Usually I am woken up from my deep late-morning slumber by the hunger pangs which strike at exactly 12:30, or whenever my messed-up biological clock thinks it's 12:30. Not so today. There is some heavy firing going on in my own backyard, and it doesn't let off for a whole fucking minute. I don't remember dreaming about India and Pakistan going to war, but it feels like I'm hiding in a bunker. My shifty imagination thinks of air-raids one moment, and terrorists the next. Or maybe air-raids by terrorists. The clock shows 11:30. I grab my pillow and put it over my head, as if that is going to make it any better. It probably would if I had the heart to choke myself to death.
It isn't war or terrorists, of course. I wish it was, it would give my conscience less sleepless nights if I shot those bastards. This is just the neighbourhood kids celebrating the festival of lights, nay, sounds, nay, noises. I wonder who gave them the idea that piercing people's eardrums was the way to moksha. And I wish they'd look for other places to attain that than my backyard. Well, not my backyard, but the inverse square law seems to have little effect. Not been a minute since the chain-cracker stopped. Now they're bursting what we fittingly call 'atom bombs'. The name doesn't convey one per-cent of the acoustic atrocity that these devils are. One burst every thirty seconds, now, unless I have lost my sense of time.
I think a hundred of those go off before my mental jurors reach a consensus. It's 12-0 for 'Go For The Gun'. I get up, open the drawer by the side of my bed and get my revolver out of it. Where the heck did I put those bullets? How could I misplace bullets? Well, record has shown I can misplace anything, and it should've been a pleasant surprise finding the gun the first place I looked. I open the barrel and look. One Bullet In Barrel. Well. A day the jury can vote 12-0, anything can happen.
I go over to the window and point my gun. Well, actually, I hide behind the curtains and take aim. The kid is about to burst the last fucking bomb he ever will. He strikes a match, smiles out of excitement, and the jury is back in the chamber. Let them be. His hand reaches for the firecracker, and that would set off an irreversible chain of events wherein the final consequence would be temporary deafness for six months for everybody in the neighbourhood. I pull the catch. It's a dirty, dirty job, but someone's got to do it. Bang!
Hah. Hah. Hah. The kid never knew what went wrong. One moment the cracker's string was there waiting to be lit, and the next: no string! I wont brag, but the string was as cleanly chopped off as if I had been there with a knife... Huh. That never occured to me. That's a fucking simpler way to chop off the fucking strings, isn't it? Chop them off with a knife. Or scissors. Less noisy too, and god knows I hate noises. One less bullet-hole in the ground too, but I think the kid overlooked that in his tremor as he ran away. The end result, however, is one less kid growing up with a topsy-turvy idea of what constitutes joie de vivre. Mission accomplished. Flash smile to camera, and return to bed.
17 October, 2009
01 July, 2009
Some comeback limericks
Anne sent me a limerick a long time back:
There was once a time when books slowly dwindled,
Bibliophiles everywhere felt nothing but swindled,
They wanted their books,
By hook or my crook,
But alas, in the end, all of them Kindled!
Which did inspire me to a reply...
The creation of Kindle is but another sign,
That everything else being idiotic, asinine,
Writing shall live on,
Or keep being reborn,
As epaper, Gutenberg, or blogs on-line!
And here are two about computer addiction:
I open my laptop and start wondering what
I should now type in the address bar slot,
Waste my time, and uncycle,
Or old limericks recycle?
But I just stare and the screen and do naught.
For now, I say, I shall stay with just chatting,
Maybe later I shall play online, combating,
And as I ignore my study,
And (the rare) offline buddy,
In the next exam, I will end up splatting!
Depressing, eh? True. But today I've got variety for you. :D (And that rhymed!)
There was once a time when books slowly dwindled,
Bibliophiles everywhere felt nothing but swindled,
They wanted their books,
By hook or my crook,
But alas, in the end, all of them Kindled!
Which did inspire me to a reply...
The creation of Kindle is but another sign,
That everything else being idiotic, asinine,
Writing shall live on,
Or keep being reborn,
As epaper, Gutenberg, or blogs on-line!
