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The marching coloumns

Every day is a swing between highs and lows, and in the last two months that I’ve experienced them, they’ve never been periodic. Setting off the work, the mood depends on the weather: cloudy is good, buoyant, rain is more than welcome, but a clear, blue sky and a blazing fireball in the empyrean is a dampener on my spirits, if not on anyone else’s. How will I work if I’m sweating all the time? Hmm.

The traffic in my erstwhile small city has grown to draconean proportions. Some argue that it’s a good sign, a sign of the city turning into a metropolis. I don’t like it. It not only places more minutes, more hours between work and home, home and work, between the factories and the beach, between the railway stations and the travel-shops, but it turns nice auto-drivers into pissed-off tyrants whom you simply don’t want to run into.

It takes nothing to precipitate all this but the clock striking 6. Areas and wards transform from familiar crenelations of microscopic economies, communities of traders, sweatshop toilers, and flower-braiders to hotbeds of rage, of exodus and maddened intra-urban migration… Suddenly, friends want to leave, fathers want to be left alone, mothers want to vent, and sisters want only to know what the hell’s going on.

If you’re in Chennai and traveling by auto in the evenings, I suggest you carry a book, or a Kindle, or a smartphone with which to kill time. It’s a time-warp, absolute and unrelenting chronostasis, with a profanity-drenched metronome ticking away like a time-bomb in the seat in front of yours. Of course, there are also people pushing, people shoving their way through the maze of vehicles. For every mile, I suppose it’s 10 points, and for every deceptively shallow pothole surmounted, 50.

In this crazy, demented rush, the only place anyone wants to be is on the other side of the road, the Place Where There Is Space, a vacuum on the far side that sucks the journeymen and journeywomen of Chennai into a few seconds of a non-Chennai space. When I ride in an auto on such days, I just don’t mind waiting, for everyone to pass by. I don’t want to make enemies of my fellows. At the same time, I never might know them better than their mumbled gratitude when I wave them ahead.

The driver gets pissed off, though. Starts to charge more, calls me “soft”, and that I don’t have what it takes to live and survive in the city. I tell him I can live and survive in the city alright, it’s just the city that’s not the city anymore. Sometimes, the driver laughs; most times, it’s a frown. In that instant, I’m computed to become an intellectual, and auto-drivers seem to think intellectuals have buttloads of money.

The only thing these days that intellectuals have buttloads of is tolerance.

Tolerance to let the world pass by without doing anything about it, tolerance to letting passersby jeer at you and making you feel guilty, tolerance to the rivers that must flow and the coloumns that must march, tolerance to peers and idols who insist something must be done, tolerance to their mundane introspection and insistence that there’s more to doing things than just hoping that that’s a purpose in itself.

It’s circular logic, unbreakable without a sudden and overwhelming injection of a dose of chaos. When the ants scurry, the mosquitoes take off, and the elephants stampede, all to wade through an influx of uncertainty and incomprehension and unadulterated freedom, real purpose will be forged. When children grow up, they are introduced to this cycle, cajoled into adopting it. Eventually, the children are killed to make way for adults.

With penises and vaginas, the adults must rule this world. But why must they rule? They don’t know. Why must they serve? They don’t know. Yeah, sitting in an auto moving at 1 mile an hour, these questions weigh you down like lodestones, like anchors tugging at the seafloor, fastening your wayward and seemingly productive mind to an epiphany. You must surely have watched Nolan’s Inception: doesn’t the paradox of pitch circularity come to mind?

The grass is always greener on the other side, the staircase forever leads to heaven, the triangle is an infinite mobius spiral, each twist a jump into the few-seconds-from-now future. Somewhere, however, there is a rupture. Somewhere inside my city, there is a road at the other end of which there is my city in chronostasis, stuck in a few-hours-from-now past.

Where auto-drivers aren’t pissed off because the clock struck 6, where fathers and mothers realize nothing’s slowed down but just that their clocks have been on fast-forward of late, where snaking ribbons of smoke don’t compete for space but simply let it go, no longer covet it, only join in the collective sorrow of our city’s adolescence.

