August 31, 2016 Wednesday



Bedtime Story

Ingenious as it is, the stellar parallax method of measuring astronomical distances has inherent limitations.

Even with the advanced methods of astrometry (recording images on photographic plates over time of the same location of the sky) and devices such as blink comparator, there are crippling limitations to the minuteness of the parallax that can be measured.

Take these two examples.

The European Space Agency (ESA) launched Hipparcos satellite (High Precision Parallax Collecting Satellite) in 1989 for precise astrometry.

It had accuracy of 0.002 arc second and could accurately catalog nearly 120,000 stars in the neighborhood.

Following Hipparcos, the ESA launched Gaia space observatory on December 19, 2013, once again for astrometry.

Its accuracy of measuring parallax is around 10 micro arc second thus allowing it to measure distances in the range of tens of thousands of light years.

That is fabulous if you wish to investigate our solar system which has a radius of around 1.87 light years.

But our milky way galaxy alone has a diameter of 100,000 light years which makes the parallax method a poor tool to probe it.

This is where the discovery made by Henrietta Swan Leavitt of the Cepheid variable becomes so important.

I shall explain to you how these Cepheid Variables and the Leavitt's Law came in handy for arguably the greatest astronomer of all times Edwin Hubble.

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

Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

August 30, 2016 Tuesday



Meeting with Mr. Merchant cancelled. 

Can you guess why?

Our IO overslept.



Bedtime Story

Don't you wish to know who was the first ape amongst our ancestors who used the idea of parallax to calculate the distance of a nearby star?

Well...First let me tell you the difficulty with this process.

The universe is so vast and the stars such distances away that the triangle we would make even at different positions of the earth from sun (maximum being 6 months apart when earth is at the opposite ends of sun) tends to subtend extremely small parallax angles.

So small that our conventional degree works out to be very large.

To overcome this hurdle, the unit used is arc second.

What is this arc second?

We know that 1 degree is 1/360 of a turn.

1 arc minute is 1/60 of a degree.

1 arc second is 1/60 of an arc minute.

This works out to 1/3600 of a degree or 1/1,296,000 of a turn.

To give you a perspective how small 1 arc second is.

The 6/6 letters in our Snellen chart at a distance of 6 metres subtend an angle of 5 arc minutes (individual limbs of letters subtend 1 arc minute).

A small coin kept at a distance of 4 kilometres would subtend an angle of 1 arc second.

The nearest star to our sun is Proxima Centauri.

It has a parallax of a meager 0.7687 +- 0.0003 arc seconds.

In fact the stellar parallaxes are so minute that in the early days of enlightenment due to its apparent absence it was used as an argument AGAINST heliocentrism.

The orbital distance of the earth around the sun is about 150 million kilometers that has been adopted as 1 astronomical unit or 1 AU.  

In spite of this Herculean task of measuring such minute angles over months and years, a German astronomer, mathematician and physicist by the name of Friedrich Bessel did make this breakthrough in 1838.

That year he announced the parallax of the binary star 61 Cygni to be 0.314 arc seconds and using the known earth's orbital radius calculated its distance to be 10.3 light years.

The flood gate to the heavens were opened by a mathematician.

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

Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

August 29, 2016 Monday



Today spoke with both Faiz Merchant and Inspector Deshmukh.



Bedtime Story

Put your finger in front of your eyes.

Close one eye. Then the other.

Do it alternatively and rapidly.

You will notice your finger moving or shifting against the background.

This is the parallax effect which is defined as the apparent shift or displacement of an object when viewed along 2 different lines of sight.

The word parallax comes from the Greek word for alteration.

Now you can make a right angle triangle by joining your baseline which is the 2 places from where you are viewing the object and then joining the ends of this line with the object under observation.

The angle formed at the viewed object is the parallax angle.

Using simple trigonometric functions such as sine, cosine or tangent, you can derive the other sides of the triangle.

Which would give you the distance between the observer and the object.

In the cosmic distance ladder or the extragalactic distance scale, this is the first method that was devised by us apes (rare smart ones that is), to measure how far some stars were away from us as they gazed up the sky.

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

Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

August 28, 2016 Sunday



Dr. Ashish Sharma came to visit me.

We are meeting first time after 2009 when he left the United States.

Bedtime Story

Henrietta Leavitt was given to analyze photographic plates that had in them "variable stars".

Cepheids are a subclass of variable stars that swell and shrink very regularly and whose physics was explained by Eddington (Eddington valve or Kappa mechanism).

Leavitt was given plates of Magellanic Clouds that are 2 irregular (no regular shape like ours spiral) dwarf galaxies that are orbiting our Milky Way galaxy.

She found thousands of Cepheid variables in the images of these Magellanic Clouds.

Her brilliant lay in noticing a pattern; she noted that the brighter ones had longer periods.

Immediately in 1908, at the age of 40, she published this finding in the:
Annals of the Astronomical Observatory of Harvard College.

She continued to work on the photographic plates.

After closely examining and ruminating some 1,777 variable stars for further 4 years, she was convinced that the relationship between their periods (of stars and not biological) and luminosity is a direct one.

In her own words:
"A straight line can be readily drawn among each of the 2 series of points corresponding to the maxima and minima, thus showing that there is a simple relation between the brightness of the Cepheid variables and their periods."

This period-luminosity relationship is known as Leavitt's law.

So what?

This is what you should ask:
"So what?".

Now that needs a little bit of explanation and detour.

You will need to understand the concept of parallax, specially stellar parallax and how it is used to calculate the distance of objects.

In fact, our own brains using the 2 eyes spaced a distance away does fabulous trigonometric calculations to get the stereoscopic images of the world.

I will deal this slowly over some nights as it is a heady topic and requires basic trigonometry.

But then, eventually everything if you down to the root of it, requires mathematics and numbers.

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

Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

August 27, 2016 Saturday


Met PSI Rahul Kadam in the evening at the police station



Bedtime Story

A little baby girl was born in 1868 July 4 (The day the 13 American colonies broke away from the British Empire) in Lancaster (not British), Massachusetts, USA.

Her father, a church minister named her Henrietta Swan Leavitt ( Swan comes from her mother Henrietta Swan).

She graduated from Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

(Please note so many names of cities of modern America are straight away British, a reminder of the Colonial era.

Yet the Americans unlike us Indians do not go about renaming or Americanizing their city names;

It is a reflection of their self-confidence.)

In the final and the fourth year of her college Leavitt took a course in astronomy.

 (just imagine it was the times of the mothers or the grandmothers of our grandmothers';
And you know how our grandmothers were like.)

After she graduated in 1892, she was 24.

What do u think she did?

She travelled all over America and Europe and somewhere in this period she lost her hearing.

(I encourage every human on earth to leave their culture and way of life and travel at a very young age as an alien to other ethnological groups.)

You can see that this not your average sort of a lady of 1890s.