And here are two about computer addiction:
I open my laptop and start wondering what
I should now type in the address bar slot,
Waste my time, and uncycle,
Or old limericks recycle?
But I just stare and the screen and do naught.
For now, I say, I shall stay with just chatting,
Maybe later I shall play online, combating,
And as I ignore my study,
And (the rare) offline buddy,
In the next exam, I will end up splatting!
Depressing, eh? True. But today I've got variety for you. :D (And that rhymed!)
There was once an exam in College Streets,
Everyone copied, and handed in the sheets,
Everyone copied, and handed in the sheets,
When the teacher spotted it,
He promptly went into a fit,
"If you copy, do copy not John Doe, but Keats!"
Now, A limerick-poem:
Attack of the Troll
A simple forum disrupted, treated with scorn,
On youtube whether it's movie, song or porn,
Or an odd post on your blog,
Suddenly invaded by a hog
Welcome the troll, who's blowing his/her horn!
Whatever you wrote, was it well founded/checked?
Why did, if so, your world-lines intersect?
They'll stumble onto any small
Mistake on your Webwall,
And chastise you for being too politically correct!
What will you do now to gain a little traction?
And save all your posts, or the remaining fraction,
Just click the brain's 'ignore' switch,
Or maybe ban that revolting snitch,
Or just fart in the what-not's general direction!
Do comment. :)
24 June, 2009
The Physics of MRI
I had a discussion with Saskia a looong time back about MRI, and I learnt a little about how MRI machines work, in the process. Anne encouraged me to blog on this new-found knowledge, and after a LOT of procrastination, I've finally managed it. Hope you like it: it's layman level, and not too badly written (I hope).
Here it is: The Physics of MRI
If you find any faults, or find some section unclear, or have any critcisms at all (even positive ones ;-) ), do comment.
Here it is: The Physics of MRI
If you find any faults, or find some section unclear, or have any critcisms at all (even positive ones ;-) ), do comment.
13 June, 2009
03 June, 2009
Science Journalism
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/men_shealth/5426895/Men-live-longer-if-they-marry-a-younger-woman.html
I wonder how many journalists bunked the class when they were taught "correlation != causation".
I wonder how many journalists bunked the class when they were taught "correlation != causation".
26 April, 2009
The Dot Song
The Idea originated when Anne put Paul Klee's quote as her status message, and I came up with my line. Then I thought, why not start a meme and ask everyone to contribute the same kind of line. We got a lot of enthusiasm going for the thing, and the lines are brilliant. :)
So, here it is:
So, here it is:
The Dot Song
A line is a dot that went for a walk.
- Paul Klee (contributed by Bimal Bharath)
A curve is a dot that flew like a hawk.
- Rahul "Anonick" Dandekar
An icosahedron is a dot that didn't know where to stop.
A scribble is a dot not knowing what it sought.
A circle is a dot that just goes round and round,
A coil is a dot that keeps getting wound.
An exclamation is a dot with an erection.
-Bimal Bharath
An asterisk is a dot with hair.
A Buckyball is a dot that was out there to shop.
A doodle is a dot that dances a lot.
-Rahul "Anonick" Dandekar
A colon is a dot who found true love.
A knot is a dot that lost it's path.
(disclaimer: in a closed space)
-Ravitej U.
A star is a dot that's really really hot.
-Adi Sengupta
A tittle is a dot.
-Anandi Rajan
Z is a dot after too many drinks.
-Shivam Gupta
A bot is a dot, out of silicon wrought.
-Preyas P.
A semicolon is a dot taking a dump.
-Ranaji Deb
A division sign is a dot looking at the mirror in vain,
A curl is a dot that had too much champagne.
-Anisha "Anne" Zaveri
A comet is a dot with a wild streak.
A shooting star is a dot that can't be caught.
-Shatabdi "Express" Chowdhury
A squiggle is a dot that lost the plot
-Nikita Mehra
An O is a dot yawning.
-Bimal Bharath
A bulls eye is dot that is tough to spot.
-Preyas P.
A fuzzball is a dot with goosebumps.