Building the researcher’s best friend

One of the most pressing problems for someone conducting any research on personal initiative has to be information storage, access, and reproduction. Even if you’re someone who’s just going through interesting papers in pre-print servers and journals and want to quickly store text, excerpts, images, videos, diagrams, and/or graphs on the fly, you’ll notice that a multitude of storage options exist that are still not academically intelligent.

For instance, for starters, I could use an offline notepad that has a toggle-equipped LaTex-interpreter that I could use to quickly key in equations.

So, when I stumbled across this paper written by Joshi, et al, at Purdue University in 1994, I was glad someone had taken the time and trouble to think up the software-architecture of an all-encompassing system that would handle information in all media, provide options for cross-referencing, modality, multiple authors, subject-wise categorization, cataloguing, data mining, etc. Here’s an excerpt from the paper.

The electronic notebook concept is an attempt to emulate the physical notebook that we use ubiquitously. It provides an unrestricted editing environment where users can record their problem and solution specifications, computed solutions, results of various analyses, commentary text as well as handwritten comments.

The notebook interface is multimodal and synergetic, it integrates text, handwriting, graphics, audio and video in its input and output modes. It functions not only as a central recording mechanism, it also acts as the access mechanism for all the tools that support the user’s problem solving activities.

(I’d like to take a moment to stress on good data-mining because it plays an instrumental role in effecting serendipitous discoveries within my finite corpus of data, i.e. (and as a matter of definition) if the system is smart enough to show me something that it knows could be related to what I’m working on and something that I don’t know is related to what I’m working on, then it’s an awesome system.)

The Purdue team went on to implement a prototype, but you’ll see it was limited to being an interactive PDE-solver. If you’re looking for something along the same lines, then the Wolfram Mathematica framework has to be your best bet: its highly intuitive UI makes visualizing the task at hand a breeze, and lets you focus on designing practical mathematical/physical systems while it takes care of getting problems out of the way.

However, that misses the point. For every time I come across an interesting paper, some sections of which could fit well into a corpus of knowledge that I’m, at the time, assimilating, I currently use a fragile customization of the WordPress CMS that “works” with certain folders in my hard-drive. And by “works”, I mean I’m the go-between semantic interpreter – and that’s exactly what I need an automaton for. On one of my other blogs – unnamed here because it’s an online index of sorts for me – I have tagged and properly categorized posts that are actually bits and pieces of different research paths.

For products that offer such functionalities as the ones I’m looking for, I’m willing to pay, and I’m sure anyone will given how much more handy such tools are becoming by the day. Better yet if they’re hosted on the cloud: I don’t have to bother about backing up too much and can also enjoy the added benefit of “anywhere-access”.

For now, however, I’m going to get back to installing the California Digital Library’s eXtensible Text Framework (CDL-XTF) – a solution that seems to be a promising offline variant.

Assuming this universe…

Accomplished physicists I have met or spoken with in the last four months professed little agreement over which parts of physics were set-in-stone and which parts simply largely-corroborated hypotheses. Here are some of them, with a short description of the dispute.

Bosons – Could be an emergent phenomenon arising out of fermion-fermion interaction; current definition could be a local encapsulation of special fermionic properties
Colour-confinement – ‘Tis held that gluons, mediators of the colour force, cannot exist in isolation nor outside the hadrons (that are composed of quarks held together by gluons); while experimental proof of the energy required to pull a quark free being much greater than the energy to pull a quark-antiquark pair out of vacuum exists, denial of confinement hasn’t yet been conclusively refuted (ref: lattice formulation of string theory)
Massive gluons – A Millennium Prize problem
Gravity – Again, could be an emergent phenomenon arising out of energy-corrections of hidden, underlying quantum fields
Compactified extra-dimensions & string theory – There are still many who dispute the “magical” mathematical framework that string theory provides because it is a perturbative theory (i.e., background-dependent); a non-perturbative definition would make its currently divergent approximations convergent

If you ever get the opportunity to listen to a physicist ruminate on the philosophy of nature, don’t miss it. What lay-people would daily dispute is the macro-physical implications of a quantum world; the result is the all-important subjective clarification that lets us think better. What physicists dispute is the constitution of the quantum world itself; the result is the more objective phenomenological implications for everyone everywhere. We could use both debates.