Then soon after returning from her travels, at the age of 25 she joined the Harvard College Observatory (HSO) that was founded in 1839.

It is incredible how this going nation had started investing money and resources into astronomy which was not even considered a proper science those days.

Leavitt became one of the women human "computers" that Edward Pickering was hiring then to measure and catalog the brightness of the stars that Pickett was recording on the photographic plates under the telescopes.

Women, even in the enlightened America, were deemed incapable of handling telescopes.

And to crown it all, Pickering was nor even paying her.

Leavitt was working for free.

Only later did she start receiving 0.30 USD an hour (without any fixed salary or benefits or Insurance).

We will gaze this young lady's work in nights to come.

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

Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

August 26, 2016 Friday



Bedtime Story

So we were left wondering with the question:
What is a Cepheid variable?

Cepheid variable is a star (our sun is a star too), with a characteristic feature.

It pulsates radially varying both in diameter and temperature that is seen to us apes on earth as a tiny spot changing its brightness in the night sky.

Moreover, the pulsation has a very well defined period and amplitude that may range from 1 to 50 days.

The brightness is technically termed luminosity and is essentially a measure of the amount of electromagnetic energy a body radiates per unit of time.

So the SI unit of Luminosity is joules per second or watts.

The instrument that measures luminosity is called a bolometer that was invented not too long ago in 1878 by an American astronomer Samuel Langley.

 (another forgotten hero!

 Just imagine what chance we have being remembered who have contributed absolutely nothing original to this planet.
I have not even passed my selfish genes.)

We shall discuss Langley and his bolometer some other night.

If you are thinking that Henrietta Swan Leavitt discovered these strange pulsating stars called Cepheid variables, you are wrong.

The first Cepheid variables were discovered way back in 1780s by men like:
Edward Pigott (English)
and
John Goodricke (another Englishman).

The first such star was seen by Goodricke in the constellation Cepheus and hence the name (in Greek mythology the King of Aethiopia just like our Lord Rama or Krishna, fancy and seductive but mythology all the same).

Constellation Cepheus though is not a mythology but a reality that was even noted by the second century astronomer Ptolemy in his Almagest.

The tragedy of Ptolemy's great work is that it has been abused on a catastrophic scale by the nonsense which is popularly known as astrology,an affront to the majestic science of astronomy.

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

Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

August 25, 2016 Thursday



Evil has changed his advocate. 

The new advocate asked for a date.

The advocate of the evil mentioned that an FIR has been filed against
Bits.

It is bit worrisome though my IO is unaware of any such FIR.

Most likely it would be a non-cognizable (NC) complaint.

Date given 3-9-16

30,000 eV Swapnil hearing 5-8-16

30,000 eV Faiz taking date today

1,50,000 eV still unused



 
Bedtime Story

Two deaths proved very advantageous for Eddington.

In 1912, when George Darwin (astronomer, barrister, mathematician and the 5th child of the great Charles Darwin) suddenly died, Eddington acquired the chair of the Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy.

Then in 1913 with the death of Robert Ball (founder of the Screw Theory which is used in robot mechanics for one), Eddington became the director of the entire Cambridge Observatory in 1914 at the age of 32.

One of the things that he devoted a great attention to was the Cepheid variable stars.

But what in the heavens are these Cepheids?

Why should they interest the sky watchers?

For this I shall have to leave Eddington for a while a talk about a very very bright lady by the name of Henrietta Swan Leavitt.

You would be surprised to know that Leavitt belonged to a group of women who were known as the women human computers.

These were American women working in the Harvard College Observatory at the other Cambridge in Massachusetts, USA.

They were all hired by the American astronomer and physicist Edward Pickering who had developed a method to photograph the spectra of multiple stars simultaneously.

This he achieved by placing a large prism before the photographic plate.

Let me show you the picture of Pickering with his Harvard computers (also sometimes called Pickering's Harem) taken on May 13, 1913.

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

Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

August 24, 2016 Wednesday


Bedtime story

Now it may be appropriate enough to move on to Arthur Eddington, a man who did much to popularize Einstein's relativity and quite tragically was overshadowed by the man he himself popularized.

It is something like Sherlock Holmes who completely dwarfed and adumbrated his creator Arthur Conan Doyle.

Eddington was born in Kendal, England in 1882 when the British Empire was at its peak even though it had lost the hold of the colonies of North America.

He lost his father when he was just a 2-year old toddler to the typhoid epidemic that had swept across England, Europe and even the United States.

You may have heard about Typhoid Mary or Mary Mallon, the most notorious and perhaps even the most destructive carrier of typhoid fever, who had migrated from Ireland to the United States.

Over there, in New York City, while working as a cook, she had spread the Salmonella typhi bacteria, to more than 50 people.

The sanitation and the public hygiene conditions of England in those days was no different than any third world country of present.

Today India has the dishonour of being the country with the highest cases of typhoid fever because of lack of clean drinking water and the roadside stalls.

Loss of his father made life for the Eddingtons very harsh.

Yet Eddington turned out to be a bright student and did particularly well in mathematics and English literature.

Because of his persistent brilliant performance in academics, he eventually was awarded a fellowship to the prestigious Trinity College at the University of Cambridge.

From there, after bit of trial and error at the Cavendish Laboratory, he found his true calling in 1905 at the age of 23.

He secured a position at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich and commenced his outstanding journey in the field of astronomy, astrophysics and eventually cosmology.

We will go in detail into the contributions made by this path breaking astrophysicist in the night to come.

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

Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

August 23, 2016 Tuesday



Today we met both Mr. Merchant and Inspector Deshmukh.

The lawyers of the evil DID indeed manage to scheme out a plan
to get his bail.


 
Bedtime Story

Assuming there was no contamination and sterility maintained, what Miller got was nothing short of astounding.

His paper chromatography revealed 5 amino acids:
Glycine
Alpha alanine
Beta alanine
These 3 were definite

The other two:
Aspartic acid
Alpha aminobutyric acid
Were less certain due to the spots being faint.

So let us analyze the chemistry of what happened:

Firstly, simple one step reactions can easily explain the formation of HCN hydrogen cyanide
HCHO formaldehyde
And other compounds such as:
Acetylene
Cyanoacetylene

For example:
CO₂ = CO + O

CH₄ + 2[O] = HCHO + H₂O

CO + NH3 = HCN + H2O

CH4 + NH3 = HCN + 3H2

Now we have:
Formaldehyde
Ammonia and
Hydrogen cyanide

Now using the well known Strecker amino acid synthesis reactions we get:

HCHO + HCN + NH3 = NH2-CH2-CN + H2O

NH2-CH2-CN + 2H2O =
NH3 + NH2-CH2-COOH (glycine).

Note that all "equal to" marks need to be substituted with an arrow pointing towards the direction of the ongoing reaction.

