The scientific method

This lofty phrase that cuts through much of the debate between proponents of intelligent design and Darwinists, theists and atheists, seers and scientists, astrologers and statisticians is really this simple (watch video).

One of the qualities of greatness is the ability to keep things simple and to be able to harness insight with a clarity of vision. People might disagree to this obvious simplification and they may be quite right in their criticism. Complexity is quite a necessity in the domains of writers, artists and poets - and I won't try to go exploring the nature of that kind of complexity because it is quite likely I might fail miserably. After all, there certainly is a reason many of us prefer Umberto Eco over Dan Brown. We can use this as a point of convenient departure.

A mail from a friend got me thinking for a while about directive principles like Occam's razor - unarguably human psychological artifacts that have proved quite useful while constructing scientific theories. They have also been misleading at times- the simplest example that comes to mind is the misplaced Aristotelian assumption that planets moved in circular orbits, the circle being the perfect shape. Another cute example that comes to recollection is the following conversation between a philosopher and his friend (I forget the names of the characters and I cannot find the source; I shall try to reproduce it from memory to the best of my abilities):

Philosopher: Tell me, why did they assume that the sun went around the earth in older times?

Friend: Why, because it's obvious isn't it?

Philosopher: What's obvious about it?

Friend: Why, it's obvious from the way it looks up in the sky, isn't it?

Philosopher: Well then, do tell me how it would have looked if instead, the earth went around the sun?

So, simplicity (or perceived obviousness) isn't always the name of the game. That said, there are other kinds of artifacts which scientists have exploited in recent years- things that fall under the bracket of 'transcendental reasoning' or 'enlightened empiricism'. Physicists, especially post Einstein, have very frequently made successful "leaps of faith" in order to preserve abstract concepts like conservation, symmetry, parity and even things like immutability of the second law of thermodynamics.

Why? Because there is a gut feeling that these things must be overarchingly correct. Of course, as Feynman himself says, the experiment should be the final judge of the thesis and also the progenitor of enlightened reasoning (as I read a couple of years ago in Freeman Dyson's "The Scientist as a Rebel", they found out that nature violates the principle of symmetry during reflection).

I have rambled enough without a direction. I return to my basic point about the power of simplicity and I now contrast it with what I percieve as obscurantism in the domain of knowledge (which safely leaves out art from the discussion). Many of us (and I confess I have been a prey too) have sometime or the other, succumbed to the temptation of being obscurantist in the process of sounding lofty and intellectual to others. Well some people in the world make make an entire life out of it :-).

I have, in the not so distant a past flung many a diatribe at my disregard for such postures. A much more eloquent essay against pseduoscience is the "Postmodernism Disrobed" by Darwin's rottweiler. I might be totally wrong (as my friend kp used to passionately reason) with my views and there is a possibility that I might be misplaced to an extent too. As a a student of science and more importantly a Bayesian, one cannot rule out any possibility wholly. But it does serve as a pretty robust working principle and makes me personally prefer Russell over Sartre, Feynman over Lacan and V.S. Ramachandran over Sigmund Freud.

But as much as I dislike obscurantism in scientific claims (to the point of possibly being irrationally militant against it :P), I love fiction and poetry. Oscar Wilde could not have been more closer to the truth when he said:

We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.

All art is quite useless.

The Respite Ends

Semester begins tomorrow. Coursework is not particularly exciting - a course on systems engineering which I daresay would be tedium, one on advanced reaction engineering which might hold something interesting and a graduate course on immunology; I'm looking forward to the last one for that is the only one of direct relevance to my research at the moment.

Florida turned out to be a welcome break for all sorts of reasons. For one, it helped me get away from the sense of mental haste that seems inescapable in Boston. Besides, thanks to my father, I indulged in a good deal of luxury and leisure during those five days. When pleasure ceased to please me, I thought. Some hovering delusions became apparent in the light of calm and calculated reason; the path of liberation, however, was not so evident.

My mind seems to waver and I cannot pay attention to the news either. Moving on,

I plucked out my tattered copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four and started flipping through its pages. Few books have affected me as this one did five years ago; it was like being punched out of a coma. I leave you with some of my favorite passages:

Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves.

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Winston Smith: Does Big Brother exist?
O'Brien: Of course he exists.
Winston Smith: Does he exist like you or me?
O'Brien: You do not exist.

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We are not content with negative obedience, nor even with the most abject submission. When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will. We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us; so long as he resists us we never destroy him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him. We burn all evil and all illusion out of him; we bring him over to our side, not in appearance, but genuinely, heart and soul. We make him one of ourselves before we kill him. It is intolerable to us that an erroneous thought should exist anywhere in the world, however secret and powerless it may be. Even in the instance of death we cannot permit any deviation . . . we make the brain perfect before we blow it out.

