June 5 was World Environment Day, which is presumably why an article entitled ‘Hindu roots of modern ‘ecology” was doing the rounds on Twitter, despite having been published in 2016. In the article, its author Viva Kermani writes,
Centuries before the appearance of the likes of Greenpeace, World Environment Day, and what is known as the environmental movement, the shruti (Vedas, Upanishads) and smruti (Ramayana, Mahabharata, Puranas, other scriptures) instructed us that the animals and plants found in the land of Bharatavarsha are sacred; that like humans, our fellow creatures, including plants have consciousness; and therefore all aspects of nature are to be revered. This understanding, care and reverence towards the environment is common to all Indic religious and spiritual systems: Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism. Thus, there is ample evidence to show that the earliest messages of the importance of the environment and the need for ecological balance and harmony can be found in ancient Indic texts.
Overall, Kermani argues that Hindus are essentially all environmentalists and that many species of plants and animals thrive in India Bharat because of Hindus’ reverential attitude towards them. The second argument is easier to swat away, especially when it shows itself as the following contention from the same article:
That India today is home to 70% of the world’s tigers – our country has some 2,500 tigers in the wild – is because the tiger is considered divine, a vahana of the Durga and present in any form of Durga iconography. Tigers have been wiped out in Java and Sumatra, the great islands of Indonesia across which, the majestic big cat once roamed freely, for Indonesia was once Hindu.
Kermani has clearly mixed up cause and effect here. Tigers don’t survive because they’re represented in Hindu iconography; they’re represented in our iconography because they were already here before the Hindus got here. More importantly, tiger populations in India are increasingly threatened by linear projects, mining activities, dams and river-interlinks. If the tiger was so important, shouldn’t the streets of Puri and Varanasi be swimming in Hindu protestors right now?
The reason Greenpeace and World Environment Day showed up was because religious importance alone is useless. It’s fine to claim primacy but to claim such primacy is also relevant is the problem. It’s not. What’s the point of repeatedly saying you invented something when clearly the invention doesn’t even work anymore? It’s hard to believe, as a result, that exercises of this nature are anything more than a form of intellectual indulgence. With some editing, they might be better served as messages of hope, inviting Hindus to look beyond the red herrings of Islamophobia and nationalism and towards sustainable living practices.
However, my issue with Kermani’s argument is deeper. While she makes a case for why Hinduism was also a very early first manifestation of environmentalism (albeit by placing the blame for our general ignorance of this factoid at the feet of Christianity), it’s not a useful environmentalism – nor is that of Greenpeace or, for that matter, the likes of PETA, etc.
Hinduism’s authority is scriptural; modern environmentalism’s authority is scientific, at least it should be. We shouldn’t have to pay attention to the needs of the non-human occupants of this world because a higher authority thinks so but because we know why it is important to do so. The centroid of our ecological morals should be located, at least in part, within humanist, social, naturalist and empirical frameworks, instead of taking sole recourse through divine proclamations that we’re not allowed to challenge, let alone overthrow.
Scriptural authority doesn’t allow our responsibilities as the alpha species on Earth to evolve with what we know. For example, it makes sense to destroy some members of an invasive species that have colonised foreign ecosystems (aided, often inadvertently, by human activities) before they displace and endanger their native counterparts. For another, it’s perfectly reasonable for forest-dwellers to cut trees down for firewood and other resources. However, Hinduism would condemn the man who does either of these things, at least according to Kermani.
She continues:
Even today, Bharat is blessed with a rich biodiversity, because of the spiritual connectedness that Hindus have with nature. That there exists sthala vriksham shows that trees were intimately associated with spiritual tradition (In Sanskrit, sthala is a place, especially a sacred place, and vriksh is tree). Every temple is associated with a tree and every tree is associated with a deity and a story. The more well-known examples of sthala vriksham include the Kadamba at the Meenakshi Sundareswarar Temple in Madurai and the vanni tree (khejri in Hindi) at the Magudeshwara Temple at Kodumudi. The famous mango tree at the Ekambereshwara Temple at Kancheepuram is believed to be more than 3,000 years old!