I will not go into details of the synthesis of all the 5 amino acids, but I am sure you must have got the idea.

Of course, this was not the end.

Many others repeated this classical experiment to verify its veracity.

Not only did these experiments confirm this initial process of abiogenesis (natural process of life arising from non living matter), but also showed the synthesis of RNA and DNA nucleobases in such similar experiments.

After Miller died in 2007, scientists reanalyzed the sealed vials left by Miller from his classical experiments.

Using high performance liquid chromatography and mass spectroscopy (u know about it now), these scientists found more organic molecules than Miller had.

In 1996, in an interview this is what Stanley Miller had to say:
"Just turning on the spark in a basic pre-biotic experiment will yield 11 out of 20 amino acids."

Remember mon ami, from simplicity can arise complexity of such magnitude that it becomes hard or impossible for our evolved brains to assimilate its ambit.

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

Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

August 22, 2016 Monday



Today we prepared all the documents.

And some pictures.

My IO Inspector Deshmukh told me that today he has called
Ramniklal Veera to give his statement for the FIR that has been
lodged against him.
  


Bedtime Story

The experiment that Stanley Miller conducted, first at the University of Chicago in 1952 and later at the newly formed University of California, San Diego (UCSD) was a chemical one.

Miller used water (H₂O), methane (CH₄), ammonia (NH₃) and hydrogen (H₂).

(Many apologies for my inability to write numerals in subscript and in superscript formats on Whatsapp though I usually correct this in my blogs as I have done above on hindsight)

These chemicals in their gaseous forms were sealed inside a sterile 5-liter glass flask mimicking earth's primitive atmosphere.

Sterility was of paramount importance.

This glass flask was connected by thin glass tubing with another smaller flask containing water.

This smaller flask was heated to promote evaporation and this vapor was allowed to enter the larger flask.

The gas filled flask along with the hot water vapor was subjected to continuous electrical sparks fired between the electrodes that mimicked lightening.

This residual air was made to cool and condense and collect by trickling into a U-shaped trap.

Miller let this experiment run for days.

In 24 hours, the solution in the trap had turned pink.

At the end of 7 days of continuous exercise, Miller carefully disassembled the experiment, adding mercuric chloride to prevent microbial contamination.

Remember, sterility was critical for the validity of this experiment (much more than even our ocular surgeries).

Further reaction was stopped by adding barium hydroxide and sulfuric acid and the mixture evaporated to remove impurities.

Miller then carefully subjected the residue to paper chromatography which itself was discovered in 1943, just 9 years before Miller was conducting his experiment.

(Its pioneers were yet more forgotten men
Richard Synge and
Archer Martin
Both British biochemist).

So what did Miller discover in the paper chromatography?

We shall keep this in nerve racking suspense and go over it tomorrow if time permits.

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

Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

August 21, 2016 Sunday



As Bits painstakingly plans out the case, I wonder what the
evil is scheming.

Bedtime Story

Since we are talking about Harold Urey, I would like to linger over another of his great experimental work.

Urey was primarily a chemist world famous for isotope separation.

The 1934 Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded to Urey "for his discovery of heavy hydrogen".

But later in life, some where in late 1940s and early 1950s he helped developed the new field of cosmochemistry.

Somewhere at that time, when he was delivering a lecture, a young man by the name of Stanley Miller, then only 20 years old, was attending and listening to very keenly.

Urey's lecture was on the origin of the solar system and how organic synthesis could be possible under the reducing environment that was present in the primitive earth.

Miller had joined the University of Chicago in 1951 for his PhD and was frantically searching for a thesis topic to work upon.

He had met many professors and was tending to go towards theoretical problems such as synthesis of elements in stars.

Experimental work is always tedious and most of us would not be able to set up a single original experiment, no matter how good we may be in cracking exams and building our careers.

Miller was immensely galvanized by Urey's lecture.

Miller approached Urey in September 1952
(Miller was then 22 and Urey was 59)
for a new research idea.

Miller wanted to test the idea that were first proposed by the Soviet biochemist Alexander Oparin in 1922.

Alexander Oparin, as early as 1922, had put forth these 4 revolutionary propositions:

1. There is no fundamental difference between a living organism and lifeless matter.

2. On account of the discovery of methane in Jupiter and other large planets, the infant earth must have possessed a strongly reducing atmosphere.

3. At first, simple organic solutions of organic matter had formed by simple arrangement of atoms into molecules.

The growth and complexity of these molecules lead to emergence of new properties.

4. This led to biology after which competition, speed of cell growth, struggle for existence and finally natural selection led to the past and modern life forms.

At first Urey did not show much enthusiasm Miller's interest in pre-biotic synthesis since no rewarding work had been done on it previously.

But the young Miller persisted.

This eventually led to the landmark Miller-Urey Experiment of 1953 that I shall discuss hopefully tomorrow if I get time.

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

Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

August 20, 2016 Saturday



I wonder what the evil is scheming with his fiendish mind.

With a calamity staring right at his face, he is not the kind to sit
hand on his hands.

One move of his recently backfired and flopped.




Bedtime Story

I know it is tempting to rush on to Arthur Eddington when it comes to cosmology.

But I think it is still premature ad enough groundwork has not been laid down.

We need to go back to that abundance table.

That one which charted the abundance elements in the universe against the atomic numbers.

This fascinating table was created by 2 men:

1. Hans Suess

2. Harold Urey

Hans Suess was born in Vienna, Austria in 1909.

He eventually did his PhD in Chemistry from the University of Vienna in 1935 at the age of 26.

He eventually migrated to the United States where eventually he along with Harold Urey was one of the 4 founding faculty members of the University of California, San Deigo famously known as UCSD.

Harold Urey on the other hand was born in 1893 in the state of Indiana of the United States where eventually he too obtained his PhD in physical chemistry.

He occupied the position of research associate at the Johns Hopkins University and later become associate professor at Columbia University (both are extremely well funded in terms of research grants).

Both Urey and Suess were pioneers of a novel field called cosmochemistry which is the study of chemical composition of matter in the universe.

Meteorites are the most important means of such studies.

In fact, the most primitive meteorites that we have dated contain a fraction of presolar grains that are even older than the Solar System itself (which is around 4.6 billion years old like our earth).

These grains are derived directly from the remnants of supernovae that supplied the dust and debris from which our Solar System formed.

This abundance is or can be measured in 3 ways:

1. By mass-fraction

2. By mole-fraction

3. By volume-fraction

In mixed gases such as planetary atmospheres, volume fraction works well.

You must have a look at this alluring and engrossing human achievement with your own eyes.

It is as if some insignificant scum of a microbe in a tiny puddle has sorted out the composition of all the oceans of this planet.

Doesn't this fascinate you?

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

Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

August 19, 2016 Friday



Today the evil tried a crafty moved.

He filed a writ petition in the Bombay High Court on 12-8-16.