Bernie Madoff

Shocking skeletons are coming out of the closet from the Madoff scandal as revealed by a recent editorial in NYT:

I’ve obtained a list of nearly all the private foundations that invested money directly with Mr. Madoff, at least at the time of their most recent tax filings. Even in the unlikely event that they cashed out since then, they may still have to repay the money to others.

What is staggering is how many of these 147 foundations had all their assets invested with Mr. Madoff and may have been wiped out as a result. For example, the Avery and Janet Fisher Foundation, which supported everything from various museums to meals-on-wheels programs, appears to have been fully invested with Mr. Madoff. And the same is true of dozens more.

The Picower Foundation of Palm Beach, Florida, with nearly $1 billion in assets and a major contributor to non-profits across the nation, has already announced that it will close down because of its Madoff investments. Its beneficiaries have included a neurological research institute at MIT, the New York Public Library and the Children’s Health Fund.

The MIT institute mentioned is the "Picower Institute of Learning and Memory" which stands opposite the Stata center on Vassar street. I pass through the building everyday on my way to the campus and I often think of taking courses there in my future semesters given my developing interest in neuroscience. Now its very survival seems to be a matter of speculation.

The Story of India (BBC documentary)

Some days ago, I got a chance to watch "The Story of India" which is a six-episode documentary produced by the BBC. Conceived and narrated by historian Michael Wood, it is a panoramic sweep on nearly six-thousand years of Indian history. The perspective of curious enthusiastic westerner is dominant throughout the film, but it is a substantial effort on the part of the crew and deserves to be watched as a fitting acknowledgment to their meticulous attempt. Therefore -Highly recommended!

The first episode presents a few glimpses into the pre-Aryan history of the subcontinent, finally culminating in the Indus Valley period. What particularly got me interested was the presentation of small investigations that possibly hold answers to the anthropological history of the Aryans in the subcontinent. First, satellite topographic images showing compelling evidence of the past existence of a river in the North West frontier have been published by a group in Imperial College, London. Though they don't mention it explicitly in the episode (to the best of my knowledge), this is a clear reference to the river 'Saraswati' which is mentioned in the Vedas (on a tangent, the other river that finds mention in the Vedas is 'Suvatsu' loosely translated to 'white serpent'. The associated valley is now known as the Swat region in Pakistan where the Taliban have taken over and are wreaking havoc). Then follows a cute part where Wood goes around the streets of Afghanistan trying to re-create 'Soma-rasa' that is frequently mentioned in the Rig Veda (The climate of the Indian plains is supposedly not conducive for this plant to grow). But the most fantastic part was the visit to an archaeological site in Turkmenistan (Central Asia) where remains of a lost civilization that reared horses and used chariot-carts (raths) have been excavated.

I got interested on this debate some months ago and though it's completely baseless, my gut inclination has been towards the invasion hypothesis. Prima facie indications responsible for this are two - 1. the Indus Valley script has no seeming resemblance whatsoever to Sanskrit or Tamil. 2. Anthropological and archeological evidence state that the horse (which finds very common reference in older Hindu texts) was first domesticated in Central Asia and not in the plains. Anyways, I'm neither skilled nor qualified to be able to authoritatively comment on this issue; it is just something that interests me and I have gathered some superficial knowledge on the issue based on recent reading. The last part of the episode deals with the excavation of (the possible) Hastinapura, the capital city of the Mahabharatha by the Indian archeologist B. B. Lal (incidentally, this research is discussed in length in William Dalrymple's City of Djinns)


The second episode deals with the extraordinary life of Buddha (who is one of my personal heroes) and Alexander's famed attempt at invasion through the Khyber pass. Subsequently, the rise of the Mauryan empire is presented at length, with primary emphasis on the lives of Chandragupta and his grandson, the emperor Asoka. The story of Asoka is the stuff that legends are made of. We owe it to the British for bringing us this part of our history into our consciousness starting with William Jones who founded the Royal Asiatic Society in Calcutta in the 18th century (V. S. Ramachandran calls him the 'father of comparative linguistics'). I remember being deeply inspired by Asoka's story when I heard it as kid from my grandfather during bedtime; those memories were revisited when I went to the National Museum in Delhi in the summer of 2008. Outside the main entrance is one of Asoka's stone edicts, where he proclaims the message of universal tolerance and compassion with an emphasis extended to the animal kingdom.

