# A prediction. Also, a couple of wishes…

The Prediction:

While the week of the Nobel prizes always has a way to generate a sense of suspense, of excitement, and even of wonderment, as far as I am concerned, the one prize that does that in the real sense to me is, of course, the Physics Nobel. … Nothing compares to it. Chemistry can come close, but not always. [And, Mr. Nobel was a good guy; he instituted no prize for maths! [LOL!]]. …

The Physics Nobel is the King of all awards in all fields, as far as I am concerned.

That’s why, this year, I have this feeling of missing something. … The reason is, this year’s Physics Nobel is already “known”; it will go to Kip Thorne and pals.

[I will not eat crow even if they don’t get it. [… Unless, of course, you know a delicious recipe or two for the same, and also demonstrate it to me, complete with you sampling it first.]]

But yes, Kip Thorne richly deserves it, and he will get it. That’s the prediction. I wanted to slip it in even if only few hours before the announcement arrives.

I will update this post later right today/tonight, after the Physics Nobel is actually announced.

Now let me come to the couple of wishes, as mentioned in the title. I will try to be brief. [Have been too busy these days… OK. Will let you know. We are going in for accreditation, and so, it’s been all heavy documentation-related work for the past few months. Despite all that hard-work, we still have managed to slip a bit on the progress, and so, currently, we are working on all week-ends and on most public holidays, too. [Yes, we came to work yesterday.] So, it’s only somehow that I manage to find some time to slip in this post—which is written absolutely on the fly, with no second thoughts or re-reading before posting. … So excuse me if there is a bit of lack of balance in the presentation, and of course, typos etc.]

Wish # 1:

The first wish is that a Physics Nobel should go, in a combined way, to what actually are two separate, but very intimately related, and two most significant advances in the physical understanding of man: (i) chaos theory (including fractals) and (ii)catastrophe theory.

If you don’t like the idea of two ideas being given a single Nobel, then, well, let me put it this way: the Nobel should be given for achieving the most significant advancements in the field of the differential nonlinearities, for a very substantial progress in the physical understanding of the behaviour of nonlinear physical systems, forging pathways for predictive capacity.

Let me emphasize, this has been one of the most significant advances in physics in the last century. No, saying so is emphatically not a hyperbole.

And, yes, it’s an advance in physics, primarily, and then, also in maths—but only secondarily.

… It’s unfortunate that an advancement which has been this remarkable never did register as such with most of the S&T “manpower”, esp., engineers and practical designers. It’s also unfortunate that the twin advancement arrived on the scene at the time of bad cultural (even epistemological) trends, and so, the advancements got embedded in a fabric of hyperbole, even nonsense.

But regardless of the cultural tones in which the popular presentations of these advancements (esp. of the chaos theory) got couched, taken as a science, the studies of nonlinearity in the physical systems has been a very, very, original, and a very, very creative, advancement. It needs to be recognized as such.

That way, I don’t much care for what it helped produce on the maths side of it. But yes, even a not very extraordinarily talented undergraduate in CS (one with a special interest in deterministic methods in cryptography) would be able to tell you how much light got shone on their discipline because of the catastrophe and chaos theories.

The catastrophe theory has been simply marvellous in one crucial aspect: it actually pushed the boundaries of what is understood by the term: mathematics. The theory has been daring enough to propose, literally for the first time in the entire history of mankind, a well-refined qualitative approach to an infinity of quantitative processes taken as a group.

The distinction between the qualitative and the quantitative had kept philosophers (and laymen) pre-occupied for millenia. But the nonlinear theory has been the first theoretical approach that tells you how to spot and isolate the objective bases for distinguishing what we consider as the qualitative changes.

Remove the understanding given by the nonlinear theory—by the catastrophe-theoretical approach—and, once in the domain of the linear theory, the differences in kind immediately begin to appear as more or less completely arbitrary. There is no place in theory for them—the qualitative distinctions are external to the theory because a linear system always behaves exactly the same with any quantitative changes made, at any scale, to any of the controlling parameters. Since in the linear theory the qualitative changes are not produced from within the theory itself, such distinctions must be imported into it out of some considerations that are in principle external to the theory.

People often confuse such imports with “applications.” No, when it comes to the linear theory, it’s not the considerations of applications which can be said to be driving any divisions of qualitative changes. The qualitative distinctions are basically arbitrary in a linear theory. It is important to realize that that usual question: “Now where do we draw the line?” is basically absolutely superfluous once you are within the domain of the linear systems. There are no objective grounds on the basis of which such distinctions can be made.

Studies of the nonlinear phenomena sure do precede the catastrophe and the chaos theories. Even in the times before these two theories came on the scene, applied physicists would think of certain ideas such as differences of regimes, esp. in the areas like fluid dynamics.

