Viswanathan K's Thoughts

We humans have lungs. But ants don’t. Why do some living things need lungs while others don’t?   In So Simple a Beginning , Raghuveer Parthasarathy starts from the basics. All creatures need a way to exchange gases, usually to take in oxygen and remove carbon dioxide. The easiest way is for the surface of the creature to do the gas exchange. A tiny creature like an ant does exactly this – the surface areas of its internal tubing is sufficient for gas exchange of its tissues.   Next, take a larger creature. Simple physics kicks in. The surface area of the living thing increases as a square of the increase in its length whereas its volume increases as the cube. If you increase the length by a factor of 3, the area increases by a factor of 3 2 = 9 times while its volume increases by 3 3 = 27 times. The volume, as you see, increases much faster than the area. The larger volume means the creature has a lot more cells, which in turn means, the creature needs a lot more gas...

In China, Kublai did what the Romans did for northern Europe, writes John May in The Mongol Empire . By that, he means the creation of physical artifacts (roads, canals) and systems (efficient taxation, trade, postal-relay). And of course, the introduction of paper money (as an easier, lighter, convenient alternative to coins made of various metals). ~~   By the time Genghis died, the man had created an empire 4 times larger than Alexander’s and twice the size of Rome, ha had not made great inroads into China. His successors doubled that size.   And yet, while the Romans have left a lot of both “hardware” (aqueducts, stadia) and “software” (art, law, language), very little of either survives from the Mongol era. (Other than in China, as we saw in the earlier blog on Kublai). “No buildings, no philosophies, no universities, no moral guidance, no literature for the subject peoples.”   Why the difference? “Because the Romans, the Greeks and the British had something to say, ...

Many say the railways were a positive product of British rule of India. Shashi Tharoor’s An Era of Darkness looks into this. In 1843, Governor General Lord Hardinge was at least honest when he said that the railways would be beneficial for the “commerce, government and military control of the country”.   Look at how it was constructed. (1) The British government guaranteed 5% return on bonds (very high for that time) used to raise money to build the railways. And why not? After all, it was taxes on India that would be used to pay the interest, not British taxpayer money. (2) This created a perverse incentive for British companies laying the tracks in India. That 5% interest was on the principal, so the more money the company claimed it needed, the higher the interest payment. Thus, there was no incentive to optimize or reduce costs. The opposite was the case. Each mile in India thus cost £ 18,000. For comparison, a mile at the same time was costing just £ 2,000 in the US. ...

Large organisms don’t look anything like magnified versions of tiny organisms. Why not? Because of the (physics) principle of scaling. And it’s not just limited t0 physical structure. In So Simple a Beginning , Raghuveer Parthasarathy asks an interesting question: Why can’t a bacterium swim like a whale?   Swimming involves pushing the water to move. There are two aspects that make this action hard: inertia and viscosity. The ratio of these two forces is called the Reynolds number. The higher the Reynolds number, the higher the inertia. Which means the liquid appears turbulent to the act of swimming. The lower the Reynolds number, the higher the viscous force.   Wait, it gets trickier. The Reynolds number also depends on the size of the object trying to swim. To a tiny bacterium, the water has a low Reynolds number. But to a whale, the Reynolds number is huge. This has other consequences: “This fact has deep consequences for how aquatic creatures can or cannot move....

In The Mongol Empire , John May says: “Two of the strangest (things) are that today’s China owes its shape and size… to a barbarian non-Chinese who was its greatest enemy; and that the same barbarian is now honoured as an insider, the founder of a Chinese dynasty.” It also explains why China considers Tibet a part of itself.   No, this tale is not about Genghis Khan.   Genghis’ descendants split the empire. Some ruled the Middle East, others towards Hungary, and the last group a little into China. “Little” is the right word, China was huge and had different rulers in different places. It was on the Chinese side that Kublai was the frontman for his brother, Mönkhe.   After hard fought wins in China, Kublai followed Genghis’s approach. Mass slaughter was perpetrated on the losers only if it would serve as a signal to the next kingdom in their path – surrender and you live, fight and be slaughtered. But if there was no kingdom nearby waiting to be conquered...