These are as much places of worship as they are lightning rods for discriminating against the lower castes. Non-Brahmins are proscribed from reading the Indic texts that Kermani is so fond of quoting; during most of its existence, especially in the post-Vedic period, the tenets of Hinduism rendered the members of such castes to be socially dead and unfit to use Sanskrit (apart from perpetrating various other brutalities). Hinduism is not an inherently ecological religion; it is inherently discriminatory, and an environmentalism feeding and drawing from its practices will only exhibit the same afflictions.
But even if Hinduism had been a wholly inclusive religion, our sense of why it’s important to save our trees shouldn’t come from there. The practice of environmentalism has many stakeholders and they contest its purpose along different trajectories, according to different needs, their geographical locations, their cultural values, etc. In this muddle, which is necessary by design, it’s important that we are more adaptable than we are prescient, more equitable than munificent, and more progressive than prescriptive. These guidelines are as such antithetical to religion by definition.
Of course, this doesn’t mean one must reject all the environmental aspects of Hinduism, or any other religion for that matter; instead, Hindus’ views on what it means to be environmentalist mustn’t be limited by what Hinduism considers appropriate, although this isn’t likely to be the case.
If you’re wondering why I chose to write about an article that appeared on a website peddling the typical far-right pro-Hindutva viewpoint, it’s that this endorsement of Hinduism as an environment-friendly entity stems as much from among conservatives as liberals, and that as much as either group would like to assert Hinduism’s credentials in this regard, such ‘spiritual environmentalism’ is, at least in part, an oxymoron.
(One last point, on a different note: Kermani writes towards the end,
Today, under the principles of the Chaos Theory, the commonly known as the Butterfly Effect – where a creature as delicate as the butterfly, by flapping its wings, sets up a series of reactions, by first causing some changes in the atmosphere, can end up causing a storm. This is nothing, but the Hindu understanding of karma, that all actions are connected and are part of the universe and that our actions affect not just other humans, but also nature, of which we are a part.
As it happens, chaos theory is not just the butterfly effect, and the butterfly effect is not concerned with the interconnectedness of all things. Instead, it is a metaphorical example of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to their initial conditions. For example, the trajectory of a pendulum changes drastically over time even if its starting position is moved only slightly. In the same way, the tornado in the metaphor could have been precipitated by a distant butterfly flapping its wings as much as, say, an eagle high up in the sky.)
Johanna Miller writes in Physics Today about how she was able to enjoy learning organic chemistry in her senior year of undergraduate study: by understanding that science is a collection of concepts, not a collection of facts. She also argues that this is in fact the key to enjoying organic chemistry, which can otherwise get quickly tedious, and that many students don’t because their teachers fail to help them towards this conclusion.
She could be true – far be it from me to dispute the opinions of a scientist-communicator – but it is proving very hard for me to believe it because my own organic chemistry experience was incredibly bad. Unlike Miller, I was first exposed to the subject in high school, in a classroom of 40 students packed inside a room with two fans, in the sweltering afternoon heat of pre-summer Chennai. All I wanted was to go home.
Then, it was impossible to understand why all those reactions were important – but we had no time to discuss that. The board exams were almost upon us, as was this or that quiz at the IIT JEE coaching class. My chemistry teacher, a small lady with a tiny voice but an imposing demeanour, seemed uninterested in justifying why it was crucial for us to know about the Hell-Volhard-Zelinsky reaction. She moved through the syllabus at the rate of five or six reactions per lecture. Even her counterpart at the coaching class had a reputation of being an excellent teacher only because he supplied handy mnemonics to memorise the arrangement of single and double bonds.
The thing is, organic chemistry feels difficult even after acknowledging that it is a collection of more elegant concepts like quantum mechanics, group theory and electromagnetism – as Miller writes – because understanding ‘science is a collection of concepts’ is not the only problem. Students are not expected to learn the principles of organic chemistry. Instead, they are subjected to a collection of multiple reactions to manipulate a variety of substances without any discernible logic as to their selection. The principles of organic chemistry, on the other hand, could have been far more enjoyable because then the students’ grade would be reaction-agnostic.
