The crazy orgies in Hollywood!

The Scientific American has an interesting short opinion piece on why there will never be another Einstein.

Before I give away the author's response, or before you go read it, what response do you have to that question?  

Do you think there will be another Einstein-like genius?  

There can never be one again?  

We have plenty even now?

I liked quite a bit of what what the author had to say there.  But, I had a nagging thought as I read that piece.  I was, therefore, happy that the author took care of my concern via an addendum, where he quotes the string theory guy Brian Greene:

 “If one means another über genius who will powerfully push science forward, then the answer is surely yes. In the past half a century since Einstein’s death, there have indeed been such scientists. But if one means an über genius to whom the world will look not because of accomplishments in sports or entertainment but as a thrilling example of what the human mind can accomplish, well, that question speaks to us—to what we as a civilization will deem precious.”

Brian Greene being a sharp guy himself, well, he has carefully constructed those sentences with a bunch of clauses.  If you are like me, then re-reading Greene's response helps to figure out what Greene is saying there.  If that too fails, the author interprets it with simple words:

Note Greene's implication: If science doesn't produce another Einstein, it's nonscientists' fault.

I agree with Greene.  Unlike in Einstein's time, we people are now obsessed with "accomplishments in sports or entertainment" and those accomplishments have become measures of what humans can achieve.  We have golfing geniuses and cricket geniuses who seem to have satisfied our appetite for the next Einstein!

Chances are pretty high that kids and adults here can rattle of names of ball players or singers or actors and be stumped when it comes to naming scientists.  As a society, we do not seem to care about science and scientific accomplishments anymore.  On the other hand, we keenly follow with utmost fascination the work and personal lives of the superstars in golf, cricket, soccer, Hollywood, Bollywood, Nashville, ... the list is endless, it seems.   In India, cricket players and movie actors are even worshiped as gods!

Brian Greene is the one with the dark sweater and with his hands folded
I took this photo ... in 2004, I think

A few years ago, Brian Greene visited our campus.  Hardly a handful of students showed up to listen to him and to ask him questions.  I am sure it would have been a standing-room-only situation if the university had instead brought to campus even a third-tier entertainment personality.  "we as a civilization" have apparently decided that entertainers are immensely precious to us.

I doubt whether even an Einstein can be an Einstein in this contemporary world!

So, why the strange title for this post? Sex and Hollywood sell, baby, not science!

I became a time traveler when I read about Einstein's "Time Dilation"

The mortal that I am, I have worries in plenty.  It is difficult to put into practice the wonderful words of wisdom from the old country of centuries past:

शोकस्थानसहस्राणि दुःखस्थानशतानि च ।
दिवसे दिवसे मूढमाविशन्ति न पण्डितम् ॥

- महाभारत, अरण्य

Everyday there are thousand reasons to feel sad, hundred reasons to worry.
Such things only bother fools; not wise men.

Mahabharata, Aranya

Source

A fool I am!  Let us see when I become wise ;)

When I decided that I needed a distraction from what seemed like a growing mountain of worries, oddly enough it was not poetry that I turned to.  It was not music that I played.  Instead, I moused over to the Scientific American website.  I suppose there is always that old math and science nerd in me!

Even more interesting was this: Scientific American did not let me down.

Experiments at a particle accelerator have confirmed the "time dilation" effect predicted by Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity

What a wonderful distraction to read about this!

The nerd was curious now.  At least two clocks will be needed to compare the slowing down, which means the question was simple: where was that second clock?

 the researchers used the Experimental Storage Ring, where high-speed particles are stored and studied at the GSI Helmholtz Centre for heavy-ion research in Darmstadt, Germany.
The scientists made the moving clock by accelerating lithium ions to one-third the speed of light. Then they measured a set of transitions within the lithium as electrons hopped between various energy levels. The frequency of the transitions served as the ‘ticking’ of the clock. Transitions within lithium ions that were not moving served as the stationary clock.
The researchers measured the time-dilation effect more precisely than in any previous study, including one published in 2007 by the same research group. “It’s nearly five times better than our old result, and 50 to 100 times better than any other method used by other people to measure relativistic time dilation,” says co-author Gerald Gwinner, a physicist at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada.

I have no idea what these people are talking about anymore.  The frequency of transitions serving as the ticking of a clock?  WTF!

But, that didn't stop me.  As an old Sanskrit couplet noted, the mind is the fastest mode of transport ever, and before I knew it, the mind had moved away from the website and was back in the old country.  I was a student talking and arguing physics with my old friend.

The worries are there, yes.  But, pleasant memories do help.

To live a life is, I suppose, to create enough pleasant memories that can sustain us through.  The third act of the drama of life is all that remains to create memories, and to overcome worries--which will only increase, I imagine.  I wonder what the future holds--if only the mind could travel into the future too!

Source

If it is Thursday, it must be science for lunch?

My science craving was a bit too uncontrollable today.  I had no choice but to feed that damn thing.  And, my, what awesome science food I had today!

A regular feature at the Scientific American, of answering science questions, had three awesome questions with wonderful explanations.  It was difficult for me to pick one from the three; if I am really, really, forced to, I would choose this question:

Let's say I'm an alien on a ship 65 million or more light-years away. Using a telescope, I look at Earth and I see dinosaurs living their daily lives. If my ship started travelling towards earth near the speed of light. Would I see the dinosaurs moving faster--fast-forwarded?

Of course, such a question wouldn't matter to those crazy creationists in any religion, who believe that there is nothing called 65 million years ago.  But, for the rest of us, this is one fascinating question.  Yes, an old one--a variation of the old one that Einstein talked about and the one that we were introduced to in high school.  But, I never get tired with any of the variations.  I am always, always, impressed that old man Einstein was so awesome!

So, what is the answer?  Don't be lazy; check it out :)

And then there was another.

