1/18/2016
How with undying persistence we balance our lives
1/18/2016
The earth and it's atmosphere condensed together out of the primal gas cloud that gave rise to the sun and the solar system.
The atmosphere then, i. e. 4.6 billion years ago was very different from what it is today.
The atmosphere of giant planets like Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune are rich in methane, ammonia, water and neon.
Lighter gases with molecular weight of less than 10 like hydrogen 2 and helium 4 have a speed faster than earth's escape velocity and can and do overcome earth's gravity and disappear into space.
So maybe, or quite likely, our earth too had a atmosphere rich in methane and ammonia some 4 billion years ago.
Today there is little of it.
Why?
How did the atmosphere come to be which allowed aerobic multicellular organisms like us to evolve?
Fascinating questions!
They will be dealt slowly.
Today I read something about Riemann zeta function.
It is very very fascinating that a mind can even contemplate such abstract ideas.
The mind that never really was supposed to be.
But that did happen to be through series of chance events and accidents over hundreds of millions of years.
Time to devote to romantic literature.
Good night mon ami.
1/19/2016
Our lives could stand a lot more pizzazz
Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe.
He suggested in it that the stars lie in a flat slab, a "grindstone", of finite thickness but extending to great distances in all directions in the plane of the slab.
His theory has long since been confirmed.
The milky way does consists of flat disk of stars, with a diameter of 80,000 light years but a thickness of just 6000 light years.
That is why we see more light when we look out from the earth along the plane of the slab than when we look in any other direction. This is what we see as the Milky Way.
Yet, it is estimated that nearly 70% of us modern humans who are born into the electrified world have never seen it.
I myself saw this beautiful view of the perfectly clear night sky only as late as in 2009 at the Yosemite National Park, California thanks again to my friend Monish.
Time to continue my nocturnal readings.
Good night mon ami.
1/19/2016
We will Monish
I promise you
Once I retire
1/19/2016
Well...
Now I won't
As long as I am focussed in my shop
1/19/2016
Wait...
Got a shop to run
1/20/2016
As Lorentz transformation applied to relativity had explained, time does slow down
1/20/2016
In order to describe movement of a body, a second body is needed to which the movement of the first body is referred to.
Even Greeks knew of it.
In physics, the body to which events are spatially referred to is called the coordinate system.
A coordinate system applied in mechanics is called an 'inertial system'.
A coordinate system that is moved uniformly (free from rotation and acceleration) and in a straight line relative to an inertial system is likewise an inertial system.
The special principle of relativity generalizes the definition to include any natural event.
Thus, every universal law of nature which is valid in relation to a coordinate system C, must also be valid, as it stands, in relation to coordinate system C', which is in uniform translatory motion relative to C.
Does it make sense?
This is an example of one of the many instances when mathematics becomes critical to describing nature than mere English words.
Time and again, it has turned out, that mathematics is the lingua franca of the universe.
Time to turn in.
Good night mon ami.
1/21/2016
Shortly after the earth was formed 4.6 billion years ago (along with the rest of the solar system) condensing from a vast cloud of gas and dust, it's atmosphere contained very little oxygen.
Around 2 billion years ago, the proportion of oxygen in the atmosphere increased to around 5%.
How?
The most likely cause was the evolution of the photosynthesis.
The bacteria in the oceans had evolved this trick as back as 4 billion years ago.
Using the solar energy, they were able to turn water and carbon dioxide into sugar and oxygen.
6H2O + 6CO2 + energy = C6H12O6 + 602
The oxygen they produced did not show up in any appreciable amount until 2 billion years ago.
The oxygen level stayed that level until about 600 million years ago, when it underwent a rapid increase to the current level of 21%.
By then, the plants had taken over this process from the cyano bacteria.
You see, that if the primitive atmosphere once kick started life, life then had a huge impact on the atmosphere.
Time to do some reading.
Good night mon ami.
1/22/2016
The correspondence of a genius
1/22/2016
An idiot like me can never imagine that so deep a mathematics could be hidden in such a simple sounding childish problem known as the "Bridges of Konigsberg" problem.
It was proposed by the great Leonhard Euler (1707-1716).
It was once called Kaliningrad when it belonged to USSR.
I have no idea what it is called now as Russians like us Hindoos love to change the city names.
This town Euler knew was centered on an island that was connected to the surrounding suburbs by seven bridges over the Pregel river.
I will send the image below.
The problem is very simple.
How do u, starting from any desired point proceed to any other by crossing each bridge just once?
Is it even possible?
Just give it a few minutes thought.
Do not worry about solving it.
Time to immerse myself.
Good night mon ami.
1/22/2016
Ha ha ha
Beautiful
Simply beautiful
1/22/2016
Exactamente that.
Ha ha ha
Well said
1/23/2016
Learn how to watch television from supreme earthling potentate's father
1/23/2016
Well...
I am sure you must have given deep thought to the problem.
I will disappoint you by telling that the famous Bridges of Konigsberg problem has no solution.
Meaning, there is no way one can carry out this Euler walk without walking on a bridge twice.
The beauty lies in how Euler converted this problem to simple concept of vertex (suburbs) and edges (bridges).
So here we have 4 vertex joined by 7 edges.
Each vertex (suburb) is connected to 3 or 5 edges (bridges).
Euler went on to prove that to make this walk possible, each vertex must be connected to even number of edges (unlike odd numbers here).