-Rajani Rajan
A double helix is a dot that is entangled and can't get out.
-Anandi Rajan
A dot is not what you and I thought.
A dot is a dot is a dot.
-Nikhil Karthik (A Gertrude Stein reference)
(Period)
23 April, 2009
An ODE to Radioactivity
One fine day, the century before last,
Henry, a Becquerel, found himself aghast.
The photofilm that he hath so carefully shielded,
To some mysterious radiation had somehow yielded!
But he could protect it, he found, with some layers of lead,
The scientist began to think himself not too right in the head.
The clue lay in an adjoining drawer, a salt of the rare uranium,
Bequerel, satisfied to the core, thanked profusely his cranium.
Scientists soon pounced on the element, and happily played,
It emitted three rays, it seemed, and the emission decayed.
The three types were then baptised, alpha-beta-gamma.
Alpha was the heavyweight, but gamma did the harm-a.
(The radiation, though exciting, was indeed damaging,
Not all the researchers met their deaths by aging.)
The part of radioactivity that's most weighty
Is that you can write a very simple O D E
Although you have to reason a little bit
About the atoms per unit time go oblit.
It's random, jumbled, funbled, culled,
Poisson being the god of that world.
But watch! If there be more atoms,
More must undergo the swat-ems.
If there're fewer for the guillotine
Fewer than previous 'll be keen.
We lay down a new Law this day,
A law that decaying atoms obey.
The number that goes kaboom,
Every fleeting second of doom,
Is proportional to it's brethen,
The number that sec breathin.
And thus, more to see them,
Means more to disappear,
And The Law so ordained,
Is an exponential - swear.
And thus, the atoms die,
One after another, sigh,
Often the offsprings,
Atoms so produced
Decay themselves,
A Little bemused.
But in the end,
Every single
One mingles
With dust.
Or Strong
Henry, a Becquerel, found himself aghast.
The photofilm that he hath so carefully shielded,
To some mysterious radiation had somehow yielded!
But he could protect it, he found, with some layers of lead,
The scientist began to think himself not too right in the head.
The clue lay in an adjoining drawer, a salt of the rare uranium,
Bequerel, satisfied to the core, thanked profusely his cranium.
Scientists soon pounced on the element, and happily played,
It emitted three rays, it seemed, and the emission decayed.
The three types were then baptised, alpha-beta-gamma.
Alpha was the heavyweight, but gamma did the harm-a.
(The radiation, though exciting, was indeed damaging,
Not all the researchers met their deaths by aging.)
The part of radioactivity that's most weighty
Is that you can write a very simple O D E
Although you have to reason a little bit
About the atoms per unit time go oblit.
It's random, jumbled, funbled, culled,
Poisson being the god of that world.
But watch! If there be more atoms,
More must undergo the swat-ems.
If there're fewer for the guillotine
Fewer than previous 'll be keen.
We lay down a new Law this day,
A law that decaying atoms obey.
The number that goes kaboom,
Every fleeting second of doom,
Is proportional to it's brethen,
The number that sec breathin.
And thus, more to see them,
Means more to disappear,
And The Law so ordained,
Is an exponential - swear.
And thus, the atoms die,
One after another, sigh,
Often the offsprings,
Atoms so produced
Decay themselves,
A Little bemused.
But in the end,
Every single
One mingles
With dust.
Or Strong
Ol' Lead.
The end
result.
.
16 March, 2009
A first try @ Posterous
Posterous is a great site for posting anything to your blog via email... try it out! Videos, mp3s, whatnot, are hosted at posterous, for free! So, here I go, with one of my favourite (marathi) songs, and one of my own stories. Hopefully this'll work! :)
07 March, 2009
Science, God and Hinduism
Note: Long Post. When I say long, I mean long. But sadly, there is no getting around the necessity of a long post on such a deep subject. You deserve an apology.
Sigh, I know what you're thinking. But given my inclination towards philosophy, atheism and, well, science obviously, this one was in the coming for years, at least. So, why now? Well, this post on Anne's blog, and the ensuing discussion below it.