The British are often credited with creating the civil services in India. Take a closer look at that institution, says Shashi Tharoor in An Era of Darkness . Indians were only recruited for the lower-level posts. Conversely, they were never allowed to rise above a certain rank.   While that was the practice, the British were careful to keep up the pretence that the locals could rise through the ranks. The reality, as the viceroy Lord Lytton wrote was very different: “(Let them believe that they are) entitled to expect and claim appointment in the fair course of promotion to the highest posts of the service. We all know that these claims and expectations never can or will be fulfilled. We have had to choose between prohibiting them and cheating them, and we have chosen the least straight-forward course.”   Today, we know that many bureaucrats in independent India have the experience and capabilities of General Managers and CEO’s of corporations. No such human capabili...

At the molecular level, nothing is ever still. Thus, every picture of DNA or proteins is fundamentally flawed – everything is a blur of motion. Yes, the famous Brownian motion at work. Brown had shown this was not a concept limited to living things only; it was something rooted in physics. It is totally random. Mathematical analysis can predict, on average , how far a particle would move from its starting point if the direction of each step is random. Hence the term “predictable randomness”. Also, the larger a molecule, the less it moves.   Ok, how is any of this relevant to biology and life? Raghuveer Parthasarathy explains in So Simple a Beginning : “(Brownian motion) solves a nagging problem with our discussion of self-assembly.” In earlier blogs, we saw proteins can arrange themselves into patterns. But Lego blocks don’t do that. What’s the difference? Brownian motion gives the answer – the size (Lego blocks are too large to undergo Brownian motion). “The recipe for self-assem...

In the 1500’s, Britain’s transition from feudalism to capitalism was, as you might have expected, very disruptive, writes Steven Johnson in Enemy of all Mankind : “(The transition) disgorged a whole class of society – small, commons-based cottage laborers – and turned them into itinerant free agents.”   While these folks were now free to move around the country, they had few skills, and thus no jobs: “Serfs once grounded in a coherent, if oppressive, feudal system found themselves flotsam on the twisting stream of early capitalism.”   So many jobless people with few prospects roaming around inevitably created problems wherever they passed. No wonder they soon became public enemy number one. In response, the Vagabond Act was passed – such folks could be rounded up by the authorities, and then whipped in public.   Around the same time, Britain was starting to become a sea-faring nation. The Royal Navy needed plenty of recruits. The “recruiters” came to be ...

Self-assembly. It is the “ability” of molecules to assemble themselves into certain shapes. Imagine an ice cream cone shaped molecule with two opposing halves – the ice-cream part is attracted to water (hydrophilic); the cone part avoids water (hydrophobic). Put enough of them in water, and they will automatically arrange themselves to “shield the hydrophobic cones”, writes Raghuveer Parthasarathy in So Simple a Beginning .   The base principle here is: “Molecular shape is a key determinant of self-assembly.” This is just a physical property. The organism doesn’t need DNA instructions for certain molecules to arrange themselves a certain way! “The cell does need genes to encode the proteins that synthesize (certain) molecules; once made, the lipids can organize themselves.” To put it differently: “Physical simplicity may underlie biological complexity.”

Poetry in those school going years. I was never a fan of it, to put it mildly. When most kids struggle with the language (English, or Hindi for non-Hindi speakers), why add a format that is not used in daily life?   In India, we make things even worse on this front. Take English where the books will have poems by Keats, Wordsworth, Dickenson, Frost and Blake. They may be great poets, but a lot of their poem involve direct or indirect contextual references to England. Like seasons that don’t exist in India. An example of this is etched in my memory. One of my cousins had this to say on the famous poem, Daffodils - What on earth is a daffodil, he vented? That was the pre-Internet era where one couldn’t whip up a photo or video of the daffodil. If kids didn’t even get what was the object in question was, how could the poem possibly make any sense?     Poetry is often about reflections and life experiences, personification and memories, nostalgia and parallels. All a...

