met Shannon in 1943 when he was posted to Washington.

Turing showed him his 1936 paper that defined what we now call the Universal Turing machine.

Shannon was very impressed.

It would not have impressed an average mind like mine at the time when the entire humanity was bent on killing each other on all the continents.

In the Indian subcontinent then, two groups of apes same in all respects were butchering each other for the sake of some crazy belief in some crazy gods.

Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans, the chimpanzee who will put things in their proper perspective to demonstrate both our greatness and stupidity.

Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape who operates Boolean function and logic gates everyday in total ignorance.

5/11/2016

Just briefly on Aristotelian logic.

All propositions consists of 2 terms.

Propositions are of 4 types:

1. A-type

Universal and affirmative

(All doctors are good surgeons)

2. I-type

Particular and affirmative

(Some doctors are good surgeons).

3. E-type

Universal and negative

(All doctors are bad surgeons).

4. O-type

Particular and negative

(Some doctors are bad surgeons).

5/11/2016

Good night noble syllologist, there shall only be 10 kinds of people those who understand logic and those who don't

5/12/2016

Driving with a demon

Is there a mechanical procedure for separating mathematical truths from mathematical falsehoods?

This innocuous sounding question was a challenge posed by the mathematician David Hilbert in 1928.

It is also famously known as the 'decision problem' or the Entscheidungsproblem.

In other words, is there an algorithm that takes as input a statement of first-order logic (which by itself needs a lot of explaining and thinking) and can answer "yes" or "no" whether that statement is universally valid?

Kurt Gödel had first worked on it creating his recursive functions.

Church and Turing independently came to the conclusion that a function of natural numbers is lambda computable (as defined by Church) if and only if it is Turing computable (on a Turing machine) if and only if it is general recursive.

This is a very very very powerful statement which till this day is a area of intense study and scrutiny by men in different theoretical fields.

Doctors of course would be least interested.

Nurses would throw this thesis into garbage as rubbish.

Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans, narrator of rubbish and useless stuff.

Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

5/12/2016

Computer science department of Princeton 1930s

5/12/2016

Yes yes

Have read this effect several times

Though keep forgetting these eponymous names

5/13/2016

If Albert Einstein became the poster boy of a genius in theoretical physics, it was John von Neumann (pronounced as Noiman) who represented the genius in computer science in 1930s and 1940s.

He could be thought of as the Hungarian Ramanujan whose ability to perform complex operations in his head stunned other mathematicians.

In fact, his closest friend was Stanislaw Ulam, another brilliant mathematician from Poland-Austria-Hungary (these political borders are meaningless for great minds).

He was born in 1903 in Budapest, Kingdom of Hungary (which was a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) as Neumann Janos Lajos to wealthy Jewish parents.

By the age of 8 he was familiar with differential and integral calculus (and I am still unfamiliar with them)!

At the age of 15, he began to study advanced calculus with the renowned analyst Gabor Szego (made fundamental contributions to orthogonal polynomials. Remember Zernike?).

On their first meeting, Szego was so astounded with the boy's mathematical talent that he was bought to tears.

When he moved to the University of Berlin in 1928 as privatdozent, he began to publish papers at a rate of nearly one per month!!

Stan Ulam described Neumann's mastery of mathematics as follows:

1. He had the gift with symbolic manipulation of linear operators.

2. An intuitive feeling for exam the logical structure of any new mathematical theory.

3. An intuitive feeling for for the combinatorial superstructure of new theories.

Stay tuned to know more on this legendary human ape.

Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

5/14/2016

Learning grammar with Hobbes

5/14/2016

What Euler was to 1700s and Gauss to 1800s, von Neumann was to 1900s.

They were mathematicians that would be the envy of other great peer of their leagues.

Hans Bethe of Cornell (remember him?) remarked:

"I have sometimes wondered whether a brain like von Neumann's does not indicate a species superior to that of man".

Still, let us stick to computing for a while.

Von Neumann was a founding figure in computing.

While consulting for the EDVAC (the first binary computer with a stored program), he described a computer architecture in which the data and the program are both stored in the computer's memory in the same address place.

This architecture to this day forms the basis of modern computer design.

The earlier computers, the Colossus series and the Bombe (more of an electromechanical device) were "programmed" using a separate memory device such as paper tape or plugboard.

Then in his pioneering 1953 paper he first described stochastic computing.

The word stochastic signifies assumptive, speculative, something vague or random.

Stochastic computing is a highly technical idea and tool for which I am incompetent to explain well.

He created the whole new field of cellular automata with his universal constructor or a self replicating machine.

Just like Turing, von Neumann was also interested in biology particularly evolution.

He stated the problem as follows:

How is the complexity growth and evolvability of biological organisms possible?

In his unfinished work he considered conflict and interactions between replicators.

