Living is a Contradiction

‘Guilt is hereditary in my family, it haunts us like a monster phantom’ , said G.S. Srinivas, a final year in my college. Read his article published in the Tehelka.

This brilliant piece of writing exemplifies how difficult it has been, and still is, to live a life of ideals and how any person’s life from the cradle to the grave is a bundle of contradictions and a tale of irony. Oddly relatable, given my recent temptations by the corporate placement regime (I once swore to a life of scientific hermitage)…

How Nerd are You?

 :)

Alice and Bob

Children of The Singularity

DISCLAIMER: This poem is bound to hurt the “religious sentiments” of most who read it. Proceed only if you accept my right of expression.

Children of The Singularity

I often wonder what I would see,
Once I die and my soul is free.
Standing amidst a sea of sinners I’d wait,
For judgment, by whom I contemplate!

Muslim, Jew and common Christian
Hindu, Jain and Zoroastrian
Every single man and woman,
Waited for a sign or omen

The heavens parted, the earth did fold
And fell from the sky, a door of gold
Lo and behold, in came Buddha!
The Chinese shouted “See! We told ya!”

But God being the Omega clown
Ripped off His mask and saffron gown
And roared in mighty bass plethora
“Ha! I’m Allah! Gotcha!”

The Muslims in their ecstasy
Fired guns in the air and shouted for glee
Short lived though was their merriment
For Allah now turned into Presley!

And so did He shift from Ram to Sita
Amma, Christ and Mahavira
Wonderstruck I watched with pleasure
This glorious farce of divine measure

At length did He take His formless form
Of boundless bound and quantum foam
And whispered with divine tears
A song into each one’s ears

“Children of The Singularity!
Why split thou into plurality?
When All is One, none right nor wrong,
It was all about how you got along!”

- lumeno

Children of The Singularity is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 India License

Tales of an Unrelenting Underdog

A few weeks back, I happened to attend an “orientation cum selection” camp at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai. Around 40 students from various engineering and science colleges in India were to be exposed to lectures and experiments in cutting-edge research in Physics and then screened for proto-research projects. It turned out that around 90% of the class was composed of engineering students and that too, from various IITs and IISERs. As you can imagine, this wasn’t a great realization for yours truly. (Our protagonist had made an attempt at Entrance Tests to these institutions and later found out that at least 4000 odd people in the country were better than him)

The fear of not being selected for a project was not entirely the reason for my glum disposition. Often during the lectures, when the lecturer posed a question, I would find myself immersed in a sea of raised hands while I struggled with questions like “So, what’s his point?” The All-India IIT-JEE First Ranker sitting next to me and trying to make his point didn’t do much to improve my situation.

Fortunately, after all of the sulking and feeling small and insignificant, I did manage to cope with the pressures after putting in a little extra effort. The results of the screening (ironically, around 90% of us will be selected) will be out in a couple of months.

On a lighter side, I did make some interesting observations of the way some IITians seem to converse. The following is an excerpt from a conversation I overheard while five of my IITian room-mates were engaged in an innocent (and intrinsically non-scientific) game of cards.

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IIT Guy 1: The game ends when there exists a player A who possesses n<2 cards

IIT Guy 2: You invented this game? Are you sure that it is a tractable process that can be performed efficiently in a finite amount of time?

IIT Guy 3: We’ll try a mathematical proof later. For now, we’ll just have to wait and see.

IIT Guy 4: I’ll set the initial conditions. I’m the youngest right?

IIT Guy 1: I think we can start now that we have the required boundary conditions.