“God is a mathematician.”

The more advanced the topics I deal with in physics, the more stark I observe the divergence from philosophy and mathematics to be. While one seems to drill right down to the bedrock of all things existential, the other assumes disturbingly abstract overtones, often requiring multiple interpretations to seem to possess any semblance of meaningfulness.

This is where the strength of the mind is tested: an ability to make sense of fundamental concepts in various contexts and to recall all of them at will so that complex associations don’t remain complex but instead break down under the gaze of the mind’s eye to numerous simple associations.

While computation theory would have us hold that a reasonable strength of any computing mechanism could be measured as the number of calculations it can perform per second, when it comes to high-energy physics, the strength lies with the quickness with which new associations are established where old ones existed. In other words, where unlearning is just as important as learning, we require adaptation and readjustment more than faster calculation.

In fact, the mathematics is such: at the fringe, unstable, flitting between virtuality and a reality that may or may not be this one.

One could contend that the definition of mathematics in its simplest form – number theory, fundamental theories of algebra, etc. – is antithetic to the kind of universe we seem to be unraveling. If we considered the example of physics, and the divergence of philosophy from theoretical physics, then my argument is unfortunately true.

However, at the same time, it seems to be outside the reach of human intelligence to conceive a new mathematical system that becomes simpler as we move closer to the truth and is ridiculously more complex as one strays from it toward simpler logic – not to mention outside the reach of reasoning! How would we then educate our children?

However, it is still unfortunate that only “greater” minds can comprehend the nature of the truth – what it comprises, what it necessitates, what it subsumes.

With this in mind: we also face the risk of submitting to broader and broader terms of explanation to make it simpler and simpler; we throw away important aspects of the nature of reality from our textbooks because people may not understand it, or may be disturbed by such clarity, and somehow result in the search seeming less relevant to daily life. Such an outcome we must keep from being precipitated by any activity in the name of and for the sake of science.

On Monday, I attended a short lecture by the eminent Indian particle physicist Dr. G. Rajasekaran, or Rajaji as he is referred to by his colleagues, on the Standard Model of high-energy physics and its future in the context of the CERN announcement on July 4, 2012. While his talk itself straightened a few important creases in my superficial understanding of the subject, two of its sections continues to nag at me.

The first was his attitude toward string theory, which was laudatory to say the least and stifling to say the most. When asked by a colleague of his from the Institute of Mathematical Science about constraints placed on string theory by theoretical physics, Rajaji dismissed it as a political “move” to discredit something as exotic as the mathematical framework that string theory introduced.

After a few short, stunted sniggers rippled through the audience, there was silence as everyone realised Rajaji was serious in his allegation: he had dismissed the question as some political comment! Upon some prodding by the questioner, Rajaji proceeded to answer in deliberately uncertain terms about the reasons for the supertheory’s existence and its hypotheses.

Now, I must mention that earlier in his lecture, he had mentioned that researchers, especially of high-energy/particle physics, tended to dismiss new findings just as quickly as they were ready to defend their own propositions because the subject they worked with was such: a faceless foe, constantly shifting form, one moment yielding to one whim, one serendipity, and the next moment, to the other (ref: Kuhn’s thesis). And here he was, living his words!

The second section was his conviction that the future of all kinds of physics lay in the hands of accelerator physics. That experimental proof was the sole arbiter for all things physical he summarised within a memorable statement:

God is a mathematician, but even he/she/it will wait for experimental proof before being right.

This observation arose when Rajaji decided to speculate aloud on the future of experimental particle physics, specially considering an observable proof of the existence of string theory.

He finished ruing that accelerator physics was an oft ignored subject in many research centres and universities; now that we had sufficiently explored the limits and capabilities of SM-physics, the physics to follow (SUSY, GUT, string theory, etc.) necessitated collision-energies of the order of 10¹⁹GeV (the “upgraded” run of the LHC in early to July 2012 delivered a collision energy of 8,000 GeV).

