Bekaar Bokbok

The Curious Case of Stephen Hawking

2011-06-04T23:41:00.000-07:00

Countless newspaper articles compare him to Einstein.
Numerous others remind us that he held the Lucasian Professorship at Cambridge, “formerly held by Isaac Newton”. In an episode in Star Trek, he appears on the spaceship’s holodeck playing cards with both Newton and Einstein – and wins.
Clearly, in the echelons of scientific achievement, Stephen Hawking is at the pinnacle, with the greatest of the great.

Or is he really?
Let’s do a little comparison.

Newton can safely be called the father of theoretical physics.
While scientists like Galileo and Kepler underscored the importance of experiments and observations to understand the world, Newton pioneered the use of mathematical modelling to explain observed phenomena and predict new ones.
His most famous achievement was formulating his laws of motion, and the inverse square law of gravity which explained both the fall of an apple and the orbit of the moon and planets with unprecedented accuracy.
In the process, he also invented Calculus – undoubtedly the most influential branch of mathematics we have seen in the last five centuries.
Newton’s book, Principia Mathematica, triggered a revolution in human thought, revealing the universe as amenable to human understanding through mathematical laws.

In 1905, Einstein unified Newtonian mechanics with Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism through his special theory of relativity, which made highly unintuitive, but completely correct predictions.
A decade later, he went even further, to create the general theory of relativity – a truly revolutionary theory that unified Newton’s law of gravity with special relativity by showing that gravity was the result of the curvature of space-time due to matter and energy.
General Relativity is one of the great pillars of modern physics, subsuming Newton’s laws of gravity and predicting a plethora of new phenomena – from black holes to the Big Bang.
Einstein also made very significant contributions to Quantum Mechanics, the other great pillar of modern physics. Most notably, he was the first to analyze light as a stream of particles rather than a wave.

Now for Stephen Hawking.
Fundamental areas of science established? None.
Influential new branches of math invented? None.
Any new fundamental particles predicted, as in the case of Paul Dirac? Nope.
How about a revolutionizing to an existing theory, like Richard Feynman? Not at all.
Don’t mean to rude or anything, but what has he done, then?

Two things, mainly.
In the late 1960’s, Roger Penrose proved a theorem to the effect that under certain conditions, general relativity predicts the occurrence of “singularities” – points in space where the laws of physics break down.
Hawking applied Penrose’s results to cosmological models, showing that under generic assumptions the point of origin of the Universe – the “moment of creation”, so to speak – is a singularity. Note that this is not a new theory, but a mathematical theorem derived from an existing theory (general relativity).

In 1974, Hawking proved the result which made him famous.
Using results from quantum field theory, he showed that black holes radiate energy and eventually evaporate. This created a huge stir, because black holes were by definition, objects from which nothing could escape, not even light. This was a strong indication that combining general relativity with quantum field theory could lead to unexpected results.
Hawking’s result has never been experimentally verified, but is accepted as true. Other scientists arrived at the same conclusion from a several different approaches, and the result explains a number of other theoretical issues in the field.

Impressive contributions? Certainly.
Worthy of a Nobel prize? Possibly.
Comparable to Newton and Einstein? Not by a very long run.
Then why is Hawking thus compared in the media? How has he gained a level of public prominence completely disproportionate to his actual achievements?
Why did his popular book, A Brief History of Time, top the New York Times bestseller list for three months straight, despite the fact that most readers claimed not to understand it?

Many think it is due to his physical condition which gets media attention– Hawking has been paralyzed by motor neuron disease since his early twenties.
In my opinion, the real answer lies elsewhere.

Grandiose Claims

Most great scientists are noted for their profound humility in the face of the universe.
The famous quote of Newton, comparing himself to a little boy playing on the shore of the ocean of knowledge comes to mind.
Now let’s hear Hawking:
“My goal is simple. It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.”

A simple goal indeed!! This is not an isolated statement.
In my view, audaciously grandiose claims like these play a key role in explaining Hawking’s arc to scientific superstardom.
While most popular science books are content to explore the wonders of the Universe and explain some of their workings, A Brief History of Time promises nothing less than an Ultimate Understanding – an answer to all the biggest questions ever asked my mankind.

In the book, Hawking claims that we are on the verge of a revolution in our understanding of the cosmos – not just any revolution, but the one to end them all.
We are on the verge of completing our quest to understand the ultimate laws of the universe, says Hawking. We will soon be in possession of a Theory of Everything – a grand unifying principle that subsumes all of physics and explains all features of the cosmos hitherto unknown, including the physical properties of all the fundamental particles, the forces and interactions between them and even the underlying structure of space and time.

What will follow thereafter is nothing short of intellectual Nirvana:
“If we do discover a complete theory.... we shall all be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason — for then we would know the mind of God.”
A parenthetic claim – never directly made by Hawking, but widely inferred by the media and lay public – is that he would be the one to achieve this ultimate triumph of reason.

The grand vision promulgated by Hawking is, of course, vastly misleading.
Even if a unified theory of physics is found, its real applications will be primarily in esoteric realms far beyond the reach of experiment or observation, such the centres of black holes and the moment of the Big Bang. While this would certainly be impressive, the discussion of "why it is that we and the universe exist” has proceeded quite far without it.
Our current theories of physics, while incomplete and partial, have nevertheless been very successful in explaining how the world around us emerged from the blazing radiation of the Big Bang. Most areas of physics itself, let alone the other sciences, would not be impacted at all by the discovery of a “complete theory”.

Furthermore, Hawking’s own role in unifying physics has been minimal.
Currently, the most popular approach for unification is String Theory. If it succeeds in producing a Theory of Everything – a very big ‘If’ – the mantle of Einstein would pass to Edward Witten. Vastly respected within the theoretical physics community for his path-breaking contributions and insights, Dr. Witten is virtually unknown to the common man due to his preference for sticking to science rather than airing extravagant claims.

Hawking has never been at the forefront of the unification program, or even a significant contributor. But his starry eyed vision of the imminent arrival of the unified theory, his self declared goal of “complete understanding of the universe”, his constant references to God in his popular books and public lectures, has given the quest of unify physics an almost religious significance in the public psyche – with the Theory of Everything as God and Stephen Hawking as It’s soon-to-be prophet.

Unfortunately, scientific gurus, unlike religious ones, must test their claims against reality.
So how has Hawking fared?

The Rather Pathetic Design

It is now past 22 years since A Brief History of Time was written and over three decades since Hawking’s first public pronouncement that the end of physics was imminent.
The unified theory is nowhere in sight, and while string theorists keep ploughing on and claiming progress, their best efforts are yet to yield a single experimental prediction.

It is also becoming abundantly clear that even if a unified theory is eventually discovered, Stephen Hawking’s name will not figure on the credits list.
Hawking seems to be having trouble digesting this fact – his strategy is to alternate between suggesting that no unified theory is possible (sour grapes, anyone?) and declaring that it has already been found (no way).

His latest popular book, The Grand Design, is a good example of this.
He starts by saying that there may be no unified theory of physics, but just a bunch of “observer dependent theories”, whatever that means. The next moment, he is spinning on a dime to declare that “M-theory” is the unified theory.
Furthermore, apparently, M-theory predicts that the universe can spontaneously originate from absolute nothingness, so God is not necessary (once again God appears to help Hawking make headlines and sell copies).
So there! Dr. Hawking has Explained It All. Hip, hip, hooray!

Nobody is convinced.
Because M-theory makes no predictions. The reason being that nobody even knows what M-theory is.
Let me explain.

In 1995, Dr. Edward Witten whom we saw earlier, demonstrated the presence of a number of “dualities” between various versions of string theory – roughly speaking, a difficult problem in one version could be translated into an easy one in another version.
This led to the hope that all the string theories were special aspects of a greater theory subsuming them all, which was termed “M-theory”.
In Witten’s own words: “The M stands for magic, mystery or matrix according to taste”.
Thus M-theory is a hypothetical theory which may exist – not an existing theory with concrete predictions.

Similarly, the spontaneous origin of the universe is not a prediction of any theory we have – it is merely speculated that a unified theory of physics which merges general relativity and quantum mechanics might allow something like this to happen.
The “grand design” revealed by Hawking is, thus, misleading on many levels.
Much like religious gurus who refuse to admit a mistake, Hawking attempts to “explain it all” through obfuscation and incorrect statements.

So, where does this leave us?
In my view, with a lesson that we keep forgetting despite endless reminders.
We humans are very small creatures in an incredibly vast Universe and our attempts to unravel its mysteries work best when we work sincerely to answer small questions.
It is only by carefully knitting together the answers to those little questions that the big picture slowly emerges.
By contrast, whenever an individual pompously proclaims an “Answer to Life, The Universe and Everything”, it inevitably turns out to be incorrect or a meaningless 42.

Serious students and followers of science would do well to ignore the self-aggrandizing hype of Stephen Hawking, our media-made “Einstein”, and heed the words of the real one:
“Enough for me an inkling of the marvellous structure of Reality, the endeavour to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the Reason that manifests itself in Nature.”

AI Is Creeping Up On You

2011-02-24T03:19:00.000-08:00

In movies, Artificial Intelligence, aka AI, always arrives with a bang.
The machines wake up, realize their power and immediately launch a nuclear holocaust or trap us in the Matrix or something similarly unpleasant. I strongly suspect this will never happen. Instead, as the decades go by, we will increasingly be surrounded by AI at many levels – while vigorously insisting all through that it’s “no big deal”.

A milestone for artificial intelligence was achieved last week in a three-day Jeopardy contest held from February 14 – 16. For those unfamiliar with Jeopardy, it is a version of our beloved Quiz contests, with some differences.
For one, the clues are often presented in deliberately convoluted language, often with more than one meaning. As a further twist, the quizmaster presents the question as an “answer”, and the contestant must present the answer as a “question”.
For instance, rather than asking “Who wrote Hamlet and Macbeth?” the host will say, “This is the author of Hamlet and Macbeth” and the contestant will answer “Who is Shakespeare?”
Rather than the straightforward scoring system of quizzes, each clue comes with a “dollar value”, which is added or deducted to the contestant’s total depending on their answer.
There are also several “Daily Double” clues, where the contestant can wager a sum of money all the way up to their total “earnings” till that point.
The score of the contestant is the total amount of “money accumulated”.

The tournament last week featured two superstars of the Jeopardy world – Brad Rutter, the biggest all-time money winner on the show, and Ken Jennings, record holder for the longest championship streak.

But the spotlight was on the non-human entrant, Watson – a supercomputer designed by IBM running natural language processing software.
The clues were sent to Watson as a text message at exactly the same time they were made visible to the other contestants. Watson would have to unravel the language in the clue, find the answer, and press the buzzer before the other contestants did to have a chance at scoring.

The first day of the match on Feb 14 ended with Watson and Rutter tied at $5000 with Jennings trailing at $2000. The internet was abuzz with theories about how the champions were merely “warming up” before trouncing the machine over the next two days.
All such speculations were crushed on Day Two, which ended with Jennings at $4,800, Rutter at $10,400… and Watson massively ahead with $35,734 !
The final day ended with Jennings at $24,000, Rutter at $21,600 and Watson at $77,147 – a thoroughly convincing victory.
The answer to “Jeopardy world champion” is now “Who is Watson?”

Apart from the immense entertainment, a pleasant aspect of the program was the graceful acceptance of defeat by the humans. The affable Ken Jennings even quipped, “I, for one, welcome our computer overlords.”

This was a marked contrast to the acrimonious ending of a similar Man vs. Machine event fourteen years earlier, when IBM supercomputer Deep Blue defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov in a 6 game match played in 1997.
Kasparov proved to be a very poor loser – storming away after the last game, being conspicuously absent at the prize distribution ceremony and accusing the IBM team of cheating.
IBM retaliated by refusing a re-match and decommissioning Deep Blue.
The whole episode remains mired in controversy and bad feeling.

Computer chess advanced considerably over the next decade.
In November 2006, the reigning world champion Vladimir Kramnik played Deep Fritz.
In contrast to Deep Blue which was specially designed software running on a customized supercomputer, Fritz was a commercially available program running on a high-end laptop.
Nevertheless, the computer won the 6 game match with 2 wins and 4 draws.

Since then, interest in human-computer chess matches has waned. Though not proved by actual play, it is quietly acknowledged that today’s best chess programs like Rybka running on a supercomputer would trounce any human chess player.

Lame Excuses
What amuses me about both the Watson and Deep Blue incidents is the subsequent proliferation of excuses from the human side for why these incidents were “nothing special” and “not really artificial intelligence”. The excuses fall into roughly four categories, which I list below in decreasing order of silliness, along with my responses.

Excuse 1: “Deep Blue and Watson were both supercomputers with top end hardware. So it’s no big deal that they could do what they did”
Response: And your point is? I can similarly imagine a rabbit saying, “It’s no big deal that humans are so intelligent, given their big brains and all.”
The power of the hardware is part of what makes the system impressive. I agree that Watson wouldn’t have won if it was running on a laptop, but I can bet you that Jennings wouldn’t do too well after a frontal lobotomy either.
Also note how quickly we jump from “A computer can never do X” to “It’s no big deal that a computer can do X”!!

Excuse 2: “The computer isn’t really thinking. It is only doing what its program tells it to do”
Response: This is in strong competition for the silliness top spot.
If a human had beaten the world chess champion, would you have agreed that he or she was thinking?
Conversely, why not argue that when Kasparov plays “he isn’t really thinking. He is only doing what the firing of neurons in his brain tells him to do”?

