World war C

This is war. Full on. No government might mention or accept it, but we are now at war. Against an enemy we can’t see or hear.  We are at war with the Coronavirus. And therefore, at each other.

You see, the only way the virus could have spread this far out into the world was my human-to-human contact. And governments world over have now started to advice social-distancing. Things have now come down to this, we now have to avoid each other ! Governments in Italy ,China, Spain have announced full lockdowns, restricting its people from even venturing out, whether they are infected or not. And other countries are following suit.

Australia, too panic-stricken to lead by example, is yet to call a nation-wide absolute lockdown. Worried more about its economy, which was already sliding before the pandemic, they only banned flights from China, and advised people to follow minimum protocols. Now with 290 confirmed cases and 3 deaths, there is a little more seriousness in the way their approach to the war. A few weeks back, the idiots down under lit up Australian national monuments in red and yellow, to show solidarity & remember the sacrifice of China; but it was more of a PR effort to retain the good relations with that country. It took the Aussies an additional week to announce the full ban against travellers from Italy, and the damage is now visible. The country had barely recovered from the disastrous bush fires, right into this pandemic. The fight for toilet paper is still on.

Things aren’t looking any better for India, who’s leaders took all their sweet time to draft and finalize a proper response. Kerala was the first Indian state to report an infection, but also the first to announce a fool-proof action plan to isolate and treat the patient. This was last month, showing exceptional knowledge & leadership in the matter. The rest of India at the time asked questions as to why is it always Kerala that is the epicenter of new, viral diseases, and religious bigots blamed the food habits and breakage of temple rituals for the initial spread. But now no-one is questioning the lack of leadership from the central government, now that there are 100 cases and 2 deaths.  Sanghis are resorting to drinking cow-urine and bathing in cow-dung to prevent an infection, becoming the laughing stock of the rest of the world.

And it is ironic that Italy and Iran , countries known to be too open and too closed to the outside world, are equally affected by COVID infections.

But no country was un-prepared for this pandemic than, wait for it….the US. The leader of the free world was caught with its pants down with s serious outbreak, when the nation was itself busy in the initial stages of its presidential election. The whitehouse, again more worried about the falling stock markets, continued to pelt lies and false propaganda, and struggled to lead a country which does not even have universal health care. The gaps in its preparedness and leadership is now as clear as night and day, with 45 deaths right in the state of Washington. If nothing else, this alone should be enough to wipe the country of its real infection, the virus sitting in the oval office, and hopefully, its citizens would vote for the democratic party, just to receive a generous medical insurance cover.

Scientists and leaders are shocked at the un-precented rapid spread of the viral pandemic, around the world, in just 3 months. At this moment, there are over 169,000 confirmed COVID cases, and 6,500 deaths. You could chart and sort the data however you want, but the fact remains that the world was too busy fighting oil wars and trade and tariff wars with each other, and no body had a plan or a prediction for a viral outbreak. Hollywood is good at making movies about viral epidemics, but for once, a horror movie is coming to life. In the initial days, virologists were trying to figure out the original source of this aberration, blaming bats, snakes and pangolins for being the host. But everyone has forgotten that branch of thought, the current host right now are human beings. The more we embrace and thank each other, the more we are passing on the virus.

This incident will change the world. Later generations, hopefully there are a few, will talk, discuss and study how grossly unprepared the world was. They will study how false news and hype caused more damage than the actual infection. And how leaders were focussed on economy and money, and were hesitant to focus on their greatest wealth and asset – human beings. Hopefully, we will emerge from this unscathed, with a fraction of the world population lost, but with lessons learnt from the mistakes we made.

This maybe the next big war we fight, as one. So please stay together in spirit, but ironically, remember to maintain your distance.

Viral of the bad kind.

There’s something in the air. And its not just love. Something viral. And its not any video, or much shared selfie. Nor is it any of those maths question which divides the internet .Pun unintended. And its also not a picture which fools the eyes.

In that last decade or so, the word ‘viral’ has gone on to take a meaning of entirely its own. People encourage it, creators tried to come up with new ‘viral’ content. So it feels strangely awkward, when the word returns to its true meaning in the common tongue. A new strain of deadly virus strain has emanated out of China, and has now travelled to 24 countries, including India and Australia. The number of people affected, cured and of those who have succumbed to the strain varies depending on which news agency one tunes to. But the general trend is that all three numbers are increasing. Yes, many have been cured, but then ten times more are affected by the next wave.

The new strain has now been named the 2019 Novel Corona virus. But after more than 2 months of the initial infection been reported, little is known about it more than this name. And the fact that ground zero is in China has not helped at all. All the news and reports coming out of China has always been heavily censored. The outside world does not get latest updates. And the attack of fake-news has entered into exactly this vacuum. False, unverified and hoax news about the disease now spreads faster than the strain itself. Along with the 1500 people who already succumbed, the strain affects global economy and supply chain networks due to misinformed fears. Countries and companies are refusing to trade with China; many countries have already placed blockades on flights originating from China. Travellers are warned, and are looked upon with suspicion.