This may sound innocuous, but here Euler had given rise to two important fields of mathematics:
Graph theory (used in integrated circuits, railways and other areas) and
Topology (a field which revolutionized Euclidean geometry)
Below is a figure of how a topologist would envision the city of Konigsberg.
Got to read.
Good night mon ami.
1/23/2016
Topological transformation of Konigsberg problem
1/23/2016
interesting in 2-d what's value of f?
1/23/2016
Enjoy Viete with hi school math...
1/23/2016
...the rest for brevity!
1/23/2016
Wait...
Will shower
Then feed my body
1/23/2016
It troubles me u see
Remember
It is about being the righteous and noble asshole
[10:43 PM, 1/23/2016] Navin: For a triangle
v + f - e
= 3 + 1 - 3
= 1
[10:51 PM, 1/23/2016] Navin: Wait...
I will come..
5 minutes
[12:40 AM, 1/24/2016] Navin: Ha ha ha
It is not intuition mon ami
It is knowledge
[12:42 AM, 1/24/2016] Navin: But I think it as you say...
When you experiment, it is messy
Even for standard physical equations
1/24/2016
It is exactamente that way
1/24/2016
When the universe conspires against you
1. Embryology - development from an egg (and sperm).
2. Evolution - coming of present forms through a continuous chain of past ancestors
DNA sequencing has shown that not only do flies and humans share large cohort of development genes, but that mice and humans have virtually identical sets of 29,000 genes;
And that chimps and humans are nearly 99% identical at the DNA level.
This molecular evidence is by far the most powerful evidence that humans are an evolved part of the animal world.
But how does large organisms like a butterfly, a leopard or even a trilobite gets formed from a single cell?
We know that most animal designs are repeating modular.
Both the enormous sauropod dinosaurs and small, delicate salamanders from the Jurassic age (over 150 million years ago) display the same repeating modular architecture of the vertebrate body plan.
And it is not only limited to vertebrates.
The famous fossils of the Burgess Shale (I think in Canada), some of the first large, complex animals that populated the Cambrian seas more than 500 million years ago, display all sorts of variations on modular body plans, as do their living ancestors today.
In my future bed time stories, I shall dwell deeper into the mystery of the formation of our bodies.
I shall try to send you pictures of our ancestors who lived in the Cambrian age.
Time to read.
Good night mon ami.
1/24/2016
A lobopodian and a trilobite
1/24/2016
Pursuing one's passion can also be disastrous
1/24/2016
you won't be able to move, think or breathe without ATP synthase JJ
[1/24, 3:39 PM] Monish Unni: ATP synthase is some 200, 000 times smaller than a pinhead made up of 31 proteins. It rotates about 60 times a second. It creates the energy currency of the cell - ATP.
[1/24,
[1/24,
[1/24,
[1/24,
[1/24,
[1/24, 4:14 PM] Monish Unni: check out how a protein gets to a stable state under thermodynamic forces - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eSwDKZQpok.
[1/24, 4:16 PM] Monish Unni: a protein can fold in 2^100 to 10^100 ways - so to get this simulation for villin - we need to spread the action of six-millionths of one second out over several seconds.
[1/24, 4:17 PM] Monish Unni: the simulation shows how heat energy makes the initial linear chain of 87 amino acids jiggle; the linear protein shivers this way and that and, over the course of micro seconds goes thru many different conformations.
[1/24,
1/24/2016
Yes
But like a true baniya, cleaning up my shop first
True to the traditions of my grandfather for certemente if not my forefathers
.
1/24/2016
I have no choice
I tried to be not-a-chutiya
Flopped miserably
1/24/2016
Wait
Customer
Boni ka time hai
1/25/2016
One of the greatest advancement ever made in geometry was made long time back.
It is this:
It has intimate connection with algebra.
It can be applied to lines, planes and much more.
Another beauty is the addition of Cartesian coordinates which (0,0) as origin and point (x,y) indicates x units east of it and y units north of it.
Now with this simple idea, you can define a circle of radius 1 with this magical equation:
X^2 + y^2 = 1
And you can go yet further.
If you can conceive of any relationship between x and y (matrimonial relationship does not count) such that when x is given y may be calculated, then y is said to be a 'function' of x.
You can write it as:
y = f(x)
And this can be 'translated' geometrically.
For example,
Look at these 2 beauties.
y = mx + c
defines a straight line
And
y^2 = ax
A parabola
This discovery allowed men like Descartes and Fermat in 1600s to transform any of the Euclidean geometric theorems into algebra and establish their validity or falsity by algebra alone!
Fascinating stuff!
Time to enter the solitude state.
Good night mon ami.
1/26/2016
Perfectly planned operation Kapow flopped due to lack of snow
1/26/2016
Besides the milky way, if you see in a clear night sky, towards the Andromeda constellation, you will see a hazy patch.
The first written mention of it appears in the "Book of the Fixed Stars", compiled in 964 AD by the Persian astronomer Abdurrahman Al-Sufi (before Islam had time to kill reason, rationality and enquiry).
He described it as a "little cloud".
Charles Messier in 1781 published a celebrated catalog, Nebulae and Star Clusters where he lists this object as M31 Andromeda Nebula.
With the advent of telescopes, it was Immanuel Kant who first proposed that these nebulae are galaxies like our own.
In 1755, in his "Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens", he suggested that these nebulae are galaxies which appear elliptical because most of them are viewed in slant and are faint because they are very far away.