Excuse 3: “The computer has no credit in this. The credit belongs entirely to the humans who programmed it”
Response: No wait, it’s not the credit of the programmers at all, but of the genes and environment that shaped their brains. No wait, actually all credit is due to the process of evolution which shaped those genes. No wait…
See how this goes?
My point is, if we follow any consistent standard for giving credit, we should certainly congratulate the programmers who for designing Watson or Deep Blue, but after that we must credit the systems for their subsequent performance.

Excuse 4: “Computers may be able to play chess and win Jeopardy, but they cannot invent new technology or compose music or *fill in the blanks*”
Response: The sentence above is missing a “Yet” at the end.

One must remember that the first ‘computers’ in society were not machines, but a group of people, mostly women, working in science laboratories. They were so called because of their ability to perform complex arithmetic accurately and repeatedly – an ability much valued and taken to indicate great mental stamina.
Fifty years ago, anyone would have agreed that playing chess well required intelligence, and a high degree of intelligence, at that.
Talking computers which understand language have traditionally been science-fiction territory – a hallmark of intelligent machines and droids of the far future.

But every time real computers reach one of these milestones, the significance of the event is denied and the bar of “true intelligence” reset several notches higher.
The current list of “what computers can never do” includes “appreciating poetry” and “falling in love”. True, perhaps, but the question is, do they need to?
The goal of AI is not to create artificial humans, any more than the goal of aircraft designers is to create a machine which flaps its wings and lays eggs.

I personally believe that Artificial Intelligence will not take the form of an all-encompassing, godlike Supermind, so beloved of science fiction authors and fans.
Instead, as the centuries roll on, we will see a proliferation of specialized applications tailored to specific tasks, that we would definitely call intelligent, but our descendants may not.
Ultimately, the only remaining special feature of human intelligence may be the ability to invent excuses for why we are special!

Male and Female

2011-01-30T22:05:00.000-08:00

We are all half-human. Think about it.

Imagine an alien zoologist who abducts one of us to conduct a biological study of the human species. However judiciously chosen, the sample will lack one major organ system and some attendant secondary characteristics. Furthermore, our inquisitive alien will be at a loss trying to figure out how the species propagates.

Much ado about little has been made in human society over the “inexorable differences between male and female” – from different dressing conventions to different expectations about career and lifestyle.
In fact, some philosophers have gone so far as to explain the entire Universe as the interaction of “male and female principles” – Shiva and Shakti, Yin and Yang.This is, of course, one of the many examples where over-extrapolating from the human condition leads to complete nonsense. The “principles” governing the Universe are impersonal mathematical laws which know nothing of male, female or transgender.

All right then, what about the biosphere?
Aren’t male-female distinctions fundamental to the living world? Hardly.

Let’s start at the very beginning – with microorganisms.
In case that’s too humble a beginning for you, consider the fact that at least 50% of the Earth’s biomass consists of bacteria alone, and for 85% of its history, life on Earth was nothing but microorganisms.
There are no genders in the unicellular world.
Virtually all microorganisms reproduce asexually – splitting into clones which mutate slowly over the ages. Among bacteria, a pair of creatures will sometimes come together to exchange genetic material, but this is not connected to reproduction.

Still too microscopic for you? Then let’s consider the green world of autotrophs.
Plants are the basis of the biosphere, converting the energy of sunlight into useful forms which all other creatures can process.
An alien botanist would face none of the “incomplete sample” problems plaguing our hapless zoologist. The vast majority of plant species are hermaphrodites – a single sample gives you the entire picture. The situation is worth a deeper look.

Each plant has many reproductive organs. We call them flowers.
In the vast majority of cases, each flower has both male and female parts – an androecium that produces pollen, and a gynaecium that contains ova. In botanist’s jargon, these are “complete flowers”.
These include roses, lilies and the hibiscus, much beloved of authors of sixth-grade biology texts. In fact, virtually all the bright and colourful flowers that gardeners cherish are complete flowers, and the corresponding plants are called “hermaphrodite”.

Now some plants produce flowers that only make pollen or only have ova – male and female flowers so to speak. But each plant has both male and female flowers.
Only a paltry 6% or so of plant species have exclusively male or female plants, with flowers of only one type. These tend to be rather small and unattractive, usually pollinated by wind.
Clearly, plants think gender is a bad idea.

So, how about things that move? If you take a walk in your garden, the earthworms and snails you come across are all hermaphrodites. During mating time, two individuals will line up and simultaneously fertilize each other!
Looking for something less slimy? Take a cruise down to the Great Barrier Reef. Among the colourful corals and sea anemones, you will see schools of bright orange and white fish, which may remind you of the movie Finding Nemo.
These are clownfish, and their gender behaviour is most interesting. Each school consists of many males and one dominant female. But if the female dies or goes missing, one of the males changes sex to become female. How extremely convenient!
In fact, clownfish will sometimes pair up and inhabit a sea anemone. If the pair consists of two males, no problem at all. One of them just “changes over” and all is well.

Such sex change behaviour, where males become females or vice versa in response to the gender ratio in the population is in fact quite common among fish in the coral reefs and several species of amphibians as well (some of you may recall that this was a plot element in Jurassic Park). Imagine the wonders such a system would work in your average engineering college.

So then, what happened to us?
Why are we stuck with the most boring of alternatives, where each individual is doomed from birth to see only “one half of life”, as it were, with much inane speculation about what the other half “really wants”? Why aren’t we hermaphroditic “complete individuals” like the plants, or conveniently mutable like the clownfish?
Turns out, this is quite a puzzle.

The only major classes of animal where all individuals are exclusively male or female are reptiles, birds and mammals (and dinosaurs too, from fossil evidence, but then birds are just living dinosaurs.) But they are produced rather differently in each case.
If you think male versus female is a matter of different versus similar sex chromosomes (XY vs XX) think again. That’s only for mammals.
Among reptiles, the sex of the individual depends on various external factors like the temperature at which the egg was incubated. For birds, it’s the males that have the same sex chromosomes (ZZ, as opposed to ZW for females).
And even for humans, chromosomes aren’t destiny. It turns out that in addition to XY chromosomes, you need functioning testosterone receptors in the foetus, otherwise it just develops into a female.
Nature has to work quite hard to produce separate-sex individuals, apparently.

But why? What’s wrong with good old hermaphrodites?
The possible diversity in the gene pool is reduced to half in every generation, thanks to the exclusive single-sex system, so what are the compensating features for evolution?
Is some kind of fitness parameter being optimized by having separate males and females?
Or is it just a “frozen accident” of biological history – the common ancestor of mammals, birds and reptiles had males and females, so that’s how it remained?

The answers lie hidden somewhere in the genetic code. But for now, we half-humans can only wonder and our alien zoologist needs a sample of at least two....

Aaji Joto Taara Tobo Akashe

2010-10-24T08:56:00.000-07:00

All the stars that grace Thy skies

Shine within my soul tonight

Thy Cosmos surges in from every side

Pouring into my depths.

Every blossom in all Thy groves

Blooms within my being.

Unbounded joy from horizons afar

Flows through my soul

A fragrance deep

Mingling, merging, gushing forth again

In ecstatic praise of Thee.

This day I heed not any one

I can hear the words of none

The Cosmic Breath

Sings in my heart

Entrancing as the sweetest flute.

Click the button to play the song.
Translation and song are both mine. The photo is not, but click on it for the full impact.

The Official Phoren Glamour Ranking List

2010-10-17T05:00:00.000-07:00

Finally! After months of painstaking research and much conversation with non-resident Indians (henceforth, NRI’s) and resident ones, I have successfully compiled the definitive ranking of the various foreign (henceforth, phoren) countries where Indian diaspora are settled.

To provide the necessary background, one must realize that beloved though our country is, it is much lacking in glamour and glitz. Resident Indians who have never left the country sadly shake their heads at the materialistically fulfilling, but spiritually devoid lifestyle of their NRI brethren. Interestingly though, they tend to make a rapid beeline for aforesaid materialistic lifestyle if given the opportunity.

But having successfully transitioned to NRI status, it is considered extremely non-kosher to declare that you want to stay on in the country you spent so much effort moving to. Instead you must always say that you intend to “go back after some years”, where the “some” is very nebulously defined.

On the other hand, actually going back to India is considered even more non-kosher, and causes much shock and awe – like saying you want to drop out of college and then really doing it.

Now, having lived in two phoren countries and then come back to India (shock! awe!), I have also observed that all phorens are not equal in the Indian psyche and some have decidedly more glamour than others. Hence, here I compile a carefully researched ranking for my readership, so that they may choose the level of glamour that best suits them.

So, firstly, the three major criteria that glamorize your phoren land:

1) Wealth and shine: No country is truly phoren unless it obviously has mucho moolah with shiny-shiny buildings, fast-fast cars and big-big highways.

As the brother of my Philadelphia resident friend keeps getting asked, “Aap ka behen phoren mein rahti hai, toh aap Nigeria mein kyon rahte hain?” Clearly, Nigeria is not phoren.

Ditto for Russia, Iran, Brazil, and Thailand (whatever other appeal it may have.)

2) White people: The race of our former colonial overlords must be present in copious quantities to legitimize phoren glamour. Don’t ask why. It’s an axiom.

3) English: More a matter of convenience, but helps fine-tune the rankings as we shall see.

So noooow…without further delay…. we give you the rankings.

Rank 1: Take a guess, anyone!

Numero Uno! The Best of the Best!! Undisputed All-Time Champ!!!!

Introduuuucing…. THE U…..S……OF…..A!!!!!! (Drum roll and thunderous applause)

Nothing, and I mean nothing, remotely compares to the glamour of living in the land of the brave, the free and the morbidly obese.

Even if you live in a nondescript small town of Idaho, the aura of the USA surrounding you will dazzle all onlookers, and allow you to sneer with impunity at Bangaloreans, Bombayites and maybe even Londoners.

Rank 2: UK, Canada and Australia

Presented in no particular order, these are the Salieris to USA’s Mozart – all the right attributes, but not quite there. The NRIs living in these countries also exhibit the mentality of those who have almost reached heaven’s door, but not quite.

So, the NRIs in the US keep talking of “going back home” while applying for a Green Card.

The UK ones talk of going back home while applying to jobs in the US.

Similar behaviour is reported for those in Canada and Australia.

Rank 3: Non-UK Western Europe

So, that means Germany, Switzerland, France, etc. Not Hungary, Poland and all those places.

Shiny-shiny – tick. White people – definitely.

But language. Such a problem, the language. Can’t you possibly move to the UK? Or maybe even, nudge, nudge, the US?

Amsterdam gets a partial exemption since the language of cannabis and red light districts is universal.

Rank 4: Singapore and Hong Kong

Aaaah, we can speak English again. But what’s with all these Chinese people everywhere?

I mean, can you even make out what they are thinking? No, no, definitely not done.

Hong Kong is sinking in status as Mandarin is increasingly becoming the spoken language.

Meanwhile, Singapore has almost risen to rank 3, because of proximity to India and relaxed visa procedures. But the Chinese itch refuses to go away, it seems.

Rank 5: Dubai and the UAE

Immense flash and glitter, no doubt. English speaking - good. Also, Muslim. Long pause.

We are in serious bad news territory here, folks. Whispers of brutal punishments, second class citizenship, Indian labourers treated as virtual slaves. Plus Dawood Ibrahim and links with Pakistan (oh no, the Muslim connection again!).

Some phoren glamour remains here, but tinged with darker hues.

Rank 6: Japan

Once a favourite of the older generation, only a lot of wealth and tremendous shine keep it on the glamour list at all. Severe language problems and a worldwide reputation for xenophobia.

Plus, what’s with all the raw fish and cut throat prices, eh?

This is definitely a place where you can tell the visa official, “I intend to stay here a few years and then leave”, without having your fingers crossed behind your back.

So, what do you think? Feel free to suggest fine tunings and alternative rankings, or make indignant comments.

Much Ado About Nothing

2010-09-09T11:43:00.000-07:00

Anybody seeking a perfect example of making a mountain out of a very harmless molehill need look no further than the supremely silly "Park 51 Mosque Controversy" dominating the US media nowadays.
Rumours of a vague plan to erect a mosque on Ground Zero - the site of the World Trade Center buildings - have even reached India. It sounded rather unlikely, and I was disinclined to pay much attention to the matter. After all, the US media is always roiled by some storm in a teacup or another, unlike India where we only discuss issues of the greatest import. :)

All this changed when I ran into an old friend, Ameena, on Facebook, after several years.

What follows is a guest post by my sister, Bisakha Sen, written after I reported my e-conversation with Ameena. Read on, and contemplate the idiocy of the human race.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Musings on Park51

Maybe I should have titled it "Banning Unitarian Universalist churches because you hate Pat Robertson"?
If there is a God that specializes in irony.....this whole mess must surely be laid at His altar !
Till recently, the whole Park51 'Mosque at WTC' was a matter of principle to me, not much more. I have no particular fondness for ANY organized religion, including Islam. However, there are certain religious freedoms in USA. Those religious freedoms cannot be denied to Muslims. And anyway, the site is a few blocks AWAY from WTC, in an area where strip clubs and bars abound -- so its not exactly 'desecrating hallowed ground' to begin with. Plus there are mosques in that vicinity already.What changed things was an email from my brother, a few days ago with a subject line screaming 'UNBELIEVABLE'."Can you believe
it, this is AMEENA'S community mosque that all these (unprintables) are going loony over !"