But to understand the illuminating power of the nonlinear theory, just catch hold of an industrial CFD guy (or a good professor of fluid dynamics from a good university [not, you know, from SPPU or similar universities]), and ask him whether there can be any deeper theoretical significance to the procedure of the Buckingham Pi Theorem, to the necessity, in his art (or science) of having to use so many dimensionless numbers. (Every mechanical/allied engineering undergraduate has at least once in life cursed the sheer number of them.) The competent CFD guy (or the good professor) would easily be at a loss. Then, toss a good book on the Catastrophe Theory to him, leave him alone for a couple of weeks or may be a month, return, and raise the same question again. He now may or may not have a very good, “flowy” sort of a verbal answer ready for you. But one look at his face would tell you that it has now begun to reflect a qualitatively different depth of physical understanding even as he tries to tackle that question in his own way. That difference arises only because of the Catastrophe Theory.

As to the Chaos Theory (and I club the fractal theory right in it), more number of people are likely to know about it, and so, I don’t have to wax a lot (whether eloquently or incompetently). But let me tell you one thing.

Feigenbaum’s discovery of the universal constant remains, to my mind, one of the most ingenious advancements in the entire history of physics, even of science. Especially, given the experimental equipment with which he made that discovery—a handheld HP Calculator (not a computer) in the seventies (or may be in the sixties)! … And yes, getting to that universal constant was, if you ask me, an act of discovery, and not of invention. (Invention was very intimately involved in the process; but the overall act and the end-product was one of discovery.)

So, here is a wish that these fundamental studies of the nonlinear systems get their due—the recognition they so well deserve—in the form of a Physics Nobel.

…And, as always, the sooner the better!

Wish # 2:

The second wish I want to put up here is this: I wish there was some commercial/applied artist, well-conversant with the “art” of supplying illustrations for a physics book, who also was available for a long-term project I have in mind.

To share a bit: Years ago (actually, almost two decades ago, in 1998 to be precise), I had made a suggestion that novels by Ayn Rand be put in the form of comics. As far as I was concerned, the idea was novel (i.e. new). I didn’t know at that time that a comics-book version of The Fountainhead had already been conceived of by none other than Ayn Rand herself, and it, in fact, had also been executed. In short, there was a comics-book version of The Fountainhead. … These days, I gather, they are doing something similar for Atlas Shrugged.

If you think about it, my idea was not at all a leap of imagination. Newspapers (even those in India) have been carrying comic strips for decades (right since before my own childhood), and Amar Chitrakatha was coming of age just when I was. (It was founded in 1967 by Mr. Pai.)

Similarly, conceiving of a comics-like book for physics is not at all a very creative act of imagination. In fact, it is not even original. Everyone knows those books by that Japanese linguistics group, the books on topics like the Fourier theory.

So, no claim of originality here.

It’s just that for my new theory of QM, I find that the format of a comics-book would be most suitable. (And what the hell if physicists don’t take me seriously because I put it in this form first. Who cares what they think anyway!)

Indeed, I would even like to write/produce some comics books on maths topics, too. Topics like grads, divs, curls, tensors, etc., eventually. … Guess I will save that part for keeping me preoccupied during my retirement. BTW, my retirement is not all that far away; it’s going to be here pretty soon, right within just five years from now. (Do one thing: Check out what I was writing, say in 2012 on this blog.)

But the one thing I would like write/produce right in the more immediate future is: the comics book on QM, putting forth my new approach.

So, in the closing, here is a request. If you know some artist (or an engineer/physicist with fairly good sketching/computer-drawing skills), and has time at hand, and has the capacity to stay put in a sizeable project, and won’t ask money for it (a fair share in the royalty is a given—provided we manage to find a publisher first, that is), then please do bring this post to his notice.

A Song I Like:

And, finally, here is the Marathi song I had promised you the last time round. It’s a fusion of what to my mind is one of the best tunes Shrinivas Khale ever produced, and the best justice to the words and the tunes by the singer. Imagine any one else in her place, and you will immediately come to know what I mean. … Pushpa Pagdhare easily takes this song to the levels of the very best by the best, including Lata Mangeshkar. [Oh yes, BTW, congrats are due to the selection committe of this year’s Lata Mangeshkar award, for selecting Pushpa Pagdhare.]

(Marathi) “yeuni swapnaat maajhyaa…”
Singer: Pushpa Pagdhare
Music: Shrinivas Khale
Lyrics: Devakinandan Saraswat

[PS: Note: I am going to come back and add an update once this year’s Physics Nobel is announced. At that time (or tonight) I will also try to streamline this post.