It was a huge leap of thought in 1800s to suggest that the universe was filled with galaxies like our own.
Certemente no religion had described the heavens in this manner.
It was quite a blasphemous idea.
More of it later.
Good night mon ami.
1/27/2016
If only wishes could come true
1/27/2016
I always knew that my room gets very dusty whenever I leave the windows open even for few hours (That is the charm of living in the heart of Bombay city).
But I had envisaged that at least up there in the heavens it will be all neat and clean, meaning dust free.
Alas, as usual, I was again proven to be wrong.
Our universe, the cosmos, the heavens is fundamentally made up of dust (besides hydrogen, helium and ionized gases).
These are the fundamental constituents of nebulae which are the "Pillars of Creation".
They can range from few molecules to 0.1 micron chondrites.
They are hard, refractory chemically being silicon carbide, graphite, aluminium oxide, aluminium spinel that condensed at high temperatures from a cooling gas.
Within these dust have been found CO, silicon carbide, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, water ice and more.
Do u see what this dust has?
Are u getting it?
It has everything to manufacture us!!
Fascinating!!
Got to read.
Good night mon ami.
1/28/2016
Our hero reminds us how screwed up our lives are
1/28/2016
This is one of the most famous puzzles that have confused bright people for centuries.
Why is everything in a mirror reversed left-right but not up-down?
I bet you find it very obvious and you go everyday through your life without giving it a thought.
Many of you may even reply saying "there is no problem here to even consider".
Since your head is reflected from the top of the mirror and your feet from the bottom of the mirror, why must it change?
But then I can argue same for the left and the right hand.
The mirror is optically symmetrical.
To prove it, simply rotate the mirror around it's center and yet your head and feet remain unchanged.
So how does this mirror "know" which is right-left and which is up-down?
Is the answer in the ray diagram which we eye doctors were made to learn only for passing exams and then never to used?
Einstein is famous for having conducted such "thought experiments" which is rather bizarre if you come to think of it.
Experiments need to be done.
Data recorded.
Data analysed and see if it fits to your theory or proposed idea.
Maybe, this mirror question also needs a real experiment.
Think about it.
Use your grey cells as Poirot would say.
Good night mon ami.
1/29/2016
How to get the last piece
1/29/2016
This question was posed to the great Richard Feynman when he had joined for his physics course at MIT, Cambridge, Ma.
He made some few observations:
1. If u point your arm to the east, your mirror image also points to the east.
2. If you point up and down, then your mirror image also points to the same direction.
3. But if you point inwards towards the mirror, your mirror image points back in the opposite direction.
So, like a true physicist, he considered the 3 axes:
The x axis (horizontal):
No change
The y axis (vertical):
No change
The z axis (the long axis running through the mirror):
Reversal!
Voila!
The mirror reverses the image in the z axis!
It is as if Alice has entered the mirror (Alice of Charles L. Dodgson aka Lewis Carroll) and then suddenly her back of the head morphs into face like Terminator!
But here is another interesting part.
Why do we find it hard to consider this possibility but usually consider the left-right reversal?
Here is where our evolutionary brain and everyday experience pops in.
What is most common happening in our everyday lives is somebody walking around us and standing opposite to us, rather than someone suddenly standing upside down or somebody's back suddenly morphing into her front!
Fascinating stuff!
Finished reading a most beautiful love story:
Love in the time of cholera.
Never thought at this age a love story would impress me.
Good night mon ami.
1/29/2016
Yup
I saw it before writing my yesterday
I try to do little research
1/29/2016
I have given me an excellent preamble to Principia
In a way, it is frightening
But when climb an Everest, it is important to be prepared
1/30/2016
Ruptured intestines
1/30/2016
Thanks to our education, even the greatest arithmophobe amongst us is familiar with pi.
It is an oddity which cannot be expressed exactly as a fraction.
The unforgettable ratio of 22/7 is merely an approximation of 3.14159...
It has fascinated mathematicians from time immemorial.
They have all derived it in many different ways.
You obviously know about dividing circumference with diameter.
Ramanujan published dozens of innovative formula for pi, remarkable for their elegance, mathematical depth and rapid convergence.
But let me tell you a strange strange way.
Take lots of matchsticks on your hand.
Then take a large paper and ask your friend to draw parallel lines on it spaced at twice the length of your match sticks.
Now just throw all the match sticks you have on this paper. Let them be x.
Now count how many match sticks have crossed the lines on the paper. Let them be y.
What do you suppose you will get if you divide x by y?
You got it!
x/y will be pi or very close to pi!!
Damn!
Always!
What the.. ?
This is the famous Buffon's needle problem poised in 1700s by the French polymath Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon.
It falls under the Monte Carlo method of using repeated random sampling to obtain numerical results.
It is used as computational algorithm whose knowledge I personally lack.
Before I end, I want you to bowl a googly.
What on earth or why should sprinkled match sticks over vertical lines should have anything to do with pi?
Chew on it or sleep over it.
Good night mon ami.
1/30/2016
Demo picture
1/30/2016
Monish
Going to gym
U keep my grey cells active
And I got to keep my flesh and bones active
1/31/2016
We were all slobbering nudists with legs like link sausages
1/31/2016
The irony of biology is, that though it is life science, it has never been able to define life.
Just as physics grapples with the idea of force and mathematics with infinity or shall I say, infinities.