Ameena. My lovely friend. Looks like a sylph and has a spine of steel. Writer, fashionasta, feminist, passionately progressive, gay-rights advocate, generous-to-a-fault. Who has been known to march out of 'traditional' mosques with her three daughters in tow because the imam had spouted some typical nonsense of 'good women should be meek and subservient' during service! Who can destroy every stereotype you held about Muslims in about 15 minutes of conversation. Who is a dedicated Sufi Muslim herself. Part of a Interfaith community full of free-thinkers of every stripe. My brother visited Friday services at this mosque when he first visited Ameena. He was absolutely enchanted -- "Sis, we had the BEST dancing with chants......sooo much fun". He assured me he had greatly enjoyed conversations with New-age artistic free-thinking types from every background as well, but clearly it was the dancing that truly impressed him ! (side note, this is a community mosque where men and women not only pray together, they dance together !!!).

When we last visited Ameena in New York, we met El-Farouk Khaki at her place. Brilliant, impassioned, extravagantly tattooed and as flamboyant as they come -- El Farouk Khaki is a Canadian activist for Muslim LGBT rights and founder of the 'Salaam', one of the biggest suport groups for gay Muslims in the west. He'd been a guest at the community mosque earlier. We all chatted deep into the night over an endless supply of kabobs -- starry-eyed social liberals imagining days when ALL organized religious groups would be welcoming to all, when imams and priests presiding over exchange of vows of gay/lesbian couples would be a norm, not an exception.
As I now hear the cacophony about this community's mosque, I can't help but wonder -- is THIS why Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin and the rest are up in arms against this community and their mosque ? Are they worried that a progressive interfaith Muslim group that is pro-gay rights will dent their cherished construct of Muslims uniformly being more 'socially backwards' and 'anti human-rights' than Christians of their ilk ?

Ameena wrote to us saying: "Traditional Muslims don't like us because we're hippy New Age types, and now Fox News says we're jihadists dancing on graves of 9/11 victims !" Frankly, I'm struggling to get my head around the sheer scale of the irony ! That opposition to Al Qaeda and Islamist fundamentalism is now taking the form of opposition to a highly progressive Sufi group! What could be a possible parallel ? Opposition to Pat Robertson's followers resulting in demonizing Unitarian Universal churches might come close!

I fear that the average American protesting this community center is getting played for a fool, and Al Qaeda members are hooting with laughter! An article in this week's Newsweek confirmed today that the Taliban are DEFINITELY hooting with laughter (http://www.newsweek.com/2010/08/30/taliban-using-mosque-controversy-to-recruit.html) -- it doesn't get better than this for them! Americans turn on Sufi Muslims --- whom both Al Qaeda and Taliban hate with a passion -- and in process of doing so, America projects an 'anti-Muslim' image around the world that helps Al Qaeda and Taliban to recruit !!!!!!!

I keep hoping for a happy resolution. Maybe the cacophony will die down a bit, and people will set aside those "9-11 taught me ALL I need to know about Islam" posters, and just be a LITTLE more curious ? Even asking "so who are the Sufis anyway" -- would be a good start! Now that its been revealed that the so-called 'shady Saudi Prince' who MIGHT have been helping with the mosque funding is actually Fox News's second largest shareholder (and among other things, has funded the George HW Bush scholarship at Phillips Academy, MA), maybe some of the anti-mosque protestors will take a small step back and reconsider the possibility that maybe they haven't *quite* been given the full picture ?

If nothing else -- maybe some people could at least start railing against this particular group of Muslims for more APPROPRIATE reasons, like they are "TOO darned" socially liberal, and therefore un-Real-American ?

I can think of no better way to finish this note than with a link from Ameena's own blog, where she talks about her own hope for Park51 leading to awareness and dialogue. Amen to that!
http://ameenameer.blogspot.com/2010/08/why-park51-needs-ayaan-hirsi-ali-and.html

Of Prisoners and Hats

2010-07-22T18:16:00.000-07:00

A bored prison warden calls together 100 very smart prisoners and announces that they will be playing the following Sadistic Game.

Each prisoner will be made to wear a hat which they cannot see. The colour of the hat may be black or white. After this they will be lined up in positions marked 1 through 100.
Each prisoner gets to see the hats of everybody in a position higher than his. (So prisoner 1 gets to see all the hats but his own, prisoner 2 sees all hats but his own and prisoner 1’s, etc)

Now starting with prisoner 1, the warden will ask each man the colour of his hat.
He can only answer “Black” or “White”. The answer will be announced on the public address system so that all can hear. The warden, in turn, will announce whether the answer is right or wrong. This, too, is announced on the PA system.
And yeah, by the way, anyone who gets their colour wrong will be executed immediately.
(That’s where the sadism comes in!)
The prisoners are given a day to come up with any scheme they can think of to save themselves.
Question: How many prisoners can be saved for certain?

So, as a first shot, suppose each man simply makes a guess. There’s a 50-50 chance of being right, so on average about half will survive.
But this is not guaranteed. There’s a very small, but non-zero, probability that everyone will be wrong! Guesswork gives zero certainty.

To guarantee that at least 50 people survive, here’s a scheme.
Every odd numbered person calls out the hat colour of the man in front of him. The even numbered people just repeat what they heard from the man behind them.
But can we do better? Yes.

In fact, there’s a scheme which ensures that all but the first prisoner survives for sure!
This is an extremely neat problem, so you might want to think about it yourself.

…………
…………

Still thinking?

…………
…………

Had enough? Giving up??

Ok here goes.
Prisoner 1 looks at the hats of all in front of him. If among them, there are an odd number of white hats, he says “White” else he says “Black”.
Knowing this answer and comparing with how many white hats he can see, prisoner 2 can deduce the colour of his own hat. (For eg: If prisoner 1 says “White” and prisoner 2 sees only an even number of white hats, he can deduce that his own hat is white).
Now knowing prisoner 2’s answer, prisoner 3 can similarly deduce his own hat colour and so on.
Done!
Only prisoner 1 has a 50-50 chance of being executed, but every noble cause needs a martyr.

Let’s Have More Colour:

Flabbergasted by the amazing escape rate, the warden tries another ploy. Maybe adding another hat colour, say, Red will improve the odds (his, not the prisoners’). Of course, he now has to give them the option of saying Black, White or Red in answer to his question, but he reckons that more prisoners will be wrong this time.
Sorry, Mr. Warden, you are still out of luck! Once again, all but the first prisoner get their colour right – this time using some “mod 3 arithmetic”.

The idea is, replace every integer, positive or negative, with its remainder when divided by 3.
So, for example, 9 is 0, 19 is 1 and -1 is 2.
For brevity, for any integer N, we say “N mod 3” to mean “the remainder left when N is divided by 3”.

Now the thing is, you can add numbers “mod 3” – which means simply add the numbers and take the remainder mod 3.
So, (46 + 21) mod 3 = 67 mod 3 = 1

It doesn’t matter if you first add the numbers and go mod 3, or take each number mod 3 and then add. For example:
(46 + 21) mod 3 = (46 mod 3 + 21) mod 3 = (1 + 21) mod 3 = (1 + 21 mod 3) mod 3 = 1

Similarly, one can subtract and multiply mod 3. Division is trickier and we don’t need it here.

So, back to the prisoners. Once again, the plan is ingenious, but elegant.
Black hats are given a “value” of 0, white hats get value 1, and red hats get the value 2.
Prisoner 1 simply calculates the total value of all the hats he sees mod 3.
He calls out Black, White or Red, if his answer is 0, 1 0r 2 respectively.
Using this, the other prisoners can work out the colour of their hat.

To illustrate, suppose prisoner 1 sees 45 black, 39 white and 15 red hats.
The total mod 3 is: (45*2 + 39*1 + 15* 2) mod 3 = 0
So, he calls out “Black”.
Now suppose prisoner 2 is wearing a red hat.
Then he will see, in front of him, 45 black, 39 white and 14 red hats.
His total mod 3 is: (45*2 + 39*1 + 14* 2) mod 3 = 28 mod 3 = 1
Having heard prisoner 1’s answer on the PA system, he simply subtracts his total from prisoner 1’s total mod 3.
This gives: (0 – 1) mod 3 = -1 mod 3 = 2
2 is, of course, the value for a red hat.
Similarly, prisoner 3 can get his hat colour using the answers of prisoner 1 and 2, plus the hats he can see.
Once again, everyone but the first prisoner escapes with certainty.

Our warden is apoplectic!
To his growing frustration, he finds that changing the number of prisoners makes absolutely no difference. A hundred prisoners, or a billion, everyone escapes for sure, except the first (and even he might get lucky sometimes).
Increasing the number of hat colours is similarly futile.
Given a million colours, the prisoners simply use “mod 1 million arithmetic” (plus some very rapid mental calculation), to get the correct answer every time.
With more colours, the likelihood of the first prisoner being executed increases, but that is small consolation for the jailor who was hoping for some serious body count.

The Seriously Sadistic Game:

Despondent at the high prisoner survival rate, which has made him the butt of prison jokes, our warden e-mails his odious cousin in Tyrannistan, detailing his woes.
The reply is swift: “Turn off the public address system. That’s how we play the game in T-stan.”

Success at last!
Without the PA system, the hapless prisoners have no information other than the colours of the hats in front of them. Every one of them faces the same position as the first prisoner in the earlier game. The only option available is to simply guess.
With N colours, this gives a mere 1/N chance of success. If N is significantly bigger than the total number of prisoners, there is a decent chance that everybody dies.
A dismal end indeed for our highly ingenious prisoners.

The story should end here with, perhaps, a denunciation of capital punishment and wanton wardens, but the mathematician in me has one last question.

What if we play this game with infinitely many prisoners?

You may wonder how that could possibly help – after all, the situation is still the same, isn’t it?
Without any information on what others can see, how could anybody do better than just guess?
All I can say is “Have faith in Infinity and read on....”

Science and Math

2010-03-23T13:23:00.000-07:00

My last post was a rather bare bones analysis of mathematics which separated it from the arts and placed it close to, but not within, the circle of the sciences. Given my emphasis on the top-down approach of science versus the bottom up style of math in that post, I thought it might be worth exploring both the similarities and differences with an (admittedly artificial) example.

The scientist does not forever create new theories about the universe. Nor does the mathematician relentlessly grind out new mathematical properties ad infinitum. In both cases, discovery usually starts with observing something new.

For instance, the astronomer looks up on a clear night, and whoa! There’s a new star in the sky! (I must confess I am very partial to astronomy, far and away my favourite science. Aficionados of other sciences can undoubtedly find analogous examples.)

Similarly, the mathematician draws a triangle and all its medians, and hey, look ! They all pass through the same point!

At this point one usually makes sure that the observation is really correct. The astronomer needs to ensure that what she saw wasn’t just a plane, or a comet or something nearby.

The mathematician is also making sure of his facts. Maybe the medians just pass very close by, and it only looks like they go through the same point because his pencil is blunt.

But no, it’s authentic. The astronomer focuses a telescope, calls her colleagues, takes parallax measurements and everything confirms that what is being seen is indeed an object many thousand light years from earth. In fact, a search through the image archives reveals a very faint star, invisible to the naked eye, at that exact location in the sky.

Meanwhile the mathematician has sharpened his pencils, and redrawn the diagram. Nope, no mistake.

Now at this point, the astronomer will not try to pull a brilliant new theory out of her hat. The first several steps are always to see if what was observed, i.e., the “new star”, can be explained within the framework of existing theory.

For starters, it looks like this wasn’t a new star really, but an existing one which has suddenly brightened drastically. Can existing theories of stellar structure and evolution explain how this may happen? Time to solve some equations and run simulations...

The mathematician, meanwhile, doesn’t have the luxury of inventing new theories. Math starts from the bedrock, remember? Triangles are triangles, medians are medians. Their properties are clearly given. All one can do is try to see what consequences follow.

Maybe he can work this out just by calculating side lengths and angles. Maybe not...

Success!! The astronomer discovers that it is possible for massive stars to explode cataclysmically at the end of their lives. An exploding star might brighten by a factor of 100 billion or more - definitely enough for a hitherto invisible star to dazzle into prominence.

A new observation has been given a satisfying theoretical explanation. She decides to call this phenomenon a supernova.

Our mathematician is also very pleased. It wasn’t trivial. He had to make some constructions, which weren’t at all apparent at the start, and think quite hard. But it’s done and he has a new theorem: The medians of any triangle always intersect at a point.

At this point, our stories diverge. The mathematician’s colleagues have all verified his proof, and he can forever rest easy.

For the astronomer, there’s always a smidgen of doubt. It looks like the theory fits, and all observations match. But it could always be the case that this was something quite different, some hitherto unknown astrophysical phenomenon with the same luminosity pattern. Maybe it was something really wild, like aliens conducting an inter-dimensional experiment.

Nobody knows what the Universe really is and the possibilities are endless.

All she can do is use a principle called Occam’s razor – go for the simplest explanation which fits the facts.

Now what if we don’t have the happy ending?

What if the new star defies explanation? What if the result can’t be proved?

At this point, things get interesting for the astronomer. The first step is to try very hard to see if the existing theories genuinely can’t explain what is being seen. Maybe something obvious is being overlooked, maybe she just has to think harder.

But if the evidence keeps piling up, it’s time to look for a new theory!!

These are the situations that scientists really love – when the boundaries of current knowledge break down, and we begin to catch glimpses of the vast unknown beyond...

The mathematician’s choices are a bit more limited. No possibility of “new theories”. Triangles are still triangles and will stubbornly continue to be so. What he can do is start looking for a counterexample – a triangle whose medians don’t intersect. In this case, the search will be futile because the result is true.

But there are examples of mathematical conjectures which were verified in thousands of cases, but no proof was forthcoming. And then a counterexample was discovered, showing that the search for proof had been misguided all along.