It came up for hearing today.

The Writ petition number was WP/2798/16. 

Petitioner Sanjay B. Veera 

Advocate Vijendra Mishra 

Respondent Senior Inspector of Police and ANR

Category: WP for Quashing Impugent Order/Judgement

Stage: For admission 

Fortunately the honorable Smt Justice R.P. Mohite-Dere saw through
the whole ruse.

She got very angry.

She told them that these dilatory tactics will not be tolerated. 

She dismissed the writ petition.

The evil had thought of this dirty trick even before the damning 
events of August 16, 2016 Tuesday. 

Today was the first day of Focus 2016 Conference.

I purchased surgical instruments like forceps, calipers and many
such stuff which allow our big hands to do fine microscopic work.

Also got the prism bar for squint evaluation.

I used the Ola Cab service first time in my life.

Very convenient.





Bedtime Story

A mass spectrometer is a 3-component device:

1. An ionizer

2. A mass analyzer

3. A detector

The ionizer converts the sample to be analyzed into ions in gas phase.

It essentially means systematically removal of bonds holding the atoms and releasing them apart.

Technically there are more than 10 ways of doing so, but we need not go into the details as the whole point of my bed-time stories is to get ourselves familiar with the idea or the concepts.

The second component, the mass analyzer separates the ions according to their charge to mass ratio.

This is done by subjecting the moving ions to known electrical and magnetic fields.

The electrical field alters the speeds of the ions.

The magnetic field alters their direction.

Two laws determine how charged particles behave when subjected to electric and magnetic fields in vacuum:

1. Newton's second law of motion:
F = ma
(Only valid in non-relativistic cases, that is when the speed of ions is much lower than that of light)

2. Lorentz force law
F = Q(E + v X B)
Q = ion charge
E = electric field
v X B = cross vector product of ion velocity and the magnetic field

With these 2 equations and knowing the initial conditions, the motion of the ions in space and time can be completely determined in terms of m/Q or mass-to-charge.

The final part of the mass spectrometer is the detector.

So what does it detect?

It detects either the charge induced or the current produced when an ion passes or hits a surface.

All this can be summa in one schematic picture which I will be sending you.

This clever analytical device construed by both Francis Aston and Arthur Dempster was an outcome of series of experiments that were being done on the humble vacuum tubes or thermionic valves on which we had rightly devoted lot of time.

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

Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

August 18, 2016 Thursday



Today supporting documents given to PSI Deshmane.

Flat possession and society formation papers.

For the FIR filed against Ramniklal Veera for violating the
Section 10 and 11 of the MOFA Act 1963.



Bedtime Story

You need to always question what I write.

Or even better, cross verify it with much better references using the device you hold in your hand.

In today's world, being ignorant is really an option (one can be knowledgeable without great education or without having several letters before or after his or her name).

So what were the developments that lead to the knowledge of relative abundance of elements in the universe?

One of the greatest help we apes got was with the discovery or invention of mass spectrometry.

The men who invented this device were 2 (at least as claimed by the Western English speaking world).

1. Englishman Francis William Aston in 1919

2. Canadian American Arthur Jeffrey Dempster in 1918.

Just imagine as Europe was involved in one of their bloodiest slaughter and carnage, these men were quietly working in their labs devising an instrument that could sort out atoms and ions based on their charge to mass ratio.

(I wish to emphasize yet again that even though atoms are a fact, we using the term atomic theory till date.)

Aston in 1900s like so many others was studying current in gas filled tubes.

In 1910 at the age of 33, he moved from Birmingham to the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge under the great J. J. Thomson.

Cathode rays and electrons had just been discovered then.

At the same time, 2 German physicists:
Eugen Goldstein
Wilhelm Wien
sometime in 1886 discovered a new form of rays which in German they called:
"Kanalstrahlen".

These were positively charged.

Wien had discovered that these rays could be deflected by magnetic fields.

Aston went one step further.

He subjected these new rays to both electric and magnetic fields.

In doing so, he could separate different ions by their ratio of charge/mass.

By 1919, Aston had achieved 2 feats:

1. He showed that atoms of a single element could have different isotopes thereby establishing as fact that even non radioactive elements have isotopes.

2. He had invented the first mass spectroscope.

The Canadian Dempster had greatly improved on it, greatly increasing its accuracy in identifying compounds by mass of elements in a sample.

This was a gigantic step to our understanding of nature.

We shall look in detail at the mass spectrometer in nights to come.

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

Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

August 17, 2016 Wednesday



Today spent almost 4 hours in the police station.

This was to file an FIR against Ramniklal Veera, the source of the evil.

He is being charged with violating the Section 10 and Section 11
of the MOFA Act of 1963.

MOFA stands for Maharashtra Ownership Flats Act.

It is supposed to regulate the promotion of construction, sales, 
management and transfer of flats in the state of Maharashtra. 



Bedtime Story

But then a pattern in data begun to emerge.

By the early 1900s, it had become quite evident that hydrogen and helium were more copious than any other elements.

Both in our solar system and universe in general.

You may be shocked to know that among the elements, hydrogen and helium constitute 98%;
the rest all constitute less than 2% of the mass of the solar system and other star systems as well.

After these two, oxygen and carbon were the next 2 most common elements.

When the graph was plotted (and this you must see) relating abundance of the elements (logarithmic scale) against the atomic number, 2 trends stood out point blank on our faces:

1. As the atomic number increases, their abundance decreases.

2. There is an alteration in abundance of elements depending on whether they have even or odd atomic numbers!

What the hell!!

A pattern!!

3. Another strange outlier was within these 2 patterns, iron and nickel showed an extra peaking in this graph.

Now certainly god would have no reason to show so much bias towards hydrogen and helium.

This set the mind of great thinkers churning.

In comes at this moment of time our star hero (pun intended), Mr. and Sir. Arthur Stanley Eddington, the perfect Englishman of the British Raj.

Who would naturally have contempt for anything coming out from a brain covered in brown skin.

But before we leap on to good old Arthur Eddington, we need another Englishman who goes by the name of Francis William Aston.

Perhaps we will start dealing with these 2 Englishmen from tomorrow onwards.

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

Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

August 16, 2016 Tuesday



Today after a long wait, finally the second wave of demolition.

Saw Ramniklal Veera, father of evil, making frantic phone calls.

Father, Nitin and Vishal had a meeting at Preetam Da Dhaba.

Let us what comes out of it.

The sons of both Sanjay Veera and Nilesh Veera came to our flat.

They had the audacity to attack Bits and threaten the whole family.

They were both abusive, arrogant and threatening.

Police had to called and immediately an FIR was lodged.

They have been charged under the IPC Section 506 (20, 504 and 34.

Section 506 deals with the offense of criminal intimidation.

But guess what?

The best part.

Both these rascals escaped right under the noses of the cops.

From the police station.