[The game progresses]

IIT Guy 5: [Mumbles to himself] Assume each of n risk-neutral potential bidders has a privately known value independently drawn from a common distribution F that is strictly increasing and atomless on [v, v]. No bidder wants more than one of the k available… [inaudible]

IIT Guy 1: [A garbled and incomprehensible jugglery of equations and mathematical blah blah]

Me: God damn you guys! It’s just a game of cards!!!
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Bless those institutes! [Our protagonist reassures you that there is no tone of revulsion for these institutes, neither is there a case of the “grapes are sour” syndrome in this last statement of his]

i traversed a wormhole

What did I do?  I mastered Einstein’s Special and General Theory of Relativity, built a time machine and traversed a wormhole.  I landed in the year 1904 and thought I would write papers on Special Relativity, Brownian Motion and the Photoelectric Effect before Einstein did, from what I had learnt back(?) in 2007 thus changing history and putting my name in the forefront of modern physics.  Unfortunately, my papers passed through the Swiss Patent Office and I never heard of them again until Einstein published my work in 1905.  Or was it his work?

 

So here I am in the year 1916, feeling miserable and dejected seeing Einstein steal all of the glory that I deserved.  Mind you, I still haven’t figured out who really did put forward the Special Theory.  It couldn’t have been Einstein because he merely stole the work I was going to publish.  But it couldn’t have been me either because I merely learnt in 2007 what Einstein was supposed to have discovered.  Weird Causal Loop This Is.

 

And he proposes the General Theory. Ass. I knew it all before he did. Funny thing is I’m still not yet born.  I’ll have to hang around till 1988 for that. It’s already been 12 years since I traversed that wormhole and I’m going on 30 now.  If I have to see myself born, I’ll have to live to a ripe 112.  I doubt I will, what with the tumor in my head (no doubt thanks to the radiation in the wormhole) and the pathetic state of medical science in the 1900s. I won’t in any way have any causal influence on my life. It’s just outside my bloody light cone!  What am I talking about? My life is under my causal influence! Why should I care about some scrawny kid who’s going to pop out in 1988?  Maybe he’ll live to be 18, build a time machine and become me again.  But that’s not going to affect me in any way.  I am this me. He’ll just be a different me. Or will he be the same?  Weird Be The Nature Of Time.

 

Hold on a sec! What if I kill the kid’s parents before he’s conceived? Holy cow! They’re my parents.  I wonder where they are right now. Come to think of it, they aren’t born yet! Hmmm… should I try and…? No, its just too scary…and a bit sinister.  Maybe I should just let things be.  There already seems to be a sense of purpose in this strange and intricately networked thing we call time.  Maybe we aren’t as free as we think we are. 

 

Darn. My head just aches, it just aches…

Geek Rant #2

I’ve been reading a lot on Quantum Mechanics lately and I have to admit that I’m utterly stupefied, astonished and taken aback at the same time.  Although I’m not yet ready for mathematically approaching the subject and will have to wait till my Second Year for it, I’ve got a qualitative picture of this amazing realm of science and still can’t get over my excitement.  Some of the things that struck me:

•  The conventional interpretation of QM, which is strongly supported by experiments, rules out the possibility of “reality” as we know it.  The universe has no existence without conscious observers (us, that is) and things have no objective existence, rather they exist only in ‘minds’.  The mind is everything and everything is the mind.  (Mind-blowing! )
  
• This interpretation when applied to the entire universe requires an observer outside the universe (science pointing towards the existence of a God?).
  
• An alternative interpretation, which doesn’t require an observer outside the universe, is the Many-Worlds Theory in which the universe branches into multiple parallel universes (that may or may not fuse back together) at every instant where there is equal probability of either of 2 things happening.  For example, if a radioactive atom has an equal probability of decaying and not decaying in a period of one hour, the current universe splits into 2 daughter universes; one in which the atom has decayed and one in which it hasn’t.  Thus, an infinity of parallel universes (some of which have slightly dissimilar copies of ourselves) exists according to this interpretation.
  
• QM allows 2 particles separated by millions of miles to instantly ‘communicate’ with each other (referred to as spooky-action-at-a-distance).  

Back in college, we Physicsees leave tomorrow for some place called Kudhiranga (I may have got the name wrong ) for the Annual Physics Trip (the trip has nothing to do with physics if you were wondering).   

Heard Coldplay’s coming to Bangalore in February!!! Must go!

