The highly improbable fact of being alive

Forget everything.  Clear your mind.

And then read the following:

A rocket powered by kerosene and liquid oxygen and carrying a scientific observatory blasted off into space at 10:49 p.m., March 6, 2009 (by local calendars and clocks). The launch came from the third planet out from a G-type star, 25,000 light-years from the center of a galaxy called the Milky Way, itself located on the outskirts of the Virgo Cluster of galaxies. On the night of the launch, the sky was clear, with no precipitation or wind, and the temperature was 292 degrees by the absolute temperature scale. Local intelligent life forms cheered the launch. Shortly before the blastoff, the government agency responsible for spacecraft, named the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, wrote in the global network of computers: “We are looking at a gorgeous night to launch the Kepler observatory on the first-ever mission dedicated to finding planets like ours outside the solar system.”

Usually, a scientist doesn't write like that.  But, Alan Lightman is no ordinary scientist.  He is one of the few alive who is a master in science and literature.  An established physicist, he has also authored six novels among other writings.  Like in the essay that I refer to in this blog post from more than 5 years ago, Lightman weaves science and the humanities so well that even those of us who barely know any science or literature can easily follow along.

When people glibly tell kids that they can be whatever they want to be, I can't but help wonder if any kid can become an expert in both science and literature.  Can any kid be whatever they want to be?  Seriously?

But, I digress.

In that paragraph, which is how this essay begins, Lightman imagines that the "account might have been written by an intelligent life form located on exactly the kind of distant planet that Kepler would soon begin to search for."

Is there life outside our own planet?  We do not have proof.  But, the probability is high that we are not the only life forms, and not the only intelligent ones either.  "With 100 billion stars just in our galaxy alone, and so many other galaxies out there, it is highly probable that there are many, many other solar systems with life" if something like 10% of stars have a habitable planet in orbit."

So, on one hand, it might seem like life in the universe is not rare.  But, Lightman makes us think in another manner, which I find fascinating:

I have estimated that the fraction of all matter in the universe in living form is roughly one-billionth of one-billionth. Here’s a way to visualize such a tiny fraction. If the Gobi Desert represents all of the matter flung across the cosmos, living matter is a single grain of sand on that desert. How should we think about this extreme rarity of life?

How should we think about this extreme rarity?

[If] we can manage to get outside of our usual thinking, if we can rise to a truly mind-bending view of the cosmos, there’s another way to think of existence. In our extraordinarily entitled position of being not only living matter but conscious matter, we are the cosmic “observers.” We are uniquely aware of ourselves and the cosmos around us. We can watch and record. We are the only mechanism by which the universe can comment on itself. All the rest, all those other grains of sand on the desert, are dumb, lifeless matter.

I wish I could require students to read this essay and comment on it as a requirement for successfully completing liberal education.  I wish!

This constant life

Way back in school, when we learnt about atoms and molecules, I had a tough time imagining that there were atoms inside me.

Atoms? Electrons?  Inside us?  For my punny mind, it gave me new meanings to be shocked ;)

When in biology we learnt about cells, it was difficult to imagine the red blood corpuscles with iron atoms.  Education and learning are perhaps also about stretching one's imaginations.  It is easy to walk around with a limited view of the world, but is a challenge to expand that view.

One of the many baffling ideas that we were presented was the Avogadro Constant.  Here's a refresher:

The number 6.02 x 10²³ is also called Avogadro’s number. Amedeo Avogadro was an Italian physicist. In 1811, he proposed that equal volumes of any gas at the same temperature and pressure contain the same number of atoms (or molecules). The number is named after him to honor his work.

One of the fundamental constants.  What would the universe be if any of these constants were even slightly different in magnitude?

I lack the imagination to think of such an alternate universe. 

Interestingly, a similar one was in the qualifying exam for doctoral students in engineering; at least, that is what I was told back when I was a graduate student.  They were asked to explain at least one effect if the mass of an electron were a value other than what it is.  All I could think was, hey, everything will change.  I lacked the imagination to explain.

Why this scientific autoethnography?

Thanks to Avogadro, "On Oct. 23, between 6:02 a.m. and 6:02 p.m., chemists celebrate Mole Day."

Get it?  6.02 on 10/23.