Now this speaks volumes about corruption in police. 




Bedtime Story

To understand the idea of stellar nucleosynthesis, or simply the way elements are formed in the universe, I need to take once again to late 1800s and early 1900s.

The earliest proponents of nucleosynthesis had a vague notion that the chemical elements of the periodic table were created at the beginning of the universe.

They had no rational or meaningful idea or understanding of how it could have happened.

In fact, then they had very little knowledge either about the age of the universe or its beginning.

Then in 1870 in Lille, France was born a boy who would be labelled Jean Baptiste Perrin.

Obviously very little will be known about him in the English speaking world as we all are biased people and biased writers favouring our own tribes just as we do with local gods.

He graduated with physics from the elite Ecole Normale Superieure (ENS) in Paris that was initially thought of during the French Revolution.

The ENS is a grande ecole (grand school), and falls outside the mainstream university system (some like Manipal deemed University of India).

Perrin had made following contributions to science:

1. He showed that the cathode rays carried negative charge in 1895

2. He determined Avogadro's number using several different methods
(6.022 X 10²³ per mol)

3. After Einstein published his theoretical explanation of Brownian movement in 1905, Perrin experimentally verified it.

It settled the century old controversy of Dalton's atomic theory (a very very powerful theory as you will be knowing by now).

For this he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for the year 1926.

But the reason I am writing about Jean Perrin is this:
In 1919 he put forward the idea that nuclear reactions could be the source of energy in the stars.

(Americans claim that it was their William Draper Harkins who first proposed the principle of nuclear fusion in 1915, four years before Perrin.)

Perrin had noticed that the mass of helium atom is less than the combined mass of 4 hydrogen atoms.

From the famous mass energy equivalence of Einstein, this tiny discrepancy of mass could easily supply enough energy to make the stars shine for billions of years.

I find this idea even today remarkable!

Chemistry and physics eventually can explain everything, even though the physics and mathematics needed is not intelligible to most of us apes.

And why should it be, for we have primarily evolved to survive and reproduce, no matter in how sophisticated way we achieve these 2 goals.

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

Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

August 15, 2016 Monday


Today father and I met our IO Inspector Deshmukh.

Bedtime Story

The question that behooves us is this; why is iron so abundant on planet earth?

As I had emphasized earlier, the mid range elements starting from carbon, Z (atomic number) = 6 and ending with iron Z = 26 were and are being produced in stars.

The technical term being stellar nucleosynthesis.

To understand and explain this supposedly innocuous sounding question of the abundance of iron takes us to the very heart of both nuclear physics and cosmology;
the sciences of the most smallest and the largest at the very same time.

Nucleosynthesis is a fundamental process that creates new atomic nuclei from already existing protons and neutrons.

The most primordial protons and neutrons themselves formed from the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) or the quark soup during the Big Bang as it cooled below 2 trillion degree Centigrade.

Now of course you will think I am talking nonsense or something that is only a theory or something that comes out straight from African tribal religious stories.

Well...
It is not as bad as all that.

First of all, QGP can be created by heating matter up to a temperature of 2 X 10¹² Kelvin
(the temperature at the edge of our sun's cote is 10 million Kelvin which is 10⁷ Kelvin).

This can be accomplished by colliding 2 large nuclei at high energy.

Experiments at CERN first tried to create this QGP in the 1980s and 1990s.

The LHC at CERN are continuing these experiments and have tentatively claimed to have created QGP at a temperature close to 4 X 10¹² Kelvin.

Besides this, there are several other experimental observations (beside theoretical computations) that confirm their existence now and then...
At the moment of creation.

These are heady topics and we need to go slowly.

We will also need to look at the contributions made by the likes of Arthur Eddington (a villain in the story of Subramanyan Chandrasekhar) and Hans Bethe in this story of stars and stellar nucleosynthesis.

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

Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

August 14, 2016 Saturday


Today Bits discussed some of his findings with us.


Bedtime Story

After the discovery of silver in about 4000 B.C. or about that time, our ancestors discovered the element iron.

You will be surprised to know that the oldest iron objects used by our ancestors in Egypt were beads from iron meteorites (which has 7.5% Nickel as compared to the iron in the earth's crust which has no Nickel).

Why so?

I mean to ask, why did they use the iron which came from the asteroids and not the one available on our planet earth?

That is simply because our ancestors discovered the process of smelting of iron much later in 3000 B.C.

The chemical symbol of iron is Fe which comes from Latin ferrum with an atomic number 26 and a characteristic spectral lines.

By mass, it is the most common element on earth, as it comprises the bulk of earth's outer core which is liquid and the inner core which is believed to be primarily a solid ball.

The solid inner core has a radius of 1220 kilometres which is roughly 70% of the moon's radius.

But how on earth do we know this?

There is a branch of study called seismology wherein the seismologists study earthquakes and the elastic waves that ripple through the planet.

It was the great Lisbon (Kingdom of Portugal) earthquake of November 1, 1755 which corresponded with the blooming of scientific revolution in Europe that started the scientific understanding of the origin of earthquakes.

The number of human apes killed in Portugal, Spain and Morocco was around 50,000.

It was in 1857 when Indians first revolted against the British Raj that an Irishman by the name of Robert Mallet pioneered the study of earthquakes and established the new field of seismology.

His 1846 paper titled "On the Dynamics of Earthquakes" was presented to the Royal Irish Academy and laid the foundation of this field.

He himself conducted his field study of the Great Napoleon Earthquake or the 1857 Basilicata Earthquake that killed nearly 10,000 in the Basilicata region of Italy, southeast of Naples.

The fact that the earth has a central solid inner core as compared to the outer liquid core was discovered by a Danish (same nationality and period as Bohr) lady seismologist and geophysicist Inge Lehmann.

All can't be narrated in one night mon ami.

We shall gradually go through this story of iron, planet earth and seismology night after night.

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

Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

August 13, 2016 Saturday



Today papa and I met Inspector Deshmukh, our Investigating Officer.

August 25 is the day set for Sanjay Veera's bail.
   


So my dear mon ami, to explain the physical and chemical properties of silver like its superlative electrical and thermal conductivity, it needed great many brilliant minds to formulate a theory that is so bizarre that at first glance it seems crazier than the God hypothesis.

It was the laws of quantum mechanics that set the electrons in their proper place, quite literally.

The laws of quantum mechanics have assigned energy with each electron configuration and upon certain conditions, electrons can jump from one configuration to other either by emitting or absorbing a quantum of energy.

This quantum of energy comes in packets called photons.

If you see here, quantum mechanics has linked the ethereal, intangible light and solid matter lock, stock and barrel.

Electron configuration and thereby quantum mechanics is the key to the understanding of:

1. Understanding the arrangement of elements in the periodic table which is probably the greatest and the most beautiful table ever made by us apes and...