Perhaps it is so because the difference between the animate and inanimate is extremely subtle.
Strangely enough, or rather aptly enough, the first person to define life in terms of pure physics and chemistry was an Austrian physicist.
Perhaps that was the day when modern biology was born.
Erwin Schrödinger, more famous for his wave equations in quantum mechanics, in February of 1943 in Dublin (he had run away from Hitler's madness) gave a series of lectures.
These lectures have been converted into a small book titled:
What is life?
It is a remarkable slim volume confronting the two major problems of biology:
1. Heredity: where he predicts there has to some kind of genetic code; (Remember, this was much before the discovery of the structure of DNA April 25,1953).
2. Order: How does life defy the second law of thermodynamics and maintains order and complexity from the surrounding chemical chaos?
From then to now, we have come a long way and safely define life to be digitized, DNA-driven biological machines.
I am aware that his goes against all your deeply cherished beliefs and faith and everything you have been told, but it is the truth.
Going back to the Buffon needle problem...
The strewn match sticks can cross the lines in all different angles, starting from being parallel to being right angle.
In fact, they can all in all, be seen as be doing all possible rotations around a point.
The more the matches, the more the possible rotations.
A full rotation is 360 degrees or 2 pi radians.
The brains of the original thinkers defy all imagination.
Good night mon ami.
2/1/2016
A subject that bothers even our supreme earthling potentate
2/1/2016
What is the characteristic feature of life?
When it goes on 'doing something'.
When a system that is not alive is isolated, all motion comes to standstill; difference of electric or chemical potential are equalized, temperature becomes uniform.
The system fades away into a dead, inert lump of matter.
Physicist call it the state of thermodynamic equilibrium, or of 'maximum entropy'.
An organism is enigmatic precisely because it defies this state of decay.
It is so enigmatic that from earliest times humans have claimed that spirits or a vital soul play the crucial role.
But that is nonsense.
The decay is avoided by eating, drinking, breathing and (in the case of plants) assimilating.
This is metabolism.
What is that precious something contained in our food that keeps us from death?
Is it material?
No.
Is it energy?
No.
It is the negative entropy that organisms feed upon to keep aloof from approaching the state of maximum entropy, I.e. death.
Metabolism frees an organism from all the entropy it cannot help producing while alive.
From
What is Life?
Erwin Schrödinger
Trinity College, Dublin, 1943 amidst the raging world war 2 and when India was struggling for it's freedom.
As my friend Monish described the book, it is a tour de force.
Good night mon ami.
2/2/2016
Our embittered old man who has seen it all
2/2/2016
Entropy is not something vague.
It is a measurable quantity.
The entropy of any substance is zero at - 273 degree Celsius.
Any substance that is brought out from that state, it's entropy increases.
The entropy increase is calculated by the heat supplied to it divided by the absolute temperature at which it was supplied.
So entropy S has it's unit as calorie/°C.
There is yet another important way of considering entropy.
That is the statistical understanding of it wherein the idea of order and disorder comes in (of which I wrote a little yesterday).
This pioneering work was done by Boltzmann much before Schrödinger and Einstein.
He came up with a most beautiful formula while walking with his wife.
He engraved this gem on the stone of the bridge.
S = k log D
Where D is a quantitative measure of the atomistic disorder of a body.
More of it in some future story.
Good night mon ami.
2/3/2016
How our supreme earthling potentate begins his day
2/3/2016
Just finished my staircase workout
Now shower
Followed by dinner
2/3/2016
If I were to ask a group of people
"Do you love nature?"
All would raise their hand.
If I were to ask them
"Do you wish to leave civilization/city and live like adivasis/natives/tribals in nature"
Then may be their enthusiasm might peter down.
Our romance with the nature stems from Nat Geo beaming sterile edited images to our drawing rooms via satellites.
The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation.
As I write, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many running for their lives, whimpering in fear.
Others are slowly being devoured from within by grating parasites.
Thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst or disease.
Do you know why it is so?
It is because we live in a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication.
Some of us are going to be hurt, others will get lucky.
You will not find any reason or rhyme or any Justice for solace.
The universe that is around us has exactly the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.
Time to imbibe myself with the knowledge of a distant genius.
Good night mon ami.
2/4/2016
Time for pounding
2/4/2016
The story of two radio astronomers,
Arno A. Penzias
and
Robert W. Wilson
Is a very interesting one.
In 1964, the Bell Telephone Laboratory was in possession of an unusual radio antenna on Crawford Hill at Holmdel, New Jersey.
This antenna had a characteristic 20-foot horn reflector with ultralow noise.
These astronomers set out to measure the intensity of radio waves emitted from outside the plane our galaxy (remember our galaxy is a flattened disc with swirling arms lying in a plane).
It is a difficult measurement because the radio waves are best described as noise, much like the 'static' one hears on the TV set when not tuned to any channel (in olden days).
It is a long story and I will deal it in few parts.
To be continued.
Good night mon ami.
2/4/2016
Surprising that I managed to get Principia but not the Red Limit
May be it reflects the legacy of Newton
2/5/2016
Secretary needed
2/5/2016
Now u see, the problem is not so serious when one is studying a "small" source of radio waves like a star or distant galaxy.
Then you could beam your antenna back and forth between the source and the neighboring sky.
In that case any spurious noise coming from the antenna structure, amplifier circuits or the earth's atmosphere could be cancelled out.