These are energies well outside the ambit of current human capability. It may well be admitted at this point that an ultimate explanation of the universe and all it contains is not going to be simple, and definitely not elegant. Every step of the way, we seem to encounter two kinds of problems: one cardinal (particle-kinds and their properties) and metaphysical (why three families of particles and not two or four?).

While the mathematics is “reconfigured” to include such new findings, the philosophy acquires a rupture, a break in derivability, and implications become apparent ex post facto.

First, there are two simple axioms: that a particle can represent two states at the same time (superposition), i.e. 1 and 0, and that the information contained by a particle is destroyed the moment it is read. Braid these principles with the exotic phenomenon called entanglement, where two particles yield the same information upon observation even though they may be miles apart, and you get quantum computing and networking.

And here’s the router for it.

How many of you are familiar with the concept of a Google Hangout?

Better yet, how many of you are web developers and are familiar with the concept of a Google Hangout?

I assure you, the number in answer to this question is low in India. At least, that’s the conclusion I’m forced to reach after having liaised with a large number of such developers for a news-daily in south India. Just today, I’d asked Mr. SH, who heads a small web-dev firm in Chennai, if we could have a Hangout in the evening to iron out some creases. His response: “OK… What’s a Hangout? Do I need to be in front of a computer for it?”

Others didn’t answer all that differently, either. Sure, it could be that the idea of a Hangout isn’t as ubiquitous as some would like it to be, but I can’t see how a developer can’t have heard of it.

What smells like a harmful thought?

A lot about our biology is intertwined with our culture. When such an association is encountered for the first time, it could sound interesting, intriguing even, but with time, it becomes an evident relationship because our culture plays an important role in our upbringing. For example, think about how the body’s olfactory wiring affects what we think about cow-dung.

Broadly speaking, scatological odors snub any inclination on the individual’s part to approach the source or even think about it for prolonged periods. Talking about excrement quells taste buds at the dinner table and there is an immediate response in the form of revulsion.

However, what could cause such a response is not a closed question. One answer that makes sense is that the brain interprets that excrement will be poisonous if consumed in any amount, and so turns the mind away from engaging with it in any fashion so as to minimize the risk of poisoning.

At the same time, in India, cow-dung is regularly used as fuel for cooking-fires and also for a multitude of ritualistic purposes. There is no revulsion of any sort amongst those who handle it, and if there had been any in the past, it could have been subdued.

If any test exists to exclude familiarity and false convictions, and establish that the excrement-poison relationship has been eliminated in the individual’s mind, this argument could be true.

How often do we do things just because someone else we used to idolize did them in the past? When will we start doing things in the present such that they’re the best things for us to do in the present?
More often than not, the environment to nurture success is given more importance than an environment in which failures can be tolerated, let alone dealt with constructively. More often than not (pardon me), the fear of failure trumps the allure of success.

The Girl in Blue

How often have you seen that girl who makes you stop whatever you’re doing, and just marshal all your faculties into attention so you can ensure you never, ever forget her face again? It happened to me for the first time earlier this evening.

I was at a coffee shop after having shopped for books at a clearance sale with my uncle and his daughter; it was 2 in the afternoon. I automatically sat down in the chair in the corner, where I’d be beside the least traffic in all the room while being able to look at people’s faces. I didn’t notice her at first – I didn’t notice anyone at first – and was just looking around. Once I and my uncle and my cousin had placed the orders, I ruffled through my haul and was wondering which book I’d read first when I saw her.

She was sitting facing her friend who was right behind my uncle. Ergo, I was facing her, albeit from about 15 feet away. She wore a dark blue top, indigo-blue jeans, her skin the colour of dark chocolate, her lips a faded maroon. She was gorgeous, with large, expressive eyes, their jet-black irises pregnant with excitement every time she smiled, her jawbone angling into her chin below her cheeks with that subtle abruptness that speaks arresting relief but stops short of outright sharpness.

I couldn’t keep staring at her – I already knew she knew I was looking at her as often as I could – so I did so in bouts, but never quite letting her out of my sight. She sat cross-legged and constantly turned her head away from her friend to look out the window, at what I couldn’t fathom. Perhaps she liked how the skies were clouding over as I did, but I suppose that’s just wishful thinking. She smiled often, too, the corners of her mouth stretching into her supple cheeks.