2. Understanding the chemistry of chemical bonding and thereby all the reactions.

At the very heart of chemistry thus lies quantum mechanics, which is pure and quintessential physics.

I think that as and when we progress and get to know the elements, I will need to keep on coming back to this most remarkable theory and the men who lay its backbone.

I always have a limited time to write since I am not a full time writer but just a wannabe Asimov with less knowledge and even lesser memory.

Hence the deficit in my explanation.

But if it arouses curiosity in you, then my work is done and I can die in sort of peace (mine is an agitated mind and restless body).

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

Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

August 12, 2016 Friday



Bits had a meeting with Inspector Deshmukh

The evil is now forced to submit the conveyance papers of our
building.



Bedtime Story

One important thing I must tell you regarding Bohr.

As a docent at the University of Copenhagen, one of his duties was to teach physics to medical students.

Bohr disliked teaching physics to medical students (which I think reflects on the attitude of medical students to anything to do with physics or mathematics;
Their brains simply shut down).

After the first world war, Bohr campaigned hard to establish an Institute of Theoretical Physics in Denmark.

And by 1921, the institute was open for admissions with Niels Bohr as its director.

Just imagine, just few years in a war torn Europe and post epidemic of Spanish flu, it took just 4 years to establish an institute of theoretical physics!

(Compare this with any third world country of today and it will seem like a miracle!)

Bohr liked the place so much that he actually moved in with his family to live in the first floor of the institute.

This place became the center of pioneering work in the field of quantum mechanics in much of the 1920s and 1930s.

1940s of course would be Apocalypse of Europe thanks to the madness and annihilation of the second world war.

At a remarkably young age of 37 in the year of 1922, Bohr was fortunate  enough to be recognized by winning the Nobel in physics.

This award was in recognition of his Trilogy and his contribution to the emerging field of quantum mechanics.

In the Nobel lecture, Bohr mesmerized the congregation with an exhaustive analysis of the known structure of atom.

Yet, fundamental physics in 1920s and 1930s was undergoing through a revolutionary transformation.

Even Bohr knew that his model worked well for hydrogen but failed to explain the phenomena exhibited by the heavier elements.

In fact, Bohr collaborated with many of the great minds of particle physics specially after his winning the Nobel Prize and founding of his institution of theoretical physics.

We shall leave Bohr now for time being.

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

Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

August 11, 2016 Thursday


Bedtime Story

It was in the year of 1913 at the age of 28, a year after his marriage and return from England that Bohr published 3 landmark papers that famously came to be known as "the trilogy".

In this he applied Max Planck's quantum theory to the Rutherford's nuclear framework.

I hope you understand this was not for fun but to explain the unexplained.

There was still no sensible account for the origin of the spectral lines of elements, specially hydrogen.

(These spectral lines are akin to the fingerprints of human apes).

Before Bohr, planetary models of atoms had been written about.

But Bohr took it a whole new level, pun intended.

Johann Balmer, a Swiss mathematician and a mathematical physicist had derived an empirical formula for the visible spectral lines of the hydrogen atom in 1885.

He in turn had used a formula and a constant that had been derived by the Swedish physicist Johannes Rydberg to predict the wavelengths of photons emitted by electron jumps.

Rydberg in fact had much earlier (late 1800s) anticipated the link between spectral studies and atomic structure.

Rydberg constant R infinity is one of the most accurately measured physical constants in physics.

It can be a topic of a series of summer lectures if one cared to understand it in depth.

I hope you are getting the idea that Bohr had constructed a new model of atom based on lesser studied papers by little known physicists to explain certain features of atoms and elements which the existing model then was not failing to address.

Many older physicists like Thomson, Rayleigh and Hendrick Lorentz did not find the trilogy to their liking.

But the next gen of scientists namely Rutherford, David Hilbert, good old Unca Einstein, Enrico Fermi, Max Born and Arnold Sommerfeld perceived this as a major breakthrough.

By the way, Arnold Sommerfeld is the German theoretical physicist who introduced the 2nd quantum number (azimuthal) and the 4th quantum number (spin) and who too needs to be attended by me in future.

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

Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

August 10, 2016 Wednesday



Today we got the news that Sanjay R. Veera has vacated his
office.

It was an illegal construction in an area meant for car parking.

It seems he got notice from the BMC that it needs to be evacuated
and broken down.

This certainly will not be to the liking of the evil.


Bedtime Story

Niels Bohr went on to do his masters and PhD at the very same Copenhagen University.

Even his doctoral thesis (which in my case was neither original nor worth defending) was groundbreaking.

He concluded that the present electron theory  (until 1911) is unable to explain the magnetic properties of metals nor can it comprehensively account for the Hall effect.

 Hall effect is the production of voltage difference across a conductor transverse to the electric current flowing across it.

It takes some courage to defend a thesis contradicting current science or established knowledge.

In 1911 at the age of 26 with aid of a fellowship, Niels Bohr travelled to the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge, England.

This was the seat of the cutting edge atomic physics where students under the guidance of J. J. Thomson were transforming the understanding of matter and atoms.

Interestingly, he failed to impress the great J. J. Thomson.

He had far better relationships with younger men like William Lawrence Bragg (the son X-ray crystallographer) and Ernest Rutherford.

Bohr did some work under Rutherford where he happened to great personalities:

George de Hevesy (a Hungarian who developed radioactive tracers which helped us apes to understand the cellular chemistry that is the basis of biochemistry)

and

Charles Galton Darwin, the grandson of Charles Darwin but himself a physicist.

He returned to Denmark in 1912 to marry following which he soon became docent (academic rank below that of a full professor) at the University of Copenhagen.

Over there he would attack and modify Rutherford's model of atom who quite ironically in turn had attacked Thomson's model to have had established his.

We shall continue to follow this interesting story.

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

Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

August 9, 2016 Tuesday




Today I managed to dig out the complaint number against the first
attack.

It was in April 2016.

Still don't think the police is competent enough to extract my
complaint from their system.

  



Bedtime Story

You will recall (most likely you will not) how I ended my story on Geiger-Marsden experiment aka Rutherford gold foil experiment.

These series of experiments led to our rethinking from the "plum pudding model" that had been proposed by the great J. J. Thomson.

Instead, atom proved itself to be mostly empty space, with all its positive charge stuffed in the center in a very tiny volume surrounded by a cloud of electrons.

Yet this model was obviously neither perfect nor complete.

If as per the Maxwell's equations these atoms were the source of electromagnetic radiation, then the electron orbiting around the atomic nucleus would loose its energy with each photon emitted and spiral down into the nucleus.

To solve this quandary, would come a Danish boy who was born in 1885 in Copenhagen, Denmark.

His father was a professor of physiology and his mother came from a wealthy and prominent Jewish family of bankers and politicians.

This boy was a passionate footballer, whose brother Harold was both a mathematician and represented Denmark at the 1908 Summer Olympics in London.

