Viswanathan K's Thoughts

The glorification of the (ancient) often involves cooking up stories and imagining capabilities that didn’t exist. But if you’re Greek and all of Western civilization is acknowledged as being a descendant of Greek everything (culture, philosophy, scientific mindset), then you can’t criticize modern Greek pride in their history on the grounds of being cooked up stories. But you can criticize modern Greeks on the grounds Richard Feynman did in a letter to his wife : “It appears the Greeks take their past very seriously. They study ancient Greek archaeology in their elementary schools for 6 years… It is a kind of ancestor worship.” Feynman being Feynman pointed out how far the West has come since then: “Experimental science, the development of mathematics, the art of the Renaissance, the great depth and understanding of the shallowness of Greek philosophy” And was irritated by the response he got: “They continually put their age down and the old age up.” Feynman goes on...

Shakespeare famously asked the question about what’s in a name. In science, the answer is: “A lot”. That sounds so wrong: after all, isn’t science a “wholly objective pursuit that allows us to understand the world through the lens of neutral empiricism”, as Ed Yong puts it. And yet… Take the term “dark matter”, used for the common type of matter in the universe, one very different from the stuff we see/feel/are made of ourselves. The problem with the name? Lisa Randall explains in Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs : “We see dark things, which absorb light, and because the ominous-sounding label makes it sound more potent and negative than it actually is. Dark matter is not dark – it is transparent.” Svante Pääbo made the same point of the problems with naming in his excellent book, Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes : “It has a tendency to elicit scientific debates that have no resolution. For example, if researchers refer to Neanderthals as “Homo neanderthalenis”, ...

In the evenings, when I go to pick up my 8 yo daughter from play, she and her friends will insist that I chase them to the lift. Since they have converted the transition from play and fun to the home into a game, it’s easier for me to get her back without the endless negotiations of “5 more minutes, pleeee…ease” or “It’s not yet dark”. As I read Jennifer Senior’s awesome book, All Joy and No Fun , on what parenting does to parents, I realized why I enjoy the chasing part. It’s the thrill of the chase, of course! “(Young children) also create wormholes in time, transporting their fathers and mothers back to feelings and sensations they haven’t had since they were young themselves.” During the chase, anytime I am closing in on one of them, they’ll scream for a timeout (“Game pause” in their lingo) shamelessly. That’s another thing with kids: rules can be bent and broken. Unlike how adults how view the world: “I’m talking about the selves who live too much in their heads ra...

I’ve always wondered how Newton figured that the force acting on the moon is the same as the one that caused, I don’t know, the apple to fall on his head. Remember, back then, the Greek view of the universe prevailed: one set of laws on earth, another set for the heavens. So how did Newton hit upon a common law for entire universe? Carlo Rovelli answered that question in his page-turning history of physics, Reality is not What it Seems . He talks of Galileo who dropped a lot of objects and realized that their speed increases (during the early part of their fall). But he then noticed that the rate at which the speed of the falling object increases is constant: “Its value is approximately 9.8 meters per second.” Decades later, Newton imagined the earth having multiple moons, like Jupiter (something that Galileo had discovered). Newton assumed that one of those extra (and tiny) moons orbiting earth just above the mountain peaks. Newton wonders at what speed it would travel? ...

I’ve never understood those who shout about democracy being murdered in India (Modi), US (Trump) and UK (Brexit). All of them won elections/referendums, so how exactly did democracy get murdered? And then I read this article by Shany Mor aptly titled “Nobody Understands Democracy Anymore”. Her article is a consolidated review of multiple books on the topic and thereby she stumbles on the problem: “What the books have in common, beyond their shared subject matter, is a common confusion over what democracy actually is.” On one of the books, she summarizes: “His book is clearly informed by a certain nostalgia for the postwar consensus of strong but limited liberal tolerance, a welfare state undergirded by a broad social solidarity, and a deference for cultural and political elites enforced by shared media that were occasionally publicly owned and nearly always publicly minded.” But in recent times, we have been seeing a decoupling of liberalism from democracy, termed as “il...

Given that foreign trips and foreign vacations are no longer the exception, life is a lot easier if one eats non-veg. So much so that many middle-class folks want their kids to grow up eating non-veg. The declared reason is that’s harder to change later in life, so better to teach kids now. But who knows, maybe the real reason is that a kid who eats non-veg makes meals a whole lot easier when abroad... Of course, it’s not always easy for vegetarian-by-birth parents to get their kids to start eating non-veg. No, not because the kids are averse to it. Rather, it’s because one of the parents is against the idea. And vegetarians can get all sanctimonious with lines like, “I don’t want to kill animals”. My then 7 yo daughter went through such a phase where some of her friends criticized her for eating non-veg. So much so that she even started drifting back to vegetarianism. And so had begun: peers trumping parents. I know, I know, parents always lose that brutal war for influence...