However, Penzias and Wilson were trying to measure the radio noise in general all over the sky.
They made their observations for a long wavelength of 21 cms to study the galactic noise.
Any electromagnetic waves longer than 21 cms (up to 1 metre) are known as microwave radiation.
To their surprise, Penzias and Wilson in the spring of 1964, found that they were receiving a sizeable amount of microwave noise at 7.35 cms that was independent of direction.
This "static" did not vary with the time of day or, as the year went on, with the seasons.
The lack of any variation with direction indicated very strongly that these radio waves, if real, were not coming from the milky way, but from a much larger volume of the universe.
They even cleaned out the pigeon goo to cut out a possible source of the noise.
But even then, this noise from the universe persisted!
This was a huge mystery:
Where the hell is this microwave noise coming from?
I want you to sleep over this question if you are on the planet's dark side and chew over it if you are on the lit side of our spinning sphere.
Good night mon ami.
2/6/2016
Things are never the way we wish them to be
2/6/2016
Any body at any temperature above absolute zero will always emit radio noise.
This is produced by the thermal motions of electrons within it.
The intensity of the radio noise at any given wavelength depends on the the temperature.
So even though a radio telescope is not a thermometer as it measures tiny electric currents produced in it's antenna by the radio waves, yet a radio astronomer can convert the measured radio noise into it's equivalent temperature or antenna temperature.
Penzias and Wilson found that the equivalent temperature of the radio noise they were receiving to be 3.5°Kelvin (meaning 3.5°C above absolute zero).
This was very surprising and hence they were left brooding over their result before publishing it.
Such are the doubts which plague true scientists.
What next?
I shall perhaps conclude this story tomorrow as I want you to think over this microwave noise.
What would you have done?
How would you have thought?
Remember, this is 1964 when cosmology and astrophysics are still nascent sciences.
Will send you a picture though.
Good night mon ami.
2/6/2016
The 20 foot horn antenna used by Penzias and Wilson
2/6/2016
I hope it did
I am obsessive
Maniacally obsessive
2/6/2016
...and this.....
"So if things are this bad, how do we get by? The answer is simple. We have a marvelous reactive neural system for killing tigers (or each other) and solving the day to day survival problems, the tenacity for surviving harsh environments (be they social or climate) and enough of us have enough kids to more than make up for the losses (the excess children being another human idiocy). An intellectual creature by nature? Bah! Humbug!
To sum it up: the human is a survival creature with a very weak intellect and a very strong set of instincts.
And that's why we have wars, poverty, hunger, neural disease, bigotry, terrorists, criminals, greedy self-centered leaders, and the list is endless. As a species, we'd like to get rid of this stuff. To do so can't be business as usual. The first thing we must do is to recognize the frailty of the mechanism that we must use.
Anyone who believes for an instant that any human is capable of creating
truth in its own mind without reference to reality is a dangerous fool.
It has been said that it is a poor worker who blames the sharpness of his tools. So how does an artisan use a defective and inadequate tool? The answer is: very carefully..."
2/6/2016
...this is nice as well..."Professional philosophers have developed an intricate and extensive knowledge base in formal logic, much in the same manner as professional mathematicians in the field of mathematics. Both are invaluable in research. Both extend the horizons of human acquisition of intellectual concepts, many of which can then be developed for species utility. Both must be used with caution in practical matters. Not that they are wrong, mind you, it's that dependence on them can, in many cases, cause unnecessary project failure. It is far safer, though a bit longer, to segment the problem into small, logically simple segments, then verify each, than to proceed through logical steps to completion where verification failure would mean starting all over.
Logic and reason, as applied to practical matters, are extremely difficult even on the most objective of projects. No matter how hard we try, subjective thought creeps in. Wanting a project to end in a particular way can bias all of the work along the way. Even striving too hard for success can turn a doomed project into a catastrophe.
The application of logic and reason in cultural matters is orders of magnitude more difficult. Human instincts arise in righteous indignation at every step, fighting tooth and claw to make sure that the final answer is emotionally compatible. Modern scientists learn their trade in an academic elitist (PC) social atmosphere. Science and dogma do not mix well. Even modern hard science is regularly distorted and truncated to safeguard egalitarian ideology. A new and widespread movement among scientists is to "humanize" science, by insuring that science does not threaten the world government, multicultural, egalitarian ideology. This is scientific hypocrisy at its worst..."
2/6/2016
Yes
That is another quality which I greatly greatly admire
Asimov gave utmost importance to clarity of thoughts rather than the poetry of a prose
2/6/2016
Yes
It is running low
2/6/2016
See how beautifully Watterson puts it
2/7/2016
If Penzias and Wilson were tinklers and doers like Faraday, their theoretical counterparts were just 60 km away at Princeton.
A friend of Penzias at MIT told him about a theoretical astrophysicist at Princeton named Peebles.
Peebles along with Robert Dicke and Wilkinson had given a talk at Johns Hopkins where they had argued that there out to be a background noise left over from the early universe.
Robert Dicke had reasoned the big bang must have scattered not only matter that condensed into galaxies but also must have released a tremendous amount of radiation.
Peebles noted that had there not been intense background of radiation present during the first few minutes of the universe, nuclear reactions would have proceeded very rapidly.
This would have "cooked" a large fraction of the hydrogen into heavier elements.
This would be in contradiction to the fact that about 3/4th of the universe is hydrogen.
Penzias gave a call to Dicke.