Then, I will be gone off the blogging for yet another couple of weeks or so—unless it’s a small little “kutty” post of the “Blog-Filler” kind or two.]

# Shaken, because of a stir

We have demonstrably been shaken here on earth, because of a stir in the cosmos.

The measured peak strain was $10^{-21}$ [^].

For comparison: In our college lab, we typically measure strains of magnitude like $10^{-3}$ or at the most $10^{-4}$. (Google search on “yield strain of mild steel” does not throw up any directly relevant page, but it does tell you that the yield strength of mild steel is 450 MPa, and all mechanical (civil/metallurgical/aero/etc.) engineers know that Young’s modulus for mild steel is 210 GPa. … You get the idea. …)

Einstein got it wrong twice, but at least eventually, he did correct himself.

But other physicists (and popular science writers, and blog-writers), even after getting a full century to think over the issue, still continue to commit blunders. They continue using terms like “distortions of spacetime.” As if, space and time themselves repeatedly “bent” (or, to use a euphemism, got “distorted”) together, to convey the force through “vacuum.”

It’s not a waving of the “spacetime” through a vaccum, stupid! It’s just the splashing of the aether!!

The Indian credit is, at the most, 1.3%.

If it could be taken as 3.7%, then the number of India’s science Nobels would also have to increase dramatically. Har Gobind Singh Khorana, for instance, would have to be included. The IAS-/MPSC-/scientist-bureaucrats “serving” during my childhood-days had made sure to include Khorana’s name in our school-time science text-books, even though Khorana had been born only in (the latter-day) Pakistan, and even if he himself had publicly given up on both Pakistan and India—which, even as children, we knew! Further, from whatever I recall of me and all my classmates (from two different schools), we the (then) children (and, later, teen-agers) were neither inspired nor discouraged even just a tiny bit by either Khorana’s mention or his only too willing renunciation of the Indian citizenship. The whole thing seemed too remote to us. …

Overall, Khorana’s back-ground would be a matter of pride etc. only to those bureaucrats and possibly Delhi intellectuals (and also to politicians, of course, but to a far lesser extent than is routinely supposed). Not to others.

Something similar seems to be happening now. (Something very similar did happen with the moon orbiter; check out the page 1 headlines in the government gazettes like Times of India and Indian Express.)

Conclusion: Some nut-heads continue to run the show from Delhi even today—even under the BJP.

Anyway, the reason I said “at most” 1.3 % is because, even though I lack a knowledge of the field, I do know that there’s a difference between 1976, and, say, 1987. This fact by itself sets a natural upper bound on the strength of the Indian contribution.

BTW, I don’t want to take anything away from Prof. Dhurandhar (and from what I have informally gathered here in Pune, he is a respectable professor doing some good work), but reading through the media reports (about how he was discouraged 30 years ago, and how he has now been vindicated today etc.) made me wonder: Did Dhurandhar go without a job for years because of his intellectual convictions—the way I have been made to go, before, during and after my PhD?

As far as I am concerned, the matter ends there.

At least it should—I mean, this post should end right here. But, OK, let me make an exception, and note a bit about one more point.

The experimental result has thrown the Nobel bookies out of business for this year—at least to a great part.

It is certain that Kip Thorne will get the 2016 Physics Nobel. There is no uncertainty on that count.

It is also nearly as certain that he will only co-win the prize—there will be others to share the credit (and obviously deservingly so). The only question remaining is, will it be just one more person or will it be two more (Nobel rules allow only max 3, I suppose), what will be their prize proportions, and who those other person(s) will be (apart from Thorne). So, as far as the bettors and the bookies are concerned, they are not entirely out of the pleasure and the business, yet.

Anyway, my point here was twofold: (i) The 2016 Physics Nobel will not be given for any other discovery, and (ii) Kip Thorne will be one of the (richly deserving) recipients.

[E&OE]

# From the horses’ mouths

My first choice for the title was: “From the Nobel Laureate’s Mouth”; I had spotted only the opinion piece by Professor David Gross in yesterday’s Indian Express [^]. Doing the ‘net search today for the URI link to provide here, I found that there also were three other Nobel laureates, also joined by one Fields Medalists. And they all were saying more or less the same thing [^].

… That way, coming from a Marathi-medium schooling background, I had always had a bit of suspicion for the phrase “from the horse’s mouth.” It seemed OK to use in the news reports when, say, a wrong-doer admits his wrong. But purely going by the usage, I could see that the phrase would also be used in the sense: “from the top-gun himself,” or “from the otherwise silent doer himself.” This guess turns out to be right [^]. Further, since there were as many as five “horses” here, the word to be used would have to be in the plural, and if you say it aloud: “From the horses’ mouths” [go ahead, say it aloud, sort of like:“horseses” mouth) it really sounds perfect (for something to be posted on the ‘net).

