Viswanathan K's Thoughts

James Carse, in Finite and Infinite Games , defines the key attributes of a myth: “I do not understand the story in terms of my experience, but my experience in terms of the story… As myths make individual experience possible, they also make collective experience possible.” Further: “We tell myths for their own sake, because they are stories that insist on being stories – and insist on being told. We come to life at their touch.” In fact, when you think more about myths: “Myths are not stories that have meanings, but stories that give meaning.” And: “We resonate with myth when it resounds in us.” Carse says this to say about religions in that contex: “Myths of irrepressible resonance have lost all trace of an author (he cites the Vedas as an example). Even when sacred texts are written down by an identifiable prophet or evangelist, it is invariably thought that these words were first spoken to their recorders and not spoken by them… Muhammad heard the Quran and did n...

We Indians think of corruption as something that holds us back as a nation. Strike that. Everyone thinks that eliminating corruption would open the road to so much betterment, not just in India but world-over.   Which is why I found Yuen Yuen Ang’s interview about her book on corruption and China, China’s Gilded Age , so interesting. As she says: “The conventional wisdom is that first we eradicate corruption and get good governance, and then we get economic growth. The point I make in this book is that’s not true – that’s a fairy tale!” Really? Does she said that because China’s economic growth has happened hand in hand with corruption? But could China be a blip, an exception? “I would say that China is a blip as much as America in the 19th Century or the UK in the 18th Century are blips. In fact these three major superpowers are very similar – what really happened is that corruption went along with capitalism, and was manageable because corruption evolved into sophistic...

Movies like Terminator and Matrix are fun to watch, but I’ve wondered why AI/intelligent machines would ever want to take over the world and/or kill mankind. Or is that just a theme for movies and sci-fi novels?   In Matrix , Agent Smith (an AI) states the reason: “Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague and we are the cure.”   Virus? Ouch! In his book, Life 3.0 , Max Tegmark writes of another reason. He mentions one of the first (computer) viruses that got world-wide attention, the Morris Worm, which in 1988, exploited bugs in the Unix OS: “It was all...

I wrote about Venki Ramakrishnan’s views on prizes in an earlier blog . But Ramakrishnan also knew he was one of the contenders for a Nobel for his work on the ribosome, whenever an award came to that field. Further, he also knew others might get the prize, not him. And so it was an emotional rollercoaster, as described in his book, Gene Machine : “Every time I learned the Nobel Prize was for something other than the ribosome, I felt relieved because it was a postponement of the inevitable disappointment. What was invidious was that even if you didn’t really care about the prize itself, by plucking out no more than three from a cohort of people who had all done important science, they made the rest feel like also-rans.”   The day he finally got the call that he’d won the Nobel: “Sometimes, I had fantasized about refusing it (who wanted to go to Sweden in cold, dark December to eat bad vegetarian food?). But the reality is that no matter how people may feel about prizes in ...

My 9 yo daughter is a dog lover. I, on the other hand, am terrified of dogs. The Irresistible Force met the Immovable Wall. This time, the wall won. So no dogs. If I had my way, no pets of any kind. But then COVID-19 enforced lockdown became the norm, and more and more parents had to buy their kids toys… and pets. And so it came to be that we agreed to buy her a fish.   The pet shop guy pointed us to some fishbowls. There were three problems with the bowl option: (1) My daughter wanted a goldfish, and they need a tank, not a bowl; (2) A bowl felt too tiny; and (3) A bowl has curved glass on all sides, which distorts the appearance of the fish from literally every angle .   So we went for a tank instead. And one fish felt too lonely, so we bought two. At home, we carefully transferred them into the bowl following all the instructions on how to move them into their new environment (The water is different, its temperature is different etc). And when moving them into the t...

It is a famous story (ok, it’s famous in the physics world) how Penzias and Wilson, while working at AT&T, and not doing anything to do with physics, stumbled upon the background radiation of the universe. Meanwhile, just 60 km away, astrophysicists at Princeton had predicted that very background radiation but hadn’t found it yet . 14 years later, Penzias and Wilson won the Nobel Prize. For accidentally finding something.   The story usually ends there. Little is said about the Princeton guys who had predicted it got nothing. Even though they had predicted it.   If you’re wondering how the Princeton guys felt about all this, look no further than the TV sitcom Big Bang Theory . Sheldon and his wife Amy come up with a theory they call the Super-Asymmetry Theory. Being theorists, they need others to devise and perform the experiments to confirm their theory. As luck would have it, a bunch of physicists named Pemberton and Campbell find experimental confirmation of...

Venki Ramakrishnan, in his very well written book, Gene Machine , talks about prizes, rewards and recognition at one point: “(The Nobel Prize) has become deeply embedded in popular culture, representing not only having done something great but actually being great.” But for most scientists, “fantasies take a backseat to reality”. And yet: “Nevertheless, scientists are only human… The corruption (of awards) starts early, with small prizes throughout our education, then prestigious fellowships, then early career under-forty prizes.”   With so many prizes, one might think that these prizes are “all independent” and would “recognize many different scientists and discoveries”. But in reality: “Often one bold committee makes the first award in a new field, and then other prize committees play it safe by following suit. This can quickly have a snowballing effect, with the result that the same luminaries pick up lots of awards.” Worse: “Instead of differentiating themselves...