Only then did the significance of their discovery dawned upon Penzias and Wilson!
This is one of those crowning moments of the scientific method.
But look at the beauty.
Both the teams jointly decided to publish a pair of companion letters to the Astrophysical Journal.
Penzias and Wilson announced their observation;
Dicke, Peebles, Roll and Wilkinson explained the cosmological interpretation.
It is quite surprising how modest the title of the paper was that Penzias and Wilson submitted:
"A Measurement of Excess Antenna Temperature at 4,080 Mc/s."
Mc/s meaning million cycles per second.
It is the dictum of modern thinking that extraordinary claim requires extraordinary evidence.
And the claim that these men were making is so extraordinary that most humans, particularly the religious types, still are unwilling to accept.
So weak is human intellect and so powerful are his cultural and emotional instincts.
Good night mon ami.
2/7/2016
Soon shopping time
Brushing my teeth
Then off
2/7/2016
If a male is removed from the top of the pile and placed on a bare rock, he becomes a she and awaits the arrival of a male.
Once a female, SLs remain females!
phew!!
2/7/2016
The Blue headed wrasse, a large reef fish familiar to scuba divers, change into females if a male is present. If no male is around, or if the local male disappears, large females change sex to become males.
In these fish, the hypothalamus regulates sex hormones and controls growth/shrink of needed reproductive tissues.
Simple eh?
2/7/2016
What did your mother have?
Retinal hole?
Lattices?
2/7/2016
In class 11
Madras
Dr. Amar Agarwal
Another of my clan
2/8/2016
People quite often say, "Everything happens for a reason."
In some ways, it is true.
I catch a cold because a patient of mine sneezed his viruses on to my face.
Or say, my car stalled due to lack of petroleum.
Or Tsunamis happen due to undersea earthquakes which in turn occur due to shift of tectonic plates.
That is the true sense in which things happen for a reason.
But people, in general, use this reason in a very different sense.
They will claim that Nepal suffered earthquake because the people there kill cows and they had it coming.
It is amazing how often people resort to this kind of nonsense.
There is deep seated belief in a "fair-world" hypothesis.
Most believe that sinners get their comeuppance and virtue is rewarded.
It is still very difficult for most to accept that the universe has no mind, no feelings or personality.
Bad things happen as much as they will happen by chance.
The universe is simply indifferent to our feelings or preferences.
Perhaps the fault lies in our upbringing and our ubiquitous cultural indoctrination, specially fiction in all it's forms.
May be, that is why, it is important to read the great tragedies like Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary.
Good night mon ami.
[10:34 PM, 2/8/2016] Navin: Yes
Against our builder
No no
My father is our lawyer
[10:47 PM, 2/8/2016] Navin: Wait Monish
Entering court or rather the forum
Offing the phone
2/9/2016
The great book
"Freedom at Midnight"
By Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins is one of the most popular and highly acclaimed work on the tragedy of India's partition.
But it's major flaw or rather bias (very understandably) is it's magnification and glorification of the last viceroy and governor general of India Lord Mountbatten.
Few men have been so concerned about how history would portray them as this man.
A veteran journalist once remarked of him, 'he acts as his own Public Relationship Officer'.
An aide of Mountbatten was more blunt, calling his boss 'the vainest man alive'.
The viceroy had instructed his photographers to shoot him six inches above the eye line, as his friend, the actor Gary Grant, had told him that this way his wrinkles wouldn't show.
After he left India, he worked hard to give and portray the best possible spin to his tenure.
He commissioned or influenced a whole array of books that would magnify his successes and gloss over his failures.
All these books portray him as a wise umpire successfully mediating between squabbling school boys, may it be India and Pakistan, the Congress and the Muslim League, Mahatma Gandhi and Jinnah, or Jawaharlal Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel.
But there was one place where he did play a role.
It was a problem the like of which no newly independent state ever faced.
When the British departed, they did not leave behind two nations as is widely known but more than 500 distinct pieces of independent territories called the princely states.
And these states had no intention of being a part of India.
I am writing this lesser known facts specially for Muslim haters or Pakistan bashers.
Given a choice, most of us would like to flee away from this country.
The story of the princely states is a fascinating topic for any bed time story.
Good night mon ami.
2/10/2016
Why after all, we need shouting tamasha on news shows
2/10/2016
Even the most erudite among us are probably guilty of complete ignorance of Penzias and Wilkinson and their discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation.
But even the most ignorant amongst us will certainly have heard about Watson and Crick and their unraveling of the double helical DNA structure not many years before the former event.
In the story of DNA, there is a person who has been tragically looked over and has gone unrewarded to her grave.
She is Rosy.
Rather, Rosalind Franklin.
She was a X-ray crystallographer.
Meaning, she would fire x ray beams on to biological molecules and study how the atoms within the molecule diffracted the x rays.
It is somewhat like estimating an object from it's shadow which we know can sometimes be tricky.
But Rosy was convinced that the only way to establish the DNA structure was by pure crystallographic approach.
She never considered using large molecular models; the approach which Watson and Crick later took.
But it was the image taken by Rosalyn in 1952 that inspired the idea of helix.
In fact, that famous black cross could only arise from helical structure as you will agree if you imagine a winding staircase going vertical up around a central pole.
Now if throw light from one end, the shadow on the other end will somewhat look this one.
Scientific discoveries are very often a group endeavor with one lucky chap at the end getting the whole credit.