Why "mole"?  It is a measure of small amounts.  Here's an example: "One mole of water with all 6.02 x 10²³ molecules of H₂O occupies slightly more than a tablespoon."

Decades have gone by since those Neyveli days when I first learnt about these concepts.  I have forgotten the calculations that we used to do involving moles and grams, and the pleasure in cracking them before others in the class did. 

At this point, it is almost like, "who cares!"

We should.  Because, if it were not 6.02x10²³ you and I will be very different.  Life itself will not be anything as we now experience.  Everything in the universe will be different.

How different?  I don't know; I lack that level of imagination!

The pleasure of finding things out

My news feed informs me that May 11th was Richard Feynman's birth centenary.

In this blog, I have referred to Feynman quite a few times.  The following is a re-post.
****************************************

In the high school biology class, during one of the lab sessions, we transferred our blood drops to a glass slide, and viewed that with a microscope.  Even though the textbook and the biology teacher (was Gladstone his name?) had prepped me for it, I was blown away that the liquid blood was not some simple solution but there was all kinds of things happening there.  There is more than meets the eye, indeed! 

I was reminded of that experience when I read this essay on how discovering the microscopic world led humans into yet another frontier to which humans had never gone before.  Explorations of the micro-biology kind.

When it came to studying the human reproductive system, after reading the textbook with a sense of being a science explorer combined with all the teenage angst and desires, there were certainly plenty of moments when I wondered if the sperm really looked anything at all like the tadpoles in the pond.  I suppose it would have been one crazy biology lab if any classmate had attempted to check that out; thankfully, nobody did, and we believed the textbook instead.

It is that kind of curiosity to constantly peek behind the curtains which has led us to where we are now.

In previous ages, natural philosophers had attributed the causes of processes to invisible, occult forces and emanations — vague and insensible agencies. The new mechanistic philosophers of the 17th century argued that nature worked like a machine, filled with levers, hooks, mills, pins and other familiar devices too small to be seen. As Hooke put it: ‘Those effects of Bodies, which have been commonly attributed to Qualities, and those confess’d to be occult, are perform’d by the small Machines of Nature.’
He never quite found them — what the microscope revealed was more often unintelligible in these terms. But there was no shortage of other marvels.

Yes, marvels. A never ending stream of marvels. 

A typical complaint is that the more we systematically analyze the world around us, the less everything is charming.  That we reduce the wonders of nature to their material components, and then we decipher the components of those components. 

It simply isn't so. 

The fact that such inquiries enabled humans to walk around on the moon has not made the sight of a full moon any less poetic--it has only increased our desire to go check out the moon for ourselves, as much as we pricked our fingers and examined that blood under the microscope.  Critically analyzing a play or a musical performance makes us appreciate the nuances and adds to our enjoyment. 

But then, I am not saying anything new.  The phenomenal polymath physicist, Richard Feynman, articulated it for all of us while talking about the beauty of a flower:

I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it’s not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there’s also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts.

Yes, the marvels we discover adds considerably to appreciating and enjoying this world.  If only people would invest a lot more time and energy to understanding science than we currently do. 

As Feynman noted in this context of a lack of interest in scientific knowledge:

we should teach them wonders and that the purpose of knowledge is to appreciate wonders even more. And that the knowledge is just to put into correct framework the wonder that nature is.

Ah, "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out" ...

From the BBC Interview for Horizon 'The Pleasure of Finding Things Out.
(http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/horizon/broadband/archive/feynman/)
Animated by Fraser Davidson (www.sweetcrude.tv).

What we have here is failure to communicate

Back in high school, it was physics in which I was most interested.  It was that common interest, especially in all things quantum, that brought this guy and me together.

But, as I grew older, the humanity around me interested me even more than physics did.  It became more and more a puzzle to me that it was possible for humans to send a few humans to the moon and bring them back, but were were/are unable to solve basic problems here on earth.  I started traveling a different road.

Turns out that the problems of humanity are not at all easy to solve.  In fact, we are hell bent on making things worse.

It does not mean that my interest in physics has died out either.  Which is why when Brian Greene came to campus, I was not going to miss that opportunity.  Which is why when Scientific American has an essay about quantum communication, well, I had to read it.