Would a more “distributed” system of power, as opposed to all power in one man, mean more peace or at least more rational choices during wars? As opposed to an ego driven choice to not stop, or fight to the death? The biography of Hannibal in the Hourly History series helps test that hypothesis. Carthage formerly was more an oligarchy (rule by a few rich men) and Rome was still a republic, and they were at loggerheads. Hannibal’s father, Hamilcar, was put in charge of preventing Rome from expanding south of Sicily: “Despite Hamilcar’s victories on the battlefield, the final move in his chess match with the Romans would not be his to make. Instead, it would be determined by the fat cat, corrupt politicians in Carthage… It was decided in the backroom dealings of Carthage’s ruling elite that they would sue for peace, before Hamilcar’s victory could be declared.” Decades later, his son, Hannibal, arrived at the gates of Rome, and history would repeat itself: “(Carthage...

Today, we take the oh-so-boring shipping container for granted. Yes, that “corrugated steel box, 8 feet wide, 8.5 feet high and 40 feet long”. In his book, Fifty Things that Made the Modern Economy , Tim Harford tells the story behind making it the standard way to transport things. The key word there is “standard” because boy, was there opposition to any standardization: 1)       The trucking companies, the shipping companies and the ports couldn’t agree on a standard. Why? Some wanted them big, others small. No one size suited them all. 2)      Dock workers felt threatened by standardized sizes. After all, the ease and speed that comes with standardization would almost certainly result in “fewer jobs to go around”. 3)      Regulators who defined the rules and pricing policies feared they’d lose their power. And jobs. No wonder then that the idea of a standardized shipping container too so long. The man credi...

Some time back, we went to this Harry Potter workshop at Jayanagar with our 8 yo. The workshop was more science than magic, but with the obligatory wand and Hogwarts style cape thrown in. Then again, as Arthur C. Clarke wrote: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” One of the tricks started with the host asking the kids: “Which of your parents is rich?” There was pin drop silence. Not an embarrassed silence, more like a resigned silence. Apparently, all parents have done an awesome job at convincing their kids that they are not rich. But there’s a minimum age before this message sinks in. Because the youngest kid, wanting the show to go on, spoke up: “My mom’s rich.” His mom looked like she wanted the earth to open up and swallow her. The host asked her for a 100 bucks for the trick, but she didn’t have change. So I gave the guy a 100 bucks note, upon which he promptly informed everyone that if the trick went sideways, he woul...

In his book, David and Goliath , Malcolm Gladwell makes this point: “When the law is applied in the absence of legitimacy, it does not produce obedience. It produces the opposite. It leads to backlash.” Most systems of power have understood the need to establish legitimacy as the basis for their rule. That’s why kings were considered the descendants of the Gods in many civilizations. But that led to the question as to who could confirm the legitimacy? Most kings gave that power to the priests, and that’s why priests became so powerful in those very civilizations. In the Game of Thrones series, legitimacy is why Cersei goes to the priests called the Sparrows: to get them to declare her son, Tommen, the “true king” when there were so many contenders for the throne. But the high priest, the High Sparrow, asks for his pound of flesh in return for any such declaration: “The realm is full of kings. For the Faith to exalt one above the rest we must be certain.” And so Cersei...

My daughter’s only 8, and if she’s like this now, I shudder to imagine how she will be in her teens. Of course, teenagers have been a dreaded lot (by parents) for ages, as Laurence and Wendy Steinberg write in their book, Crossing Paths : “The child's entrance into adolescence is often a difficult personal period in the parents' lives—perhaps even more difficult for parents than it is for their children.” But it was a shock to read from what followed: “This is not simply because raising teenagers is an arduous task. It is because watching our children mature unearths complicated and intense emotions deep inside us.” And what are some of those “complicated and intense emotions”? “The physical blossoming inherent in adolescence provides a cruel contrast to our midlife journey. ... Psychologists note that in middle age there occurs a shift in time perspective in which individuals start measuring their lives in terms of how long they have left to live rather than how...

In his terrific history of chemistry, Mendeleyev’s Dream , Paul Strathern pointed out the impact of what Newton did to physics and science in general: “Any scientific advances were expected to incorporate the mechanical rigor and mathematical exactitude of Newtonian physics.” Poor chemistry. It still belonged to the “world of quality”, not quantity. And so chemistry would stay until Antoine Lavoisier came along a century later. He believed in weighing and measuring. He made a leap of faith and assumed that while “substances taking part in a chemical reaction could be transformed, but their overall weight would be the same”. If he had just made an assumption that was later proven true and is now a bedrock of science itself, it could be dismissed as a lucky guess. But Lavoisier performed experiments based on his assumption and the conclusions he drew changed chemistry. For example, he had seen that water boiled for hours produced a sediment on the flask it was boiled in. ...

The Japanese and the Germans are famous (stereotyped?) for certain qualities. In Barking Up the Wrong Tree , Eric Barker quotes Karen Arnold, a Boston University researcher on the education system worldover: “We are rewarding conformity and the willingness to go along with the system.” Later in the book, Barker writes: “Following the rules doesn’t create success; it just eliminates extremes – both good and bad.” I wonder if that explains why conformist societies like Japan and Germany rarely seem to change the world? What is the last new thing that either of them invented? The Walkman maybe? Barker makes another interesting point: “We spend too much time trying to be “good” when good is often merely average. To be great we must be different.” “Different” in this case means being non-conformant. Japan and Germany both seem to worship conformance. And therein may lie the explanation as to why neither country invents anything new: “The same traits that make people a ...