The boy himself who we are talking about, Niels Bohr, played several matches for the Copenhagen based Academic Football Club as goalkeeper.

In 1903, at the age of 18, this young goalkeeper enrolled as an undergraduate at the Copenhagen University with his majors as physics.

His brilliance shown when in 1905 the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences organised a gold medal competition to measure the surface tension of liquids by measuring the frequency of oscillation of water jet radius.

This idea was originally proposed by the English physicist Lord Rayleigh who had predicted acoustic waves on the surface of solids.

(Incidentally, he is the sane Rayleigh of Rayleigh scattering that explains the blue sky of our planet).

Bohr conducted his own experiments in his father's laboratory as the university had no physics laboratory (and had just 1 physics professor Christian Christiansen).

He made his own glassware equipments and test tubes with elliptical cross sections.

Bohr went beyond the original competition by working with finite amplitudes instead of infinitesimal ones and also adding modifications to the Rayleigh's theory.

His last minute submission won the gold medal.

We shall continue our story on the idea of electron configuration in the nights to come.

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

Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

August 8, 2016 Monday



BMC Sub-engineer came to meet us today.

Demolition will be further delayed as they have to serve at least 2 notices.

The notices have to be served in person.

After the 2 notices, they will need to stick the notice on the wall.

Sanjay Veera's illegal office in P1 still remains elusive.

That needs generating an additional notice and then the long serving
process.

In between deals will be made and currencies will exchange hands.





Bedtime Story

After gold, not surprisingly, our ancestors soon discovered silver.

It probably happened in Anatolia or Asia Minor, the modern-day Turkey just west of the Fertile Crescent.

Not only was silver discovered shortly after copper and gold, with the atomic number of 47, it lies in group 11 between copper and gold!

 The symbol for silver is At from the Latin argentum which in turn came from the Greek "aryos" meaning shiny or white which in turn originated from Proto-Indo-European (PIE) language root " herg ".

You should not be surprised that just like the way life evolved on our planet, or the way universe evolved from the first moment of singularity, so did the various languages we speak today evolved gradually over time.

Using historical linguistics, the PIE language has been reconstructed which is the common ancestor to the languages as varied as English, Hindi, Russian, Punjabi and 440 more of them.

Silver, among all the metals, exhibits the highest electrical and thermal conductivity along with the highest reflectivity (which we apes have exploited fairly well to our advantages).

The 47 electrons are arranged in the configuration 4d10 5s1, similar to
 copper 3d10 4s1 and   gold 4f14 5d10 6s1.

This unique arrangement with a single electron in the highest s subshell over a filled d subshell explains the peculiar properties of this shiny metal.

But what is this electron configuration?

We did study atoms before but this term seldom came up.

This needs to be investigated.

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

Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

August 7, 2016 Sunday


Bits seems to have achieved some kind of success with the CDR
and IMEI data analysis.

Not sure about the nature of it.

No, nothing uncovered. False Alarm. 

The evil may still go scot-free as there is no strong evidence
linking him to Raja Pallanisami Devendra.

 
Bedtime Story

As a young man, I fell for the just-world hypothesis, hook, line and sinker.

How could I not, for it was so romantic and appealing.

If I had an affluent childhood, good Convent English schooling, great and healthy parents and siblings, it was because somehow I had earned it or deserved it (How I earned it I never gave a thought to it).

But it also implied as a corollary that those who were poor, unfortunate, miserable too deserved it either by their evil deeds or inactivity.

This rosy picture was destroyed as the reality hit me as I grew older and managed to see, observe and study more of the world.

The fact is that people are poor or failures by the law of chance or the hand of the fate.

As Dr. House said:
"You get what you get."

But the world that we live in or have created is a topsy turvy one;
We are now made to believe that poverty is a fair reward for inefficiency.

In this era of privatisation and free markets, the media and the people around us enforce that success is there to have;
One just needs to grasp it.

Advertising enjoins everyone to consume, right from high end electronics to luxury cars.

While the economy prohibits the vast majority from doing so.

This world puts on a banquet for all and then slams the door in the noses of majority.

The world is equalizing in the ideas of lifestyle and habits it imposes yet it is unequal in the opportunities it offers.

Through the mass media the owners of the world like Reliance, Tata, Mercedes and Apple inform us of our obligation to look at ourselves in a single mirror.

Whoever doesn't have, isn't.

He or she who has no luxury car or doesn't wear designer clothes or imported perfume is only pretending to exist.

But we all know the reality.

Whoever is not a prisoner of necessity is a prisoner of fear.

They are deprived of sleep by status anxiety of things they are lacking or a fear of losing the things they possess.

The world at large rewards the "killer instinct", lack of scruples and feeds cannibalism but scorns honesty.

The directive that everybody must do or acquire what so many cannot becomes an invitation to the crime.

And what is true for the individuals is also true for nations as a whole.

Latin America, South Asia and Russia are prime examples.

They are slave economies which masquerades as  modern ones;
They pay African wages, charge European prices and the merchandise produced most efficiently is injustice, corruption and violence.

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

Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

August 6, 2016 Saturday



Our advocate Faiz was comprehensively bowled over with the way
Bits had built up the case against the bail of the evil.

The points were meticulous, precise and proceeded logically.

Each detail was carefully thought over. 

Today it was the turn of our investigating officer (IO).

He needed Bits to do the call data record (CDR) analysis of the 
accused and the evil mastermind.  

For this, the software also uses the International Mobile Station
Equipment Identity (IMEI) which is a specific number for each
devise.

Bits actually learnt how to use this software to do the data analysis.

The IO does not trust his own officers to follow his orders.

And he also suspects that his senior has been bribed.

The distrust that cops have for each other speaks volumes about
our great people.

But there is something to say about our entrance exams.

No wonder Bits scored a rank of 104 in the All India Medical
Entrance Exams in the year of I think 1993 or 1994.



Bedtime Story

It should not surprise us that since our ancestors discovered gold, we have always been deeming it as precious.

8000 years and our lust remains for this lustrous metal.

Ever wondered about the colour of this precious metal which is slightly reddish yellow?

Again we need to revert back to the atomic theory.

It is the density of loosely bound valence electrons that impart the characteristic colour.

How so?

These loose electrons show collective oscillations as a collective "plasma" medium.

In most metals the oscillations lies in the ultraviolet range.

But in gold, due to relativistic effects that affect the orbitals around gold atoms, these oscillations fall in the visible range.

Now just appreciate this point.

To explain the colour of gold, we not only need quantum mechanics (which is difficult enough), but also adding to it the theory of relativity!

Insane right?

One of the most banal application of relativity to the quantum world is the relativistic mass of the electron.

It is given by a very familiar equation which I shall write down.

It was a British woman by the name of Bertha Swirled who in 1935 gave a relativistic treatment to many-electron system.