I am not going to comment on the physics there.  Because, well, I have no expertise to say anything meaningful.  I am not even sure if I understood the nuances being discussed there.

But, there is something else that I want to comment about.

Consider the following names mentioned in that essay:
Hatim Salih
Jian-Wei Pan
Yuan Cao
Yu-Huai Li
Tae-Gon Noh

Consider this excerpt from that Scientific American essay:

While living in England in 2009, a young man named Hatim Salih read Noh’s paper and asked himself, “Why didn’t I think of that?” He had a degree in electronics but had taught himself quantum physics after reading a few popular books by Roger Penrose and attending seminars in York . A year later Salih returned to his native Sudan, where he marketed solar panels, and a friend invited him to be a visiting researcher at the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia. He did not have a PhD, but with a colleague there and two other theorists at Texas A&M University, he took “the logic of counterfactual communication to its natural conclusion.”
...
Salih then founded a company, called Qubet Research, to monetize the idea.

Take a look at this photograph from that same piece:

Now, consider this photograph:

Photo at the Fifth Solvay Conference, in 1927
Source

If only this current president and his minions understood that 2017 is not 1927.

You are the cosmos. The cosmos is you.

As I read this NY Times op-ed on "our cosmic selves," I was, yet again, reminded of the mahavakyas, especially "तत् त्वम् असि"

Ok, I am getting ahead of the story.

A question that practically everybody on this planet would like to know the answer to is this: where did we, and everything else, come from?  An awesome mystery ever, right?

If you are talented and creative enough, and have enough charisma, you can then offer your own narrative and gain a few followers.  If the numbers keep growing, then you gain notoriety as a cult leader.  If your cult manages to survive for a hundred years, which will mean you are dead by then, that cult becomes a religion based on the narrative that you offered.

I grew up with interesting narratives that had survived over the centuries.  But, after a while, the puranas, which are stories about the gods, didn't deliver any meaning whatsoever.  They just seemed like awesome soap-operas, with complex subplots.  And, yes, most stories had some element of moral instruction too.

Then there was the fascination with prophets, who turned out to be as clueless as I was--but were master manipulators.

Source

The narratives that appealed to me during the final phase of the religiously agnostic life were whatever I could understand of the vedantic approach.  There were no stories here. No prophets. Only ideas.  Thus, there was no trivial discussion like whether Sita was chaste enough after her time away from Rama, or whether Krishna's rasa lila with the gopis were metaphors to illustrate the deeper points about the soul.

The vedantic ideas were abstractions.  It was like doing math. Imaginary numbers--in this context, you, too, will find it interesting that "i" is discussed there!  Anyway, the vedantic stuff is where I came across the mahavakyas.  And I found it interesting that a commentator on these vedantic aspects was Sivananda, who was from grandmother's village, Pattamadai.  His childhood home was only a couple of doors from grandmother's.  How about that!

One of those mahavakyas is  "तत् त्वम् असि": That thou art.  You are that.  The sentence and the philosophy works well even without bringing in any creator into the discussions.

A wonderful philosophical idea that once we strip from ourselves all the identifications that we use to define who we are, well, the self is "that."  In the vedantic philosophy "that" refers to the "brahman."  (Not to be confused with the brahmin.)

In physics, "that" is cosmic dust.

The iron in our blood, the calcium in our bones and the oxygen we breathe are the physical remains — ashes, if you will — of stars that lived and died long ago.

We are all stars ;)

science continues to show just how intimately connected life on Earth is to extraterrestrial processes. In particular, several recent findings have further illuminated the cosmic origins of life’s key ingredients.

You and I are all the same. Whatever our skin colors ;)

Amid the material comforts and the relentless distractions of modern life, the universe at large may appear remote, intangible and irrelevant, especially to those of us who are city dwellers. But the next time you catch a glimpse of the Milky Way in its true glory, from a dark outpost far from city lights, think of those countless stars as nuclear factories and the starless hazy patches as molecular breweries. It is not much of a stretch to imagine the inchoate seeds of life emerging in the distance.

The universe has never seemed "remote, intangible and irrelevant" to me.  Towards the last couple of years of my "Indian" existence, I felt that deep connection to the vast universe via "तत् त्वम् असि".  Now, it is via cosmic dust.  