Did the British create a united India? Shashi Tharoor takes a stab at that in An Era of Darkness . Even at first glance, that “claim” runs into trouble – wasn’t British rule openly a policy of divide and rule? Both in India and other colonies?   If they were so into uniting India, why did they allow for multiple rulers across so many “princely states” (never to be called kingdoms because the only monarch was, of course, in Britain)? Why was there an elaborate hierarchy amongst them, if not to foster rivalry and enmity?   The codification of the caste system started with Warren Hastings who hired eleven pandits to help frame laws for the country based on some kind of continuation of the shastras . Even if the intent was sincere (continuity, sensitivity to local practices), the mode of defining the laws (via the eleven pandits) led to major flaws. First , the pandits made (genuine) mistakes in their interpretation of parts of the shastras . Second , they took advantage o...

The circadian rhythm. It’s a natural oscillation within the bodies of living things with a periodicity of a day – 24 hours (It’s why we experience jet lag). What acts as this clock in living things? Raghuveer Parthasarathy explains the concept in So Simple a Beginning : “The simplest possible oscillator is a gene that represses itself.” This sounds crazy at first: once repressed, how would it activate itself again? “The answer lies in the fact that both expression and repression take time.”   He elaborates. But first, a quick recap from an earlier blog: DNA has the gene to create the protein, and promoter and repressor sites before it. When read, the gene produces the protein (red blob) which attaches itself to the repressor site, thus physically blocking any RNA attempts to read the gene.   Coming back to the oscillator. All the above steps (creating the protein, then for the protein to “meander and find the promoter region”) take time. Ok, so it took time. But isn’t the gen...

Back in 2016, Shashi Tharoor wrote this book, An Era of Darkness , on the impact of British rule of India. He starts off with a few important disclaimers: (1) The fact that successive Indian governments since independence have made their share of mistakes, been corrupt etc does not impact the truth value of the damage done by the British; (2) It is impossible to put a number value of the amount lost/stolen from India, so the intent is not to seek specific reparations from Britain (who’d enforce it anyway?); (3) The point is not about the return of specific items like the famous Kohinoor diamond.   He starts by pointing out India’s share of the world economy before and after British rule – it fell from 23% to 3%. The one-line reason? “India was governed for the benefit of Britain.” After all: “Unlike every other foreign overlord who stayed on to rule, the British had no intention of becoming one with the land.”   Some argue that the decline was mostly due to...

After invading Iraq, the Americans fired all individuals at the top of most institutions (army, police, bureaucracy). Why? Because, by definition, the top guys would have appointed by and thus supportive of Saddam’s policies. The results were disastrous since now there was nobody with “work experience” available to take the top jobs of governance and providing security.   But when Nazi Germany fell, nobody did any such cleansing. Sure, the very top Nazis were prosecuted (if captured). But the majority of the next rung weren’t. William Boyd writes in his summary of Danny Orbach’s book, Fugitives : “Most – it stands to reason – quietly blended back in to postwar German society. It is estimated that at the end of the conflict in 1945 the Nazi party had around 8.5 million members. Only a tiny percentage were hunted down and prosecuted. What happened to the millions of others?” These Nazis had no good choices, esp. if they were ideologically inclined. Join the hated West (whom ...

DNA strands are long (several meters long). How on earth do they then fit inside the nucleus of a cell? By bending and folding themselves. But not in any random way. They wrap themselves around proteins 10 nanometers in size called histones . But it would require a lot of force to compress them like this. What is the source of that much force? The answer is electrostatic force, between the negatively charged DNA and the positively charged histone.   This isn’t just “intellectual curiosity”. Which parts of the DNA are “expressed” as proteins depends on the packaging and wrapping of the DNA. How? Remember DNA strands are read by a transcription molecule called RNA. Parts of the DNA that are inaccessible (due to the way they are wrapped) won’t be expressed. It has thus been turned “off”! Accessible = On; inaccessible = Off. “The physical arrangement of DNA is a powerful tool for regulating the activities of the cell.” writes Raghuveer Parthasarathy in So Simple a Beginning . ...

