Viswanathan K's Thoughts

We’ve all heard of jokes like this one by Groucho Marx: “One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I don’t know.” Julia Galef wrote this awesome blog on how our mind switches perspectives to “get” the joke: “You can almost hear the gears grinding as we shift from “I, in my pajamas, shot an elephant” to “I shot an elephant who was wearing my pajamas.” Apparently, there’s even a term for cases like this “whose latter half surprises us, forcing us to go back and reconsider the assumptions we’d made about what was going on in the first half”: paraprosdokia. You’re probably thinking only a nutjob analyzes the process behind a joke, right? Hang on because Galef points this is usually how theories change in science, except much more slowly than when you got that joke! “As you collect more observations that don’t seem to fit your theory, you either dismiss them as an anomaly, or find a way to shoehorn them into the framework of your theory, or you...

In his awesome book, Fooling Houdini , Alex Stone said that magic is all about breaking the laws of physics. Or appearing to do so. I never thought of it that way, but on reflecting, I feel that’s a great definition. After all, isn’t magic all about the card that tunnels through the deck to the top, the girl who gets cut in two and lives, the magician who escapes from a box dropped into water while he was chained? Later in the book, Stone talks about a category of magicians called mentalists. Those are the folks who claim to be able to read your mind and to communicate with the dead. But there’s a key difference, says Stone: “A magician should pull off every trick perfectly; a mentalist should not. Mentalists should only be about 85 percent accurate…The idea is that the sixth sense, like the other five senses, should be fallible.” Ironical, isn’t it? The very definition of science is repeatability; but if you break the laws of physics with repeatability, we call it magic, a t...

In his book, The Big Short , Michael Lewis talks about a fund manager named Steve Eisman who, as a young man, decided to study the Jewish holy book, the Talmud. Why? “Not because he had the slightest interest in God but because he was curious about its internal contradictions.” I didn’t read religious stuff with that aim ; but I did start to notice the contradictions as I went along. Take prophecies, for instance. Almost every religion has them. A prophecy implies that the future is pre-determined. So does that mean there’s no free will? And if it’s true that there’s no such thing as free will, then it is illogical to claim that heaven, hell, rebirth or nirvana are based on your actions, right? Take Kamsa. After hearing the prophecy that he’d be killed by Devaki’s 8 th born, if he had turned over a new leaf, would he still have been killed? A la Angulimala? Or would he have been spared, in which case all future celestial prophecies would have been considered non-binding...

A year or so back, we bought a science kit for our then 5 year old daughter. As with all such kits, the highlight was supposed to be the volcano (vinegar with baking soda). And as we’ve discovered so many times since, that experiment is never anywhere near as spectacular as the pics will show or what you think it will be… But that activity still got her interested in “science experiments”, many more of which have since been done based on YouTube and various kits. One of her first experiments was to catch a couple of ants in a bottle and observe them with the magnifying glass provided in the kit. Any attempts at telling her to leave the poor ants alone was met with a ferocious “Do you or do you not want me to do science experiments?” response. Oh, what horrors we inflict in the name of science. (Note: she’ll call her friends who “play” with ants the ant bullies…) The wheel with different colors (or patterns) that merge when the wheel is spun fast blew her mind. How can that be...

Sometimes, when we see people (or companies) make terrible choices and get butchered, we wonder: How could they not have seen that coming? Why didn’t they think deeper about it when they had a chance? There are (obviously) many reasons for that, but here are a few more of the common ones. Sometimes, it’s because people have a mental model of the world that they truly believe in. Leonardo di Caprio describes it in the movie, Inception : “What is the most resilient parasite? Bacteria? A virus? An intestinal worm? An idea. Resilient... highly contagious. Once an idea has taken hold of the brain it's almost impossible to eradicate. An idea that is fully formed - fully understood - that sticks; right in there somewhere.” What’s worse is that just having an opinion is bad enough at times, says Leo Tolstoy: “The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to th...

A pic of a Buckingham Palace guard started off a conversation with my 6 year-old on kings and queens. She was surprised that England still has a queen. Not just England, I said, so too do many European countries. Except France, I added. And thus came up the topic of the guillotine. What’s that, she asked. I drew a pic of the guillotine setup. This is how the conversation continued: She : “Really, so the French king was killed by his own people?” Me : “Yup.” She : “But why did they kill their king?” (I told her the infamous Marie Antoinette quip on eating cake). She : “Don’t tell me jokes and stories, I am asking what really happened?” Me: “I’ll find out the kid-version answer and tell you later.” I’ll-get-back-with-the-answer-later is one of the only topics where my daughter has the patience to wait. In fact, I was very gratified to hear her say one day to my wife, “If you or appa don’t know something, you say you’ll find out and tell it later. Why can’t my m’am do that...

In his book, Ignorance: How it Drives Science , Stuart Firestein wrote: “In science there are so far two well-known instances where knowledge is shown to have limits.” He was referring to the famous Uncertainty Principle from quantum mechanics and Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem in maths. The former says it is impossible to know both items in certain pairs of properties of objects. What does Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem say? Simply put, it about any system of axioms (statements taken to be true, as being “obvious” without a formal proof) and proofs built using those axioms. No matter how you much progress you make with this system, the theorem says that there will always be true statements that cannot be proven . Aha, you think, but does this just mean that one needs to add another fairly obvious axiom to the list? Would that then make all true statements provable? Go ahead, said Gödel, add another axiom to the list. I’ll then find a different true statement that can’t...