She had a delicate elegance about her, the sort you do when you’re handling books that are centuries old, or artifacts to which you attach too much sentimental value. In fact, it was the sort of elegance which you swear you won’t do anything to injure the moment you notice it, the sort of elegance that tells you that it’s a given that she’s going to be graceful.

All this while, my uncle and my cousin were going on about how her college life was going to be – she starts tomorrow. They expected me to impart all my lessons that I learnt while I was in college. But looking at the Girl in Blue, though, I couldn’t think of anything. Luckily, before they could get too pushy, my sandwich arrived. I ate in silence; my eyes, however, were clamouring.

I knew I might not ever see her again. I also knew for sure that I wasn’t the sort of guy to interrupt their conversation and tell her I thought she was incredibly pretty. For added measure, I was also fighting a battle with myself: one half of me wanted me to whip my phone out, take a quick picture, upload the image to the web, and attempt to identify that awesome face. The other half, of course, emerged triumphant. I’m still not happy with that half.

When her and her friend’s orders arrived, her friend did something silly: the mango-shake she’d called for was too sugary, so she slid down the couch to talk to the waiter, conveniently blocking my view of my interest. I mean, who does something like that?! Anyway, the four minutes of visual silence that followed almost blinded me to all else. Reluctantly, I took the time to clarify all of my cousin’s doubts. Just when I thought I would have to intervene and somehow persuade the girl to slide back down the couch, she moved by herself.

I could see the Girl in Blue again. Oh, what a sight! By then, I was just looking at her whenever I could, no longer devoting any effort in considering what would be appropriate. How ironical then that I might’ve precipitated her leaving: she got up just as I caught her staring out the window at some car below. It strikes me now that that car could’ve been a boyfriend’s – fathers don’t have orange Suzuki Swifts with a matte-finish – but right then, at that moment, nothing could’ve swayed me from my apotheosization of her.

As she left, she turned to look at me. Our eyes met. My life flashed before mine. I’m sure she, however, saw a creep. I didn’t care. I still don’t care. Some moments are well-known not to happen too often, the sort of moments that work away at your memory, displacing one after another as they lock themselves within cages that you hope will last a lifetime, memories that jolt you out of one reality and into another, where it is a picture within your cranium no more but a sensation that suffocates you. That sweet release…

Her legs were slender, like reeds pulsing with life, and she was tall, but not that tall. I, of course, by then had forgotten what sort of girls I liked and what sort of girls simply wouldn’t work out. In my cranium, the sensation was filling up. Needless to say that I was distressed as she stepped out of the room and climbed down the flight of stairs. Oh, that’s when I noticed her friend: ugly. Never mind.

I know I will forget the face of the Girl in Blue. I will ravish it with my mind’s eye over the course of two days, maybe three, and then, I know it will start to morph into other faces, faces more memorable than they are simply gorgeous because they belong to loved ones whom I hurt in the past. Her face will dissolve into the narrow space of a name, and then a date, and then simply an inkling. Until then, I will think about her.

And until the end of eternity, I will have this piece to remind me of the truth of the moment when I saw her.

Graphene the Ubiquitous

Every once in a while, a (revolutionary-in-hindsight) scientific discovery is made that’s at first treated as an anomaly, and then verified. Once established as a credible find, it goes through a period where it is subject to great curiosity and intriguing reality checks – whether it was a one-time thing, if it can actually be reproduced under different circumstances at different locations, if it has properties that can be tracked through different electrical, mechanical and chemical circumstances.

After surviving such tests, the once-discovery then enters a period of dormancy: while researchers look for ways to apply their find’s properties to solve real-world problems, science must go on and it does. What starts as a gentle trickle of academic papers soon cascades into a shower, and suddenly, one finds an explosion of interest on the subject against a background of “old” research. Everybody starts to recognize the find’s importance and realize its impending ubiquity – inside laboratories as well as outside. Eventually, this accumulating interest and the growing conviction of the possibility of a better, “enhanced” world of engineering drives investment, first private, then public, then more private again.