And various places are reporting a growing behaviour of racism towards people from China. Some of the strain related news claimed that the original hosts of the virus were bats, or snakes, or pangolins. People in China are known to trade and eat these kind of game animals. Most of those affected in the first viral wave where workers in Wuhan’s meat market. It is now proven that the virus can spread through human contact, and it does not show symptoms for the first 14 days. This has resulted in people in other countries just avoiding places frequented by Asians, and the people themselves.

This is unprecedented. And all this is fuelled by the simple fact that all of mankind’s medical science have yet failed to identify the source of this strain, and the best ways to prevent its spread and it sure-footed cure.

The common consensus is that it will take he world’s scientists more months to properly identify and create the cure. A possible vaccine. Hopefully, mankind will come together and annihilate this freak of nature. Like how we fought SARS , and nipah. Because otherwise, the future looks bleak for us. Medical science needs to continue to grow and co-operate to fight these strains. 

Because if there is one thing this new virus has proven yet again, it is that we as a species, is more connected than ever before.

PS: Source of the virus or not, IMHO, people should just stop eating bats.

Heartbeats on the moon

What wonderful times we live in. Around the world, media houses are covering the 50th anniversary of America's mankind's moon landing, and all sorts of wonderful articles are being published, detailing otherwise un-heard of stories and anecdotes of that historic week. One such article is regarding how mission control at Houston tracked and observed the hearbeats and life stats of the three men onboard. Fascinating read  !

Also, the journal of the entire mission is online, in public domain, for anyone to peruse and research forever. They are sometimes too technical, but are sprinkled with jokes and light ribbing between the crew and Mission Control, even in the midst of stressful moments.

Armstrong later said he wasn’t worried about the fuel. They were close enough then that if the engine cut off, the moon’s gentle gravity, one-sixth that of Earth’s, would let them coast safely down. But the descent must have been some adrenaline rush to push the lunar commander’s heart rate to 150. Armstrong’s pulse began to climb after he turned off the autopilot and took the controls in his gloved grip. The fate of the mission was, quite literally, in his hands. Tens of thousands of engineers had helped get him here, but this last bit was up to him. That kind of responsibility would quicken anyone’s pulse.

Best museum visit ever !

Today I learnt a lot. Because today, I went to the museum. I felt like a kid again, and boy, was it fun. This would be my best museum trip ever. I visited the Melbourne Museum in Carlton, just because I had a day off and didn't kmow what else to do. A day well spent.

First off, I have always had dual relationships with museums. The name is supposed to spark curiosity, and fun, and questions. But the museums in India are so poorly done, the only question it invokes is "Why is this place still open ?". They don't have that many speciemens, due to …well, lack of funding. They focus on near history, our recent past only, and no address what we know in the long term. And they also don't bother about the future. They put up paintings and sculptures on their walls, but they don't spark curiosity.

But I have had better museum visits outside India. The natural history museum in Helsinki had dinosaurs. The one in Austria focussed on European flaura and fauna. Also..Vikings ! These guys really know their stuff. So I had high hopes when I walked into the largest museum in the southern hemisphere , in Melbourne.

The dinosaur walk was front and center. And they talked at length on the earth, meteorites, and a little too much about crystals and stones. Nothing fancy about that. One or two collections would have been enough. But upstairs, they talked about evolution, and the principle minds that worked behind that idea. And a room full of taxidermied animals ! And more bees and butterflies !  Some of Darwin's and Owens' original specimens are also on display, you have to squint to spot them ! The focus was on animals found in Victoria, but they also added a polar bear and a panda. The whole arrangement, lighing, and occasinal sound effects were all perfect.  Just enough information to answer your queries, without a long monotnous speech. Sadly, I missed the marine room.

The outdoor installation of Forest history is very cleverly done. I doubt anybody else would have thought about that. They already had giant trees in the back, and they built underground installations to show the birds and animals of such a forest.

Wonders never cease. They have spent a good portion of their space to talk about Victoria, and Melbourne's own little history. Through detailed research and hundreds of actual historical pieces, they have told a continous story of this city from its colonial past. The original natives of this place is mentioned, and without sugercoating, they have also detailed the cruelty these people had to suffer at the hands of 'white-men'. After the gold rush, and a huge influx of migrants, the city planners really had to work overtime to get back to a planned, livable city.