In the third episode we visit the south, which, towards the beginning of the first millennium AD traded gold and lapis lazuli among other things with the Roman empire and even with the Hellenic world. A short glimpse into the unique Graeco-Indian empire that ruled India in the early part of this millennium with the Kushan king Kanishka is provided. This empire, that made its capital the city of Peshawar, was primarily responsible for opening up trade routes like the Silk route from China. Incidentally, the progenitors of this civilization were nomadic tribes from China; by what wand of nature they settled in the northwest and developed a beautiful synthesis of Buddhism and Hellenes remains an enigma.

In the fourth part, we come to the Gupta dynasty, supposedly referred to as the Golden age of India. This was the time when Vatsyayana wrote the Kamasutra, Kalidasa and Asvaghosha wrote their plays, Aryabhatta brought in the zero and Bhaskara estimated the circumference of the earth. However, the revival of Hinduism by Adi Sankaracharya does not find mention and we immediately jump to the south of India to the time of the Cholas (giving the Chalukyas, the Rashtrakutas and the Pallavas a slip for considerations of time). The art and the legacy of the Cholan empire is discussed in some detail (they are to my knowledge the first Indian empire to engage in colonial expansion through sea-routes) and there are glimpses into the beautiful temples of Tanjore (which happens to be my native place too!).


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I wanted to finish the blurbs for parts five and six but am feeling increasingly overpowered by sleep. They shall follow. But I shall mention in passing that all the facts covered by this documentary is a small subset of the spread that Nehru provides in his 'Glimpses..' or alternatively 'Discovery of India'. I have come across many people to have a very narrow and monolithic view of Nehru based (I believe) primarily on preconceived notions. We thus fail to understand his significance as a writer and historian of rare skill and erudition whatever be his political legacy and personal life scandals. I recently achieved my first 'conversion' on this issue - my victim being my own father who has started reading 'Glimpses..' to bedtime :-).

Why does it keep repeating?

1. "Sri Ram Sena" and the Mangalore Pub
2. Shiv Sena and Hotel Intercontinental Grand.
3. MNS and Mumbai University

Embittered. Hurt. Depressed.

I don't want to think or write about it. I have nothing to state except the naivest of hopes that such vandalism ends and the youths, who are the principal instruments for effecting the will of fiends and demagogues against other youth find better avenues. Having stared at the computer screen for more than fifteen minutes without being able to continue, I give up, weary and helpless. One cannot be creative about issues that drive one to mad rage.

Unfortunately, mental disengagement seems difficult at the moment to do anything productive. Hence, capitulated sleep.

Boca Raton, Fl

I arrived earlier this afternoon in Boca Raton with my dad. While he is here for a business conference, I made use of the opportunity to make a getaway from the Boston freeze. As he got busy with his meetings immediately on arrival, I sought to explore the place on my own. Besides it had been a while since I could afford to go out on the roads with only one layer of clothing and roam around in shorts. The absence of public transport was expected; so, armed with my i-pod (which was resurrected from idleness after a whole semester), I started walking on the street right off the coast listening to my favorite Jim Morrison songs. They somehow fit snugly into the mood. The sun, somber yellow now, was on its way home mixing its warm benedictions with the cool sea breeze blowing soft and flat. I passed by a group of fat men smoking cheroots in a communion after a swim in the sea; behind them stood a bunch of pretty young girls drying themselves up and playing some sort of catch-and-run while at it. Their liveliness seemed inviting but I don't think they would have been even slightly impressed if I removed my t-shirt and joined them in their game. Besides, it seemed the boys they came along with were playing volleyball at a distance, so I looked askance and trod along the concrete road with 'Feast of Friends' playing inside my ears. Morrison's songs were getting somber and heavy down the playlist. It was then that I passed by a car whose music seemed to overpower the volume of my i-pod and my attention was all of a sudden beleagured. The driver of a car, a man of about twenty-five, had his stereo on full volume and was singing along in the loudest and the most monochromatic of voices:

How does it feel
How does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone?

This man's appropriation of any other singer/group would have put me off, but this was just the change I needed. And I was happy to search and find that my derelict i-pod had all of Bob Dylan. I walked aimlessly for another hour or so (no intended metaphor with the song there please) and returned back to the hotel to find my dad still engaged in his meetings. He was finally relieved and we went out for dinner at an Indian place with a couple of his colleages. The were busy discussing business over dinner and there was very little I could participate in it except when they discussed current political affairs. I was quite up-to-date on the Satyam story and I was found useful when the others were trying to remember names from the new board of directors, their older CFO and CEO (I have a useless memory for such details; I wish I could remember facts from molecular biology/biochemistry with the same level of comfort). As I was relishing an especially good Masala Dosa, they started speculating on some M&A plans for the future. Though by then I had stopped paying attention and was on my own stream of thought, I could hear fancy words like profitability, revenue model, core-competency come up again and again. I recollected then the short period of my IITB life when I engaged in some serious preparation for interviews with consulting firms with some of my favourite people. Little less than a year before, I could fancy myself being quite interested in making sense of such conversations and trying to show off some of my own gyaan on this matter, given that I had the pride of being recruited on a hot-shot consulting job swelling up my chest. Presently however, the time, the thrill and the illusions are long gone. An ordinary graduate student with ideals in his mind and a hope of finding vitality in his work is all that remains.