Enter graphene. Personally, I am very excited by graphene as such because of its extremely simple structure: it’s a planar arrangement of carbon atoms a layer thick positioned in a honeycomb lattice. That’s it; however, the wonderful capabilities that it has stacked up in the eye of engineers and physicists worldwide since 2004, the year of it’s experimental discovery, is mind-blowing. In the fields of electronics, mensuration, superconductivity, biochemistry, and condensed-matter physics, the attention it currently draws is a historic high.

Graphene’s star-power, so to speak, lies in its electronic and crystalline quality. More than 70 years ago, the physicist Lev Landau had argued that lower-dimensional crystal lattices, such as that of graphene, are thermodynamically unstable: at some fixed temperature, the distances through which the energetic atoms vibrated would cross the length of the interatomic distance, resulting in the lattice breaking down into islands, a process called “dissolving”. Graphene broke this argument by displaying extremely small interatomic distances, which translated as improved electron-sharing to form strong covalent bonds that didn’t break even at elevated temperatures.

As Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, experimental discoverers of graphene and joint winners of the 2010 Nobel Prize in physics, wrote in 2007:

The relativistic-like description of electron waves on honeycomb lattices has been known theoretically for many years, never failing to attract attention, and the experimental discovery of graphene now provides a way to probe quantum electrodynamics (QED) phenomena by measuring graphene’s electronic properties.

(On a tabletop for cryin’ out loud.)

What’s more, because of a tendency to localize electrons faster than could conventional devices, using lasers to activate the photoelectric effect in graphene resulted in electric currents (i.e., moving electrons) forming within picoseconds (photons in the laser pulse knocked out electrons, which then traveled to the nearest location in the lattice where it could settle down, leaving a “hole” in its wake that would pull in the next electron, and so forth). Just because of this, graphene could make for an excellent photodetector, capable of picking up on small “amounts” of eM radiation quickly.

An enhanced current generation rate could also be read as a better electron-transfer rate, with big implications for artificial photosynthesis. The conversion of carbon dioxide to formic acid requires a catalyst that operates in the visible range to provide electrons to an enzyme that its coupled with. The enzyme then reacts with the carbon dioxide to yield the acid. Graphene, a team of South Korean scientists observed in early July, played the role of that catalyst with higher efficiency than its peers in the visible range of the eM spectrum, as well as offering up a higher surface area over which electron-transfer could occur.

Another potential area of application is in the design and development of non-volatile magnetic memories for higher efficiency computers. A computer usually has two kinds of memories: a faster, volatile memory that can store data only when connected to a power source, and a non-volatile memory that stores data even when power to it is switched off. A lot of the power consumed by computers is spent in transferring data between these two memories during operation. This leads to an undesirable difference arising between a computer’s optimum efficiency and its operational efficiency. To solve for this, a Singaporean team of scientists hit upon the use of two electrically conducting films separated by an insulating layer to develop a magnetic resistance between them on application of a spin-polarized electric field to them.

The resistance is highest when the direction of the magnetic field is anti-parallel (i.e., pointing in opposite directions) in the two films, and lowest when the field is parallel. This sandwiching arrangement is subsequently divided into cells, with each cell possessing some magnetic resistance in which data is stored. For maximal data storage, the fields would have to be anti-parallel as well as that the films’ material spin-polarizability high. Here again, graphene was found to be a suitable material. In fact, in much the same vein, this wonder of an allotrope could also have some role to play in replacing existing tunnel-junctions materials such as aluminium oxide and magnesium oxide because of its lower electrical resistance per unit area, absence of surface defects, prohibition of interdiffusion at interfaces, and uniform thickness.

In essence, graphene doesn’t only replace existing materials to enhance a product’s (or process’s) mechanical and electrical properties, but also brings along an opportunity to redefine what the product can do and what it could evolve into in the future. In this regard, it far surpasses existing results of research in materials engineering: instead of forging swords, scientists working with graphene can now forge the battle itself. This isn’t surprising at all considering graphene’s properties are most effective for nano-electromechanical applications (there have been talks of a graphene-based room-temperature superconductor). More precise measurements of their values should open up a trove of new fields, and possible hiding locations of similar materials, altogether.