This is where the history of Melbourne differed from a place like..well, an Indian city. Through planning , and efficient government, they built the most livable city in the world, out of slums and closed mines. They go through both the world wars, and were able to successfully move to modernizatin. There are separate exhibits of objects used in all these various time-capsules. The first electrical appliances, the first cable driven trams, old movies, and radios, and then music and footy..the time travel was instantaneous ! I specially adored the pieces designed for their maritime history, with scale models of wooden clippers, and large luxury liners, even a navy ship. They have these little photo albums placed at various points, with real photos taken by people living in here, in various points of time. Thanks to photography, we can now glimpse how they lived , more than 120 years ago. No question, they put on their best clothes while posing for the cameras !

So, in closing, this is how a museum should be designed. There is no way a place can cover 4 billion years of history in a day. The key is to show snippets, and answer questions that really matter. If you have a spare day, spend it at the museum, you feel like a kid again. You won't be dissappointed.

Seeing a Black hole

These are exciting times ! Scientists have presented the first-ever image of a black hole.

The data for this image was captured in 2017, but ti took the agency 2 years to transport and process the data to generate the image. A network of 8 radio telescopes in different countries , including the south pole, captured information simultaneoulsy, and the data itself was transported on hard drives. The data captured was radiowave imaging, so there was no colour. They chose a bright orange color just to look good.

The image shows the shadow of the black hole at the center of the galaxy M87, a massive galaxy in the Virgo galaxy cluster 55 million light-years away. Its mass is 6.5 billion times that of the Sun. It took a worldwide collaboration of telescopes, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), in order to find it.

This is not really a “picture” of a black hole, and the shadow does not denote the black hole’s event horizon. Instead, you’re seeing the effects of gravity on the radio waves emitted from matter surrounding the black hole in a slightly larger region around the black hole’s event horizon. Gravity warps the shape of spacetime itself, deflecting some of the light in the region and generating an eerie circular shadow.

But it’s a groundbreaking observation, and another important proof of the theory of gravity that physicists use as a guide to the universe, Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

Black holes have long served as a theoretical exercise. But astronomical observations in the past 60 years have increasingly demonstrated that there are objects in the Universe whose gravitational field is so intense that it warps spacetime such that light cannot escape beyond a point of no return, called the event horizon. Thanks to a world-side collaboration, is the closest image ever taken to the event horizon itself, near-direct evidence of the black hole’s existence.

Black holes as a theory are a consequence of trying to solve the equations of Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity for a spherical, non-rotating system. However, it was the work of physicist David Ritz Finkelstein in 1958 that determined what black holes would look like in space: points of no return for light. We already had lots of indirect evidence of black holes’ existence—we’ve seen gravitational waves, predicted perfectly by mass turned into energy after the utterly inconceivable collision between a pair of black holes each a few dozen times the mass of the Sun. We’ve seen jets of particles spew forth from galactic centres that are far more energetic than those that come from collisions at our highest-energy physics experiment, the Large Hadron Collider. Technically, the EHT data is indirect evidence as well, but it’s about as close to direct evidence as we’ve had thus far.

It all started with Einstein. And Hawking.

Happy 140th birthday, Einstein

Albert Einstein was born 140 years ago. Yes. He lived over a century ago. And his ideas continue to inspire and question us today. And will continue to. Probably the most influencial figure in science today.

In 1900, Einstein's paper "Folgerungen aus den Capillaritätserscheinungen" ("Conclusions from the Capillarity Phenomena") was published in the journal Annalen der Physik.On 30 April 1905, Einstein completed his thesis,with Alfred Kleiner, Professor of Experimental Physics, serving as pro-forma advisor. As a result, Einstein was awarded a PhD by the University of Zürich, with his dissertation "A New Determination of Molecular Dimensions".

In that same year, which has been called Einstein's annus mirabilis (miracle year), he published four groundbreaking papers, on the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, special relativity, and the equivalence of mass and energy, which were to bring him to the notice of the academic world, at the age of 26.

Scientists Discover Hidden Asteroid Crater Under a Mile of Greenland Ice

 

Scientists have discovered a colossal impact crater hidden under a mile of ice in northwest Greenland, according to a new study in Science Advances that could have major repercussions for several scientific fields.

This is exactly the kind of news we need, but the mainstream media simply does not cover. I found about this on the radio today morning, none of the print media here or in India mentioned it. The crater was actually first detected in July 2015, but only now have scientists been able to verify the discovery. It’s the first time that a crater of any size has been found under a continental ice sheet. The enormous cavity is bigger than London and ranks among the 25 largest impact craters on Earth.

The crater stretches for 31 kilometers (19 miles) underneath Hiawatha Glacier, and was blasted into existence by a mile-long iron asteroid that unleashed the equivalent of 700 one-megaton nuclear bombs of energy upon impact. It is the first impact crater ever detected under Greenland’s ice cover, and ranks among the top largest 25 impact formations known on Earth.