Right now, that is not the case, at least in India. And it is the only reason I remember the Hell-Volhard-Zelinsky reaction (principally because I remember wondering, in 2005, why anyone would name their child “Hell”).
In 2018, scientists from IISc announced they’d found a room-temperature superconductor, an exotic material that has zero resistance to electric current in ambient conditions – considered the holy grail of materials science. But in the little data the authors were willing to share with the world, something seemed off.
Within a few days, other scientists in India and around the world began to spot anomalous data points in the preprint paper. If the paper wasn’t already vague, it was now also very suspicious. And it was still hard to tell what was going on: the scientists weren’t speaking to the press, IISc kept mum and the narrative was starting to turn smelly.
The duo clearly had to walk a fine line if they wanted their claim, and themselves, to retain legitimacy. They were refusing to talk to the press until their paper had been peer-reviewed, they said. However, others said this was a weak excuse and it was easy to see why: the best way to clear up confusion is to open up, not clam up. But they refused to, as much as they refused to provide any more information about their experiment or to allow academics around India to join in. And the narrative itself had by then become noticeably befouled by suspicion that there was foul play 😱.
In a new effort to beat these dark clouds back, the duo updated their preprint paper on May 22 with a lot more data, apart from tacking on eight more collaborators to their team. (One of them was Arindam Ghosh, a particularly accomplished physicist at IISc.) This was heartening to find out, esp. that they’re receptive to feedback. In fact, they’d also made note of that anomalous data pattern (although they still aren’t able to explain how it got there).
Making the GIANT ASSUMPTION that their claim is eventually confirmed and we have a room-temperature superconductor in our midst, a lot of things about many technologies will change drastically. Theorists will also have a new line of enquiry – though some already do – to find out which materials can be superconductors under what conditions. If we figure this question out, discovering new superconducting materials will become that much easier.
IFF the claim ends up being confirmed, many people will also likely have many different takeaways from what will become encoded as an extended historical moment, the prelude to a major discovery (or invention?). At that time, I think it will be interesting to look back and consider how different scientists respond to something very new in their midst.
To adopt Thomas Kuhn’s philosophy of scientific progress, it will be interesting to examine individual attitudes to paradigm-shifts, and the different extents to which skepticism and cynicism dominate the story when the doctrine of incommensurability is in play. After all, a scientific result that has researchers scrambling for an explanation can evoke two kinds of responses, excitement or distrust, and it would be useful to find out if they’re context-specific in a contemporary, Indian setting.
In fact, the addition of Arindam Ghosh to the IISc research team reminds me of a specific incident from the not-so-distant past (and I do NOT suggest Ghosh was included only for scholastic heft). In 1982, Dan Shechtman discovered quasicrystals, whose internal crystal arrangement defied the prevailing wisdom of the time. So Shechtman was ridiculed as a “quasi-scientist” by a person no less in stature than Linus Carl Pauling, the father of molecular biology.
But Shechtman was sure of what he had seen under the microscope, so he attempted a third time to have his claim published by a journal. This time, he improved the manuscript’s presentation, and invited Ilan Blech, John Cahn and Denis Gratias to join his team. The last two lent much weight to an application that the casual historian of science frequently considers to be an objective and emotionless enterprise! Their paper was finally accepted by Physical Review Letters in November 1984.
Also in the early 1980s, Dov Levine in the US had discovered quasicrystals but without knowing that Shechtman had done the same thing, and Levine was eager to publish his paper. But Paul Steinhardt, his PhD advisor, advised caution because he didn’t want Levine to be proven wrong and his career damaged for it. Wise words – but also interesting words that show science is nothing without the people that practice it, that there’s a lot to it beyond the stony face of immutable facts, etc.
This is something many people tend to forget in favour of uttering pithy statements like “science is objective”, “science is self-correcting”, etc. Scientism frequently goes overboard in a bad way, and the arc of scientific justice doesn’t bend naturally towards truths. It has to be pulled down by the people who practice it. Science is MESSY – like pretty much everything else.