It was not a topic I would have guessed would be at the Scientific American.

It was about the great financial collapse. About those complex derivatives and subprime loans and other mumbo-jumbos.

With a catchy title: The Real, and Simple, Equation That Killed Wall Street

What the ... what?  A simple equation that contributed to the Great Recession?

Really?  This equation?

The equation, though simple, reveals one dangerous truth that investors love to exploit.

Really? How?

It is the equation for a leveraged return, L:

Y is the return of the asset, R is the cost to borrow money, and N is the “haircut,” or the percentage of money the investor must put down to secure the loan (the down payment).
A simple example. An investor wants to buy a bond returning 7% using borrowed money. The bank requires them to pay 20% in cash with the remaining 80% lent at a rate of 5%. What is the leveraged return?

So after borrowing, a 7% return is turned into 15%.  Kaboom!

Kaboom, indeed!

Of course, there is a lot more to it; read it and weep!

Science matters, folks. Science!

From the frying pan in one part of the world ... to the freezer at the other side!

Mentally getting ready to head out from 95+ degree high to 50+ degree high. .... Hoping to see daffodils and tulips, even though the weather news indicates that it ain't spring yet :(

It is difficult to dismiss such freakish unusual weather systems as unrelated to global climate changes.  Back in Nagercoil, a common remark that I heard from from taxi cab drivers to relatives was that the rainfall patterns have changed and that increasingly they feel the unbearable heat of April even at the end of February and early March.  A friend in Central Europe remarked about the lack of the usual snow this time around.  A Chennaite quoted her sister who feels that they practically had no snow this time around in New Jersey.

Oh well, perhaps some day soon the climate change skeptics will begin to see the world for what it is.  And, at the same time, we will also invest wisely to prepare for a future that, if the trends continue, will be very different from what we experience now or experienced a couple of decades ago.

Ultimately, it all depends on our fellow-humans.  As Einstein noted,

How strange is the lot of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he senses it. But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people -- first of all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness is wholly dependent, and then for the many, unknown to us, to whose destinies we are bound by the ties of sympathy. A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving.

Quote of the day: on stupids and geniuses

Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid

 So said Einstein.

The attributes of an intellectual scholar? Really?

Am not so sure about this old saying:

अत्यंतमतिमेधावी त्रयाणां एकमश्नुते ।
अल्पायुर्वा दरिद्रो वा ह्यनपत्यो न संशयः ॥

A very highly intellectual scholar will have at least one of the below three misfortunes - short life, or poverty, or childless.
Fate some how ensures that his wisdom is not carried forward to future generations.

Source

I suppose we could posit that wisdom is not something that is necessarily genetically carried forward. After all, if that were to be the case, then the world would have been flooded by Da Vincis and Einsteins, instead of blokes like me!

Without wisdom being passed down genetically, well, Hollywood has already covered that scenario--Idiocracy :)

Alone in a darkening space

when future astronomers look to the sky, they will no longer witness the past. The past will have drifted beyond the cliffs of space. Observations will reveal nothing but an endless stretch of inky black stillness

Why so?  Because the universe is expanding at faster and faster rates, writes Brian Greene:

A hundred billion years from now, any galaxy that’s not resident in our neighborhood will have been swept away by swelling space for so long that it will be racing from us at faster than the speed of light. (Although nothing can move through space faster than the speed of light, there’s no limit on how fast space itself can expand.)
Light emitted by such galaxies will therefore fight a losing battle to traverse the rapidly widening gulf that separates us. The light will never reach Earth and so the galaxies will slip permanently beyond our capacity to see, regardless of how powerful our telescopes may become.

Greene, who came to our campus a few years ago, presents a very depressing situation; well, depressing to me:

If astronomers in the far future have records handed down from our era, attesting to an expanding cosmos filled with galaxies, they will face a peculiar choice: Should they believe “primitive” knowledge that speaks of a cosmos very much at odds with what anyone has seen for billions and billions of years? Or should they focus on their own observations and valiantly seek explanations for an island universe containing a small cluster of galaxies floating within an unchanging sea of darkness — a conception of the cosmos that we know definitively to be wrong?
And what if future astronomers have no such records, perhaps because on their planet scientific acumen developed long after the deep night sky faded to black? For them, the notion of an expanding universe teeming with galaxies would be a wholly theoretical construct, bereft of empirical evidence.

Hmmm ....

The one and only science celebrity: Einstein

I remember being absolutely impressed--as a curious elementary school student--when we learnt in geometry about π ... The Pythagoras Theorem was also really neat. 
It felt magical that I could not do anything to alter them. They determined the fate of geometry, and we had to simply obey them. Awesome.

But, all those dwarfed when in the "modern physics" part of physics we studied about mass and energy, and Einstein's equation.
It looked so simple.
So simple.
I mean, just ridiculously simple a formula.
And that simple formula meant that not only academic physics, but the world outside of the academic walls also would never be the same.  It was an equation that shook the world. A big bang of its own.  I was blown away.
It also helped that my best friend in high school was a physics nut himself. (Ironically, neither he nor I are anywhere near physics in our respective professions now!)

Even years--30 years--later, I am as blown away as I was the first time.

Over the years, I have also come to appreciate how much the name Einstein is recognized all over. People know Shakespeare even if they have never read any of his works. It is the same with Einstein too.  And, of course, his face with his hair as a halo perhaps one of the most recognized faces, I would assume.

I would imagine that people went to see him even if they cared not for physics or relativity.  I wonder if people walked up to him to get his autograph, or to take photos with him. 

And, he pre-dates Cher and Madonna as a one-name celebrity. Absolutely cool!

Too bad there is nobody like that today ... oh well ...

Cartoon of the day: the war in Afghanistan

Colbert talks about Einstein and relativity

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