The discovery has been in the making since 2015, when lead author Kurt Kjær, a geochemist at the University of Copenhagen, noticed a weird depression under the glacier in maps made by NASA’s Operation IceBridge.

As a bonus twist, the discovery may shed light on the heated scientific debate over what catalyzed the Younger Dryas, a period of sudden global cooling in the Northern Hemisphere from 12,800 to 11,700 years ago. A 2007 study suggested that the Younger Dryas could have been set off by an asteroid impact that plunged the hemisphere into ecological disarray and helped wipe out megafauna species like mammoths.

Rebuttals to this idea abounded, and the Hiawatha Glacier crater could end up being totally unrelated to the Younger Dryas. But for now, it’s one of many intriguing questions that Kjær’s team hope to pursue in future research.

“This study suggests several avenues for further research into both the nature and age of the Hiawatha impact crater and other possible subglacial impact craters,” the authors concluded in the study. “In particular, an improved geochronology for this impact event awaits the discovery and analysis of additional samples, from either within the crater itself or the surrounding area.”

 

 

Faith and Reason Are Irreconcilable

 

Faith is a tricky subject. Once people believe deeply in some stories, they are not available for reason any longer. I think its best explained by the scientist of our times.

 

Well, so let me say that differently. All efforts that have been invested by brilliant people of the past have failed at that exercise. They just fail. And so I don’t, the track record is so poor that going forward, I have essentially zero confidence, near zero confidence, that there will be fruitful things to emerge from the effort to reconcile them. So, for example, if you knew nothing about science, and you read, say, the Bible, the Old Testament, which in Genesis, is an account of nature, that’s what that is, and I said to you, give me your description of the natural world based only on this, you would say the world was created in six days, and that stars are just little points of light much lesser than the sun. And that in fact, they can fall out of the sky, right, because that’s what happens during the Revelation.

You know, one of the signs that the second coming, is that the stars will fall out of the sky and land on Earth. To even write that means you don’t know what those things are. You have no concept of what the actual universe is. So everybody who tried to make proclamations about the physical universe based on Bible passages got the wrong answer.

So what happened was, when science discovers things, and you want to stay religious, or you want to continue to believe that the Bible is unerring, what you would do is you would say, “Well, let me go back to the Bible and reinterpret it.” Then you’d say things like, “Oh, well they didn’t really mean that literally. They meant that figuratively.”

So, this whole sort of reinterpretation of the, how figurative the poetic passages of the Bible are came after science showed that this is not how things unfolded. And so the educated religious people are perfectly fine with that. It’s the fundamentalists who want to say that the Bible is the literally, literal truth of God, that and want to see the Bible as a science textbook, who are knocking on the science doors of the schools, trying to put that content in the science room. Enlightened religious people are not behaving that way. So saying that science is cool, we’re good with that, and use the Bible for, to get your spiritual enlightenment and your emotional fulfillment.

 

 

 

 

“God is the name people give to the reason we are here” – Prof Stephen Hawking

 

 

Excited about ‘First Man’

 

I love space. And after that, I love space movies. Apollo 13 is my second favourite movie, right after the dinos. I was always surprised that they made a movie about the  'successful failure' mission, but not the 'successful success' of Apollo 11. Of course, many other movies have touched upon Apollo 11, eg: The Right Stuff, and it is also the subject of numerous documentaries, no one ventured to give the story a full hollywood treatment. My personal guess is that the subject matter is equally political as it was inspiring, given that it occurred during the height of the cold war during the 60s. There is no way a studio could give it a unbiased treatment without declaring it as an American achievement.

So imagine my surprise, when someone did put a foot forward to address and tell the story of this historic moon landing. And that was the most unlikely person one would expect. Damien Chazelle, who has so far made movies in music and dance subjects, is going to take this giant leap. I hope nobody decides to break into dance on the moon, you know, with lower gravity. A few more days wait till it hits the theatre.

But already, the film has ruffled a few feathers. Some american politicians have found problem with how the film does not show the actual scene where the astronauts hoist the american flag on the moon. The creators have addressed the controversy diplomatically, saying the giant leap was for entire mankind, and not just for USA. Its hilarous reading these king of news articles even before the movie has fully released. But not surprising. Because we Indians have been seeing these kind of complaints against movies for decades.

So you see, this is a deeply political subject. Possibly precisely the reason other directors have been reluctant to tell this story on the big screen.

But although that mission was a success, it could very well have gone down in history as a great failure as well. Nobody had ever done it. And on a limited technology and the deadlines of those days, there was a very small chance of success. For all we know, Neil Armstrong and crew were on their very last mission. They could have very well crashed into the moon. Or the Apollo 11 could have been stranded on the moon, if they could not launch back into space. They could have failed to get back into orbit. They could have burnt up on re-entry. There were thousands of tiny reasons why the mission could have ended in a disaster. The pressure of expectations on the team was huge.