If neither proof nor counterexample can be found, despite the best efforts of mathematicians over many, many years, a conjecture tends to gather fame and notoriety, and sometimes, money. One such example is the Riemann hypothesis, proposed in 1859 and still unresolved.

Currently, there is a one million dollar prize offered for a correct proof or counterexample.

I might have given the impression that the astronomer’s task is simple. Just pull a theory out of thin air and voila!

In reality, it is extremely difficult to come up with a successful new theory – particularly if the current theory is well-established. Not only must a new theory explain the new observations, it must also be consistent with everything that is already known and explained by current theory.

Theoretical physicists know this very well.

The two main pillars of modern physics – general relativity and quantum field theory – are mutually incompatible. If you try to use them together, they give nonsense results.

Over the last two decades, observations have revealed that 96% of the universe is composed of substances whose nature is not described by any existing theory. Observations are also making it clear that the universe began with a huge burst of hyper-accelerated expansion, but once again, our known theories of physics can’t suggest anything which could cause this.

For the past three decades, theoretical physics has been stuck in an impasse with virtually no progress and no successful new theories. String theory has been much hyped as a candidate to take us beyond the boundaries, but it has yet to make a single correct prediction.

Meanwhile, in 2004, mathematics saw the solution of one of the most famous unsolved math problems of the past century – the Poincare conjecture.

Life goes on for science and math – similar but different.

What is Mathematics

2010-03-23T08:09:00.000-07:00

Is it a science, an art, or something else altogether?
Most universities give math majors a Bachelor of Science degree. And I am sure anybody who has studied or worked with math would agree that it feels far more like doing science than painting a picture or composing a poem.

Yet a number of mathematicians ardently believe that mathematics is an art. As a friend of mine from grad school used to say, “Science is about the Why and How, but math is about the Wow.” He is echoing the great mathematician G.H. Hardy, (of Hardy-Ramanujan fame) who wrote, “A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.”

The way I see it, the crucial difference between the arts and sciences is the primacy of Truth. One may argue endlessly about whether Tagore’s writings are more beautiful or appealing or resonant than Shakespeare’s, but there’s no meaningful sense in which either can be said to be true or false.
But in science, truth is all. A scientist may use aesthetic appeal as a guide to formulating her theories, but “even the most beautiful theory may be slain by just one ugly fact”. And once that happens, it’s just another discarded theory, of interest only to historians of science.

Truth is central to mathematics as well. A mathematician may formulate the most elegant conjectures, but if proved false, he must discard them. To paraphrase Hardy, a mathematician may be a maker of patterns, but the only worthwhile patterns are the ones which are true. So, I’d say, math is certainly much more a science than an art in terms of its primary objectives.

Theories versus Theorems

So does that end the argument? Not quite.
While truth may be central to both science and math, a vital difference exists regarding how truths are established.

To illustrate, consider the General Theory of Relativity. It is the theory that gravity is caused by the curvature of space and time in the presence of matter and energy. Over the past century, the predictions of the theory have been confirmed by dozens of observations and tests – it forms one of the main pillars of our current understanding of the universe.

In contrast, consider the Riemann Hypothesis. It is the statement that all nontrivial zeroes of the Riemann Zeta function lie on the straight line with real part equal to half (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riemann_hypothesis). Over the past century, about 10 trillion zeroes of the function have indeed been found to lie on this line. But all this “observational support” makes no difference – the Riemann hypothesis remains a conjecture, albeit probably the most famous conjecture in mathematics.

On the flip side, none of the confirmations establishes general relativity beyond doubt.
The theory is extremely elegant and has withstood the test of time really well. But the proverbial ugly fact may always show up. In fact, general relativity itself replaced Newton’s theory of gravitation which was considered unassailable for over two centuries before it!

In contrast, if a correct proof is given for the Riemann hypothesis, the hypothesis would become a theorem. One would never have to worry about an unruly zero showing up to topple the edifice, any more than one worries about someone drawing a triangle whose angles add up to more than 180 degrees.

So, whence this difference? Why isn’t it considered adequate to justify a mathematical conjecture by providing a bunch of observations and tests? Conversely, why can’t one prove a scientific theory once and for all?
I will argue that the reason is the essence of the difference between science and mathematics.

Top-down versus Bottom-up

Nobody knows what the Universe really is.
The abstract structure of the universe is hidden from us and we only have access to sensory data about the objects within it – either directly or via our instruments. Trying to figure out this structure is the work of science.

A scientific theory is a statement about fundamental properties of the universe, inferred from observed properties of objects within it.
Of course, not all theories are quite so grand. Most are merely attempt to explain features of a particular class of objects, - say the luminosity of stars. These theories may themselves be based on “deeper” theories – the luminosity of stars, may be explained in terms of nuclear physics, which in turn is based on quantum mechanics.
But ultimately, we want to “get to the bottom” - to work out the ultimate structure of the universe from our observed data.
Science works from the top down.

And this is why a scientific theory can never be proved beyond doubt.
It is ultimately a guess.
We see the surface of the ocean of reality, and try to guess where the bottom is. Our guesses may be very educated indeed, but it is always possible that the bottom is further down, since we can never see it directly. It is even possible that there is no bottom, no ultimate Theory to explain it all.

We can never know with absolute certainty, only with provisional degrees of confidence, always tinged with doubt. We can support our best guesses by gathering additional data, but one never knows whether the next data point will confound us all.

Mathematics, by contrast, works from the bottom up.
There is no doubt at all about what the mathematical entities being studied “really are” – in fact, they are very clearly defined right at the outset. And given the basic properties and definitions, a mathematician tries to work out further properties of the objects of interest.

A mathematical theorem is a statement about properties of mathematical objects, deduced from their fundamental properties.
This is why a mathematical theorem can be proved. It is not a guess about fundamental properties of objects – those are laid out right at the beginning. We already know where the bottom is. The rest is just (?!) deduction and logic.

So where does this leave us?
Given the centrality of “true propositions”, I would place math much closer to the sciences than the arts. However, because of the opposite directions of inference, and the consequent difference in how propositions are verified/falsified, I’d say it’s not entirely accurate to call mathematics a science. But they are so similar, that it makes sense to say “science and math” in the same breath, as people often do.

National Anthem

2010-01-26T00:34:00.000-08:00

It is India’s 60th Republic Day today. Even as I write, flags are being hoisted across the country and the national anthem is being sung.

This is, therefore, an opportune moment to put to rest an extremely silly, but annoyingly persistent, ‘controversy’ about our national anthem, “Jana Gana Mana”, composed by Indian poet laureate Rabindranath Tagore. The song was written, so the accusation goes, to felicitate the coronation of British emperor George V. Hence, it should be replaced by ‘something patriotic’.

So, what do I make of this?

My shortest answer is unprintable. A slightly longer answer is, “No, the song was not addressed to George V and ‘Bharatabhagyavidhata’ in the song does not refer to the British emperor, except in the imaginations of the ignorant and/or deliberately obtuse.”

The details of the song’s composition can be found in a delightful little book by Dr. Prabodh Chandra Sen – literary scholar, historian and a contemporary of Tagore.

To summarize, Tagore was asked to compose a song of felicitation at the coronation of the British emperor by a high ranking acquaintance in the Indian Civil Service.

Incensed by this request, the poet stayed awake all night, penning this masterpiece of a song.

It was first sung on 27th December, 1911 at the proceedings on the Indian National Congress.
The British press dutifully reported that “the Bengali poet Babu Rabindranath Tagore sang a song specially composed by him to welcome the emperor”.

Little did they know that what they had heard was an eulogy to the eternal spirit of India, referring to the geographic and religious unity of the country, the oppression of foreign rule and presaging an independence to come!

If you are frowning in puzzlement at this, you very probably don’t know that the song has five verses. What is sung at the flag hoisting ceremonies is the first verse – merely the ‘geographical introduction’, so to speak.

So, here I give you all five verses, sung and translated.

The singing is mine.

The translation is a bit of a ‘family project’. My parents remembered that my sister had done a translation way back. So, late last night, Dad emails me saying, “Here it is.”

Both sis and I take a look at it, and our conclusion was, “Hmm, not that great, needs some serious changing.” In fact, we are both secretly convinced that this might have been mailed to Dad by somebody else, though parents insist it wasn’t.

Anyway, I heavily modify the second and fifth verses, and sis does a complete rewrite of the third and fourth. And after some further fine tuning, we think, “Now it looks decent.”

After all this, I get another email from parents. Turns out that ‘sister’s original attempt’, which we pretty much rewrote, was actually Tagore’s own translation. Aaaah, well !! :) :)

However, what you see below, is our translation of the song.

Listen, read and judge for yourself.

Thou art the ruler of the minds of the people,
O Creator of India’s destiny.
Thy name rouses the hearts of Punjab, Sind,
Gujarat and Maratha, of Dravida, Orissa and Bengal.
It echoes in the hills of the Vindhyas and Himalayas,

Mingles in the music of Jamuna and Ganges,
In the surging of the Indian Seas.
They pray for thy blessing and sing thy praise,
O Creator of India’s destiny,
Victory, Victory, Victory to thee.

Day and night thy call is heard across the lands,
Drawing Hindus, Buddhists, Jains and Sikhs to thy throne
And Parsees, Musalmans and Christians.
East and West bring offerings to thy shrine,
A garland of Love is woven.
O Uniter of the hearts of all,
Creator of India’s destiny,
Victory, Victory, Victory to thee.

Along that road rugged with the rise and falls of Nations
Which Mankind travels down the ages.
Eternal Charioteer, the thunder of thy Chariot's wheels echo.
Amidst the revolutions of history,
Thy trumpet sounds its clarion call,
Thou guide to all travelers in their paths of peril,
Creator of India’s destiny,
Victory, Victory, Victory to thee.

When the long dreary night was dense with gloom
And the Country lay in a fevered stupor,
Thy sheltering arms held her,
Thy watchful, compassionate eyes bent upon her face.
Against the dark evil dreams of oppression
Did thou protect her, most Compassionate Mother.
Creator of India’s destiny,
Victory, Victory, Victory to thee.

The night dawns, the Sun rises
Over the mountains of the East
The birds sing, life stirs in the morning breeze.
Blessed by the golden rays of thy love,
India awakes again from sleep
And bends her head at thy feet.
Victory, victory, victory to thee,
O Lord of all kings,
Creator of India’s destiny,
Victory, Victory, Victory to thee.

God and Aliens

2010-01-22T14:32:00.000-08:00

A very belated Happy New Year to all.
I’m back after a long hiatus, so let’s start on a high note.

Over the past few months, I’ve often been asked “Do you believe in God ?”.
The problem is, of course, that everyone seems to have a different definition of God. However, if you statistically accumulate the various views, (and ignore the obscure or tautological ones), God is generally defined as:
“An all-powerful intelligent Being that created the universe, loves and protects us, and watches over our lives”.

Hmm, still problematic.
To illustrate, suppose you are asked, “Do you believe in aliens?” (being an avid sci-fi fan, I get asked that a lot, too) and aliens are defined as :
“Intelligent beings from elsewhere in the universe who are visiting us in their spaceships.”
See the issue ? Both definitions are conflations of two concepts which are not necessarily linked.
To resolve the problem, let’s split the Alien definition into:
ET’s: “Intelligent creatures elsewhere in the universe”.
UFO’s: “Intelligent creatures who are visiting us in their spaceships”.
Realize that it is perfectly possible to believe in ET without believing in UFO’s. The Alien question is actually two questions in one.
Similarly, God splits into:
Alpha: “An all-powerful intelligence that created the universe.”
Omega: “An all-powerful, loving being who cares about and protects us.”

Observe that when people talk about God, they mostly mean Omega.
It is assumed that God created the universe as well, but the primary attribute is that God cares about us as individuals and a species. All the paraphernalia of religion – prayers, rituals, efforts to live according to specified ‘God given’ norms – are useless if the deity does not care. Additionally, Omega is typically imagined as an enhanced human, complete with very human-like emotions, though one is occasionally admonished that “God cannot be understood in human terms”.

Alpha is a different entity altogether. An intelligence that created the universe could be infinitely mysterious, utterly alien. Such a Being may be totally indifferent to us carbon based life-forms in our obscure corner of a typical galaxy. It may not even notice our existence. Religious literature, being overly anthropocentric, provides few examples, but think of the Overmind in ‘Childhood’s End’, or Olaf Stapledon’s ‘Star Maker’.

Distinctions similar to Alpha and Omega have been made in the past. Religious philosophies, especially in Hinduism, make a distinction between an ‘impersonal’ and a ‘personal’ God.
Alpha would roughly correspond to Brahman, and Omega to Ishwara.

Ok, then, what do I believe? First, let’s face the facts.
There is no concrete evidence for Alpha, Omega, ET’s or UFO’s.
Anyone claiming to “know that God exists” is either using ‘know’ as a synonym for ‘strongly believe’, or confusing belief and fact.
I’m not about to provide any such evidence either, I’ll just say what I believe and a bit of why. So, here goes.

I don’t believe in UFO’s.
The idea that intelligent extraterrestrials are flying all the way to Earth, only to remain in hiding and get occasionally spotted by unreliable witnesses, strains my credulity to breaking point. UFO-believers typically offer arguments like “maybe they are trying to stay hidden” Sounds more like an excuse than a reason – why would they, after coming so far?
Usually this degenerates into “Who can fathom their purpose?”. Still an excuse (and one which we shall see again).
I can’t prove with 100% certainty that UFO’s don’t exist, but I can’t do that for the Lochness Monster either. But it’s clear to me that the evidence is strongly against them.