And, dust to dust it shall be in a few more years.  Before then, there are papers to grade ;)

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

Poem for a cold November night. Cold day too!

Frosty has arrived on the rooftops and on the grass.  Two consecutive mornings of feeling blasted by the cold air when I ventured out to the front porch to get the newspaper.

The car's thermometer display said 27 degrees (not in Celsius!) when I left home yesterday for work.  This morning, it feels that the overnight temperature might have been down to 20 or even the high teens.  Way, way below the normal for this time of the year.  I suppose old man winter is poking his head early through the couple of leaves left on the trees.

It is this cold because it has not rained for a while.  The sky is clear--plenty of sunlight during the day, and moonlight streams in through the windows in the night.  Makes me fondly miss the grey, overcast, and rainy conditions because if we had those rains, the temperature would never dip this low.

Back in India, in high school physics, we learnt about how cloudy nights are warmer.  That was one of the many "theoretical" ideas that made me wonder why we didn't have more local, contextual examples to work with.  I recall another situation too, which was also about heat.  In that word problem, a guy orders coffee for himself and his friend, who is expected to join him in five minutes.  He adds cream to his cup of coffee, while the friend's coffee is black.  The question asked us to think about which cup would be the warmer of the two when the friend arrives after five minutes.

I had no problems working out the physics of cooling.  But, I could not understand why they made coffee that way--after all, I was only used to the traditional பில்ட்டர் காபி, which is something like the latte we drink here.  Perhaps it was me and my limited imagination, but back then I thought the whole coffee by itself was pretty darn stupid.  Even more confusing was the "cream" part; what the heck was that!

All because the book used examples from a cultural context that was alien to me.  Alien then.  Not strange anymore.  Now, I routinely drink black coffee, and buy cream or milk only if I have to take care of a visiting friend.

Back as a kid, "the weather outside is freezing" was also nothing but a theoretical understanding.  Now, I experience it, a lot more than I would like to.  It is almost as if I came here to this part of the world to do the practicals, as we referred to the lab work then, in order to understand the theory.

I scanned the web for poems that would tell the story of a cold night in November. I lucked out; here is one:

November Night
by Adelaide Crapsey
Listen. . .
With faint dry sound,
Like steps of passing ghosts,
The leaves, frost-crisp'd, break from the trees
And fall.

Higgs-Boson. Frankly, my dear, I don't get it!

As much as I was a physics nut through high school, slowly I drifted away from that field.  All the brouhaha from CERN has, yet again, reminded me of that old love.  I suppose intellectual love affairs are more difficult to get over than the love affairs we usually refer to!

In the news coverage of the CERN event, we got to see, or read about, Higgs getting emotional at the event and wiping his tear drops away.  It is way beyond my imagination as to how exhilarating his love affair with physics would be.

In the few minutes before the idiot box, I didn't notice a single newscaster even remotely comment anything about the second part of the Higgs Boson.   Yes, I refer to the boson.

Perhaps boson has stayed in my head forever because I am from India?  The connection is this: "boson" is named after the mathematical scientist, S.N. Bose.  Bose's life story is like the mother of all "I don't get no respect" stories.

Despite Bose's huge contribution to science, the only lasting legacy is the SN Bose National Centre for Basic Science that was established by an Act of Parliament in 1986. Though honoured with the Padma Vibhushan in 1954 and appointed National Professor in 1959, the scientist failed to grab the imagination like Swamiji, Gurudev, Subhas Bose or even Sourav Ganguly. Known to worship its heroes, the city let down one of its most brilliant sons.

Not even to the level of Sourav Ganguly!

Tagore dedicated his only book on science Visva-Parichay to Bose. "What's remarkable about Bose is that he was a self-taught scholar with a wide range of interests - physics, mathematics, chemistry, biology, mineralogy, philosophy, arts, literature and music. He did his best to promote science among the people by translating scientific papers into Bengali. Bose's contribution to the world was as much as the more celebrated heroes of Bengal," said Satyaki Bhattacharya, yet another scientist at SINP who has been associated with CERN.

So, why the neglect?

C N R Rao, who heads the scientific advisory council to the PM, says Bose had been historically ignored, both in India and abroad. "Maybe because he was so outspoken. I remember a function addressed by Jawaharlal Nehru, where Bose disagreed with a point Nehru made," says Rao. Bose would have been more popular had he lived in the US, he says. 