And that is why this story is so inspiring. And has to be told. People only the stories of successful expitions, without pausing to look at how narrow their chances were.

So , thats it. Supercharged for the movie. Ready to back in time and (hopefully) re-live mankind's first journey to somewhere else.

 

PS: Also Apollo 11 put the Futura font on the moon. And in space.

Georges Lemaître , a scientist priest.

Georges Lemaître was an astronomer and professor of physics who is thought to be the first to have theorised that the universe is expanding.

His theory was observationally confirmed soon afterwards by Edwin Hubble in what is now known as Hubble’s Law.

Lemaître is also credited with proposing what has now become known as the Big Bang theory – which says that the observable universe began with an explosion of a single particle.

Born on 17 July 1894 in Belgium, he initially began studying civil engineering. His academic pursuits were however put on hold while he served in the Belgian army for the duration of the First World War.

After the war, he studied physics and mathematics and was also ordained as a priest.

In 1923 he became a graduate student at the University of Cambridge before going on to study at Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

In 1925 he returned to Belgium, where he became a part-time lecturer at the Catholic University of Leuven. Two years later, he published his groundbreaking idea of an expanding universe.

His initial idea was not related specifically to the Big Bang, but his later research focused on the concept of the universe starting from a single atom.

In 1933 at the California Institute of Technology, some of the greatest scientists of the time from around the world gathered to hear a series of lectures.

After Lemaître delivered his lecture and theory, Albert Einstein stood up and said: “This is the most beautiful and satisfactory explanation of creation to which I ever listened."

He was elected a member of the Royal Academy of Sciences and Arts of Belgium and the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

In 1951, Pope Pius XII claimed that Lemaître's theory provided a scientific validation for Catholicism – a claim that Lemaître resented, as he stated his theory was neutral.

He died in 1966, shortly after he discovered the existence of cosmic microwave background radiation, which added weight to his theory on the birth of the universe.

Reading the Martian, and book experiments

 

I’ve been travelling in Sydney trains for a few months now. I spend about 40 mins travelling one way, so its more than an hour of commute each day. Though the distances covered is larger than those I covered in Bangalore in the same time, or any Indian city, I would venture. And good thing about my commute, there are always seats ! Even during the rush hour, you could find seats to slid into. So I figured the best way to spend time on these commutes would be to listen to podcasts, or just read a plain old book when the batteries die down.

I’ve been also running a crazy experiment of sorts. After I finish reading a book, I leave it on the seat. There. Abandoned. For the next commuter on that seat. You see, the building I live in has a library of abandoned books. Books which their owners throw out when its too much cargo when they move out. So its a free library ! I’ve read and left about four books on the trains so far. Just finished reading Andy Weir’s The Martian. This novel was turned into the hit 2015 movie by Ridley Scott. The movie was Ridley’s best work in this decade, in between all those Alien duds.

I could see why the book was a hit, its a story of survival in the harshest conditions. Its a fight against nature, and the cosmos itself. Its a story of the whole earth uniting to save one man stranded on a distant planet. But I also could not see why the book was such a hit. Its nerdy. Its full of long jargon, longer, meticulus calculations, and technological exposition. Engineers and scientists would love this kind of thing, but anybody else would find it..hmm…boring. Repititive.

I didn’t !

I loved it. Most of it. But then even I got bored of all those calculations, error variance, and best estimates. There is a lot more of the story happening in the book, which got cut out of the movie. And that was good, because there is no way a 2 hour movie could capture this much techno-babble.

We all know what happened to the stranded fictional astronaut Mark Watney. He is eventually rescured after 500 days alone on planet Mars. But the book goes into great detail to explain all the problems he and the NASA team faced along the way. There is a journal entry for most of the 561 sols he spend on the planet. There are other subplots not discussed in the movie.

Like the incident during the drilling of the second rover’s rood. Mark accidently shorts out the electronics on the pathfinder, and loses his ability to communicate with earth.  This is not shown in the movie. But in the book, Mark has no choice but communicate one way using stones arranged in morse code on the route he follows across Mars.

Or when the rover tumbles into the crater.

But I still had questions, which I hoped would be answere in the books, but was left disspointed.

For starters, Mark is extermely optimistic. Like, he is the most optimistic literary character I have read till date. He beats Robinson Crusoe hands down. Its unnatural , the guy simply does not give up. He does talk to himself a lot, but he voices his optimism clearly. I wanted to know the why he was so. Wanted to know about his childhood, his college days. Was he in the forces ? Does he belive in a god ? What pulls him to earth ? Was it his family ? Speaking of family, neither the book nor the movie tries to shed light, what kind of family did he grow up in ? Does he have siblings ? A girlfriend ? His best friend ?