I don’t believe in Omega.
There is just way too much unfair misery in the world. Start with the recent disaster in Haiti and continue with all the natural disasters that have struck in this century alone. Add all the horrors of history – the Holocaust, the Khmer Rouge, the Partition riots.... Now continue with the countless cases of individual suffering from birth defects to cancer to unfortunate accidents. This list goes on ad nauseam.
Just does not make sense in a world where Omega is out there to love and protect us.
Once again, excuses abound. “God is testing us”, “Bad karma from previous births”, “All works out for good in the end”, and finally, “Who can fathom the ways of God?”.
We saw this before and I am not convinced. It really looks like people believe in Omega despite the evidence rather than because, just like the UFO-maniacs.

I believe in ET’s.
Our galaxy alone has 400 billion stars. There are about a 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe. It is becoming clear that most stars have planetary systems orbiting them. Molecules of life are abundant in interstellar clouds. Plus, it is entirely possibly that life may be based on completely different chemicals from terrestrial life.
None of this proves that ET’s exist. Maybe the odds of life forming are incredibly low, low enough to make it improbable despite all the stars out there. Maybe life happens, but it remains at the level of bacteria with overwhelming odds. But the existence of ET’s is at least consistent with the evidence.
Still, why believe without proof ? Because I like the idea!
I find it incredibly depressing to think that Earth is the only place in this incredibly vast universe to have complex life-forms and intelligence. If the evidence points overwhelmingly in that direction, I will have to accept it.
But all the evidence so far is consistent with the vastly more appealing picture (to me), of a universe where life and intelligence are commonplace, where we are but one voice in a cosmic symphony. So, I’ll stick with it until forced otherwise.

I believe in Alpha.
We live in an amazing universe “rich beyond measure – in elegant facts, in exquisite interrelationships, in the subtle machinery of awe”. Our investigations of the universe reveal a profound and elegant underlying order that continually challenges the imagination and ingenuity of our brightest minds. The depth and intricacy of the cosmic order frequently leaves our best scientists with a feeling of “rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection”.
To me, it seems entirely plausible that Alpha “breathes fire into the equations, creating an universe for them to describe”.
Once again, this is not the only possibility. The mathematical order of the universe may just be a ‘brute fact’, admitting of no further explanation. Alternatively, our universe might be a tiny part of a far bigger Cosmos, where natural laws self-organize and emerge like galaxies and ecosystems.
But yes, I personally find that elegant though the laws are, I am disappointed by the idea of “All that is or was or ever will be” being merely the working out of an algorithm that could perhaps be written down on a T-shirt.
Much more appealing to me is the concept of our universe as just one creation or manifestation of a numinous and ineffable Alpha, a mysterium tremendum without beginning or end.
Nebulous, imprecise, unverifiable – I know. But, hey, this is a belief, not a scientific hypothesis. And it is consistent with all the facts so far (though not implied by them).

Finally, a related question – Am I religious ? Short answer: No.
While religions pay lip-service to Alpha and occasionally come up with evocative poetry
(eg: The “Om Purnamadah Purnamidam” shloka of the Upanishads), their primary concern is Omega and how we can relate to Him/Her (never “It”). Doesn’t work for me.

Addendum: Throughout this piece I’ve quoted liberally from Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking and Einstein. Any reader of popular science will recognise them at once. If you don’t, what are you waiting for? Get reading! :)

Mahabishwe Mahakashe

2009-11-16T21:18:00.000-08:00

Amidst this vast cosmos

Through deep space and time

Alone I walk ever, in awe.

Amidst infinite mystery

Art Thou, Lord of All,

Alone in Thy glory, ever silent.

Across endless space,

From the stars beyond count

Thy gaze falls on me,

I gaze back at Thee.

Silence descends,

The world rests in peace.

Eternal One, amidst Thy Oneness

Alone I dwell, ever fearless.

Click the button to play the song.
Translation and song are both mine. The photo is not, but click on it for the full impact.

Prothomo Aadi Tobo Shakti

2009-10-18T02:52:00.000-07:00

Thine is the power primordial,

Thy dazzling radiance fills the skies.

Thy ancient Word, bearing Thy eternal bliss,

Arises anew in endless forms.

In the heavens of Thy mind,

Shine the sun, moon and stars,

Life ebbs and flows with Thy breath.

Thou art the primal poet,

O guru of poets,

The cosmos resounds to thy chant.

Click the button to play the song.
Translation and song are both mine. The photo is not, but click on it for the full impact.

Akash Bhora Shurjo Taara

2009-10-18T02:48:00.000-07:00

Amidst skies full of stars, a world full of life,

Have I found my abode.

My song awakes in wonder.

The vast surge of Endless Time

That ebbs and flows through all Creation

Ripples through the blood in my veins today.

My song awakes in wonder.

I have tread the soft grass on forest paths,

Delighting in the scent of woodland flowers,

I have seen the gifts of joy strewn all around.

My song awakes in wonder.

I have opened my eyes, aroused my senses,

Poured myself on the bosom of this world,

Ever amidst the known have I sought the Unknown.

My song awakes in wonder.

Click the button to play the song.
Translation and song are both mine. The photo is not, but click on it for the full impact.

The Bhagavad Gita In Brief

2009-10-15T10:48:00.000-07:00

I am guessing many of you have never read the Gita, but at least some have felt they should have made an attempt. I’m in the category that tried, made some progress (making notes and all), then quit. Until recently, that is.

A late evening attempt to decipher the Sanskrit text with a friend resulted in a renewed surge of interest, and I decided to just go ahead and finish the project. It’s done now and what follows is my roadmap of the 18 chapters of the Gita – with some shlokas to highlight the path - for those wishing to delve in and explore further.

Chapter 1: Setting the stage. Surveying the armies at Kurukshetra, Arjuna is overcome by grief when he realizes what the war will entail. Good for him.

Standard interpretations speak of this as ‘weakness’ on Arjuna’s part. Au contraire, I find the very human anguish, the questioning of a war which entails the mass slaughter of kinsmen and loved ones for the sake of a kingdom, coming from a man who is expected to be a relentless killing machine, to be one of the brilliant character touches that makes the Mahabharat great. Krishna responds, and the main Gita begins.

Chapter 2: The soul stuff. “As a person casts off old garments and puts on new ones, so the soul leaves one body for another” and “Weapons do not cleave the soul, fire does not burn it, water does not wet it, nor wind make it dry” (Shlokas 22 and 23).

Get the point? Krishna is saying that Arjuna won’t really be killing his loved ones, just destroying their bodies. The soul is the real thing and that’s safe. Of course, if one doesn’t buy the soul stuff, this argument goes for a toss, along with much of the Gita.

Chapter 3: All work and no attachment makes Jack a Karmayogi. To be accurate, this starts off in chapter 2 with the famous “Karmanyevadhikaraste, ma phaleshu kadachana” (Chap 2, Sh 47). Acting without attachment – one of the central principles of the Gita.

To be honest, I find Karmayoga unconvincing. Why would one do anything if one has no interest in the results?

Furthermore, how is one supposed to act? The answer, as per Gita, is to follow ‘swadharma’ – nebulously interpreted as ‘one’s innate nature’ or ‘duty’, it’s never quite clear. “Better is swadharma, though carried out imperfectly, than the dharma of another carried out perfectly”(Sh 35).

Highly unsatisfactory. This suggests that people are born with some kind of innate duty (who dictates what that is?) and one should ‘just stick to it’. More problematically, if you interpret swadharma as ‘duty’, what if that duty conflicts with basic human values like compassion, love, loyalty and so on? This is really Arjuna’s question and Krishna never quite answers it, IMO.

Chapter 4: Krishna to the rescue !! “Yada yada hi dharmasya...” is right here ! (Sh 7 & 8)

The rest is largely a rehash of Karmayoga. Apparently, Arjuna is not convinced first time, and I don’t blame him. Apart from all the swadharma issues there’s the growing problem of “Who should take responsibility for one’s actions?” - very relevant when battle is about to commence. Well, over the past two chapters, there have been growing hints that humans are mere intermediaries and God is the ultimate source of all actions, so the answer is.....

Chapter 5: Blame it all on God!! Or at least, if you do, the responsibility won’t stick to you. “He who works, resigning his actions to God, is not touched by sin, even as a lotus leaf is untouched by water” (Sh 10).

Chapter 6: Introducing Mr. Detachee, aka, the Yogi, “to whom a lump of mud, a stone and a piece of gold are the same”, “who is equal minded among friends and foes” (Sh 8 & 9), “who does not rejoice on obtaining what is pleasant nor sorrow on obtaining what is unpleasant”. Personally speaking, I am more for rejoicing on getting the pleasant and staying calm in the face of the unpleasant, rather than zoning out equally on both. But this picture of the Yogi, devoid of worldly attachments, is a familiar presence in our culture.

The rest of the chapter is about what the Yogi should do – Dhyanayoga, meditation in the grand old style. “Holding the body erect and still, looking fixedly at the point of his nose, serene and fearless, firm in the vow of celibacy, let him sit, his mind turned to Me alone” (Sh 13 & 14). The ultimate goal of all this –“Thus making the self ever harmonized, the yogi experiences the infinite bliss of contact with the Eternal. He who sees Me everywhere and sees all in Me: I am never lost to him nor he lost to Me” (Sh 29 & 30).

The story so far: Act without attachment, remember that all actions are rooted in God, then focus, focus, focus on God. At this point, the reader may well ask, “So who is this God person anyway?” We’ll see.

Chapter 7: Ok, so let’s talk God. Here goes.

“I am the origin of the universe and its dissolution as well. There is nothing whatsoever higher than I. All that exists is strung on me like gems on a string.” (Sh 6 & 7).

Straight to the point and no mincing words either. That’s pretty much the message in this chapter. But some interesting asides exist.

Firstly, some glimmerings of the concept of Maya which hides the true form of God from the world. “Deluded by the three gunas, the world does not recognise Me who am above them. This divine Maya of mine is hard to overcome.” (Sh 13 & 14)

Secondly, an interesting piece about tolerance of worship for other gods, but emphasizing that they are inferior. This is clearly the period when the existing Vishnu and Shiva cults were taking over from the old Vedic deities.

“Those whose minds are distorted by desires resort to other gods, observing various rites. Whatever form a faithful devotee wishes to worship, I make his faith firm. But temporary are the results of their worship. Those who worship the gods go to them, but My devotees come to Me.” (Sh 20 to 23)

Chapter 8: Not too much going on here, frankly. The main point seems to be “He who utters Aum at the moment of death come to me” (Sh 13) and “having come to Me, they do not get back to rebirth” (Sh 15). The rest is a rehash of chapter 7.

Chapter 9: Panentheism. Distinct from pantheism (no ‘en’), which identifies God and the universe, panentheism is the belief that God pervades the universe, but also transcends it. Here it is, loud and clear.

“By Me is all the universe pervaded in My unmanifested form. All beings abide in Me, but I do not abide in them. My spirit which is the source all beings, sustains them, but does not abide in them. All beings pass into Me at the End, and I send them forth again at the Beginning” (Sh 4 to 7).

The superiority of bhakti to God over Vedic rituals is re-emphasized very explicitly.

“The knowers of the Vedas who drink the soma, pray for the way to heaven. They reach the holy world of Indra and enjoy the pleasures of the gods. Having enjoyed paradise, they return to the world of mortals again. But to those who worship Me alone, I bring attainment of what they have not.” (Sh 20 to 22).

Chapter 10: This is just God going ‘I am the Greatest”, over and over. “Of the Adityas I am Vishnu, of the heavenly lights I am the Sun, .....of the gods I am Indra....... of weapons I am the thunderbolt” and so on and on and on. Finally ends with, “I support this entire universe, pervading it with but a fraction of Myself”. Enuff said.

Chapter 11: Vishwarupa!! The grand climax of the Gita. Arjuna gets to see the Cosmic Form of God.

Imagine that! A mind-blowing, soul-searing, all-encompassing vision of Ultimate Reality, of All That Is or Was or Ever Will Be!!! What could ever be more awesome and humbling, more ecstatic and terrifying, more devastating and transformative than that?! What an absolutely brilliant concept.

Unfortunately, followed up by poor execution. It starts off well enough with, “If the radiance of a thousand suns were to blaze forth at once in the sky, that might resemble the splendour of the Exalted one” (Sh 12), but is followed by a huge overload of anthropomorphic imagery – eyes, hands, stomach, mouths, teeth, garlands and such. Just doesn’t do it for me.

IMO, contemplating the Hubble Ultra Deep Field or zooming into the Mandelbrot set can convey a far better picture of what Vishwarupa might have been like. :-)

(Deep field: http://www.spacetelescope.org/images/wallpaper3/opo0428b.jpg Every little speck in the image is a galaxy!

Mandelbrot set: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAJE35wX1nQ )

Brief Interlude: So, now with the Cosmic Form shown and described, does the Gita end on a high note? Alas, no. Seven more chapters follow. Many of them are just remixes of the old ones, and give the impression of being added on to make the magic number, 18.

Chapter 12: Strong advertisement for bhakti. Devotion to a personal God (Ishwara) is declared at the outset to be superior to contemplation of the impersonal Brahman. And what is the ideal bhakta like ? “He who behaves alike to friend and foe, who is alike in heat and cold, pleasure and pain” (Sh 18)... sounds familiar? Yes ! Mr. Detachee from chapter 6 is back.