Since then, most or many of the quantum mechanics equations have undergone relativistic modifications.

In the periodic table, many of the chemical and physical differences between the 6th period (Cs to Rn) and the 5th period (Rb to Xe) arises from the larger relativistic effects in the former.

These effects are specially large when it comes to gold and its neighbours platinum and mercury.

Now u will appreciate that even the most ordinary phenomenon of nature needs profound understanding of physics and eventually mathematics.

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

Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

August 5, 2009 Friday



Rizwan Merchant had not come.

As was told to us by Faiz because of rains.

Swapnil argued briefly for 2 minutes that the case ought to be
transferred to court 29 as the case does not fall under the Crime
Branch.

The senior advocate from the opposite side was also missing.

His junior said that he is in the High Court and will come later for 
the argument against the shifting of the court.

Mercifully Judge Wankhade did not allow and transferred the case
to court 29.  

Swapnil asked for a short date but Judge Wankhade said the 
transfer takes time.

The date has been set for August 25th Thursday.

My IO Inspector Deshmukh also pointed out to the judge that the
case is under Kalachowky jurisdiction.

Inspector Deshmukh was pleased as they will have time to make
the case stronger.

He also gave us a warning that he does not trust his superior to
handle the case in general and the call records in particular.

I think I know whose palms has been greased by the evil who goes
under the guise of Sanjay Ramniklal Veera.  

75,000 eV.

1,50,000 eV lies unused for the next appearance.





Bedtime Story

Now just an example how chance events rule our lives.

Our existence here and now is an outcome of series of chance events spanning a time that we were never evolved to contemplate or grasp.

The Vredefort crater is the most massive impact crater on our planet.

(The second largest being the Sudbury Basin in Ontario, Canada).

It is currently located in South Africa which until 2006 was the world's preeminent gold producer.

The asteroid that formed this gigantic crater (originally of 300 km diameter) is estimated to have been around 20 km in diameter, one of the largest to have struck our home planet.

This happened some 2.023 billion years ago (remember we apes are pretty good in dating stuff on which I have done a bed-time story.

It has something to do with radioactivity, half lives, decay and mathematics).

That age has been labelled as the Paleoproterozoic Era when there was little oxygen in the atmosphere and the life that existed was anaerobic and generally unicellular.

Moreover, in that era, a day had just 20 hours and a year had 450 days.

This was also the era when the shifting continents first "stabilized" and had some semblance to today's geography.

Now under the surface of South Africa lay the Witwatersrand Basin which was created over a period of 260 million years some 3 billion years ago.

Much before the Vredefort impact.

As we very well know, all or rather vast majority of the gold deposit of the earth is locked up in its core (just like a bank vault).

When the massive asteroid struck Vredefort, it distorted the Witwatersrand basin.

The gold-bearing rocks were brought to the erosion surface of Johannesburg thereby making the area that we call South Africa a literal gold mine.

This is just specific example how a random event had increased a nation's wealth only to be exploited and fought over by us greedy apes.

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

Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

August 4, 2016 Thursday


Bail application for Sajan Rajukumar Singh has been rejected.

Father and Bits had again gone to the sessions court today.

He is the 6th accused

He served as a bike driver

Three more are shown as absconding

1. Sanjay Ramniklal Veera

2. Joy the professional criminal

3. Bhushan 



Bedtime Story

The third element (almost like the proverbial third wife) with whom our love affair begun was gold.

The oldest gold treasure dating back to 4600 B.C. has been found at Varna Necropolis not far from Lake Varna in Bulgaria.

Our ancestors left this gold at the burial sites of the dead ones hoping they would be of use in the afterlife.

But alas there is nothing called afterlife or life hereafter. 

Just one life.

Just one chance in a roulette of atomic arrangement.

Gold has an atomic number of 79 and lies somewhere in the center of the periodic table in group 11.

It is one of those heavy elements that were formed in supernova nucleosynthesis and in the neutron stars colliding against each other.

Neutron star by the way, is the collapsed core of a large star (large being 10 to 30 times as our sun which is as an average star as I am a chimpanzee).

Gold was present in the dust from which our solar system had formed.

Our planet earth was all sloshy and molten when it had formed, and gold being heavy, had sunk to the bottom of the planet, meaning the planetary core.

All the gold that we apes play around with today have been extracted from the crust or mantle of the earth.

How so?

The asteroids!

Their incessant impact during the Late Heavy Bombardment (LHB or lunar cataclysm) period 4.1 to 3.8 billion years ago churned the earth like the plough does to soil.

This was a period when the planets had formed and accreted (by gravity, the reason for our existence) most of their masses and earliest unicellular replicating life had just evolved.

We shall continue this interesting journey of the gold formation that is so dear to us.

Just for this reason alone stay tuned to the voice of an average storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.in/

Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

August 3, 2016 Wednesday




Today was the bail hearing of another co-accused Sajan.

Sajan Rajukumar Singh.

The hearing was short.

I cannot thank Bits enough for the support he is showing to me.

I would be all at sea without his guidance.

Mercifully enough, today my insurance company reimbursed my
entire medical expense that I had to bear at the Nanavati Hospital.

I had submitted my claim papers on July 16, 2016.

In astonishing 17 days!


     

Now what is the idea behind this so called magic numbers when it comes to the nuclei of elements.

Well...
Experimentally when in the labs people like you tried to knock of either a proton or neutron, a lot of energy was needed.

I mean...
Say you wish to knock if an electron orbiting around the nucleus of Hydrogen atom.

You would need a photon whose energy would amount to some electronvolts or eV (1.6 x 10^-19J).

In fact this is the principle behind the photoelectric effect and the dawn of quantum mechanics.

But if you wanted to knock off a proton or a neutron from the nucleus of any atom, you would need lots of energy.

In the range of millions of ev.

Why?

Because the protons and neutrons are held tightly to each other with a strong nuclear force.

It is a powerfully attractive force at the extremely short distances of femtometers (I am sure all ophthalmologists are very familiar with the term femto)
1 femtometer or fm =
1.0 X 10^-15 meters.

This strong nuclear force can be also seen as binding energy per nucleon.

The people who love blasting away at atomic nuclei discovered much to their surprise that elements with certain atomic numbers are very stable.

Meaning they have far more average binding energy per nucleon (or a stronger nuclear force) than one would expect and hence they are more stable against nuclear decay (like beta decay or fission etc.).

These numbers turned out to be
2, 8, 20, 28, 50, 82 and 126 (notice all are even).

The magical numbers!

Lead if you recall has an atomic number of 82 and is incredibly stable inspite being so heavy.

Theoretically it can undergo alpha decay to isotopes of mercury (atomic number 80) with release of energy;
but it would take over 10^100 years.

Why these atomic numbers result in nuclear stability lead to a whole novel interpretation of atomic nucleus structure.

That is a topic for another night.

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Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.