Another question, this is more of a tease. The story mentions that Mark travels more than 3oo days travelling across Mars in rovers. He was carrying all the equipment to keep him alive, but he was not carryin a porta-toilet or something. So, where did he poop ? How ? And how did he cook the food he brought along ?

But what I find most astonishing is the passage of time. 500 days is almost 2 years. He spends a lof of that time travelling, and completing all sorts of tasks. Its easy to say 100 days of travel. But Mars has a barren crust, its the same shade of red everywhere. 100 days of travelling through it is not at all easy, with no one to talk to, and having to be alert all the time. At some point, one will at least think of giving it all up. But not Mark.

Anyway, despite all of this, the book is still a good read. The epilogue in the movie is missing in the book. It ends with Mark’s rescue from the planet. Science, technology, humany ingenuity and persistence, this is what the story is about.

Now that I finished reading it, I am going to leave it on the train tomorrow. For someone else to enjoy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Professor Hawking continues to radiate

 

Yesterday was Pi day, and also the birthday of Einstein. So I was expecting to read all those nerdy articles they usually come up with. But later in the day, the devastating news of the demise of Prof Stephen Hawking upset us all. Very few scientists have attained the kind of cult status with Professor Hawking had attained. His persistent scientific approach, his zest for life was a inspiration to many.

But thinking of him now, I am reminded of my own childhood friend, who passed away years ago. His name was Krishnadev, and it was him who had introduced me to Hawking and his Hawking radiation. Way back in school days, physics was my favourite subject. Our school textbooks did not have the time to dedicate entire chapters to subjects like stars and universes, which honestly cannot be covered in a million chapters. The school course at that time, and I think even till this day, was backward in comparison to contemporary scientific knowledge. The 10th grade physice text book did mention black holes, but made no mention of Hawking radiation. It was ‘out of syllabus’. But there was a genius in our class who was always ten steps ahead of the class teacher. C Krishnadev, who would later end up in IIT Chennai, was the brightest mind I personally knew, and a kind hearted and good friend. He told me about this fantastic book called ‘A Brief History of Time’, which was available in our school library. And how that one book had more knowledge than all of the world’s religious books combined. I expected it to be a comic or science fiction of some sort, it was not. But it turned out to be so much more entertaining and fun than anything I had read at that time. I was surprised that none of that was in our ‘prescribed’ course syllabus at that time.

Anyway, thats when I started hero worshipping Prof Hawking. I have also downloaded and tried to read his doctoral Thesis , ‘Properties of Expanding Universes’, but frankly, I have now forgotten the little high school physics I had. The 1966 doctoral thesis by the world’s most recognisable scientist is the most requested item in Apollo with the catalogue record alone attracting hundreds of views per month. In just the past few months, the University has received hundreds of requests from readers wishing to download Professor Hawking’s thesis in full.  Not everyone can truly understand this work, his best selling book is a much more concise and simplfied read.

Up until that point, I had expected Hawking to be just that, a highly capable scientist, whos genius cannot be gauged by the common man. But later I was surprised when I saw this popularity continuing to rise, and the pop culture emerging around him. He showed no signs of resting. He gave more talks and appearances, he appeared on TV in the news as well as in TV shows. He was featured in cartoons and sketches. He even sang for Monty Python !

Along with Prof Tyson,  and Prof Brian Cox, he became one of our generation’s rockstar astrophysicist. Suddenly, science was cool !

Religion was an early attempt to answer the questions we all ask, why are we here ? Where did we come from ? Nowadays, science provides better and more consistent answers, but people will always cling to religion because it gives comfort. And they do not trust or understand science.  - Prof Stephen Hawking

And that is the truth about science, it has always been cool. As the generation of religous, superstitious and doomsday obsessed pessimists wither away, a new generation of young scientists will come in, to carry on the good work done by generations of past scientists. We may not understand the mysteries of our universe today, but mankind as a whole, will be able to do that at some point in future.  And scientists like Prof Hawking will continue to inspire them. A different kind of Hawking radiation, so to speak.

 

 

He did his part. It is upto us now.

Happy Birthday, Sir Charles Darwin

 

Today is Charles Darwin's 209th birthday. Next year, 2010. Amazing ! The man was clearly ahead of his time. He is actually head of our time. Because two centuries later, there are still people who are not convinced by his ideas. They want to teach and learn evolution as simply a theory. Its a case of reverse Darwinism, survival of the dumbest.

I was expecting a few science articles , and a Google doodle in his honor today. But the current winter Olympics currently underway in South Korea has hijacked the media attention. More for political reasons than sporting. History’s most famous biologist will have to wait, maybe one more year.  He is celebrated as one the greatest British scientists who ever lived, but in his time his radical theories brought him into conflict with members of the Church of England. But right now, he is facing criticism from Indian politicians, of all places. 