That is why it is important that these stories be told so that the left out ones are not really left out.
Good night mon ami.
2/10/2016
The landmark picture
2/10/2016
Beautiful
2/11/2016
Alaska is worth a trip
0, 1, 2, 3, 4...are natural numbers
... - 3, - 2, - 1, 0, +1, +2, +3... are called integers
1, 1/2, 2, - 1/2, -2, 3/2, - 3/2 are fractions or rational numbers
And then there are real numbers whose familiar number can be represented by infinite decimal expansions, such as:
1/3 = 0.333333333...
Now what do u think?
Don't you think that there are far more infinite integers than natural numbers?
Would you also not consider that there would be far more infinite fractions than integers?
It is interesting that anybody would even consider such questions considering one has to make a living, get married, have kids, educate the kids and get them married...
You know, the routine animal cycle.
By the way, as I type, scientists at Caltech, MIT and the LIGO international project (laser interferometer gravitational-wave observatory) are presenting their "status report on the effort to detect gravitational waves".
Wonder what is their finding.
Good night mon ami.
2/11/2016
Ha ha ha
U remember that incident!!
What kind of neurons do you possess Monish?
2/11/2016
Ha
It gets more interesting
2/12/2016
This is the way to raise your child (not that I have any experience)
2/12/2016
The accuracy of the physical measurement used at the LIGO observatories boggles my not-so-smart mind.
Yes, not one but two L-shaped observatories were and are being used.
One of them is in Livingston, Louisiana located south east in US.
The other is at Richland, Washington up north west in US.
They are separated by a distance of 3002 kilometres. And that for a special reason.
It helps us to locate the source of the gravitational wave.
But how?
Well, think about your ears.
Why was there an evolutionary pressure to have two ears when one should have sufficed on top of the head?
Well..
It is about triangulation.
Much before we found it out, nature very blindly of course, had figured it out (it had too much time to tinker and sacrifice animals).
Triangulation is a process of determining the location of a point by measuring angles to it from known points at either end of a fixed baseline.
The gravitational waves coming to these two observatories arrive with a difference of 10 milliseconds.
10 milliseconds!
This is enough for our mathematics to determine the source of the wave!!
Ingenious!
I will tell you more about this LIGO observatories over few nights.
This endeavor is far more delightful than any Bollywood movie or more delicious than any tasty Indian curry!
It is a story that must be told.
And it must be savoured slowly like a four course gourmet dinner.
Good night mon ami.
2/12/2016
Aerial view of the LIGO observatory at Richland with two arms each 4 km long
2/13/2016
The way things are, it would be comical if not for the tragedy
2/13/2016
As you can see from the picture, the observatory is an L shaped ultra high vacuum system, each arm being 4 km long.
But, at the very heart of the LIGO observatory is the Michelson interferometer.
Yes Sir,
The very same Michelson of the famous Michelson and Morley experiment of 1887.
This is one of the few handful of the experiments that completely transformed physics.
They were hoping to show via their experiment that just as sound travels through a medium of air, light also travels through a universal medium called ether.
And just as sound waves speed, the speed of the light must change relative to the observer depending upon whether the observer is moving towards the light or away from it.
But they found none!
The experiment was performed at the Case Western Reserve observatory in US.
All the great Lords of Britain like Lord Kelvin found the result preposterous and assumed the experiment to be flawed.
But in science, unlike religion, men do not matter.
Only experiments do.
This experiment laid the foundation for the modern physics in more ways than one.
But I digress.
Tomorrow I shall dwell more on the workings of the Michelson interferometer.
Just in case if you are one of the guys who like frying pan science (for it's applications) rather than for it's sheer power of explaining nature...
At the heart of our commonly used ophthalmic device OCT which gives us retinal imaging to almost cellular resolution, lies this same awesome Michelson interferometer!!
Incredible, isn't it!
Tomorrow entire day I will be in an ophthalmic conference at Andheri near the airport.
One has to keep learning.
Good night mon ami.
2/13/2016
Yes
Even as I was typing, I knew I might be typing not what I was meaning to
I am very happy my writing is under scrutiny, for to be ignored would be it's greatest sorrow
2/14/2016
Michelson interferometer is essentially a partially reflective mirror or beam splitter with 2 mirrors at 90 degrees to each other.
The partially reflective mirror or the beam splitter receives a light from a laser which it divides 50% to the x axis and the other 50% to the y axis.
Both these light are made to travel along those 4 km long arms but through a devise called Fabry-Perot etalon which in effect makes the light waves travel 75 trips up and down the arms.
This is done to increase the sensitivity of the whole experiment.
The beam of lights returning from the two arms are kept out of phase such that when both arms are in resonance (like when no gravity wave is passing through), their light waves cancel out (peaks and troughs) and there is no interference pattern seen at the receiving photodiode.
But when the gravitational waves passes through the interferometer, the two L shaped arms shorten and lengthen by a miniscule amount (or rather should as theoretically predicted), causing the beams to become slightly less out of phase, so that instead of cancelling out the photodiode receives interference patterns of concentric circles.
I will show you the schematic representation of the set up.
Since the effect of the gravitational waves originating from millions of light years away is so tiny on our earth, that it requires the interferometer to be scaled to such gigantic proportions.
And unlike all of us ordinary humans, the scientists are very aware of the danger of fooling ourselves.
(Almost all of us suffer from this confirmatory bias.