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My dad is an interesting character. In spite of being a pucca man of business (which he undoubtedly is) he sometimes shows a childlike curiosity for matters of science that are of little use to him. When we were still in Boston yesterday, after relishing a lunch of rasam and pongal that his soon assiduously prepared, he asked me to sit down and explain what 'entropy' and the 'Gibbs free energy' meant. He confessed that he had never understood these things while he was himself a student of chemical engineering and all the books he read subsequently never really provided a clear understanding of these concepts. Over the twenty minutes or so, I tried my best to use simple examples (which included a most wonderful example I stole from Richard Feynman's Cornell lecture titled 'The distinction between past and future', the video recording of which I had seen recently during MIT IAP series. Interested people can find it in his collection of popular lectures called 'The Character of Physical law' available in paperback) and illustrations to explain the general concept of thermodynamic potentials and the corresponding consequences of the second law. My dad would incessently interrupt me to ask questions and make me constantly reflect on whether I was being effective in transferring what I understood about these quantities to him. He smiled when he finally understood one of the points I was trying to make - that the law of increasing disorder was not a consequence of some cosmic force in the universe but that it can be simply understood as the sheer statistical preponderence of disordered states over ordered states (once again here, Dawkins' nice analogy with a 'library' presented in his essay 'Darwin Triumphant' from 'The Devil's Chaplain' proved handy) and then he said that would be enough for the time being. I am not sure I entirely convinced him at the end and it made me realize that it's difficult teaching someone who has had a principal role to play in shaping your own conventional wisdom both by nature and nurture. I am sure he took his siesta that afternoon thinking that he sent me to all these colleges and bought me all the books I wanted in my 'pursuit of learning' but that the returns of those investments were not entirely evident at the moment. :-)

Taliban and Arjun Singh

Rarely have I been as scared in the recent past as I was while reading this article in the NYT earlier today. It describes the Taliban gaining consolidation in the Swat valley in Pakistan and their flouting of every law of the land while spreading a wave of unspeakable terror among the natives. Every line is shocking beyond description. Doubts to whether the US reporting was cooked came to my mind, so I did a simple search on google Pakistani newspaper reports on the same issue. They resonated with the NYT report, for instance this one and this one. The Dawn article also glibly reports some spineless political moves that the civilian government is making to "keep the Taliban at bay".

Among the many things that the Taliban have kept themselves busy with, one is the "blowing up of approximately 150 schools in the Swat area" 100 of which were schools for girls. As the Dawn article states, one of the 'strategic measures' being employed by the Zardari government to reach a compromise with the Taliban is the promulgation of Shariah law in the region. Shariah, among many other things, forbids women from attending schools and permits only madrasa education for the men. In the light of all this, let us also remember with pride that not more than a few days ago, our wonderful HRD minister passed a law which places madrasa certificates on par with CBSE and SSC certificates (Read this article) for government job applications. What a travesty!

There is another thing that deeply bothers me. I haven't yet come across one article in the Indian free press questioning this decision. Google for the subject and you will find a couple of dozen newspapers reporting the decision but I would be grateful if someone could find me an article by any journalist/op-ed speaking critically on this issue. One only finds comments and outburst such as the following (taken from an online discussion forum) :

The foolish rulers thinking this step will bring the muslim community in to national mainstream,no. psudo secularists betrayed hindu community by giving unconstitutional rights to minorities. where is our SNDP,NSS leaders who are always talking and fighting each other in the name of reservations? Why they are not open their mouths

hindu wake up.. wake up.

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BJP will do nothing
If any one expects to BJP to do any thing, they are living in a fantasy world. BJP too is now behaving "secular" and would agree with this move. It is upto a Hindu at an individual level to understand his true situation and make his kids hard fighters. Let them use the existing schools and facilities, study hard and win in competetive exams. No madrassah based idiot would even come close. And let hindus start getting into every government job through sheer merit. Muslims then can do what they do best, Jehad and kill innocents.

A nation where public dialogue is of such stellar quality deserves such laws :-)