Viswanathan K's Thoughts

“I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds.” -          The line Oppenheimer remembered from the Bhagavad Gita Robert Jungk wrote this great book titled Brighter Than a Thousand Suns about the “atomic scientists” who contributed to the building of the atomic bomb: via theory, via exhortations to build it, and via direct participation in its construction. Later it talks of how they reacted after the nukes were actually used. Around the time Hitler came to power, the theories had identified the enormous energy waiting to be unleashed in the atom. The German scientist, Heisenberg, explained why people like him agreed to build the Nazi bomb: “(If anyone protests), he will naturally finish up a few days later in a concentration camp.” Non-Aryan scientists were persecuted and fled Germany. The exodus continued from other parts of Europe as the Nazis marched on. Most of these scientists were terrified at the prospect of Nazi Germany bui...

“Math doesn't lie, but our brains are huge scam artists.” -          Scott Adams Ever since Newton, maths has become the language of science, especially physics. That trend only accelerated in the last century to a point that when asked whether physics would ever again have a theorist like Faraday who could do wonders without sophisticated maths, Richard Feynman replied: “I'd say the odds are strongly against it. For one thing, you need the math just to understand what's been done so far. Beyond that, the behavior of subnuclear systems is so strange compared to the ones the brain evolved to deal with that the analysis has to be very abstract.” And yet even physicists (at least the pre- Feynman era ones who were at the cutting edge of 20 th century physics) couldn’t believe in their own maths: 1)       Physicists of the day, for example, had to wait for Hubble and his data before they believed what the mat...