I can easily imagine that Bose would have made it big time had he lived in the US, and perhaps become the only Bose that Americans would have heard of, making this guy's life a tad less golden!  As for the "god particle" itself, the intellectual aspects of it are way, way over my head.  I agree with Robert Wright:

I personally continue to have no idea what the Higgs boson is. And I think the physicists who 'understand' what it is can do so only because they don't have the layperson's compulsion to think about the world in ways that are ultimately metaphorical. Or, at least, these physicists have dropped the idea that to truly understand something is to have a crystal-clear metaphor in your mind, a metaphor that doesn't break down at any point and doesn't contain internal contradictions. For them, apprehending a purely mathematical description of something is tantamount to comprehending it.
For the rest of us, I suspect, the Higgs belongs in the same category as various other parts of modern physics: It is yet more evidence that the human mind, to the extent that it was designed by natural selection to truly comprehend anything at all, was designed to comprehend the macroscopic world, not the microscopic world. 

The "odd man" out is .... a woman?

Of course, there were pioneers who blazed trails that eventually made possible the recent data that a majority of doctorates in America were earned by women. 

In the sciences, however, there is still quite some lag.  All the more impressive then when we look back at the accomplishments of Marie Curie, who is the "odd woman" in this photo, which is one heck of a collection of brain power!

The caption at the source notes:

The 1927 Solvay conference on particle physics: back row, third from right, Werner Heisenberg, sixth from right, Erwin Schrödinger; middle row, from right, Niels Bohr, Max Born, Louis de Broglie and centre, Paul Dirac. Front row, second from left, Max Planck, next to him, Marie Curie, then Hendrik Lorentz and Albert Einstein. Of the 29 pictured, 18 won Nobel prizes, Curie in both physics and chemistry

I wonder how much more advanced our collective understanding of this universe will be if women hadn't been systematically held back all over the planet.  Now, if only we can get more young girls interested in math and science before they fall victims to social pressures!

Fox News invents a new physics to debunk climate change

The good news is that I get only limited cable, which means I do not get any of the 24x7 news channels, nor the cartoon channels like Fox News.

The bad news is that as a news junkie, I watch Jon Stewart and Colbert who watch, digest, and spit out the best moments from the (un)Fair and (un)Balanced network.

When even the folks at Scientific American begin to write about Faux News, well, we are in very deep shit thanks to Fox Noose:

On the August 6 edition of Fox and Friends Saturday, the hosts interviewed Joe Bastardi​—whom they introduced as “chief meteorologist at WeatherBell”—on global warming.

Before introducing Bastardi the hosts said that the global warming debate was heating up “after a new NASA study seems to debunk whether it’s actually manmade.” No further details were provided. Instead, as evidence the hosts provided the results of a poll. But presumably the Fox presenters were referring to a study that has created a lot of controversy and media hype.

The most jarring part however came later, when Bastardi commented that he didn’t believe CO2 emissions could ever affect the climate. Unfortunately, Bastardi’s argument was based on what seemed to be poor understanding of basic physics, including thermodynamics and atmospheric physics.

Hey, if the "lamestream" physics doesn't work, then invent your own, Folks News:

Bastardi claimed that the idea of manmade global warming is incompatible with the laws of physics.

“[Saying that CO2 could affect the climate] contradicts what we call the first law of thermodynamics: energy can never be created nor destroyed,” Bastardi said. “So, to look for an input of energy into the atmosphere you have to come from a foreign source.” His prepared remarks were accompanied by screens that seemed to display an intent from the TV show to be pedagogical.

The first law of thermodynamics does indeed guarantee conservation of energy. And the CO2 injected into the atmosphere does not carry energy with it—or rather, it does, because matter always carries energy, but not in a way that would raise temperatures significantly, if at all. But no one has ever claimed that CO2 would raise temperature by itself. Putting it this way is a grotesque distortion of what climatologists say.

What climate science says is not that CO2 carries energy into the atmosphere or somehow magically generates it out of nowhere. Instead, it says that CO2 and other gases acts as a blanket, keeping heat from escaping into space. This, as Bastardi should know, is called the greenhouse effect.

