Viswanathan K's Thoughts

As a kid, I played plenty of board games. Snakes and ladders, ludo, Chinese checkers, chess, Scotland Yard and Monopoly . In the age of the Internet, of course, there are sites to rank your favorite board games. Like BoardGameGeek . Oliver Roeder wrote an article after checking out the site. The best game? It’s called Twilight Struggle . I’d never heard of it! Then again, I’ve not played board games for a long, long time. Note that despite the name the site includes card games and pencil-and-paper games like Tic-Tac-Toe (also called Noughts and Crosses). Which, by the way, is the lowest ranked game on the site. At 10,505 th place (I’m betting you didn’t know that there are that many games to rank! Me neither). It’s easy to understand why Tic-Tac-Toe is bottom of the heap: “It’s a solved game — if both players are above the age of roughly 5, the game ends in a draw.” And yet everyone of us has played Tic-Tac-Toe. Why? Here’s Roeder’s answer: “Tic-tac-toe represents a ...

The sci-fi movie, Interstellar , has two exotic concepts of physics: wormholes and black holes. If you neither know nor care about what either of those things are, don’t worry: this still makes for interesting reading. When Christopher Nolan made Interstellar , he had a problem: while physicists and sci-fi fans may know what wormholes and black holes are, how would he render it onscreen accurately ? Willing suspension of disbelief or not, sci-fi fans would tear into his movie if the rendering were obviously wrong in any way. (In case you don’t know, a “renderer” is a piece of software that draws stuff on screen. The term will be used repeatedly, so it’s good to know). Nolan turned to Kip Thorne , a retired astrophysicist who has always wanted to popularize relativity to the layman, for help: “So he (Paul Franklin, Nolan’s computer graphics man) asked Thorne to generate equations that would guide their effects software the way physics governs the real world...Thorne sent...

Continuation of Parts 1 , 2 and 3 … Ok, so we know about the dominance of maths. But has the maths now taken over completely? Are physicists increasingly “working on mathematics rather than physics”, asks Sabine Hossenfelder ? Has the trust in maths crossed the Rubicon: “Somewhere along the line many physicists have come to believe that it must be possible to formulate a theory without observational input, based on pure logic and some sense of aesthetics. They must believe their brains have a mystical connection to the universe and pure power of thought will tell them the laws of nature.” Of course, many physicists warn against going overboard. Like Lee Smolin: “The idea that the truth about nature can be wrestled from pure thought through mathematics is overdone…The idea that mathematics is prophetic and that mathematical structure and beauty is a clue to how nature ultimately works is just wrong.” But why not just test the predictions of the maths against observed re...

Continuation of Parts 1 and 2 … It’s one thing to trust the maths wherever it leads or whatever it implies; but soon scientists had to abandon any understanding of what was being described…even as the “the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics” continued to march on. This was especially true in the field of quantum mechanics because it left “an uncomfortable blank space where their picture of reality was supposed to be”, as James Gleick put it in his biography of Feynman, Genius . Or as Gleick puts it in another part of his book: “They could write numbers and symbols on their pads, but their mental picture of the substance beneath the symbols had been reduced to a fuzzy unknown.” Of course, not all physicists were happy with this state of affairs. But the majority just accepted it as the new normal. One of quantum mechanics’ founders, Heisenberg, suggested that we just accept it and move on by saying: “The equation knows best.” The other famous statement on this pe...

In my last blog , I talked about maths becoming the language of physics and how a few mathematical predictions from the equations of relativity, though totally counter-intuitive, seemingly outrageous and not matching any observed phenomenon till date yet proved out to be correct. The other major theory of physics, quantum mechanics, was not only mathematical (like all theories since Newton) but was also unimaginably accurate. For example, in 2006, the theoretical and experimentally measured values for the magnetic moment of an electron (it doesn’t matter if you don’t know what that means) matched to a precision of eight parts in a trillion ! This unbelievable accuracy of theory led Freeman Dyson to comment: “I’m amazed at how precisely Nature dances to the tune we scribbled.” Besides, the sub-microscopic reality that quantum mechanics describes is so tiny, so unlike anything we’ve seen or experienced (and hence not evolved to imagine either) that it’s hard, if not impossible,...

(This is the first in a series on how maths seems to be the language in which the rules of the universe have been written: the “MU” in this series titles stands for “Mathematical Universe”). Long, long ago, science could be done by “by watching your bathtub spill over” (as Sabine Hossenfelder put it). All that began to change when Galileo began to argue that “the keys to deciphering the universe’s parlance were mathematical relations and geometrical models”, as Mario Livio put it in his book, Is God a Mathematician? But it would have to wait until Isaac Newton until someone came up with mathematical relations to describe the universe. In the process, calculus had to be invented because, as Charles Seife puts it in his book, Zero , “calculus was the very language of nature”. From Newton onwards, all of physics has been stated in mathematical equations. So much so that when Richard Feynman was asked whether we could have a theorist today who was “not mathematically sophisti...