Well, me being an atheist, you know what viewpoint to expect. I just want to be clear that I don't mean to insult anyone. If I do, I'm sorry. (Yeah, I'm writing this before writing the post. It, ehm, might get rough.) If I commit ad hominem or create men out of strings straw, do point it out though.
Enter, stage West
I have read, and debated, a lot about the concept of God in Western civilisation. It all comes down to one thing: The concept of God is what you should take on faith. It is your personal choice. A lot of people might agree with you, but that does not make it less personal, or truer. The email that inspired Anne's post comes from this worldview, but counters by saying that if God is to be taken on faith, so is Science. (Sorry, if I capitalise God but not Science, all my physics Physics books will spring to life and kill me.)
Anne and I begged to differ, of course. The scientific method is a tested and sensible way to develop models of the world. Models which "work", and by work I mean, they are predictive and have be tested in experiments which are repeatable. More can be found at Anne's post, but I wanted to repeat this because we'll need it below. Of course, there are subtleties, and loads of them, in Philosophy of Science. But, in the final analysis, it makes sense, is self-consistent, and works. By works, I mean, you can apply it to the real world. Here I'm quietly assuming a realist philosophy, but please, lets stay with that.
The concept of God (still in the west here) does not predict any observable phenomenon which does not have a valid scientific explanation. God does not lead to many testable, repeatable predictions, of course. (But see prayer.) Besides, the concept of a real true existent God (still in the West here) conflicts with what is the current state of knowledge in Cosmology.
Stage Centre: Science
How do I view Scientific knowledge as a whole? I think all Science has are models, but they lead to testable predictions which have been tested, and although issues like theory-ladenness, underdetermination, the demarcation problem, etc crop up, I think the fact that my hard drive is currently using GMR, and that our satellites have to apply GR corrections, leads me to be pretty confident that even some the most esoteric of today's theories, which have been built on a foundation of older ones, have a direct connection to reality. We may hypothesise about infinite "fields" in four dimensions, but face it, we can accurately predict cross-sections that we actually observe in our backyard accelerators. Science is not just self-consistent, it's held to reality at many, many points by strong connecting wires. You just cannot argue that I take Electric Fields on faith, because every testable prediction made by Maxwell's equations has been borne out.
See, there are theories, and there are the predictions the theories make. You are free to argue with me that Electric and Magnetic fields do not exist, but if you say that an electron placed in a cyclotron will not behave exactly the way my theory of "electromagnetic fields" says it will, I will punch you in the face. I have never observed a magnetic field, and I know I cannot. But if I assume that there exists a "electromagnetic field" which obeys certain "equations" I hypothesise, maybe out of thin air, and if I indicate every point my theory connects to experiment, and if every experiment has agreed with me, you just cannot say I'm taking my theory on faith. Please.
Eastward Drift
And it is here that we enter the Eastern religions. Specifically, those of India. Now I confess at the beginning that I do not know much about Indian religious philosophy. So there are probably many objections you can raise. I will skirt around the actual topics that I know nothing about, and hopefully some of the commenters might illuminate them.
I want to be very clear about my points at the start. A human being cannot live without food. People cannot defy the laws of gravity by pure thought. And finally, today's science is not rediscovering what Indian mystics had discovered thousands of years ago.
[Of course, when I say "Indian religion", I actually mean "Ancient Indian Philosophy". Thanks to Wanderer's comment on Anne's blog, I googled for ancient Indian views on Physics, and I have taken the help of three such links to write the following: One, Two and Three. Actually, just the first two. The third one is laughably silly.]
About not being able to live without food: sadly, the myriad such cases in India are very poorly documented, and the bastardised version of such "practices" in the west is very silly indeed. I cannot give any criticism to this except vouching for common sense. Same for levitation, which I guess is held indoors in secret clubs throughout the subcontinent, because I haven't seen anyone not claiming to be a magician do it yet, and neither has anyone I know. And here I vouch for more than just common sense: I vouch for Schwarzschild, the graviton, and the derivative of the Einstein-Hilbert action with respect to the metric.