All in a day's work!

Richard Feynman, I hardly knew ye :(

I could not have started my day any better, it feels like.

Freeman Dyson, whose essays in the NYRB are always ones I look forward to, has a wonderful piece on Richard Feynman, while reviewing two biographies of that phenomenal thinker as a person (ht).  Dyson, a gifted and  accomplished polymath himself, writes that perhaps "Richard Feynman is rising to the status of superstar" among the worldwide masses of non-physicists, similar to the standing that Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking have.

I loved Dyson's summary of Feynman's picture of the classical and quantum layers of nature.  It is amazing how these gifted folks are able to narrate complex scientific ideas to those of us whose intellectual abilities are way, way down the ladder.  Dyson writes:

Feynman’s picture of the world starts from the idea that the world has two layers, a classical layer and a quantum layer. Classical means that things are ordinary. Quantum means that things are weird. We live in the classical layer. All the things that we can see and touch and measure, such as bricks and people and energies, are classical. We see them with classical devices such as eyes and cameras, and we measure them with classical instruments such as thermometers and clocks. The pictures that Feynman invented to describe the world are classical pictures of objects moving in the classical layer. Each picture represents a possible history of the classical layer. But the real world of atoms and particles is not classical. Atoms and particles appear in Feynman’s pictures as classical objects, but they actually obey quite different laws. They obey the quantum laws that Feynman showed us how to describe by using his pictures. The world of atoms belongs to the quantum layer, which we cannot touch directly.
The primary difference between the classical layer and the quantum layer is that the classical layer deals with facts and the quantum layer deals with probabilities. In situations where classical laws are valid, we can predict the future by observing the past. In situations where quantum laws are valid, we can observe the past but we cannot predict the future. In the quantum layer, events are unpredictable. The Feynman pictures only allow us to calculate the probabilities that various alternative futures may happen.
The quantum layer is related to the classical layer in two ways. First, the state of the quantum layer is what is called “a sum-over-histories,” that is, a combination of every possible history of the classical layer leading up to that state. Each possible classical history is given a quantum amplitude. The quantum amplitude, otherwise known as a wave function, is a number defining the contribution of that classical history to that quantum state. Second, the quantum amplitude is obtained from the picture of that classical history by following a simple set of rules. The rules are pictorial, translating the picture directly into a number. The difficult part of the calculation is to add up the sum-over-histories correctly. The great achievement of Feynman was to show that this sum-over-histories view of the quantum world reproduces all the known results of quantum theory, and allows an exact description of quantum processes in situations where earlier versions of quantum theory had broken down.

It was neat to read this especially because a couple of weeks ago I read the interview with Leonard Susskind, whose string theory ideas attempted to provide a unified theory of physics and nature.  Too bad that Scientific American has this behind a subscriber wall!

Dyson's essay comes at a time when we are marking another important milestone in science and technology that also, in a way, introduced Feynman in a big way to the American public and the world--his work with the committee that inquired into the causes for the space shuttle Challenger to explode moments after liftoff.  Here we are having witnessed the final launch of the spaceshuttle, and after Atllantis returns, the space shuttle program will end.  Feynman's simple demonstration of the failure of the "O-ring" when exposed to icy conditions is legendary.  Dyson writes that Feynman was critical of the political culture at NASA that vastly overestimated the safety and success of the spaceshuttle.

The second opportunity to educate the public concerned the culture of NASA. Feynman wrote an account of the cultural situation as he saw it, with the fatal division of the NASA administration into two noncommunicating cultures, engineers and managers. The political dogma of the managers, declaring risks to be a thousand times smaller than the technical facts would indicate, was the cultural cause of the disaster. The political dogma arose from a long history of public statements by political leaders that the Shuttle was safe and reliable. Feynman ended his account with the famous declaration: “For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”

A profound statement that "nature cannot be fooled."  It is not merely about physics, of course.

I was a first year graduate student at USC when Feynman died.  Shift the time-line a tad, I would have had enjoyed a talk of his at Caltech. But then time flows only in one direction and "nature cannot be fooled."

Confessing another long-running love affair!

As the NASA space shuttle program comes to an end, I realize that it is the end of an affair for me; yet another affair that goes back to my teenage years in a far, far away Neyveli.