Chapter 13: Just Sankhya philosophy – Purush and Prakriti. Prakriti is dynamic and everchanging, ceaselessly bringing forth myriad different forms. Purush just sits around, observing and unobserved, unaffected by anything that happens. Yet, somehow, Purush is supposed to be the better of the two. Possibly because He is the Man.

Chapter 14: More on the three gunas – sattva, rajas, tamas – first seen in chapter 7. Sattva is goodness, rajas is passion, tamas is darkness/ignorance. Most of the chapter is an elaboration on what qualities are associated with each. But towards the end, Arjuna asks, “What are the qualities of one who has risen above the three gunas?” Turns out, this is someone who “regards pain and pleasure alike, treats alike a lump of mud, a stone and a piece of gold, who...” ok, ok, we got it, we got it. It’s Mr D. again.

Chapter 15: Remember the cosmic tree? It’s this very interesting image of the reality as an inverted tree, with its roots originating in Brahman, its leaves and branches constituting the world. Quite a unique picture, really. (Ok, there’s Yggdrasil of Norse myth, but it’s the right side up). I had no idea the image was in the Gita, so that was interesting.

But what are we told to do? “Cut off this firm rooted tree with the sword of non-attachment”. Uh-oh, it’s the D-word again. The rest of the chapter is about how the Lord dwells in all things and suchlike, but we’ve seen this all before in chapters 7 to 9.

Chapter 16: All about the daivic (divine) and asuric (demonic) natures intrinsic to human beings. The message: Daivic nature, very good, very good, Asuric nature, very bad, very bad.

Chapter 17: Rather artificial classification of diets, forms of worship, types of penance etc as sattvic, rajasic and tamasic. Don’t know why this wasn’t just attached to chapter 14. Sudden digression into the meaning and significance of “Aum Tat Sat” at the end.

Chapter 18: The finale, and a fairly eclectic mix of previous material. The three-way classification of the last chapter goes on for a bit. We have the three kinds of knowledge, three kinds of work, three kinds of understanding and so forth.

Karmayoga and swadharma re-appear, but this time, the dharma is laid out by caste in shlokas 42 – 44. (I really don’t buy that stuff.) A bit of Dhyanayoga pops in. Then, a particularly strong form of ‘God is responsible for all action’ – “The Lord abides in all hearts, driving them as machines” (Sh 61). The implication is that if Arjuna refuses to fight, the will of God will compel him.

And finally, “Fix thy mind on Me, be devoted to Me, prostrate thyself before Me. Abandoning all duties, come to Me alone for shelter. I shall deliver thee from all evils” (Sh 65 & 66).

In conclusion: Thus, ultimately, it is ‘Surrender to Me and do My will’.

How disappointing! So much better would have been, “Use your new knowledge, think carefully and make up your own mind.” Don’t you think so?

Large Numbers

2009-09-10T05:18:00.000-07:00

Let’s talk about large numbers. Not your humdrum, everyday sort of large number, like the number of stars in the galaxy (about 10^11 or 100,000,000,000) or drops of water in the ocean (about 10^25 or 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000). Not even the somewhat larger numbers like atoms in the visible universe (10^80, I won’t bother to write it out) or the Googol (10^100, not to be confused with Google).

No, today I want to talk about seriously large numbers. A good first try is the Googolplex, or 10^(10^100), that is 1 followed by a googol zeroes. While a googol vastly exceeds the number of atoms in the known universe, a googolplex can’t even be written out in full within the universe, even assuming you could write each zero using only one atom!

Ok, now we’re talking, but this is just the beginning. To represent the sort of numbers I have in mind, we need a new type of notation, called Arrow Notation. Here goes.

Arrow Notation:

If a and b are positive integers, a^b is just defined as ab.

The general definition is recursive:

a^...n arrows...^b = a^..(n-1) arrows..^a^..(n-1) arrows..^a^.......^a

where the (n-1) arrows operation is executed (b-1) times. The arrow operations are executed from right to left.

Let’s illustrate by example. It’s easy to check that a^^..n arrows ..^^ 2 is just a^2 for any n and any a. The smallest value of b which gives us something interesting is 3.

So, to start off:

3^3 = 33 = 27

3^^3 = 3^3^3 = 327 = 7,625,597, 484, 987

Ok, so that’s one of our garden variety large numbers. The ^^ operation, known as the ‘tower’ operation quickly gives us much bigger numbers.

For example, 3^^4 = 3^3^3^3 = 3^7,625,597,484,987, which is a number with about 3.5 trillion digits. 3^^5 would be 3^(3^7,625,597,484,987), which means if you wrote it out in base 3, the number of digits would be 3^7,625,597,484,987 !! And so on...

But now let’s get serious. How about adding yet another arrow?

3^^^3 = 3^^(3^^3) = 3^^7,625,597, 484, 987

How big is this? Well, when we look at 3^^3, 3^^4 and 3^^5, we see the incredible impact of increasing the number to the right of the ^^ by 1. Well, we’ve just increased it by about 7.6 trillion, so it’s impossible to imagine not only the number itself, but even the number of digits in the number, or even the number of digits of the number of digits of the number , or even....hmmm, running into some serious linguistic limitations here, but you get the idea.

But ok, let’s quit trying to imagine and just add one more arrow.
Let’s look at 3^^^^3

3^^^^3 = 3^^^3^^^3 = 3^^3^^......3^^3

where the ^^ operation is done 3^^^3 times.

Take another quick read through the part where I describe 3^^^3. Now take a very deep breath.

Imagine you are doing the evaluation of the right hand side in the expression above. Remember it’s done from right to left.

So, at step 1, you get 3^^3 which is kid-stuff.

But at step 2, you already have 3^^(3^^3) which is our mind-cracking 3^^^3 !!! Now, you just have to continue for another (3^^^3 – 3) steps....

If you’re really feeling masochistic, you can try working out 3^^^^^3, but by now I hope you’ve realized the effect of adding just one extra arrow. So, I’ll go ahead instead and mention the biggest number ever used in a mathematical proof.

Graham’s Number

First brought to attention in 1977, the number was used by the mathematician Ronald Graham working in a field called Ramsey theory. Ramsey theory deals with problems of the form, “How many elements must a set have for a certain property to occur.”

So, for example, suppose you have a gathering where any two people either know each other or don’t. How many people must there be, so that you always have either three people who all know each other or three people who all don’t know each other ? The answer in this case is 6. (Prove it!).

If you make the property more complex, the size of the set increases correspondingly. Graham showed that for his problem, the desired property is always satisfied if the set has at least Graham’s number of elements.

So, what is this number? Let’s define a sequence as follows.

G1 = 3^^^^3, our humongous old friend.

Now let G2 = 3^^...^^3

where - and read this bit very carefully – the number of arrows is G1 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (What I really feel like doing is adding at least a googol exclamation marks here, or maybe a googolplex.)

G3 = 3^^...^^3 where the number of arrows is G2.

Still hanging on? Ok then, so we define G3, G4, G5 etc in the same style.
Graham’s number is G64.

Infinity

So, finally, we come to the biggest of them all. “Nonsense!”, interjects the mathematician, “Infinity is not a number at all. It’s an abstract concept and a pretty tricky one at that.”

Of course, of course. But when we mere mortals think of Infinity, we do tend to think of something very, very big which goes on and on and on and on.

How big? Well, the ancients used to mention things like “stars in the heavens”, “drops of water in the ocean”, “grains of sand in the desert” etc to convey a sense of infinity. But as we saw right at the start, these concepts are easily tamed with standard mathematical notation, and turn out to be all too finite and very manageable.

If we go beyond and introduce arrow notation, we can quickly write down numbers which completely drown the imagination all the way up to Graham’s number (and way beyond of course.)

However, compared to Infinity, there is no difference between Graham’s number and zero.

In fact, think about the sequence G1, G2, etc, where Graham’s number if G64. If we take the “Graham’s number”-th number in this sequence (!!!) and subtract it from Infinity, it makes, not a small difference, not a tiny, puny, minute difference, but absolutely no difference whatsoever.

That’s what Infinity is. Treat it with respect.

Project Mahabharata

2009-08-23T00:15:00.000-07:00

I am planning to read the Mahabharat. All of it. You can, too. A complete and unabridged translation of the Sanskrit original is available at http://www.sacred-texts.com/hin/maha/index.htm

In addition, I have a copy of Kaliprasanna Singha’s translation in Bengali. I remember seeing it first in my grandfather’s house when I was about 9. It seemed inconceivable that anybody could finish reading even a chapter of that humongous tome, let alone the entirety. My grandfather, it seemed, had done this, proving once again that he was the smartest man in the world, ever.

Now, over two decades later I have a copy of my own. I estimate that if it was written out in the same style as, say, the US hardbound edition of the Harry Potter series, it would be about 5000 pages. Now that’s big, but nowhere near infinite. The HP series itself is a total of about 2500 pages, and children routinely read it all. So, it’s eminently possible to read the entire Mahabharat from start to finish! How cool is that?

So, I’m reading the Mahabharat and I must admit it’s a lot tougher going than Rowling’s work or Tolkien’s, because, boy, this book needed an editor!!!

To begin with there’s an incredible amount of fluff, and descriptions tend to be overly detailed and highly formulaic. If I have to read yet another description of warriors fighting ‘like passionate bull elephants during mating season’, I swear I’m going to throw the book at somebody’s head (and severely sprain a muscle in the process). Every time a deity or rishi or even a minor dignitary enters the scene, be prepared for a mile-long stava (‘oratory of praise’) elevating him all the way to Param-Brahma. And if anybody starts lamenting, especially Draupadi, you might as well head for the hills, or at least skip the next several pages.

Secondly, the narrative is highly nonlinear. There’s no “Once upon a time there were five brothers.....”. The Mahabharata is more like the Arabian nights. People start telling a story, and the characters in the story start telling each other another story, and on it goes. Then, all of a sudden, somebody gets beheaded or something and you're like, "Wait, wait, wait, what?? Which level of the loop was I on???"

Then there’s the whole blasted habit of giving away the ending. Happens all the time in the war chapters. For example, right at the outset of Karnaparva, Sanjay goes, "And so after two days of valiant fighting, the mighty Karna was slain by Arjuna..." . Dhritarashtra promptly faints away in shock, and I'm going, "Damn you, that was supposed to come at the END." Then they revive the old King, and Sanjay goes, "So, as I was saying, after Drona died, Duryodhana made Karna the new senapati...." and so on.
Honestly, those ancients had NO concept of slowly building up the tension to a big climax!!

It makes more sense if you remember that the epic was designed for listening in real time. So, during an endless stava or lamentation sequence, you could let your mind wander or run a small errand. Whereas maybe an ending-giveaway was a way of saying, “Hey, don’t go to the bathroom now. Big action scene coming up!” But for a modern reader, it can be rather frustrating.

So, then why bother, you may ask? Why not just read one of the dozens of abridged versions available in the market?

Well, I already have. In fact, if you can read Bengali, I will highly, highly recommend Upendrakishore Raychaudhuri’s (he was Satyajit Ray’s grandfather) version for children. I knew it as ‘CCheleder Mahabharat’ (Mahabharat for Boys), but apparently its been PC-ly renamed ‘CChotoder Mahabharat” (Mahabharat for Youngsters). The book is a gem – very entertainingly written and very faithful to the original as I am finding.

Part of my motivation is a reality check – one constantly hears that something or the other is ‘written in the Mahabharat’, I want to see if that’s really so.

But what really drives me is the sheer feel of reading the massive old epic. It’s not like reading a novel at all. Apart from the main plotline, the Mahabharat contains tons of other stories. Virtually every ancient Indian story you’ve heard of is present somewhere or the other – ‘Shakuntala-Dushyanta’, ‘Nala-Damayanti’, ‘Kacha-Devayani’, a condensed version of the Ramayan and much, much more. And often in the most unexpected of places – for example, the story of Shiva, Parvati and the birth of Kartika suddenly shows up before the final battle between Bhima and Duryodhana. Add to all this a huge dollop of philosophical discourse, political advice, social directives and whimsical folk tales thrown in almost at random and you have the big, bewildering mishmash that is the Mahabharat. Reading the great epic is a lot like walking the ways of an ancient city – you wander around pondering the well-known sights, and all of a sudden you are in a dingy little alleyway which leads to an exquisite garden, tucked away where you least expect it. It’s an experience you shouldn’t miss.

P.S: If you want to try the Mahabharat project yourself and want some company, some of us have set up a discussion blog at http://groups.google.com/group/mahabharata-discussion
All are welcome.

BANG!!!

2009-08-08T13:57:00.000-07:00

“Ten to twenty billion years ago, something happened. The Big Bang, the event that started our Universe. Why it happened is the biggest mystery we know. That it happened is reasonably clear”. Thus wrote Carl Sagan in 1980.

Now nearly three decades later, we know that it happened not “ten to twenty billion years ago”, but more like 13.7 billion years give or take 200 million. And we’re beginning to home in on why it happened.

For the cosmologically uninitiated, the Big Bang is the colossal explosion which started our Universe. It’s not really your garden variety explosion - it happened everywhere at the same time and space itself began to expand and has been expanding ever since. (Expanding into what ? Wrong question! Space just expands. There need not be anything outside for it to expand into.). As a bonus, all the matter and energy in the Universe came into existence at the Big Bang. Must have been really something to see (for the picosecond before your retina evaporated.)

Ok then, so what caused the Big Bang? Answer: Gravity.

“Now hang on”, you say, “gravity is an attractive force. It makes everything collapse and clump together. The Big Bang was an explosion. Am I missing something here?”