Listening to Don’t Panic by Coldplay…

CHEMISTRY LAB – ACTIVITY 1

AIM: To completely screw-up a chemistry experiment and convince the teacher that I’m a dunce when it comes to practicals.

APPARATUS: Myself, a partner, bottled hatred, a nosy teacher with a squeaky voice, fragile laboratory instruments and a hell lot of bad luck.

THEORY: Be thyself.

PROCEDURE:

1. Attach a condenser to a flask and hold the combination by the neck of the condenser. The flask will come off, fall to the floor and break with a sound loud enough to attract the attention of the rest of the students and the teacher.
   
2. Clench your hand around a test-tube. Make sure you have a good grip on it. Now, simultaneously think of your hostel Dean, George Bush, perverts on crowded buses and life in general. Chances are the test-tube will break without hurting you.
   
3. Take 20ml of concentrated sulphuric acid in a beaker. Toss it at your partner’s face, unintentionally of course. Then, convince her that plastic surgery isn’t expensive anymore.
   
4. Weigh rocks from the Science Block Lawns on a delicate chemical balance. Deduce breaking point of the balance axis.

PRECAUTIONS:

1. Try not to fall asleep when taking readings of the number of drops falling from a stalagmometer.
   
2. If falling asleep is unavoidable, try not to drool over your own notebook.
   
3. Affordable plastic surgery doesn’t help first degree burns. So check acid concentration with your teacher before using on partner.

RESULTS:

1. Decreased self-esteem by 50%

2. Managed to make partner cry

3. Proved to the lab assistants that laboratory instruments aren’t good enough these days

Free Will

This post will be the first of a series of discussions on a wide range of philosophical issues.  What I wish to address today is the problem of free will. I’ll try to make it as short and sweet as possible.

THE PROBLEM:

Four differing views exist

1.      That man is free to some extent and that an individual is ultimately responsible for his choices and these choices determine his life. This is the existentialist view.

2.      That freedom is meaningless and that all events in the universe are predetermined. A person does what fate destined him to do. Choice and free will are an illusion arising from the complexity of the brain. There exists only a single past and a single possible future. This view is known as neo-fatalism.

3.      That all events are not predetermined because the uncertainty principle in physics introduces randomness into the universe. Thus multiple possible futures exist but only one future is fulfilled and the particular path of future taken can change at any instant. However, freedom is still meaningless as the individual is not in control of the randomness. I don’t have a name for this view but I have reason to believe that this is the view held by most contemporary physicists.

 4.      Finally, the multiverse/many-worlds view that says that every time the universe encounters an event with a random outcome, the universe splits it into as many parallel universes as there are possible outcomes and each universe exists independent of every other. Freedom is still elusive here as the choice of which universe we are conscious in does not rest with the individual.  This view is considered as wild and speculative. 

In this post, I will proceed to refute view 1 and conclude that freedom is meaningless in the universe as we know it.

Whenever we make a conscious choice, a number of factors influence this choice (genes, upbringing, experiences, environment, etc.).  But freedom of will means that even with the presence of all these factors, a person has the capacity to go against them, the driving forces, and express his choice (the freedom to do otherwise).  Thus, this would require that the person makes a choice which is ultimately influenced by nothing.  There is no driving force, factor or cause that led to the person’s choice. 

The person’s choice is an effect.

All effects must have causes.

The choice was caused by nothing and has no cause.

Contradiction!

Thus, the assumption that the choice was uninfluenced is incorrect.  This implies that the choice is not a free one. In fact, free will as a concept is meaningless as is shown above.

One may argue that free will does not mean absolute lack of influence of factors but that the previous choices of the person are what ultimately decide the present choice.  This would imply that all the choices made by a person are ultimately factored by the first choice that the person made whenever or whatever it was.  We would then be left with the problem of determining what influenced the first choice, and if we assume freedom of will for this choice, we would end up with the same contradiction.

This conclusively refutes view 1 and the concept of free will.

Please post your comments.

uh oh

hold on people, i’ll come up with something soon!