One of the high school subjects that fascinated me the most was physics.  To such an extent that once when I had a nagging question about what happens to the speed of light as it gets refracted when it travels through different media, and when my high school teacher couldn't provide me with a satisfying answer, I decided to write to a physics professor at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) at Madras.

It was those prehistoric days before the internet.  All I knew was that there was a professor named "Ram Shastri" that another physics teacher, who had moved on to a different town, had mentioned at some point.  So, I addressed that letter to Professor Ram Shastri at IIT-Madras, and detailed my question to him.

It would be a terrible understatement to say that I was ecstatic when I got a reply from a Professor Shastri, whom I had never met.  I was blown away that a professor at that level would care to respond to a student like me.  I wish I had saved that letter!

So, yes, physics fascinated me. Physics was also the opening to understanding the cosmos.  It was such a profound love for the subject that solidified my friendship with a classmate, Srikumar.  He was as much a physics nut as I was.  Though, I suppose, to him physics and philosophy went together a lot more than the physics and math combination that worked for me.

It was through Srikumar that I came to understand NASA's space shuttle program.  The miniscule resources at out local library had next to nothing on this, which meant that we had to rely on newspaper and radio reports.  I think Srikumar wrote to NASA, or perhaps it was to the US embassy in India, asking for informational materials about the space shuttle, and I recall him getting quite a bit of glossy printed materials.

One can imagine, therefore, the thrill I had following the news about the successful launch of Space Shuttle Columbia, which was about the time we were having our school leaving final exams.  It was also because of such an intense personal connection that I was devastated when Columbia did not make a successful reentry back in 2003. 

Such a teenage love doesn't die, of course, and these are the kind of affairs I hope to carry to my very end, which, for all I know, is simply round the corner :)

More on the darkening space, Pongal, and gods in India

Since the earlier post, I have been thinking a lot about physics--a love for the subject that goes all the way back to high school days.  And, about the wonderfully gifted popularizer of science and physics: Carl Sagan.  Of course, growing up in India, and without television, meant that I had no idea about Sagan; I hadn't even completed high school when PBS began airing Cosmos here in the US.  It was much later in life, as a graduate student, that I started reading/watching Sagan.  (One of my greatest regrets was that I missed out on an opportunity to go to a Richard Feynman lecture at Caltech, during my first semester in this country, and a year later he died!!!)

Anyway, thinking more about how lonely we humans are in this universe, which is rapidly expanding, made me go back to Carl Sagan's Cosmos.  What a coincidence it was that I should watch it now, as in during this time of January--"Pongal" that Sagan talks about in this video was two days ago, and I watched this video on "Maattu Pongal"!  Of course, Sagan butchers the pronunciation, but that is ok :)

It is shame that even a series like Cosmos has not been able to rid the creationists who make a caricature of American scientific enterprise.  The pursuit of science and truth is being ridiculed on a daily basis, when it really ought to be the other way around.  This ought to worry us a lot as a metric of the decline of America :(

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 ....

God, universe, and Stephen Hawking

More on Hawking's observations on how we came about ...

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 ...

Homophobia caused Queen's demise in the US ...

I wondered earlier on why there wasn't as much an interest for, and excitement in, Queen here in the US.  My only hypothesis was that somehow the life and lifestyle of the singer--Freddie Mercury--was not received well, particularly during the virulent anti-gay days of the 1970s and 1980s, which was when Queen was soaring high.

I wonder no more.

Unfortunately that was the case.  And this was from the metaphorical horse's mouth--from Brian May, make it Dr. Brian May, who was the co-founder of the group and their lead guitarist.

May was a guest in Terry Gross' "Fresh Air", and her question to him was about the rather incongruity between most of the band's fans who in those years were not quite supportive of homosexuals.  May suggested that even though the world was aware of Mercury being gay, it was something like an unspoken topic amongst his fans.  He put it so well:

"I think it was an undiscussed thing for a long time. The truth of the matter is nobody should care. Why should anyone care what sexual persuasion people have? It's about the music, and Freddie would have been the first to say that. He never hid the fact that he was turned on by men instead of by women, but strange enough, I don't think it was always the case. Because in the early days, we used to share rooms. So in the early days, I know who Freddie slept with, and they weren't men, but I think it gradually changed. And I have no idea how these things work, but it wasn't really anybody's business but his, and we never talked about it as if it were important. Why should it be important? We just made music together."