Western analysts wonder if the US and China are heading for Cold War 2.0. You can see the basis for that feeling. What started off as trade related issues has now escalated into tit-for-tat consulate closures in Houston and Chengdu, China practically shredding its commitments towards Hong Kong, and increased military moves by both sides in the East and South China Sea.   Nick Bisley makes an interesting point about the “first” Cold War: “While the Cold War was a global contest, its dynamics were starkly different in Asia and Europe. Most obviously, the first three decades of the contest were anything but cold in Asia. Indeed, the label seems like a cruel joke for a region that experienced several large-scale wars from the 1950s to the 1970s in Korea and Indochina, killing many millions of people.” Yes, the period was “free of bloodshed” in Europe, which is what the white man really cared about. Another difference, writes Bisley, was that Asia had no “Berlin Wall moment”, i...

In this tele-serial named Gotham (it’s about Gotham City while Batman was still the kid), there’s one episode where a vigilante nicknamed the Balloon Man, approaches known bad guys who are too rich and too powerful to ever be prosecuted. The Balloon Man would approach such people, suddenly snap on a handcuff, and set off the inflation of a weather balloon attached to the other end of the handcuff. Upon which the balloon would go up, taking the handcuffed man along with it… until the balloon broke and the man plunged to his death.   Fiction, right? Until I read of street magician, David Blaine, who “grabbed onto a bunch of big helium balloons and floated into the sky”: “Over the next 50 minutes, he rose to an altitude of almost 25,000 feet before letting go and skydiving/parachuting safely to the ground.” If you’re interested, check out the 2-hour video of the whole event on YouTube .   Which in turn reminded me of Austrian daredevil, Felix Baumgartner, who back i...

Sometimes things play out in a way that, depending on your perspective, are either ironical or totally unfair. For example, Western countries are colder places. Unsurprisingly then, as Ed Yong wrote : “In response to the global energy crisis of the 1970s, architects made structures more energy-efficient by sealing them off from outdoor air, reducing ventilation rates.” A totally unintended side-effect of that? “Pollutants and pathogens built up indoors, “ushering in the era of ‘sick buildings’  . ” Which, of course, is the worst setup when you’re trying to deal with a pandemic: “The indoor spaces in which Americans spend 87 percent of their time became staging grounds for super-spreading events.”   Here’s another example. Remember those “ghost towns” of China? It refers to entire cities built in China that remain uninhabited. Did the government miscalculate/mis-build? Or does China keep activities going because, hey, economic growth can never stop, even if it leads t...

As I wrote earlier , Bragg had found a way to know the structure of a crystal. But as Venki Ramakrishnan writes in Gene Machine , Bragg’s method involved making guesses about the structure that would explain the observed pattern of concentration spots. This was not a practical approach as the number of types of atoms in a molecule increased.   Perhaps you are wondering: “Couldn’t we just use X-rays with a lens to see images of molecules directly?” Aha, writes Ramakrishnan, that’s not an option because: There is no lens that’s capable of making images of molecules based on X-rays; Worse, X-rays have a lot of energy, so they “damage the molecules they hit”. In other words, they end up distorting the very thing they observe.   Well, ok, can’t we solve Issue #1 above (no lens problem) by having a computer do the maths that a lens, had it existed, would have “done” to create the image? Not really, says Ramakrishnan, because a real lens combines both the amplitude and...

In his book, Gene Machine , Venki Ramakrishnan explains how we “see” molecules and DNA strands. Actually, that’s not entirely true. Here’s why: “When light passes through a very narrow opening or around the edge of an object, it spreads out… in a process called diffraction… If two very small objects are close together, their images spread out and merge with each other.” This puts a limit on resolution capabilities of any viewing instrument: “Someone looking through a microscope would see just one large fuzzy object rather than two distinct ones.”   Ernst Abbe calculated that you could see two objects as separate if they were no closer than half the wavelength of the light used to look at them. Therefore, no matter what the magnification power of the microscope, one can’t see anything smaller than half the wavelength used to see, i.e., ½ of 500 nanometers (a nanometer is a billionth of a meter). And since molecules are smaller than that: “It would be impossible to see in...

  I found Sreejith Sasidharan’s analysis of the Indo-China skirmishes and standoffs in the Himalayas very interesting because it suggests that there’s a bigger picture here than just the obvious India-China aspect to such incidents.   Sasidharan starts by pointing to a Chinese defense white paper from 2019 that talks of their need to look at multiple “strategic directions”. Their “primary” strategic direction, says that white paper, is the US, and therefore, the Western Pacific. But India is their main challenger in the “secondary” direction: “When China allocates military resources and deploys armed forces, Beijing’s main objective is to maximize the resources towards what it considers to be its primary strategic direction, the United States and its system of alliances. This can be achieved only by allocating the minimum possible resources in a secondary strategic direction towards New Delhi and the Himalayas.”   But if that is true, then why has the...