We-e-ell, you see, there’s gravity and gravity. Our usual type of gravity, the type that foils your attempts at spontaneous levitation, is caused by our everyday type of matter. But make that matter sufficiently weird, and gravity can push things apart with enough OOOMPH to satisfy the most ardent anti-gravity aficionado.

Let me elaborate. Our best model of gravity today is Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. What GTR says is that the gravitational force generated by an object is proportional to its mass/energy. This is pretty much what we know, the heavier the body, the more the gravity. But there’s also something else – the pressure of the system also contributes.

To illustrate, if you have a spring, then its mass will create a gravitational attraction. If you squeeze the spring, its pressure increases and so does the pull of its gravity. Now here’s the crux – if you stretch the spring, the pressure term becomes negative and the gravitational pull decreases. And if you stretch it enough, the negative pressure term can totally overwhelm the effect of the spring’s mass, and the gravitational field will repel rather than attract. A sufficiently stretched spring is an anti-gravity machine!

Unfortunately, any real spring will rip into pieces long before anti-gravity sets in. But there does exist a substance which can act like our hyper-stretched theoretical spring. What is it? Nothingness.

No, I haven’t suddenly gone Zen on you. If you remove all our usual matter and energy, the empty space that remains (which would qualify as nothing for most people) might still have an ‘energy’. The details are technical, but the gist is, this weird ‘vacuum energy’ generates a ferocious burst of antigravity, the Bang of the Big Bang. In the space of 10^(-35) seconds the nascent universe expands by a factor of at least 10^30, and the rest is history.

But wait, first let’s give a sense of those numbers. 10^30 is one followed by thirty zeroes. That’s like blowing up a virus to the size of our galaxy! And how fast did this happen? Well, if a blink of an eye was scaled down to 10^(-35) seconds, then the lifetime of our universe would be one hundred millionth of a nanosecond. Unimaginable doesn’t even begin to describe it.

As if this wasn’t enough, we have every reason to believe that the expansion went on way beyond this. A consequence is, our observable universe is miniscule compared to the actual universe. To picture this, imagine the entire Universe to be the surface of a giant balloon studded with galaxies. The observable universe, which is what we can see, from the Earth to the most distant galaxies spotted by our telescopes, would be like a patch drawn on the balloon. The diameter of that patch would be about 90 billion light years, which is about 10^27 metres. Now the question is, “What is the circumference of the entire balloon?” A possible estimate is, 10^(10^12) metres. Yes, you read that right. One followed by a trillion zeroes!!!

Usually astronomers like to convey the scale of things with analogies like, “Suppose the earth was the size of an orange, then the Sun would be...” etc. So, let me try to convey the size of the whole Universe. Shrink the Universe by a factor of 10^40. The observable universe, with all its hundreds of billions of galaxies is now the size of an atomic nucleus. Now repeat the procedure 25 billion times. At this point, the Universe has the same size as our observable universe... or an atomic nucleus if we’ve scaled down one too many times by accident! Does it really matter?

Now let’s go back to the beginning, before that miniscule speck of vacuum energy expanded to incomprehensible size. On the smallest of scales, quantum physics rules, which implies roughly that “nothing ever sits still”. So, even on the tiniest scales, the vacuum energy cannot be uniform- it is perpetually roiled by quantum fluctuations which ensure that its values are never quite the same everywhere. What do these elusive quantum fluctuations look like? Take a look below.

What you saw was a map of our universe on the largest scales we can see. The reddish foam-like structure represents clusters of galaxies strewn across space with vast voids in between. The gigantic cosmic expansion stretches the quantum fluctuations out from submicroscopic scales to cosmic ones - resulting in a froth-like clustering of galaxies as far as we can see. The largest structures we see in the visible universe are quantum fluctuations stretched across the heavens.

And finally the grand slam. The universe contains an enormous amount of matter and energy. At least a hundred billion galaxies with a hundred billion stars each. Where did all this come from? The traditional answer is, “From the Infinite and Eternal Mind of God”.

But we’ll try for something much humbler – by starting with a glass falling from your hand. The glass gains kinetic energy from the earth’s gravitational field, which then gets converted to sound, heat and a mess on the floor. A rather more spectacular example is a supernova. A giant star at the end of its life collapses under its own gravity. The energy gained from the gravitational field converts into a cataclysmic explosion which blows the star apart and temporarily outshines an entire galaxy. This is all with our familiar matter and energy.

A speck of vacuum will also gain a gigantic amount of energy from its own gravitational field. But instead of collapsing while doing so, it blows apart in a Big Bang. At the end of this blast of expansion, the energy gained at gravity’s expense is let loose in a flood of radiation and matter that makes up everything you see and much more. So, there we go - you don’t need a hundred billion galaxies worth of material to start off the universe. Just a tiny seed of vacuum energy and the rest will follow.

At this point, it’s a case of ‘almost, but not quite’. After all, where did that seed come from? Nobody knows, but here’s a possibility. Start off with truly empty space – so empty, it’s even devoid of vacuum energy. Now, remember those pesky quantum fluctuations? They’re always around, wriggling, wiggling, flickering and jittering. So, even if you assume that the vacuum energy of empty space is zero, it’s never quite so. The value keeps fluctuating up and down, here and there. Given enough time, somewhere, on some miniscule, submicroscopic domain, a fleeting fluctuation will exceed a critical threshold, and.... BANG!!!

So, at the end of things (or is it the beginning?), think of Space. From the endless voids between the galaxies and the yawning gulfs separating the stars therein to the emptiness within an atom, space pervades everything. Think of the fact that every bit of that space, every minute, infinitesimal bit – so small that an atom looks is a galaxy in comparison – has the potential to blossom into an entire Universe of stars and galaxies, life and mind. Maybe it is happening somewhere right now. Maybe, even as you read this sentence, a billion, trillion, zillion Universes are exploding into existence....

The Western Experience

2009-07-26T07:11:00.000-07:00

If you’ve read the ‘About Me’ part of the blog, you already know I’m not a galaxy. Good start. To be a bit more explicit, I’m human, male, grew up in Kolkata till end of college, went off to the US, lived in the West (USA and UK) for about 12 years, and came back to India for good (Yes ! Really !!).

It seems de riguer for an NRI, or ex-NRI, to write an angsty piece about their life in the West and make grand extrapolations to the experience of ‘all Indians’. (It’s generally considered totally uncool to just say, “Ya, life was/is very chilled out t/here”). So, here it comes.
Ok, to begin with, I didn’t feel I was abandoning my parents and cultural roots, I wasn’t appalled by the ‘lack of family/spiritual values’, I wasn’t in the least bothered by women in tank-tops or couples snogging in public. For all that, there’s Jhumpa Lahiri.

But here’s what did bother me.

I grew up on a pretty rich diet of English books and movies. Tintin and Asterix comics, Famous Five, Hardy Boys, Sherlock Holmes, Agatha Christie, you name it. Then there was Star Trek, Mickey Mouse and Spiderman on TV, and the big surge of Hollywood films during Christmas was always eagerly anticipated. Being a bit of a geek (just a bit?), I was heavily into science fiction and fantasy, which are genres of literature almost completely dominated by North American and British authors. Then there were all the great popular science authors, once again, mostly American or British.

So, to cut it short, I grew up absorbing, enjoying and admiring many of the products of western culture, and I believe my experience of quite typical of urban, middle-class Indian children (extrapolations have begun!).

It was a shock, therefore, to go to the West, and find that this feeling is absolutely not reciprocated.

To the average urban, middle-class westerner, India is invisible. Some people may have heard of Gandy (“what was that? Oh, Gandhi”), some New Age types have some curiosity about Indian religion (“chakra, chakra, not shakra”) and you get asked whether you like ‘curry’ (“curry is not a dish, idiots! Its like asking, Do you like soup?”). But apart from that, there’s just a very vague awareness of India as a land of starving people and cows, and nowadays, telemarketers and IT nerds. And there it ends.

Once, this sank in I re-read my beloved science and SF authors and realised with great disappointment that this was true of them as well. People like me were never part of their intended audience, and in fact, probably outside their mental horizon altogether. A very notable exception was Arthur C. Clarke, who often introduces Hindu and Buddhist names and themes into his novels. Carl Sagan dwells at some length on Indian cosmological speculations in Cosmos. But that’s about it.

And then I started seeing it in all the English books and movies I grew up with. Here I’d been thinking, like any eager reader, that the authors were ‘talking to me’, so to speak. But no, they weren’t. In fact, they had no idea that people like me might even read their work, just like all the ignoramuses I kept meeting in everyday life!

Now I’ll make a grand extrapolation and say that my experience is quite typical of Indians arriving in the West. And this is a problem. Most of us grow up with an awareness that our country has a vibrant culture with deep roots and this is a source of pride. To suddenly end up in a place where all of that is completely ignored or peripheralized, feels like, well, Arthur Dent looking up the Hitchhiker’s Guide and finding that the only entry under ‘Earth’ is ‘mostly harmless’! (If you didn’t get that reference, er..., let’s just have a chat sometime, ok?)

People react to this in different ways. Some decide that the best way to regain importance is by trying to act as ‘western’ as much as possible. Nowadays, their numbers are dropping and good riddance. Others embark on private crusades to raise India-awareness. As a result any unfortunate westerner in the vicinity is subject to long lectures on ‘glorious Indian culture and traditions’ (and subsequently avoids any Indian event like the plague.) Many get into an angry defensive crouch – “If they can’t be bothered about us, screw them! We can’t be bothered about them either”. Kind of difficult if you are living in their country, so what happens is a gradual tendency to segregate into rather claustrophobic all-Indian communities.

Of course, the circus really begins when the next generation comes along, but that’s a can of worms to be opened elsewhere.

Why Science Will Never Accept God

2009-07-23T02:19:00.000-07:00

Amidst all the clamour of the science/religion debates, one persistently hears the accusation from the religious camp that scientists do not want to believe in God.

Scientists, claim the believers, are being obdurate – they have decided to shut their minds to God’s existence and would stretch their theories to any length to avoid the possibility of divine involvement. Is there any truth to this ?

On casual inspection, the claim is patently false. There are any number of scientists who have produced excellent work while being devoutly religious. And to my knowledge, there is no stricture against scientists holding religious and/or supernatural beliefs. Humans hold all kinds of personal beliefs and scientists are no exception.

However, the accusation begs a deeper question. Namely, is the scientific method itself incompatible with God? Or, in other words, can God ever be a valid scientific hypothesis?
I think the answer to the latter is No.

To begin my argument, science works by making careful observations of nature and framing hypotheses to explain those observations. The hypotheses are then used to make further predictions which are then tested by observation and experiment.

This is admittedly a gross simplification of the scientific method, and in reality, the scientific enterprise does not proceed in a linear fashion. Guesses, prejudices and misunderstandings abound. Theories are ignored on first publication or dismissed by prominent scientists, only to resurface decades later and gain prominence. However, for the purposes of our argument, the observation- hypothesis-testing model of the scientific method suffices.

Now to begin with, there is no observational evidence for God, of course, or this whole debate would be moot. So we need to ask if God can be a good scientific hypothesis. Indeed most theist-atheist arguments traditionally start with, “What made the universe?”

So: Observation: Universe, Hypothesis: God, Test: ????

This is the point where the problem arises. An unwritten rule in science is Occam’s razor – We choose the simplest possible hypothesis to explain a given fact. In accordance with this, the basic ingredients in scientific models are as elementary as possible.

For example in physics, the typical entities in models are particles and fields, - mathematical constructs whose behaviour is completely described by a handful of numbers. For all the intimidating math in theoretical physics, the models contain nothing remotely as complex as even a virus!

Now let’s take a look at God.

God is the Supreme Being, “omnipotent, omnipresent and omniscient” according to the Abrahamic religions, “ the infinite, immanent and transcendent reality which is the Divine Ground of all matter, energy, time, space, being, and everything beyond” according to Hinduism.

Very impressive indeed, but from a scientific viewpoint, extremely problematic!
Such a being is the polar opposite of simple and elementary. In fact, almost by definition, this is the most complex entity that can ever be hypothesized in a model. Thus, by Occam’s razor, every possible alternative should be considered before suggesting God as an explanation. On an infinitely long list of conceivable explanations for a phenomenon, God would be right at the bottom !

So much for Occam’s razor. How about predictive power?

If God is your hypothesis, what’s the prediction? Well, everything - after all, there’s nothing an all-powerful being can’t do. And nothing - because His Omnipotence is certainly not obliged to do anything! Thus, the God hypothesis produces no testable predictions.

Awe inspiring and humbling though the idea of God may be, as a scientific hypothesis it is useless.

So if God is no good as a hypothesis, how about a proof by observation? Once again, trickier than it seems.

Certainly, it is possible that we may observe supernatural phenomena, though none have been documented to date with any credibility. Water turning into wine, or people walking on water, or statues drinking milk for instance. These would be completely contrary to our current understanding of the world, and scientists would be forced to admit that ‘something else’ was at work. But even so, how would we know this was God, the Supreme Being, in action and not some more mundane creature, such as a genie or an asura?
Similarly, even if we had incontrovertible evidence that our universe was intelligently designed, how would we know it is the Mind of God that designed it? Maybe it’s just an alien schoolboy in a metaverse which was itself sneezed out by the great green Arklesnoozer in a meta-metaverse and so on.

In some ways, this is akin to the problem of figuring out if the universe is infinite or just really large. We can keep going and always finding more, but it can still be that the end is just beyond our horizon....

So, where does all this leave us? Not, I think, with the conclusion that science has disproved God, as some may claim. In fact, from what I just said, science cannot prove or disprove the existence of God, because the God hypothesis makes no testable predictions. But since science is the best way we know of producing reliable, objective knowledge, it is unclear how we can ever resolve the issue.