So, that’s how comes the title.

As to the horses’ thoughts… Ummm…

[But please, please, give me just a moment to get back to the title again, and congratulate me for not having chosen a title like: “From Dave Himself.” You see, Professor David Gross had visited COEP in 2013, and I might have been, you know, within 50 meters of where he was sitting. I mean, of all places, in the COEP campus! Right in the COEP campus!! [^]. Obviously, you must compliment me for my sense of restraint, of making understatements.]

OK. As to their thoughts… Umm….

I think these guys are being way too optimistic. Also naive.

Without substantial economic reforms, I see no possibility of the Indian Science in general undergoing any significant transformation yet again. And substantial economic reforms aren’t happening here any more. In fact, no one is even talking about it, any more. [Check out Arnab’s hours, or Sardesai’s, or Dutt’s, if you want to find out what they are talking about. [I don’t, because I know.]]

It was the 1991 that could propel, say a Mashelkar into prominence several years later, and help transform the 70+ CSIR labs from something like less than 100 patents a year, to thousands of them per year—all within a matter of a few years [less than a decade, to be sure]. If the same momentum were to be kept, the figure should have gone up to at least tens of thousands of patents by the CSIR labs alone—and with a substantial increase in the share of the international patents among them. Ditto, for the high-quality international journal papers.

Why didn’t any of it happen? Plain and clear. The momentum created by the economic liberalization of the early 1990s has been all but lost. Come on, face it, 1991 was twenty-five years ago.

To an anthropologist, 25 years is like an entire generation! More than enough of a time to lose any half-hearted momentum (which, despite the hysterical Indian press, the liberalization in the early 1990s was).

It’s been years that we entered the staleness 2.0 of the mixed economy 1.0. Even today, the situation continues “as is,” despite a change of regime in New Delhi. Yes, even under “Modiji.” [I am quoting Professor Gross—I mean the word.]

But, yes, the five gentlemen were also being realistic: Each one of them emphasized decades.

Decades of sustained efforts would have to go in, before the fruits could begin to be had. [But you know that decades isn’t a very long period—just recall what was happening to India’s economy some two decades ago—in the mid ’90s.]

Talking of how realistic they actually were being, Haroche even pointed out the lack of freedom in China [obvious to any one outside of California], and its presence in Europe [I don’t know about that] and in India [yeah, right!].

But anyway, it’s nice to hear something like this being highlighted after an Indian Science Congress, rather than, say, “vimaanshaastra.”

Both happened during “Modiji”’s tenure. So what is it that really accounts for the difference? I have no idea. (It can’t be a “pravaasi” whatever, to be sure; they would be too busy booking the next Olympics-size stadium.)

Whoever within the organizers of the Congress was responsible for the difference, compliments are due to him. (Hindi) “der se kiyaa lekin kuchh achhaa hi to kiyaa.”

In the meanwhile, bring out your non-programmable desk calculators and do some exercises: $0.8 \times \dots$, $2.7 \times \dots$, $4.4 \times \dots$ and $2.1 \times \dots$. Oh well, you will have to refer to the ‘net.

OK then. Find out also the R&D spending by, say, (i) Baba Ramdev’s pharmaceutical industries, (ii) the top or most well-established five industrial groups in India (Reliance, Tatas, Mittals, whoever…), and (iii) the top three (or five) Indian IT firms. Compare them to those in the advanced countries. Let your comparisons be comparable: pharma to pharma; oil, steel and engineering (and salt!) to oil, steel and engineering (and salt!); IT to IT [engineering IT to engineering IT]; overall (GDP) to overall (GDP).

And, never forget that bit about freedom. Don’t just count the beans “spent” on research. Think also about whether it is the government spending or the private spending, and where the expenditure occurs (in private universities, private labs, independently run government labs, public universities in a country with a past of a private control, etc., or in the in-service-pensioner’s-paradises with something like “laboratory” in their titles).

But why didn’t the “horses” cite any specific statistics about how many Indian students go abroad for their graduate studies, and choose to permanently settle there—their trends?

Obvious: Nobel and Fields laureates (and in fact any visiting dignitaries to any country (and in fact any visitors to a foreign country)) generally tend to be more polite, and so tend to make understatements when it comes to criticism (of that host country). That’s why.

A Song I Like:

(Hindi) “kahin naa jaa…”
Music: R. D. Burman
Lyrics: Majrooh Sultanpuri
Singers: Kishore Kumar, Lata Mangeshkar

[E&OE]