A little note about the "Law of Karma": I cannot find a lucid enough explanation of it. Will someone in the comments please enlighten me?
And now for what people claim the ancients knew of Physics. Firstly, let us define two things: Knowledge, and Philosophy. (As I said earlier, I'll be a realist throughout the post.) I'll define Knowledge to be a human conceptual model which accurately represents the "real" world. (I knew philosophers will sneer as that statement and use it for coffee table jokes. For them, I'll define knowledge as the set of all Justified True Beliefs. I'm not a philosopher, mind you, so please refrain from insults and enlighten me in the comments.) Now, let us define Philosophy. It is the set of all human conceptual models. Knowledge is then a subset of Philosophy.
I ask the question: Are the Physics ideas in Ancient Indian texts knowledge or philosophy? Hmm... how we can test if something is knowledge?
One way would be to compare it to existing scientific ideas: here many of statements of Hindu philosophy seem to make sense. But I claim it's all a matter of interpretation. Let's see:
(From link one)
Other universes/wormholes. I saw within [the] rock [at the edge of the universe] the creation, sustenance and the dissolution of the universe... I saw innumerable creations in the very many rocks that I found on the hill. In some of these creation was just beginning, others were populated by humans, still others were far ahead in the passage of their times. [6.2.86]
It's easy to interpret this as the idea of a multiverse (I don't know where he got the wormhole from). But this isn't exactly scientific fact: Physicists are still debating how useful and observable the idea of a multiverse can be, and even though the idea of wormholes connecting different universes might explain some stuff, but no wormholes have yet been observed. Indeed, to travel between universes is almost impossible for human beings. You can object that we haven't yet attained the knowledge that the ancients had, but then I say, they should've given the recipe for inter-universe or wormhole travel too, if they actually knew it (a la Contact).
You can also object that this may just be ancient science fiction. But I object. The presence of science is required for science fiction. I'll come back to this below in the "third way".
A second way to test if something is knowledge is to look for how people arrived at it. The ancients arrived at their philosophy through pure thought, it is claimed (by Raj). Now, although it might be claimed that I'm adopting a modern western viewpoint which is unfit here, I think that knowledge can only be ascertained through experiment. Even the General Theory of Relativity was philosophy until Eddington's legendary experiment in 1919. (Not totally, though. See below.) I find no evidence that the ancients tested, or could test, their "preliminary ideas of gravity" or even those of wormholes.
Besides, there is no evidence that they actually had mathematical equations to accompany their concepts. In the absence of such equations, concepts cannot graduate to knowledge, simply because they have no predictive power. In the spirit of thinking big, Indians came up with their grand conceptions, but they were not based upon reality neither were they tested to see if they agreed with it. They were concepts, pure and simple. They may have been accurate, and I do not claim that there aren't passages where the conceptions sound disturbingly modern, and I do not claim that this isn't a matter of chance. What I claim is, without mathematics and without experimentation, these concepts are philosophical constructs. Philosophy too aims for knowledge. It results in the birth of science. Indian Philosophy is deep and beautiful. But there was no effort made for it to be "true", in our modern scientific sense.
The third way is to analyse a philosophical system and look for where the concepts behind the statements. In Indian Philosophy, we do not find any reference to basic Quantum Mechanical ideas, or to the constancy of the speed of light, or to the spacetime ideas of general relativity. We do not find any reference to knowledge of the nucleus which corresponds to modern ideas; we find references to "worlds within the atoms". In the light of this, I claim, that we should classify the references to "A single projectile charged with all the power in the Universe", or to the multiverse ideas mentioned earlier, as philosophical fantasy, not science fiction. One cannot get to the concept of wormholes without having basic notions of GR. One cannot have nuclear weapons without knowing about the nucleus and its constituents.
I said earlier that I might be accused of taking a Western view when analysing Eastern philosophy, which I did. But common sense tells us that knowledge has to be compared with experience. It has to work. Almost by definition, it has to "be" out there. Science is a very complex process. Theories are built on top of each other. One cannot get to the peak without climbing the mountain, or without your ancestors having formed theories of aerodynamics which allowed you to built flying machines which operated on those experimentally verified principles, and allowed you to get to the peak. Einstein's GR was an accepted theory in the scientific world even before 1919 because it was a generalisation of the experimentally verified SR, and it reduced accurately to Newton in the sensible limit.