As we know, petrol, diesel, kerosene etc are all different extracts of the same underlying material – what we call “oil” when we think of the Middle East. Purify that oil to different extents, and you get different outputs, all very useful because they are all storehouses of energy that we can use for various purposes.   Until I read Pranay Kotasthane’s post , I didn’t know that: “Cooking oil is used to make sustainable aviation fuel.” It gets better – we are talking of used cooking oil (UCO) here! “UCO is the oil that’s left after you have cooked food in it four or five times; thereafter, it is no longer suitable for cooking but can be used as a fuel.” What drives this trend is that the aviation industry gets brownie greenie points for being environmental friendly when it converts UCO into aviation fuel.   As always, there are second- and third-order behaviors that then kick in. Malaysia, for example, subsidizes its palm oil: “Hence, the new oil's market ...

Certain features are common to many life forms. Why? That is the theme of Raghuveer Parthasarathy’s So Simple a Beginning . There are multiple angles from which one can approach that question, and this book looks at it “through the lens of physics”.   In the book, his focus is on 4 principles from physics that recur often in biological organisms: (1) self-assembly; (2) regulatory circuits; (3) predictable randomness; and (4) scaling. ~~   Before diving into all that, he first explains the basic building blocks of life. DNA, as we know, has 2 strands. To read it, we need to first separate the strands. Which leads to the question: Does DNA melt?   This may sound like a weird question, so Parthasarathy explains its significance. Ice melts if you raise the temperature above 0° C (a precise temperature). But not everything is like that. Honey doesn’t suddenly change state upon heating - it just becomes progressively less viscous. Now for the relevance to DNA splitting. If...

When a (big enough) meteor hit the earth the last time around, the dinosaurs were its most famous casualty. But that’s not why NASA setup CNEOS to keep an eye for asteroids! Instead, it’s due to something humans saw happen, write Jorge Cham and Daniel Whitman in Frequently Asked Questions about the Universe : “In 1994, the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 broke into twenty-one pieces on its way toward the sun, and those frag­ments crashed into Jupiter. One of those pieces created a gigantic explosion approximately the size of Earth.” Yes, an explosion as big as the earth.   As of today: “The CNEOS team has created a pretty good database of all the biggest rocks around us, where they are, and where they will be in the near and far future.” The good news is that the biggest rocks are rare (That’s good news since it’s the biggest ones that can cause catastrophic destruction). Even better: “Luckily, large rocks like that are not only rare but also relatively visible. If a large ro...

When we were in Malaysia last year, at the KL Tower ticket counter, I was asked my daughter’s age. To decide whether she was entitled to the kid’s pricing or not. I replied, “12”. My daughter, who was standing next to me, was furious. “I am 13”, she said, “How can you not remember my age?” I get it – it’s not just the mathematical difference between 12 and 13. Rather, it is the difference between being a member of the Exalted Club of Teenagers and being in the World of Lowly Children .   I could remember her age and class when she was younger. Now I struggle and frankly consider these things Details of No Consequence. 12, then 13, now 14. Her age keeps changing. So does her class. It is hard to keep up.   I also suspect that as an adult, it is very confusing to have this individual who behaves like a kid but thinks she is an adult who knows everything and can do everything. Behaves like she is 6, thinks she is 25. Why blame me for not knowing her age?   Of course, I am t...

When the Nazi government seized power, they started removing Jews from more and more positions, including the civil services, and the science departments of Germany. Those physicists who saw the writing on the wall fled to either UK (like Schrodinger) or the US (like Einstein), writes Adam Becker in What is Real?   The great physicist, Enrico Fermi, wasn’t a Jew. But when Mussolini aligned with Hitler, Fermi came under suspicion since his wife was a Jew. To make matters problematic, Mussolini’s new laws had made it illegal to take “more than pocket change” out of Italy. Neils Bohr broke an unwritten rule of the Nobel and told Fermi that he (Fermi) was in the running for the Nobel that year. Perhaps Fermi, should he win, could consider escaping from Stockholm with the prize money to start a new life? Fermi agreed, but it was touch and go – his wife’s passport had been confiscated, which meant she couldn’t come to Stockholm. Fermi managed to pull a few strings to get her passport...