But scientists, true scientists, are not giving up. The February 12 to 18 'Darwin Week' is being organised by The India March for Science Organising Committee and the Breakthrough Science Society. To this day the theory of evolution by natural selection is accepted by the scientific community as the best evidence-based explanation for the diversity and complexity of life on Earth. The human race has, by and large, embraced Darwin’s postulate and we have had no reason to question its soundness. No rebel has come forward with an equivalent of the laughable Flat Earth Society to refute Darwin’s views. Even at the most basic level of thinking, monkeys look like us (more or less), and pretty much behave like us, and are only handicapped by not being biped like us, and not gifted with the power of speech — thank goodness !

Something else I came across recently. Darwin documented his findings on the HMS Beagle journey in his notebooks. He was astounded by the colors of these forms of life in the Galapagos islands. But two hundred years ago, he did not have the simple smartphone or even a portable camera to capture a form. All he could do was write, and so he described the colors of the creatures and plants meticulously in his books. During the voyage he drew many of his words from a slim volume called “Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours,” published in 1814 by the Scottish artist Patrick Syme.

“I had been struck by the beautiful colour of the sea when seen through the chinks of a straw hat,” Charles Darwin wrote, in late March, 1832, as H.M.S. Beagle threaded its way through the Abrolhos Shoals, off the Brazilian coast. The water, he wrote, was “Indigo with a little Azure blue,” while the sky above was “Berlin with [a] little Ultra marine.”

Read about how a little known book served as the basis of color description in Darwin’s notes.

Other trivia: There is a place here in Australia, named after Charles Darwin. I plan on visiting it some day. The city was named Darwin by an explorer who had travelled with Darwin on the HMS Beagle. And heres another. Abraham Lincoln was born on this exact same day and year, in 1809. Two different pioneers in such vastly different fields, born on the same day in history.

The reason we can’t see evolution at work is because our human lives take up only the tiniest fraction on the scale of cosmic time We are but one iteration in billions of years of evolution.

That gives us a point to contemplate: wether we believe in god or science we are fortunate to be alive and self aware.

Our comfort is ruining the planet

 

We keep reading about how humans are slowly destroying the planet. We also keep reading about how a few try to do some good and negate the effect. Turns out, the amount of bad greatly outnumbers the good being done. The more we try to live comfortably on earth, the more we ruin the planet. There are now so many of us on Earth that the planet just doesn't have enough resources for us all to live comfortably, which means we require a radical rethink of how we could start living within our means.

A new study by researchers at University of Leeds looked at 151 nations and found not a single one was running itself in a sustainable way – ensuring a decent life for its inhabitants without taking more than it gives back in terms of natural resources. Even the most developed countries are using up natural resources at rates unheard of before, to maintain their high standard of living. While the other countries score far worse on both scales. As can be seen in this graph, the sweet spot quadrant, the top left, is wide empty.

The researchers used 11 different indicators to measure the quality of life in a country: life satisfaction, healthy life expectancy, nutrition, sanitation, income, access to energy, education, social support, democratic quality, equality, and employment.

That was then measured against 7 biophysical indicators, including the ones we've already mentioned, along with material footprint, nitrogen use, and blue water use. Each country's allotted share of these resources was based on its global population.

No country performed well on both scales. In general, the more social thresholds a country achieves, the more planetary boundaries it exceeds, and vice versa.

Although wealthy nations like the US and UK satisfy the basic needs of their citizens, they do so at a level of resource use that is far beyond what is globally sustainable. In contrast, countries that are using resources at a sustainable level, such as Sri Lanka, fail to meet the basic needs of their people.

Among the countries doing the best job are Vietnam, with 6 social thresholds achieved and only 1 biophysical boundary transgressed, and Germany, which hits all 11 social thresholds but has exceeded 5 of the 7 biophysical boundaries.

So thats the future for us, we are slowly eating into the planet. Developing nations, like India, languishing in the bottom, follow the blueprint set forth already by developed nations, with neither the funds or the inclination for alternatives. Almost everything we do, from having dinner to surfing the internet, uses resources in some way, but the connections between resource use and human well-being are not always visible to us.

The universe moves on , like clockwork

 

The much hyped celestial event, the super blue blood moon, occurred precisely at the time astronomers predicted. The moon was cutoff a little, then glowed an eerie orangish-red. It was weird watching it personally, this is only the first time in my life I have seen this kind of a lunar eclipse. And perhaps the last time too.