Exit: stage East
In conclusion, even if the Ancients had aquired their knowledge differently than experiment, the lack of mathematical expression for it, and the impossibility of putting the cart before the horse in science leads me to be a little skeptical when anyone classifies their philosophy are knowledge.
What about the Idea of God, which we began with? Disregarding the actual prevalent theological ideas in Ancient India (God, Demons, Heaven, Hell and Earth), even if we think of the Sages as thinking God was one with the universe, of him being above, beyond and in time and space, one can only speak of the God as a philosophical construct. Thus, even God in Hindu philosophy is subjective. (That said, not all philosophical constructs are subjective. But there is much more scope for differing concepts in Philosophy then in Science.)
Sigh, I know what you're thinking. But given my inclination towards philosophy, atheism and, well, science obviously, this one was in the coming for years, at least. So, why now? Well, this post on Anne's blog, and the ensuing discussion below it.
Well, me being an atheist, you know what viewpoint to expect. I just want to be clear that I don't mean to insult anyone. If I do, I'm sorry. (Yeah, I'm writing this before writing the post. It, ehm, might get rough.) If I commit ad hominem or create men out of strings straw, do point it out though.
Enter, stage West
I have read, and debated, a lot about the concept of God in Western civilisation. It all comes down to one thing: The concept of God is what you should take on faith. It is your personal choice. A lot of people might agree with you, but that does not make it less personal, or truer. The email that inspired Anne's post comes from this worldview, but counters by saying that if God is to be taken on faith, so is Science. (Sorry, if I capitalise God but not Science, all my physics Physics books will spring to life and kill me.)
Anne and I begged to differ, of course. The scientific method is a tested and sensible way to develop models of the world. Models which "work", and by work I mean, they are predictive and have be tested in experiments which are repeatable. More can be found at Anne's post, but I wanted to repeat this because we'll need it below. Of course, there are subtleties, and loads of them, in Philosophy of Science. But, in the final analysis, it makes sense, is self-consistent, and works. By works, I mean, you can apply it to the real world. Here I'm quietly assuming a realist philosophy, but please, lets stay with that.
The concept of God (still in the west here) does not predict any observable phenomenon which does not have a valid scientific explanation. God does not lead to many testable, repeatable predictions, of course. (But see prayer.) Besides, the concept of a real true existent God (still in the West here) conflicts with what is the current state of knowledge in Cosmology.
Stage Centre: Science
How do I view Scientific knowledge as a whole? I think all Science has are models, but they lead to testable predictions which have been tested, and although issues like theory-ladenness, underdetermination, the demarcation problem, etc crop up, I think the fact that my hard drive is currently using GMR, and that our satellites have to apply GR corrections, leads me to be pretty confident that even some the most esoteric of today's theories, which have been built on a foundation of older ones, have a direct connection to reality. We may hypothesise about infinite "fields" in four dimensions, but face it, we can accurately predict cross-sections that we actually observe in our backyard accelerators. Science is not just self-consistent, it's held to reality at many, many points by strong connecting wires. You just cannot argue that I take Electric Fields on faith, because every testable prediction made by Maxwell's equations has been borne out.
See, there are theories, and there are the predictions the theories make. You are free to argue with me that Electric and Magnetic fields do not exist, but if you say that an electron placed in a cyclotron will not behave exactly the way my theory of "electromagnetic fields" says it will, I will punch you in the face. I have never observed a magnetic field, and I know I cannot. But if I assume that there exists a "electromagnetic field" which obeys certain "equations" I hypothesise, maybe out of thin air, and if I indicate every point my theory connects to experiment, and if every experiment has agreed with me, you just cannot say I'm taking my theory on faith. Please.