All this is just a tiny fraction of the output of this great mind in the short span of 53 years.

I will probably devote a bed-time story in describing his superhuman cognitive abilities which dazzled even the brightest minds at the IAS, Princeton around him.

Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans.

Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

5/14/2016

Only his science books

4 of them

Co authored with mathematician Ian Stewart

And Cohen

5/14/2016

Will do

" the essence of the blog is that every weekday I read a computer science paper which I find interesting for some reason or other and write up a summary on the blog. The way I kind of stumbled into this actually began when I started working more in the center of London and with the commute on the train, it was one hour each way, and I figured a couple of things: one is that if I do not do something productive with this commute time I am really going to come to resent it. And I was kind of looking around the carriage and observing and, as you could imagine, there were many people there reading the morning paper, being The Times, The Guardian, The Telegraph or other papers that we have here in the UK. 

I am not really that interested in reading that kind of paper, but I could read more useful papers, ie. research papers and on Hacker News there are always stories like “The top 10 papers that every programmer must read” and I am sucker for that stuff. Have I read all those ten papers? I do not know. Let me find out. So I started reading them on the train and then I thought “Oh, this is kind of fun. I am reading a morning paper and they are reading a morning paper. Let me just put the 'Morning Paper' in the paper title” and it kind of snowballed from there. That is how it all began."

5/15/2016

I strongly contend that a powerful memory (specially long term but also short term working) is an essential prerequisite to high intelligence among human apes.

It does NOT follow that a brain endowed with powerful memory would by default be intelligent or logical.

By intelligence, I specially refer the ability of performing higher abstract mathematics (but not exclusively that), as that is one of the few modalities of thought that elevates a brain higher than other animals.

(Most humans 99.9% behave almost 99.9% times like their cousin chimpanzees). 

In this respect, von Neumann was remarkable; he had the gift of absolute recall.

On once reading a book or article he was able to quote it back verbatim; even years later without hesitation.

His friend Herman Goldstine (one of the original developers of ENIAC) tested this ability by asking Neumann how "A Tale of Two Cities" started.

Whereupon, without a pause, Neumann immediately started to recite the first chapter until asked to stop after about 10 to 15 minutes!

His teacher George Polya, another Hungary-American mathematician said that Johnny was the only student he was afraid of.

If in the course of a lecture at ETH Zürich, Switzerland (currently ranked 5th best university in the world for engineering with 21 Nobel prizes), if he ever stated an unsolved problem, chances were that Neumann would come at the end of the lecture with the complete solution scribbled on a slip of paper.

I will end today's bed-time story with this one incident.

Neumann was given this problem to solve.

2 cyclists 20 miles apart are heading towards each other at a speed of 10 miles per hour.

A fly who flies at 15 miles per hour starts 

from the front wheel of one cycle and flies to the front wheel of the other one.

Then it turns around and flies back to the front wheel of the first one.

It continues to do so until it is crushed between the 2 front wheels.

Question:

What total distance did the fly cover?

One quick smart way to solve this is that that the cyclists will cover 20 miles in 1 hour.

And since the fly does 15 miles in 1 hr, the answer must therefore be 15 miles.

Neumann when asked this question solved it instantaneously and thereby disappointed the questioner.

The questioner said:

"Oh, you must have heard the trick before!"

Neumann replied:

"What trick?

All I did was sum the geometric series."

So if you are gifted with a superior high quality memory mon ami (unlike me), pray use it well.

Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans.

Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

5/16/2016

I, the Pan narrans, briefly narrated to you how the humble and rather a simple device called the vacuum tube or a diode opened the flood gate of implementing logic and mathematics electronically.

But there is another fascinating side to these much maligned tubes (they blew off rather frequently).

The vacuum tubes provided a way for a handful of very intelligent apes to investigate the very essence of matter, the atoms.

The story of the atom almost runs parallel to the drama of computing, logic and mathematics.

On this stage of the play, the role of the lead actor among the dramatis personae was played by the English physicist Sir Joseph John Thompson whose atoms lie buried close to those of Sir Isaac Newton.

He was born in 1856 in Manchester, Lancashire to a man who ran an antiquarian bookshop.

Interestingly enough, his first degree was BA in mathematics (a society that can encourage its brightest minds to go for mathematics rather than civil services is a rarity) in this world of power hungry apes.

Again he did his masters in mathematics receiving the prestigious Adams Prize from the University of Cambridge (Maxwell had earned it too).

And yet surprisingly, in 1884 he was chosen to become Cavendish Professor of Physics at the University of Cambridge.

The first Cavendish professor was again James Clerk Maxwell, who then was relatively obscure.

Just like Faraday, he started he started  tinkering and dabbling with the vacuum tubes which were then also known as Crookes tubes and cathode ray tubes.

Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans, the narrator of landmark experiments.

Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape made up of atoms just like anything else in the universe.

5/17/2016

A true friend

5/17/2016

To be honest, many men including William Crookes (invented Crookes tube) and Heinrich Geissler (invented Geissler tube) had observed the electrical glow discharge much before Thomson in 1850s and later.

But none could explain it.

Some speculated it to be a kind of wave. 

J. J. Thomson was in the league of Newton and Faraday.

He had to investigate these magical aura like surreal light emanating out from these vacuum tubes.

Let us see what experiments he did without going into their mathematical calculations (which were critically important as well).

1. He placed magnets over and below these cathode rays (then known as Lenard rays after Philipp Lenard) and noticed they got deflected (using fluorescent screens).

2. He placed an electrometer (another fascinating device worth writing a story on) near the Cathode or the Lenard rays.

The electrometer registered a charge only when the cathode rays were deflected to it.

3. To study if Lenard rays could be affected by electrical fields, he constructed Crookes tube with higher vacuum (earlier experiments had failed to show this due to ionization of residual gas atoms).

The rays were sharpened to a thin beam by 2 metal slits, first one having a positive charge and second being earth neutral.

This beam was made to pass between 2 parallel aluminum plates which when connected to the battery produced an electrical field between them.

And Voila!

The rays got deflected and their deflection changed when the polarity of aluminium plates were reversed.

4. His fourth experiment is the classic.

He measured the charge to mass ratio of these rays by measuring the deflection by magnetic and electrical field and solving the 2 equations algebraically.

It was a transforming moment!

Just read the conclusion of Sir J.J. Thomson in his own words:

"As the cathode rays carry a charge of negative electricity, are deflected by an electrostatic force as if they were negatively electrified, and are acted upon by magnetic force in just the way this force would act on a negatively electrified body moving along the path of these rays, I can see no escape from the conclusion that these are charges of negative electricity carried by particles of matter."

Beautiful!

Logical, precise with no exaggeration.

So u do not have to see an electron to believe it exists mon ami.

Stay tuned to the voice that may often sound negative but nonetheless always seeks truth.

Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

5/18/2016

J J Thomson was a remarkable man not merely as a scientist making seminal contribution to our understanding of nature.

He could easily have rested on his laurels as the Cavendish professor of physics and doing world tours giving lectures.

He was a highly gifted teacher.

Just let me name a few of his notable students:

1. Ernest Rutherford

2. Max Born

3. Niels Bohr

4. J. Robert Oppenheimer

5. William Henry Bragg

6. Francis William Aston

7. Charles Barkla

8. George Paget Thomson

And many more.

Eight of his students went on to win the Nobel in either Physics or Chemistry.

The last name in the list is his son!

The father proved that the electrons were discrete particles which he called corpuscles (quite a popular name those days. Newton used it for photons).

Ironically enough, his son George Paget got the Nobel for demonstrating that the electron undergoes diffraction and behaves like a wave.

Thus he proved the de Broglie hypothesis.

Louis de Broglie in his 1924 PhD thesis had theoretically postulated the wave nature of electrons.

He went further to suggest that all matter has wave properties (at subatomic levels).

Thus J.J. Thomson set of a chain reaction quite literally if you know what I mean (J. Robert Oppenheimer is among those who are called the "father of the atomic bomb").

And all this started from a humble vacuum tube!

Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans.

Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin apes living in the planet ruled by electrons.

5/19/2016

Louis de Broglie was born in 1892 in Dieppe France in a royal family called the House of Broglie.

His first degree was BA in history as he planned to pursue humanity (being wealthy he had no financial stress).

Later for some reason he started studying mathematics and physics and got his next degree BA in sciences in 1913 and then PhD in 1924.

All from the University of Paris metonymically known as Sorbonne.

(Other example of metonymy as a figure of speech is the Wall Street which signifies US financial and corporate sector).

De Broglie in his 1924 thesis wrote this:

"The fundamental idea is following:

The fact that, following Einstein's introduction of photons in light waves, one knew that light contains particles which are concentrations of energy incorporated into the wave, suggests that all particles, like the electron, must be transported by a wave into which it is incorporated...

My essential idea was to extend to all particles the coexistence of waves and particles discovered by Einstein in 1905 in the case of light and photons."

Again so beautiful, so elegant and on hindsight, so simple.

To join a particle of mass m incorporated into a wave of velocity v of wavelength lambda, he brought into existence this exquisite equation:

lambda = h/mv

where h is the Planck's constant named after Max Plank 

(6.626 x 10^-34 J.s)

So u see mon ami, physical science started with the waves of Faraday and Maxwell.

Then came the idea of particles thanks to Sir J J Thomson.

And now we are stuck with the messy wave-particle duality which I find very unnerving.

De Broglie was the first high level scientist to call for establishment of a multi national laboratory like CERN.