The same applies in the IISc superconductivity claim case as well. Nobody can respond perfectly in the face of great uncertainty; we can all just hope to do our best. Some ways for non-experts to navigate this would be to a) talk to scientists; I know some who’d surprise you with their willingness to sit down and explain; b) pick out publications you trust and read them (that’s The Wire Science 😄 and The Hindu Science in this specific case) as well as try to discover others; and c) be nice and don’t jump to conclusions, esp. within a wider social frame in which self-victimisation and entitlement has often come too easily.
Faith in S&T has done wonders for our society. CSIR has played a crucial role in this, thanks to the 1.3 billion fellow citizens to have faith in our fraternity. @PMOIndia@kvijayraghavan@CSIR_IND@csir_serc Science as saviour – The New Indian Express https://t.co/REhHJgMNG1
(Setting aside the use of the word ‘faith’) The work that some parts of CSIR has done and is doing is indeed very good. However, I feel we are not all properly attuned to the difference between the words “science” and “technology”. I don’t accuse Mande of ignorance but possibly the New Indian Express, the publisher. In a writer-publisher relationship, the latter usually determines the headlines.
Being more aware of what the words mean is important for us as mediapersons to use them in the right context, and this in turn is consequential because the improper overuse of one term can mask deficiencies in its actual implementation. For example, I would rather have used ‘Technology as saviour’ as the headline for Mande’s piece, and for various pieces in the Indian mainstream news space. But by using science, I fear these publications are giving the impression that Indian science is currently very healthy, effective and true to its potential for improving the human condition.
Quite to the contrary, funding for fundamental research has been dropping in India; translational support is limited to areas of study that can “save lives” and are in line with political goals; and the political perception of science is horribly skewed towards pseudoscience.
Before that one commentator jumps in to say things aren’t all that bad: I agree. There are some pockets of good work. I am personally excited about Indian researchers’ contributions to materials science, solid-state and condensed-matter physics, biochemistry, and experimental astronomy.
However, the fact remains that we are very far from things being as they should be, and not as political expediency needs them to be. And repeatedly using “science” when in fact we really mean “technology” could keep us form noticing that. That is, if we were mindful of the difference and used the words appropriately, I bet the word “science” would only occasionally appear on our timelines and news feeds.
By themselves, some of the aromatic molecules in dark chocolate smell like rancid sweat, cabbage and vinegar. They come together in your nose to smell wonderful. https://t.co/08ReNszhnp
Information like this always reminds me of one fact that awakened me to the behind-the-scenes role that the natural universe plays in our cultural lives. The organic compounds called indole and skatole are what give human poop its unique and uniquely disgusting smell – an odour that our brains have evolved to be repelled by so that humans, by whatever accident of fate, don’t consume the damned thing.
However, indole and skatole are also what make jasmine flowers smell so wonderful. This happens because the two compounds are present in higher concentrations in faecal matter and in lower concentrations in jasmine. This is essentially Lovecraftian horror at its best: like in the tale of Arthur Jermyn and his family, our horrors are not horrific inasmuch as they inhabit us. They don’t harm or pollute us in any sense. It is the interpretation of that information, after realising it, that can be so utterly devastating.
It is a story of the familiar becoming unfamiliar, triggering a sense of our biological identity having deluded our cultural one. In the case of Arthur Jermyn, the man sets himself on fire after realising that one of his paternal ancestors mated with a great ape. In the case of indole and skatole, many are likely to be thrown off their affinity for jasmine flowers. But I prefer thinking about it backwards: I like jasmine all the more for what it is because it redeems the two compounds, freeing them from the poopiness for which only evolution is to blame, not themselves.
Aside 1: I wouldn’t be able to do the same thing with an Arthur-Jermyn-like discovery, however: it is vastly more innate and visceral, and as inescapable for it.
In the same vein, the caste system (the Hindu version of which I am most familiar with) taints its followers with pseudoscience simply because it supersedes the biochemical composition of faecal matter with the inexplicable, immoral and dehumanising pall of untouchability. A person can be a great particle physicist, for example, but the moment he believes there is an untouchable caste whose members are deigned to clean drains, he also disbelieves the cleansing and deodourising potential of antibiotic solutions and chemical disinfectants. He, in effect, has elevated poop into a socio-cultural kryptonite up from the mass of organic compounds that it actually is, and becomes both a scientist and a pseudoscientist at once. There are many such people in India, and they demonstrate what they believe science to be: a separate entity isolated from the rest of society.