Eastward Drift
And it is here that we enter the Eastern religions. Specifically, those of India. Now I confess at the beginning that I do not know much about Indian religious philosophy. So there are probably many objections you can raise. I will skirt around the actual topics that I know nothing about, and hopefully some of the commenters might illuminate them.
I want to be very clear about my points at the start. A human being cannot live without food. People cannot defy the laws of gravity by pure thought. And finally, today's science is not rediscovering what Indian mystics had discovered thousands of years ago.
[Of course, when I say "Indian religion", I actually mean "Ancient Indian Philosophy". Thanks to Wanderer's comment on Anne's blog, I googled for ancient Indian views on Physics, and I have taken the help of three such links to write the following: One, Two and Three. Actually, just the first two. The third one is laughably silly.]
About not being able to live without food: sadly, the myriad such cases in India are very poorly documented, and the bastardised version of such "practices" in the west is very silly indeed. I cannot give any criticism to this except vouching for common sense. Same for levitation, which I guess is held indoors in secret clubs throughout the subcontinent, because I haven't seen anyone not claiming to be a magician do it yet, and neither has anyone I know. And here I vouch for more than just common sense: I vouch for Schwarzschild, the graviton, and the derivative of the Einstein-Hilbert action with respect to the metric.
A little note about the "Law of Karma": I cannot find a lucid enough explanation of it. Will someone in the comments please enlighten me?
And now for what people claim the ancients knew of Physics. Firstly, let us define two things: Knowledge, and Philosophy. (As I said earlier, I'll be a realist throughout the post.) I'll define Knowledge to be a human conceptual model which accurately represents the "real" world. (I knew philosophers will sneer as that statement and use it for coffee table jokes. For them, I'll define knowledge as the set of all Justified True Beliefs. I'm not a philosopher, mind you, so please refrain from insults and enlighten me in the comments.) Now, let us define Philosophy. It is the set of all human conceptual models. Knowledge is then a subset of Philosophy.
I ask the question: Are the Physics ideas in Ancient Indian texts knowledge or philosophy? Hmm... how we can test if something is knowledge?
One way would be to compare it to existing scientific ideas: here many of statements of Hindu philosophy seem to make sense. But I claim it's all a matter of interpretation. Let's see:
(From link one)
Other universes/wormholes. I saw within [the] rock [at the edge of the universe] the creation, sustenance and the dissolution of the universe... I saw innumerable creations in the very many rocks that I found on the hill. In some of these creation was just beginning, others were populated by humans, still others were far ahead in the passage of their times. [6.2.86]
It's easy to interpret this as the idea of a multiverse (I don't know where he got the wormhole from). But this isn't exactly scientific fact: Physicists are still debating how useful and observable the idea of a multiverse can be, and even though the idea of wormholes connecting different universes might explain some stuff, but no wormholes have yet been observed. Indeed, to travel between universes is almost impossible for human beings. You can object that we haven't yet attained the knowledge that the ancients had, but then I say, they should've given the recipe for inter-universe or wormhole travel too, if they actually knew it (a la Contact).
You can also object that this may just be ancient science fiction. But I object. The presence of science is required for science fiction. I'll come back to this below in the "third way".
A second way to test if something is knowledge is to look for how people arrived at it. The ancients arrived at their philosophy through pure thought, it is claimed (by Raj). Now, although it might be claimed that I'm adopting a modern western viewpoint which is unfit here, I think that knowledge can only be ascertained through experiment. Even the General Theory of Relativity was philosophy until Eddington's legendary experiment in 1919. (Not totally, though. See below.) I find no evidence that the ancients tested, or could test, their "preliminary ideas of gravity" or even those of wormholes.
Besides, there is no evidence that they actually had mathematical equations to accompany their concepts. In the absence of such equations, concepts cannot graduate to knowledge, simply because they have no predictive power. In the spirit of thinking big, Indians came up with their grand conceptions, but they were not based upon reality neither were they tested to see if they agreed with it. They were concepts, pure and simple. They may have been accurate, and I do not claim that there aren't passages where the conceptions sound disturbingly modern, and I do not claim that this isn't a matter of chance. What I claim is, without mathematics and without experimentation, these concepts are philosophical constructs. Philosophy too aims for knowledge. It results in the birth of science. Indian Philosophy is deep and beautiful. But there was no effort made for it to be "true", in our modern scientific sense.
