Searching for water on the moon!

By the time I came along, humans walking on the moon had already become a part of school textbooks.  During my teenage years, it was all about the space shuttle.  I recall telling my grandmother that it might just about be possible that, well into my years, I will be able to travel to outer space and come back to earth.  She didn't care for that though!

There was the science and technology aspect that I was fascinated with, yes.  But, I was also troubled by the deprivation and injustice that was all around.  The rebellious teenager ended up not caring about science and technology, and became increasingly worried about the misplaced priorities of a society that was not addressing the fundamental and basic needs of people.

I continue to worry about the misplaced priorities.  More than five years ago, I blogged about the colossal waste that results.  In my post, and in most of my complaints about India's awful resource allocation decisions, my question has always been along the lines of why the fundamental issues--like toilets--don't get the priority they deserve.

Or, consider water.  Chennai, a "city of nearly 10 million — India's sixth largest — has almost run out of water."

Without water we are doomed.

Piped water has run dry in Chennai, the capital of the southern state of Tamil Nadu, and 21 other Indian cities are also facing the specter of “Day Zero,” when municipal water sources are unable to meet demand.
...
Middle- and upper-middle-class people in Chennai are paying twice as much as before the crisis for water from tankers, and they can afford to drill new wells twice as deep as would have been needed 15 years ago. “We are on war footing,” one of my cousins, who lives there, remarked. As with most environmental crises, the poor are affected disproportionately.

As always, it is the poor who suffer the most.

Yet, it is the same old democratic ways of resource allocation--the government of India is getting ready to launch yet another spacecraft to the moon.  Like the previous one, this mission will also search for, among other things, water.  What a tragic irony!

The US, too, is no exception to this rule.  In the context of the 50th anniversary of the first ever human footprints on the lunar surface, think about the US in the 1960s when JFK launched this mission.  Life in the US was brutal for anyone who was not white.  By the time NASA was getting ready for the launching of the Apollo 11 rockets, MLK had been assassinated.  There was injustice all around.  Yet, the government was not investing resources in order to address the injustice.  We were a lot more enthusiastic about spending gazillions to go to the moon.

Which is why there was a protest.  A symbolic one.  But, a protest nonetheless:

They must have been a sight: around 150 Americans, mostly black mothers and their children, walking with two mule-drawn wagons through light mist and rolling thunder. Led by Ralph Abernathy, the caravan arrived at the John F. Kennedy Space Center in advance of the Apollo 11 launch. Unlike many thousands more, however, they hadn’t come in celebration and awe. They came to protest.

The reasons were real.  The protesters were no snowflakes!

The contrast was dramatic: mules and rockets, rambling wagons and a vast sky to be conquered. The S.C.L.C. argued that one-fifth of the American population lived in poverty, without adequate food, shelter and health care, and therefore it was indecent for the nation to spend billions on the dream of spaceflight. Abernathy said, “I am here to demonstrate with poor people in a symbolic way against the tragic and inexcusable gulf that exists between America’s technological abilities and our social injustices.” 

"They exposed the essential tension at the root of the nation."

America’s ambition persistently stopped short of the equality creed, and yet it seemed to always demand a self-effacing patriotism from even the most vulnerable, including the poor folks who marched with Abernathy on Cape Kennedy.

Back in India, the injustices seems insurmountable.  A couple of months ago, during my winter visit with the family, I met a vocal activist.  I asked him how he keeps going. "I am a rabid optimist," he replied.

In writing about the water crisis in Chennai, he writes:

Our dominant economic model, with its blind faith in technology, is doomed.
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Chennai's struggles with water - be it flooding or scarcity - cannot be addressed unless the city re-examines its values, and how it treats its land and water. 

Injustices cannot be addressed without examining the values behind our collective decision-making.

Yes, celebrate the anniversary of a phenomenal human achievement of going to the moon and returning.  But, let's also pay attention to the injustices all around us.  As MLK noted, “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."

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."

Wars and the economy. Guns v. butter

Variations on the theme of guns v. butter ... would you rather spend gazillion dollars on the military, or ...

Yes, the horrible guns v. butter reality ...
Not to be confused with Guns N Roses :)

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 :)