May went on to say that in the US, it was indeed the gay aspect that resulted in the group touring in America much less than they liked :(  That they were the biggest group everywhere in the world, playing to packed stadiums, except here in the States.

In particular, he referred to the video they made for "I want to break free".

In the video, which is easy to make out that it is a spoof at various levels, the Queen's players dress up as women.  May said that in the promo tour interview in the Midwest, the ashen-faces of the people when they watched the video made it all clear ...

Anyway, apparently after Wayne's World made Bohemian Rhapsody and Queen famous all over again, by when Mercury was already quite ill, Mercury's comment was that he would probably be dead before they got big in America again.  It all makes sense, now, as to why his death did not register as a huge event here in America :(

Brian May is quite a Renaissance Man.  The way he explained the physics of the acoustics of their music making to the physics of inter-stellar dust .... he came across as a wonderful lecturer too.  Dr. May is now the Chancellor of Liverpool John Moores University.

This is research at MIT? :)

Can the Euro LHC top this scientific achievement reported by America's finest news source?

Poem for the day: from the world of science

So, there I was watching a program on Newtonian physics and the intellectual inquiries that kept accelerating since his time, and about 20 minutes was about electromagnetism and Maxwell.  It was fantastic. 
I suppose when I was younger I was way too keen on solving the assigned problems (which I did, really well too!!! ahem!!!) and didn't have the patience, nor the right kind of teacher, for understanding the profound importance of the ideas and the history of those scientific achievements.

Everyday life now owes a lot to Maxwell and his contributions to physics.  That was not quite news to me.  But, what was news was how much he was more than just an awesome physicist--he was multidimensional, as most extraordinary people seem to be ... And the story of how this casual poem, which I have copied/pasted here is way too cool ...

It was an exciting time of the first ever trans-Atlantic cable.  Samuel Morse comes up with the single-line telegraph and Morse Code, and the world begins to shrink, so to say.  The next logical thing then was to link up Europe to the emerging economic powerhouse--the US.  But, this required undersea cabling.  Quite a technological challenge for the day, I would imagine.
Maxwell's friend--a fellow Scot as well--Thompson (later, Lord Kelvin) was the technical guy behind it, but apparently the company did not follow his instructions.  So, a failed first attempt--as the ship moved along unreeling the cable, it snapped somewhere under the sea!  Of course, the next time they followed the instructions and everything worked.

So, here is Maxwell writing a poem about this ... Now, writing verses was apparently not any unfamiliar territory for him, as this collection in an 1882 work notes
And, a quick note on the "2(u)" ... for the sake of efficiency in communication (!) Maxwell used "2(u)" to denote "Under the sea, under the sea"

THE SONG OF THE ATLANTIC TELEGRAPH COMPANY
I.
2(u)
Mark how the telegraph motions to me,
2(u)
Signals are coming along,
With a wag, wag, wag;
The telegraph needle is vibrating free,
And every vibration is telling to me
How they drag, drag, drag,
The telegraph cable along,

II.
2(u)
No little signals are coming to me
2(u)
Something has surely gone wrong,
And it’s broke, broke, broke;
What is the cause of it does not transpire,
But something has broken the telegraph wire
With a stroke, stroke, stroke,
Or else they’ve been pulling too strong.

III.
2(u)
Fishes are whispering. What can it be,
2(u)
So many hundred miles long?
For it’s strange, strange, strange,
How they could spin out such durable stuff,
Lying all wiry, elastic, and tough,
Without change, change, change,
In the salt water so strong.

IV.
2(u)
There let us leave it for fishes to see;
2(u)
They’ll see lots of cables ere long,
For we’ll twine, twine, twine,
And spin a new cable, and try it again,
And settle our bargains of cotton and grain,
With a line, line, line,—
A line that will never go wrong.

Source

Image of the day: Maxwell's equations

Explanations here

I know what you are thinking: where can I buy this shirt?  I don't know :)

update: a helpful reader (sadly, anonymous) has left a comment on where this t-shirt can be purchased.  Hey, thanks, whoever you are ....