It was nice reading about the enthusiasm with which people looked forward to viewing this spectacle, inspite of superstitions around the world.Of course there are superstitious idiots in even the most advanced of places. And last year there was a similar hype for the solar eclipse. Today we understand the movement of the stars with precision, imagine what the earliest humans would have thought when they saw the moon turn red. In ancient Amazon , they would have sacrificed a few dudes to the event. Or some 'homam's and 'puja's would be conducted with large amounts of ghee burn for nothing. We need a scientific approach to universal phenomenon. Questions need to be asked, and answered. Even after all the data, nobody could predict who would win the  2016 election accurately. But eclipses can. We seem to understand more about our universe than about our own minds.

And it is events like these which remind me that despite all the chaos on earth, the universe moves on without unchallenged. Its as if nobody up there cares about the stupid things we do down here. And rightly so. Events like these re-reinforce my belief in science, nature; and the truth that ultimately ,we humans are powerless against the forces of nature.

Reminds of that great quote by Carl Sagan.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

Wow , thats disappointing

The 40-Year Old Mystery of the "Wow!" Signal Was Just Solved. Background: In 1977, the sound of extraterrestrials was heard by human ears for the first time — or so people at the time thought. The Wow! Signal was detected by astronomer Jerry Ehman using Ohio State University’s Big Ear radio telescope. It is a radio signal detector that, at the time, was pointed at a group of stars called Chi Sagittarii in the constellation Sagittarius.

When scanning the skies around the stars, Ehman captured a 72 second burst of radio waves: He circled the reading and wrote “Wow!: next to it, hence the signal’s name. Over the last 40 years, the signal has been cited as evidence that we are not alone in the galaxy. Experts and laypeople alike believed that, finally, we had evidence of alien life.

For a very long time , this was the strongest candidate we had as proof of extraterrestrial intelligence. It could not be explained any other way. However, Professor Antonio Paris, of St Petersburg College, has now discovered the explanation: A pair of comets. The work was published in the Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences.

These comets, known as  266P/Christensen and 335P/Gibbs, have clouds of hydrogen gas millions of kilometers in diameter surrounding them. The Wow! Signal was detected at 1420MHz, which is the radio frequency hydrogen naturally emits. Notably, the team has verified that the comets were within the vicinity at the time, and they report that the radio signals from 266/P Christensen matched those from the Wow! signal.

Pluto Is Still A Planet….

 

…in New Mexico !

As far as most of the world is concerned, poor Pluto got downgraded from planet to dwarf planet (or planetoid) back in 2006 when the International Astronomical Union revised their definition of what constitutes a planet. For the curious, Pluto was downgraded because it lacks enough gravitational pull to distinguish itself from other dwarf planets in similar nearby orbits.

Whatever the reason was for the change in Pluto’s classification, New Mexico’s House of Representatives was having none of it. For you see, the man who discovered Pluto back in the 1930s, Clyde Tombaugh, was a long-time resident and a former professor of astronomy at New Mexico State University. Regardless of what the international astronomy community had to say about the matter, the people of New Mexico had a very strong opinion about the matter. Kandilley, karimeen puttaakee ?

In 2007, the House of Representatives passed a resolution declaring that March 13, 2007 would be observed as Pluto Planet Day and that whenever Pluto is in such a position that it can be observed in New Mexico’s night skies it is, in fact, still a full-fledged planet.

Bonus Trivia: Because Clyde Tombaugh was born in Illinois, the Illinois State Senate passed a resolution in 2009 that asserted Pluto was “unfairly downgraded to a dwarf planet” by the IAU.

Carl Sagan’s greatest contribution

 

 

John Glenn: 1921 - 2016

 

 

The Primary Function Of Water Towers Is…..to pump Water !

 

I didn’t know this. All these years I used to look up at water towers and say “Why did they have to build them that tall ?” Here in India, water towers are used primarily as…landmarks ! The Koramangala water tank is well known, then there is the Sankey water tank. But today I learned that the reason of building the water reservoir on a tower is to let gravity act on it, and the water pressure thus created will let the water rise up into higher floors in buildings. Look at the diagram:

At first glance, it would be easy to assume that water towers exist to store water. They are, after all, giant above ground vessels filled with anywhere from tens of thousands to millions of gallons of water.

But whether you’re talking about a modest little water tower perched atop an apartment building in New York City or a giant municipal water tower, water storage is not the primary function of the tower (if water storage was the only goal, it would be significantly cheaper to build a reservoir). The primary function of water towers is to pressurize water for distribution. Elevating the water high above the pipes that distribute it throughout the surrounding building or community ensures that hydrostatic pressure, driven by gravity, forces the water down and through the system.

The design helps keep the cost of water distribution lower for two reasons. First, it allows for centralization of pumping and pressurization, and decreases the number of pumping stations needed in the vicinity of the water tower. Second, it allows the water company to pump water up to the tower during off-peak energy times to decrease the expense of running the pumps.