For example, if I think all poor people are foolish and if I see the world around me, no matter what data you present to me, it will only confirm my bias more and more even if you show me all data why initial poverty is a great set back to an individual who has same intelligence as the so called successful person).
They set up controls, null hypothesis, work in teams who are blind to each others' work and blind to the origin and selection of data.
In fact, they try to even disprove themselves.
You remember Penzias and Wilson, how baffled they were about the source of noise and how they held on their data before publishing?
Tomorrow I will give you the kind of data the LIGO scientists are dealing with.
Today my eyes were given visual treat of astounding surgical skills.
Good night mon ami.
2/14/2016
Basic Michelson interferometer
2/15/2016
TV shows and movies are our key referral points
2/15/2016
Now we come to the crux of the experiment.
What did it seek out to measure?
The gravity waves that originate millions of light years by cosmic cataclysmic events are expected to distort the 4 km mirror spacing by about 10^-8 m!!
It is so small a distance that it is less than 1/1000th the charge diameter of a proton!!
In relative terms to the 4 km arms, the change in distance of approximately one part in 10^21!!
This is insanely miniscule!
But the very fact that we humans have even the technology to actually measure it demonstrates the power of the scientific method.
It is this fact which blew away my mind more than anything else.
A typical event which might cause a detectable event would be a late stage inspiral and merger of two 10 solar mass black holes.
This technique has opened up a whole new way of looking or listening at the universe.
I end my 4 part series of the LIGO experiment.
Hope you got the sense of how the scientific method works and now with this understanding you will realize that there is something special about the scientific truth.
Good night mon ami.
2/15/2016
Yes
The second question was bothering me as well.
I have to do a story on that one too if I first get my head around that one
In fact, a story is already forming in my brain
Though I need to get the facts first
2/16/2016
Some few lucky people
2/16/2016
I have been a student of science and medicine all my life.
And yet, not once I remember a chapter or a lecture devoted to:
"How to set up an experiment?"
Not once I have remembered the usage of the term scientific method.
It is very sad that I have to admit this today, but science was taught to me almost like a religious doctrine.
Newton's law because Newton said so.
Darwin's theory because Darwin thought so.
Dalton's atomic theory because just like Mohammed, one day he was vouchsafed about atoms.
No wonder science courses have been useless and futile.
The very basis of science, that is experiments have been gravely and I dare say, mortally undermined.
But experimental evidence is the ultimate way of understanding our universe, may it be medicine or be it physics;
Provided you know how to set up your experiment;
Provided you know how to cover your biases;
Provided you understand the importance of controls;
Provided you are thorough about the concepts of false positive, false negative...;
Provided you have the knowledge or the software of statistical analysis of your data.
I am not sure if any of us are even aware how to differentiate a rigorous experiment or a study from a frivolous one.
In view of this, it is critical that we question the LIGO experiment and ask the question:
How do we know that the chirp we heard from the black holes collision was really that and now a rat squeaking away inside on of it's silicon suspenders?
I will talk about it tomorrow night if I am able to get a good grasp of the study by then (though I am hardly qualified to do it).
Good night mon ami.
2/17/2016
Weirdness comes in the most weirdest of ways
LIGO experiment has ultra high sensitivity I.e. very high true positive
But what about it's specificity or ability to keep false positives low?
Let me enlist in very simple terms what was done to keep the specificity high:
1. Looking out for a very specific type of signal
(Human and rodent activity signals are bit different)
2. Multi-centered analysis of the data as the LIGO collaboration team consists of 991 scientists spread over several countries including Russia, Brazil, India, Australia and many more.
3. Intermittently and without anyone knowing, injection of simulated data into the system and observing the team's response ( the first blind exercise took 18 months).
4. Elimination of all possible spurious sources of noise, human and animal activities and seismic vibrations by high power lasers, fused silica mirrors, fused silica fibre suspensions in 4 pendulum stages).
5. Dedicated highly sophisticated computer algorithms to find the characteristic signal.
6. Running the data through parallel processing on multiple super computers.
LIGO started operating in 2002.
Enhanced LIGO started operating in 2009.
Advanced LIGO started operating in 2015.
Over all these years, the first signal was detected in September 2015.
In fact, when it came, the first reaction was:
"It is too good to be true. Was there a blind injection?".
I have to say I am no expert and I have not seen the data.
But...sometimes and somewhere experts need to be listened.
Good night mon ami.
2/18/2016
This is why physics is important
2/18/2016
The structure of life would rapidly break down were it not for the powerful low entropy source, upon which almost all life on Earth depends, namely the sun.
Most of us see sun as the supplier of energy which is not altogether correct.
Why so?
Because the energy which earth receives from the sun is returned back to the empty space.
If not, earth would heat up till it reached an equilibrium.
The life on earth depends on the fact that the sun is much hotter than the dark space.
Each individual photon (yellow light) from the sun carries far more energy than the infra red photons (longer wavelength) that earth returns to space.
This is given by the Planck's formula:
E = h(nu)
Thus there are many more photon leaving earth than those that it gets from the sun for the same energy.
More photons means more degrees of freedom
And from Boltzmann's
S = k log V
Higher entropy.
Hence sun in other words is a source of low entropy for life on earth (which we consume in the form of food after chlorophyll has done it's work).
I am trying to give you a sense of how fundamental the second law of thermodynamic is to everything in the universe.
Good night mon ami.
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