A survey in the West pointed out the obvious: news consumption is declining. Jeff Jarvis feels that old media is still “chasing the wrong horse”: news consumers. He says that the world has moved to the engaged reader, one who wants customized news and not the one-size-fits-all version of news, wants it available when needed, not just at predetermined times. Now that’s the very definition of online news, isn’t it? Others could (rightly) argue that personalizing news means people just read whatever views they already subscribe to, and whatever topics interest them already. Where is the expansion of horizons, they wonder? Where is the opportunity for serendipity, they lament. On the other hand, is that just editorial ego , as Jarvis wrote in another blog: “It’s all about us , about  our  content, about how  we  want to make it, how  we  want to present it to you, how we  organize it, how  we  make money on it, how  we  protect ...

The popularity of the Internet and social media has triggered a reaction from many, albeit still a very small minority, who have made “digital detox”, “disconnection”, and “unplugging” buzzwords in their criticism of the virtual world we live in. Nathan Jurgenson took a look at this reaction and wrote this is what the naysayers feel: “Once upon a pre-digital era, there existed a golden age of personal authenticity, a time before social-media profiles when we were more true to ourselves, when the sense of who we are was held firmly together by geographic space, physical reality, the visceral actuality of flesh.” But he calls this view of how the world was pre-Internet as “fairytale”: “ According to this popular fairytale, the Internet arrived and real conversation, interaction, identity slowly came to be displaced by the allure of the virtual — the simulated second life that uproots and disembodies the authentic self in favor of digital status-posturing, empty...

It’s not often you find a book review turning out to be a great article in itself even as it says the book itself is average! But that’s exactly what Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow managed to do in her review of Judy Wajcman ’s book, Pressed for Time . The theme of the book is about the “crazy busy” lives most of us feel we lead, what Tuhus-Dubrow describes as: “What changed? Was it just that then I was a kid, and now I have a kid? Time no longer seems unlimited: then I had possibilities; now I have responsibilities.” Of course, if we are perfectly honest about it, she reminds us that we should check whether we really had more time back then or whether we are “just misremembering it all through a haze of nostalgia”. Or if: “When we complain about how busy we are, it may be sincere, but it is also a kind of humblebrag.” (Humblebrag. I love that word. I’d never heard it until then but its meaning is so obvious, isn’t it?) Some of the contributing factors to this feeling include ...

Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, wished that euthanasia were legal as his father suffered through his last days with no chance of getting better. But of course, euthanasia is illegal in most countries. (Many of the reasons why it’s illegal are perfectly valid: fear of misuse by relatives; a rash decision made by the patient when things look bleak and/or he is in agony that may well be short-lived and so on). Months after he had ranted and wished the worst sort of deaths for lawmakers who refused to allow even terminal patients to die easily, Adams came up with this idea of a doctor-assisted suicide machine that would combined a machine with a random number generator: “Let's say the random part of the device is attached by electronics to another part of the device that delivers a fatal dose of sedatives and poison to whoever is attached to it. You push the button and one of two things can randomly happen: o    Nothing o    Lethal drugs are released” ...

The old saying “Think Before You Speak” has long been replaced with its digital age equivalent, “Google Before You Tweet”. Continuing with that line of thought, CS Krishnamurthy wrote this article advocating the use of blogs in schools as a way to teach writing, to encourage “individual participation in the marketplace of ideas”. One of the advantages? “Typically, when students write essays in school, their work is mostly read by their teachers. Students spend hours together on Shakespeare, wars and history only to find one single person evaluate the end result. Blogging will help get a greater audience for every published piece.” Another reason: “Reading the blogs of their peers may spur the students to read, analyse and question more.” I doubt this would happen in our schools though because Internet access and computers/tablets are not going to be available in most schools. Ironically, even as Krishnamurthy recommends blogs, the digital world is already treating them ...

On the photo-sharing site Instagram, a ridiculously large number photos posted are of the ones of the food its users are eating! Insane, right? And so everytime the site goes down, the Internet humour has a field day. A few samples: “Instagram is down! Such a shame because I'm hungry but now there's no point in eating until it is back up.” And “Well, there's no point in ordering dessert now.” My 3 year old thinks food is for playing, smearing, splashing, anything but eating…soon she’ll be adding posting it on social media to her list (sigh). Scott Adams found a use of this tendency when he wrote his blog on the “broken” smartphone/iPad interface . But first, what’s his problem exactly? “If you were to design a smartphone interface from scratch, without any legacy issues, would it look like a bunch of app icons sitting on a home screen? No. Because that would be stupid. Would you want your users to be hunting around for the right app every time they want to d...

Until I read a book review on the topic , I didn’t realize that forging art wasn’t always a crime! Unlike, say, forging drugs and currency, which have always been a crime. That makes sense. After all, as the Economist puts it : “If the purchasers of great art were buying paintings only for their beauty, they would be content to display fine fakes on their walls.” That’s rational thinking. But the Middle Ages were hardly the age of reason, were they? And yet the Middle Ages did not consider art forgery a crime. Why? Firstly, paintings and sculptures were mostly meant for religious purposes, which meant they were almost always commissioned by the Church. And since the Church had no intention of selling them, who would believe your copy was the real thing anyway? Besides, many of those works of art were not valued for their look or the painter/sculptor. Instead: “What mattered about objects such as these was not so much whether they were originals or copies, whether they ...