De Broglie never married nor reproduced.

Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans.

Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

5/20/2016

Bell Labs, today known as Nokia Bell Labs, is an American research and scientific development company owned by Finnish company Nokia.

It is today located in Murray Hill, New Jersey.

It was started in 1880 by the money given by the French government to Alexander Graham Bell in the form of Volta Prize (remember him?) of 50,000 francs (equivalent to 250,000 USD of the year 2005) for the invention of the telephone.

This 50,000 francs of 1880 could not have been put to any better use.

This single lab has made more contributions to science, understanding of reality and technology than all the nations of South Asia, Middle East and South Americas combined in these last 135 years.

I hope you remember my bed-time story on Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson who discovered CMB cosmic microwave background radiation, the first direct evidence of the Big Bang.

Yes Sir, it happened right here with the shoe horn antenna of the Bell Labs!

Tonight I wish to tell you about similar 2 bright young men named Clinton Davisson and Lester Germer.

Now these two young men were simply studying the surface of a piece of nickel.

Not a very attractive piece of work by any standards.

But as I said, a society should be judged by the amount of support it can give to such rare men who can do either abstract mathematics or basic fundamental useless investigations.

This is probably the single reason why I worship the American society.

I digress too much too frequently.

Let me return with the story tomorrow night.

Stay tuned to the voice of the storytelling chimpanzee.

Good night mon ami and my fellow ape.

5/21/2016

Most of us, even as "learned doctors", are not aware of Koch's postulates which are critical to linking a disease with a specific microbe.

Koch's postulates go as follows:

1. Isolation of suspected pathogen from all cases of a disease.

2. Successful culture of the pathogen in vitro (meaning on culture mediums).

3. Reinoculation of the pathogen in a host (like mice, rabbit) to cause the disease.

4. Lastly, reisolation of the pathogen from the host.

Today an important step that precedes these 4 steps is the PCR or the polymerase chain reaction.

PCR is a molecular photocopier.

The basic principle of replicating a piece of DNA using 2 primers was first described by Hargobind Khorana in 1971, an American citizen. 

(His home country would not have been able to exploit his diligence and central processing abilities).

PCR however was perfected to its current form by Kary Mullis in 1983, again an American.

It is a test of an extremely high sensitivity (remember we discussed the 2 terms sensitivity and specificity with respect to the LIGO gravitational waves experiment?).

Even as low as 10 to 100 genome of a virus or bacterium can be detected by PCR.

And just as in the case of the LIGO, such a super high sensitivity can lead to lot of high false positives.

PCR is also a highly specific test.

Which means that the adenoviral genome will show up largely as an adenoviral genome and not as an Herpes Simplex Virus (HSV).

But then, it might also pick up dead colonising flora or some probable contamination.

In my own work, PCR has found great usage in the diagnosis of infectious uveitis, specially viral but also other germs like chlamydia, Toxoplasma gondii, acanthamoeba, a protozoan and many many more.

So u see mon ami, how various disciplines unite and come to join to aid us "learned doctors".

Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans.

We need to go back to Davisson and Germer very soon.

Good night mon ami and my fellow replicating cousin ape.

5/21/2016

I never knew Alan Turing had met all the greats of his time

Alonzo Church

von Neumann

Claude Shannon

5/22/2016

In 1921, just after the end of the horrendous first world war, after the Russian Bolshevik revolution and during the Chinese Civil War, Davisson and Germer were studying nickel surface.

At the Bell Labs.

They were directing a beam of electrons (discovered just 20 years ago) on the nickel surface and how they were bouncing off.

Let me explain this in slightly more detail.

They used a heated filament as the source of electrons which they named fancifully in the true American fashion as the electron gun.

These thermally excited electrons were then accelerated by applying a potential difference giving them a certain kinetic energy.

To avoid the collision of these electrons with other molecules, these 2 men evacuated the chamber and created a vacuum inside (just like J J Thomson had done).

To detect how the electrons were scattered, a Faraday cup electron detector that could be moved on an arc path around the nickel piece.

Davisson and Germer in their experimental historical data found that at certain angles there was a peak in the intensity of the scattered electron beam.

An accelerating voltage of 54 volts gave a definite peak at a scattering angle of 50°.

Mind you, this was not one but a series of experiments started in 1921 and continued through 1927; Six long years for just one simple stupid sounding experiment!

Such was the freedom and funding given by Mervin Kelly, the chairman of the board, to his researchers.

The scientists were given so much autonomy that the board was unaware of their progress until years after he authorized their work.

This is a kind of society I dream about which can let great minds do useless tinkering and dream abstract mathematics.

I shall get back to the Davisson Germer experiment tomorrow night.

There might be some equations to solve, so beware.

Stay tuned to the voice of the storytelling chimpanzee.

Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.