Viswanathan K's Thoughts

There are two broad kinds of problems in science, writes Siddhartha Mukherjee in The Song of the Cell . He calls the first category the “eye in the sandstorm” problem. That’s the kind of field where there is immense confusion (the sandstorm) and no pattern or map on how to navigate exists. “Quantum theory serves as a good example…. A shifted paradigm about this atomic/ subatomic world was required to get out of the sandstorm.”   The second category is the inverse of the above, what he calls the “sand in the eye” problem. “Everything makes perfect sense, except one ugly fact that just won’t fit the beautiful theory. It irritates the scientist like a sand grain lodged in the eye – why, why, she asks herself, won’t this one irritating contradictory fact go away?” He uses that as the runway to explain such a problem from the world of neurons, but that requires you to read the book to understand things. So I will cite an easily understandable example from the world of physics – when Me...

Pranay Kotasthane’s starts off with a deliberately provocative statement after the forced resignation of the Union Education Minister recently. “Let me propose an idea that sounds radical but isn’t: India does not need a Union Education Ministry.”   He elaborates why. How did the constitution originally envision education? “General education was a State List subject, meaning that states had exclusive legislative power over schools and colleges.” But yes, the center had control over central universities (AMU, BHU), certain technical institutions it considered as being of national importance and a few other areas. All central ministry ideas on school education were advisory, and states could reject or accept them as they wished.   Like so many things, all that changed during the Emergency. The 42 nd amendment added “education, including technical education, medical education and universities” to the Concurrent (center) List. And with that: “The Union gained le...

How fast can a camera take photos? Vaclav Slim talks about just that topic in Numbers Don’t Lie . In the early 1870’s, Leland Stanford challenged his employee, Easweard Muybridge, to develop a camera that could settle an old debate: Are all four legs of a horse in the air when it runs? To answer the question, Muybridge came up with a camera with a shutter speed of 1/1,000 of a second in 1878. The question could finally be answered, with (photographic) proof: Yes, all four hooves of a horse are indeed airborne at the same time.   Soon, the shutter speed increased to 1/10,000 of a second. By 1940, it hit the millionth of a second mark.   In 1999, Ahmed Zewail won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing a rapid laser technique that could capture the transition states of chemical reactions on a scale of femtoseconds (a millionth of a billionth of a second). Today, we can detect events separated by attoseconds (a billionth of a billionth of a second). It allows us to “s...

In The Song of the Cell , Siddhartha Mukherjee narrates an amusing incident from his younger days. He was still a very junior person in the medical chain, and his mentor was an Italian postdoc, Enzo Cerundolo, a garrulous man who nonetheless barely spoke to Mukherjee: “He rushed around the lab, navigating his way past me as if I were some irritating piece of equipment that someone had off-loaded in the wrong place.”   One aspect of the project the lab was working on at the time involved repeatedly freezing, then thawing a sample. The sequencing mattered – two thaws in a row, or two freezes in a row would kill whatever was in the sample. Unfortunately for Enzo, the assistant in charge of it (also an Italian) had gone on vacation. Nobody knew if the next step was to freeze or to thaw.   Mukherjee asked to see the tube. On its bottom, in barely visible ink, he saw the letters C, S, C, S, C, S. He asked Enzo what the Italian word for “freeze” was. Congelare . And the Ita...

The stereotype image on population growth is that only the southern states rates are declining while the rest of India is closer to the UP-Bihar end of the spectrum. Not true at all. While UP-Bihar are indeed the worst, most Indian states have low birth rates, not just the southern states. So much so that, as Raghu S Jaitley says : “We have gone from a Total Fertility Rate (TFR) of 3 to 2 in under 12 years; possibly the fastest such transition in the past century. Most of the developed economies of today took more than half a century for a similar drop.”   A generation back, we were told our population was one of the big reasons why India was poor, doing badly economically. So such a reduction in TFR must be a good thing, right? Well: “We have reached a TFR of under 2 now at a per capita of about US$3000, while such levels were reached by other economies at more than US$15,000.” Two major exceptions to that were Japan and China. Both overcame a low TFR before they becam...

If a country wants to keep its population unchanged, each couple should have 2.1 kids on average. The “extra” 0.1 is to adjust for the odd kid who dies early.   In Numbers Don’t Lie , Vaclav Slim points out that a radical change in the demographics of a country (increase or decrease) has historically “had enormous demographic, economic, and strategic implications”. As Europe’s share of global population fell from 18% in 1900 to 9.5% in 2020, so has its global significance. Asia, in the same period, has moved in the opposite direction on both fronts. From now to 2070, by this metric, Africa’s share should increase.   No country has ever managed to achieve exactly (or very close to) the replacement rate of 2.1. Japan, (in)famously dipped well below that number. But how far below 2.1 can a country go and still “recover”? Historical data suggests that below 1.5, such reversals are very unlikely. Spain, Italy, and Romania are at 1.3; Japan, Ukraine, Greece, and Croatia are...