For this same reason, God will never be part of an attempted scientific explanation of anything, though people may, and will, of course continue to believe in Her for other reasons.

All I can say is that, to date, we have succeeded in explaining all observed phenomena within the framework of elementary entities behaving according to elegant mathematical laws. It is possible that these laws were designed by a transcendent intelligence beyond the universe. But this is by no means inevitable, or the only possibility.

Furthermore, there is no way to scientifically test claims about beings beyond the universe, since all our observations and experiments are necessarily confined within it.

So, this may be a good time to invoke the eminently sensible proverb, “Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we should remain silent.

Harry Potter and the Half-Baked Flick

2009-07-21T07:56:00.000-07:00

SPOILERS GALORE !!! READ AT YOUR OWN RISK !!!

Right off the bat, let me admit that Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince is a cut above the previous five movies. But only because the others are so lame.

The movie starts off at a brisk walk with storm clouds gathering above London and Death Eaters streaking out like sooty comets to wreak havoc in the city. By half-time it looks like it might even run. Then it shoots itself firmly in both feet to collapse in an anticlimactic heap. In what follows I will assume, that you like myself, have read and loved the book (and preferably, all the books.) So, I’ll abandon the usual refrains of “Harry Potter and friends are back in a deeper, darker, scarier, more adult, more mature, ...... yakkety yak yak”.

In a bizarre inversion of quality, the film shines precisely where the book fails and vice versa. Anybody who has read the series (or is it just the old and cynical ones like me ?) tends to agree that Rowling’s depictions of teenage romance and angst are by far the most annoying aspects of Book 4 onwards, and a general lowering of overall standards. However, the romance bits of the movie are genuinely entertaining and often very amusing. Jessica Cave delivers a hilariously over-the-top performance as the lovestruck Lavender Brown. Rupert Grint’s idiotic grin as Ron under the effects of love potion has to be seen to be believed. Also very amusing are Harry and Ginny’s awkward attempts at romance, continually interrupted by the bumbling Ron.

Unfortunately that’s where the good news ends. Now for the bad.

The central thread of the Half-Blood Prince book is a series of revelations about Voldemort’s life, seen in Dumbledore’s pensieve. Dumbledore is demystifying Voldemort – showing Harry that the Dark Lord is not an invincible superbeing as he wants all to believe. He is just a man, who was once a child, and then a teenager. In a fascinating series of snippets, we read about his ancestors, obsessed with heritage and wizard pride. We see him as a boy already inclined towards cruelty and domination, a teenager ever adept at flattering teachers to get the information he needs. We find out about his obsession with objects of antiquity and value. Then the final revelation and the key to bringing down the Dark Lord – the multiple Horcruxes, each created by murder, which bind him to the world.

All this is replaced by two hasty scenes totalling not much more than 5 minutes!!
Then the chilling scene of locating the Horcrux locket – the huge underground lake, the deadly potion in the basin, Dumbledore screaming in terror and agony, then lying in a faint begging for water... Once again,very clumsily done. To begin with the sets look so obviously fake,that disbelief is hard to suspend. The lake looks tiny. Dumbledore flails about a bit all right, but in half a minute, looks quite fine. When he asks Harry for water, it seems he’s just being lazy.

And now the finale.

I remember how it felt when reading the book. The Dark Mark hovers above Hogwarts. Harry suddenly finds himself petrified beneath his invisibility cloak. He watches, helpless, as a visibly weakening Dumbledore faces Malfoy, who has come to kill him. But the old wizard is completely unfazed. He is sure Draco’s heart is not in it. In fact, yes, Malfoy is losing his nerve and lowering his wand. All’s well after all...

Then four Death Eaters burst in. Tension once again. Dumbledore remains composed but now the outcome is far from certain. Then Snape enters. At this point I know all will be fine. Dumbledore trusts Snape. Snape will surprise the Death Eaters and rescue him, he’s the ace in the old man’s sleeve.... Snape kills Dumbledore !!! What the ****** ???!!! While this is yet to sink in, we find Hogwarts in chaos. Death Eaters are battling the students and the Order of the Phoenix. Spells fly everywhere and pandemonium reigns, while the Death Eaters make their exit. And as a last, shocking revelation, Snape is the Half Blood Prince, whose potions book has helped Harry all year round !

That’s the book. Now for the film.

They come back to Hogwarts all right. Then Dumbledore tells Harry to stay out of sight. No petrifying spell, no cloak. Enter Malfoy, enter Death Eaters, enter Snape. No build up, no tension, nothing. Snape does the Avada Kedavra almost as an afterthought. And all the while Harry just watches with the moronic, vacant expression that seems to be Daniel Radcliffe’s trademark. Then the Death Eaters sort of saunter out with Harry obligingly following behind, with no attempt to attack them, raise the alarm, or create any resistance. And I’m thinking, “Is everyone finding this as stupid as I am?”

Bellatrix Black trashes the great hall and sets fire to a couple of buildings. Nobody wakes up, nobody notices. Is everybody in Hogwarts on drugs or what? Only when the Death Eaters are well out of the building, does Harry challenge them and get his butt thoroughly kicked. Serves him right for being such a retard!

Ok, that’s it. The film ends shortly in a total anticlimax. I don’t know if this is a deliberate ploy in order to get a PG rating, but every previous Harry Potter movie shows the same tendency to downplay and rush through the darker, chilling parts that make Rowling’s books such a pleasure to read. It is unfortunate that the Half-Blood Prince movie makes the same, tired mistake and leaves you with the same insipid taste in your mouth.

The Credit Crisis -----Continued

2009-07-21T04:00:00.000-07:00

Penetrating all the jargon in finance articles has been tough, but I

think I've done it.
So I'm going to write it up here.

The subprime mortgages and defaults are the easiest part to understand, but wasn't clear to me what exactly the investment banks had done and why everyone is panicked.

Now I think I do.
It’s all due to the invention of new financial technology (yes, we quants are called financial engineers officially).

Its an instrument called the Credit Default Swap (CDS) and its heavyweight cousin, the CDO.

I've been working in this area doing models and all the last few years, but the big picture was never made clear to us all this time. Turns out, the models were window dressing, it was mainly a lot of fraud.

Here goes...

Credit Default Swap - Part I

The CDS is a very simple instrument.

The idea is, suppose you have XYZ company which is BBB rated (very bad shape). Now you own $1m worth of XYZ bonds and you are getting interest. But problem is, XYZ can go bust any day and you'll lose $1m.

So, big investment bank, let us refer to it as Evil I-Bank, offers you a credit default swap on XYZ.

The CDS on XYZ specifies that you will pay a quarterly premium to Evil I-Bank, (usually specified as a percentage on the underlying, in this case, $1m). In return, if XYZ goes bust, Evil I-Bank, pays you $1m.

Typical insurance scheme.
So how can that cause a crisis ?

Because, rather than just insurance, CDS can also be used for speculation.

Credit Default Swaps – Speculation

So, now suppose you are a speculator. You know that XYZ is BBB rated, so could go bust any day.

How do you take advantage of that ?

Well, the standard way is to short XYZ stocks. You can even short XYZ bonds (though more complicated).

But there's a problem with that. You need someone to lend you the XYZ stock to short it, and there's only a limited number around.

Maybe $10m max, since XYZ is a small company. Ditto with bonds.

But now you have a new means. Simply get into a $10m CDS with Evil I-Bank on XYZ company. You see, one doesn't need to actually own any XYZ bonds to set up a CDS on XYZ !

Its as though, I can buy car insurance which will pay me if my neighbour has an accident.
And so can all of you.

Thus, previously if XYZ went bust, the max total loss to anybody is $10m.

Now it can be $1 billion, $10 billion, who knows ? Because everyone can set up a CDS to bet against a company and many people did.

This is the leveraging everyone's talking about.

But on the other hand, why were the I-banks so eager to set up CDS's with whoever wanted them.

Weren't they liable to lose a lot ?

Enter the CDO.

CDOs

Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs), the hot product of the last few years, engineered by all us math/physics PhDs.

The idea is suppose you are Evil I-Bank.
You have 100 BBB rated companies like XYZ. You've just sold $10m worth of CDS on each. So, now if they all go bust, you can lose $1billion. What do you do ?

Answer: Slice it up !

So, you create a "0 to 3%" slice. (technically, tranche)

Which means you go to a client and say, Look, I have an asset based on 100 underlying companies. Now I'm going to pay you a quarterly premium. In return every time a company in this pool goes bust, you pay me $10m, but *only up to the first 30m dollars* (so that's 3% of 1bn). Of course, the client will want a high premium for bearing this risk.
But lets go on.

Then you have a "3 to 7%" slice. So, you pay another client a somewhat
smaller premium. The idea is in return he will start paying you back when the total loss
to the underlying portfolio exceeds 30m (i.e., from when he 4th company goes bust), but stops at 70m (so from 8th company onwards, not his problem).

And so it goes, till you usually have a 15 - 100% slice.

This total scheme of slices is a CDO.

So, now here's the deal.

Note that every time one of the 100 XYZ companies defaults, you have just passed the loss onto one of the clients of the CDO.

And in return you can pay them a part of the quarterly premiums you were getting from the people who had CDS on the XYZ companies !

So, the more CDS's you sell on one end, the more CDO's you can sell on the other.
Perfect !

But is it really so great. Who wants to take these slices ??

CDOs and the ratings debacle

Its all in the ratings.
If you have a basket of BBB rated companies, not many people will want to buy into those.

But now what if you've sliced and diced it the way I described ? How much are those slices worth ? What's theirs rating ?

Underneath all the high math, here's the heart of the business.

The I-banks managed to convince the ratings agencies hat the 15 - 100 % slices were AAA !! You'd get interest on those, but it was extremely unlikely that more than 15 of the 100 companies would default, so as good as having a bond of a blue-chip corp !

And this is the crux of the crisis. Any type of long term investor, like a pension fund, wants to invest in AAA securities. But these are generally hard to find, expensive, etc.

Now I-banks had a way to (spuriously) manufacture them out of thin air. Simply, sell tons of CDS on crap companies to speculators and charge them high premium (because these are BBB rated).

Join them together into CDO's. Sell the 15 - 100% slices to long term investors. Since, these are AAA rated, you pay them a low premium and they are happy. Voila ! Money for nothing !

And long term investors were snapping these up, so big bonuses and party time.

What about the 3-7% slice etc. These are bought by hedge funds as a way of getting easy cash in the short term. Hedge funds always need quick, short term cash

All fall down

So, that's the big picture.

Once things started going south and companies went bankrupt, losses were magnified gigantically by the proliferation of CDSs.

The AAA rated CDO slices built on the CDS turned out not to be AAA after all, so the long term investors are collapsing.

Hedge funds are dying by the thousands as the earlier slices get hit.

I-banks are hit hard. After all you think you are well hedged. But what happens when the pension funds you duped go down and *can't* pay the losses you passed on ?

Plus they have to mark to market, which means the books start showing big losses long before companies actually collapse.

All because of the CDS, which allows you to 'take out insurance on your neighbours life'.

There's still an estimated 45 to 60 *trillion* worth of CDS liability which can be called in as recession deepens and more companies fall.
No one knows how corresponding CDO slices are placed...

The Credit Crisis in Brief

2009-07-19T15:09:00.000-07:00

In the beginning, the Universe was created/ hatched from the Multiverse/bootstrapped itself into existence.Eons later, on a puny planet circling an in significant yellow star in the outskirts of one of hundreds of billions of galaxies, arose a race of ape descended life forms so primitive that they thought digital watches were a neat idea. As if that wasn't bad enough, they then thought it would be even cooler to trade trillions of dollars worth of dodgy financial securities called credit derivatives.

As a result, we (Ooops! They are Us!) find ourselves in the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression.Being one of the ape descended life forms involved in the trading of these instruments- albeit, in a fairly minor capacity - I decided to write a little piece summarizing the reason for the current debacle in what I hope is a sufficiently intelligent-layman-friendly fashion.

Keep visiting my blog, as I shall shortly come back with the entire story.

Song of Creation - Rigveda

2009-07-17T06:36:00.000-07:00

There was neither Nothingness nor Being,
Nor the skies above, nor the heavens beyond.
What covered it ? Where was it ? In whose keeping ?
Was there water then ? Water in depths unfathomed ?

Death was not then, nor immortality,
Nor any sign of night or day.
The One breathed alone, self sustained,
The One there was, and no other.

Darkness there was wrapped in darkness
All was ocean, swathed in gloom.
The One came to be, alone in the void
Born at last from fire within.

Desire arose in the beginning then
Primal seed of the nascent mind.
Sages searching their hearts with wisdom
Know that which Is, is kin to what Is Not.

Across the void shone the light piercing
What was above and what below ?
Mighty forces surged, fertile, creative
Power raged above, earth heaved below.

Who truly knows ? Who can speak forth ?
Whence it was born, whence came creation ?
The gods themselves were born after
Then who can say whence it came to be ?

How came to be this vast creation
Whether it was made, or formed itself
He who sees all from highest heaven
Verily he knows, or perhaps he does not….

***

What better way to start off a blog ?

The above is my (semi)-translation of the Nasadiya Suktam, one of my all-time favourite poems from the Rigveda. I found several translations on the Internet (not a single one by an Indian!), all somewhat unsatisfactory and mutually contradictory in places.

So I got hold of the original and where the translations conflicted, I was able to use my admittedly limited knowledge of Sanskrit to give what I hope is a more accurate rendering. Then I tried to make it all a bit more poetic – always a risky proposition.

What you saw was the final result.