The third way is to analyse a philosophical system and look for where the concepts behind the statements. In Indian Philosophy, we do not find any reference to basic Quantum Mechanical ideas, or to the constancy of the speed of light, or to the spacetime ideas of general relativity. We do not find any reference to knowledge of the nucleus which corresponds to modern ideas; we find references to "worlds within the atoms". In the light of this, I claim, that we should classify the references to "A single projectile charged with all the power in the Universe", or to the multiverse ideas mentioned earlier, as philosophical fantasy, not science fiction. One cannot get to the concept of wormholes without having basic notions of GR. One cannot have nuclear weapons without knowing about the nucleus and its constituents.
I said earlier that I might be accused of taking a Western view when analysing Eastern philosophy, which I did. But common sense tells us that knowledge has to be compared with experience. It has to work. Almost by definition, it has to "be" out there. Science is a very complex process. Theories are built on top of each other. One cannot get to the peak without climbing the mountain, or without your ancestors having formed theories of aerodynamics which allowed you to built flying machines which operated on those experimentally verified principles, and allowed you to get to the peak. Einstein's GR was an accepted theory in the scientific world even before 1919 because it was a generalisation of the experimentally verified SR, and it reduced accurately to Newton in the sensible limit.
Exit: stage East
In conclusion, even if the Ancients had aquired their knowledge differently than experiment, the lack of mathematical expression for it, and the impossibility of putting the cart before the horse in science leads me to be a little skeptical when anyone classifies their philosophy are knowledge.
What about the Idea of God, which we began with? Disregarding the actual prevalent theological ideas in Ancient India (God, Demons, Heaven, Hell and Earth), even if we think of the Sages as thinking God was one with the universe, of him being above, beyond and in time and space, one can only speak of the God as a philosophical construct. Thus, even God in Hindu philosophy is subjective. (That said, not all philosophical constructs are subjective. But there is much more scope for differing concepts in Philosophy then in Science.)
By the way, if you came so far (without scrolling down quickly too much), you deserve a thanks.
18 February, 2009
Stuck in a shell
Physicsy poem... It mostly requires just a basic knowledge of atoms. I wrote it when I was bored in class. :)
Here it is...
Stuck in a shell
2n^2 - 1 electrons enjoying universality,
Were looking for a partner to complete orbitality,
They'd soon done a hole-in-one
A spin-down guy with mass 511
But they did not foresee reversal of parity!
"Oh crap," said one, "now our beloved shell,
Once bosonic, is under Fermi's spell.
To get back the fun,
One must transition,
But who it must be, how can we tell?"
"Life in a complete shell is anyway dull,
One of our number will thus, surely, cull."
And there was a bump,
As one tried to jump,
From this to the n+1 orbital.
But he came back, not losing any Joules,
And cried, "All of us, are silly fools!"
We are stuck with this n,
For if we jump, then,
We'll violate nature's selection rules!"
And they had learned to live with fight and bout,
When a photon came leapin' and knocked one out.
Here it is...
Stuck in a shell
2n^2 - 1 electrons enjoying universality,
Were looking for a partner to complete orbitality,
They'd soon done a hole-in-one
A spin-down guy with mass 511
But they did not foresee reversal of parity!
"Oh crap," said one, "now our beloved shell,
Once bosonic, is under Fermi's spell.
To get back the fun,
One must transition,
But who it must be, how can we tell?"
"Life in a complete shell is anyway dull,
One of our number will thus, surely, cull."
And there was a bump,
As one tried to jump,
From this to the n+1 orbital.
But he came back, not losing any Joules,
And cried, "All of us, are silly fools!"
We are stuck with this n,
For if we jump, then,
We'll violate nature's selection rules!"
And they had learned to live with fight and bout,
When a photon came leapin' and knocked one out.
- Anonick
N.B.: "Selection rules" are rules which forbid transitions between certain levels in atoms.
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