To a chemist nothing on earth is unclean. A writer must be as objective as a chemist, he must lay aside his personal subjective standpoint and must understand that muck heaps play a very respectable part in a landscape, and that the evil passions are as inherent in life as the good ones.
This must not be construed as an attempt to trivialise the importance of culture, however, as the backward-case of jasmine should demonstrate. It is simply an example to illustrate the weird and fascinating fact that while scientific knowledge that underlies a human phenomenon can inhabit a continuum of possibilities – such as the increasing or decreasing concentrations of indole and skatole – it is entirely possible for the overlying cultural substrate to undergo more drastic, and analog, transformations – such as from desirable to detestable.
Don’t read beyond this point if you’re yet to watch Love, Death & Robots.
Episode 7 of the Netflix series Love, Death & Robots – entitled ‘Beyond the Aquila Rift’ – captures this transformation very well, albeit in a very material way. When a waylaid spacefarer wakes up after many months in a repair station lightyears away from his original destination, he begins to suspect that something about his ‘reality’ is amiss. He realises that he is in a simulation being fed to his brain by a superior entity and demands that he be allowed to see what his actual surroundings look like.
He suddenly wakes up in a dilapidated place covered entirely in webbing, with no apparent signs of life nearby. Then, the alien presence that was maintaining him in suspended animation shows itself thus:
Source: NetflixSource: Netflix
The episode’s directors (Léon Bérelle, Dominique Boidin, Rémi Kozyra and Maxime Luère) and animators (Unit Image) did very well to depict this transformation in this way. The transition from lady to alien is scarred on my neural circuits, and if I look at it backwards, it only becomes more terrifying, as if it seems to ask: Will glimpses of the familiar suffice anymore?
My piece on May 12 calling out Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s baffling conviction in his knowledgeability about surveillance radar systems and atmospheric attenuation has prompted some criticism as to its scientific accuracy. Apart from the compulsively defensive bhakts, some scientists also wrote to me saying that Modi was technically in the right to have claimed clouds and rain could have worked in the Indian Air Force’s (IAF’s) favour on the day of the Balakot airstrikes in February.
Much of this criticism hinged on the premise that military radar-surveillance systems operated on the X band (approx. 7-11 GHz), popular during World War II. However, many – if not most – of the surveillance units that the Defence R&D Organisation has built for the IAF operate over the L and S bands (1-2 GHz and 2-5 GHz, resp.). Consider the following official descriptions of four of them:
Central Acquisition Radar – “a ground based mechanically scanning S-band pulse Doppler radar for air space surveillance to detect and track air targets with reliability, even under hostile EW operational environment for the Indian Air Force.”
Tactical Control Radar – “a Tatra VVL mounted, mobile stand-alone medium range, all weather 3D surveillance radar for detection and identification of aerial targets. Pertinent data can be collected … 20 km away from the radar. The radar operates in S-band and [can track] airborne targets up to 90 km for fighter aircrafts and 65 km for UAVs, subject to radar horizon. The antenna is mechanically rotated in azimuth to provide 360º and 50º elevation coverage upto 10 km height.”
BHARANI – “L-band 2D radar [is] a light weight, battery powered and compact sensor which provides 2D surveillance solution to alert Army Air Defence Weapon Systems mainly in mountainous terrain against hostile aerial targets like UAVs, RPVs, helicopters and fixed wing aircraft flying at low and medium altitudes.”
ASLESHA – “a multifaceted ground based S-band 3D low level lightweight surveillance radar for deployment in diverse terrains like plains, deserts, mountain tops and high altitude regions. Aslesha detects and tracks heterogeneous air targets, including helicopters, fighters and UAVs at low and medium altitudes.”
According to a USAF paper published in 1975, the amount of signal attenuation through clouds is exponentially higher at higher frequencies. According to the log-log plot (below) presented in the paper, it is nonexistent to minimal in the L band and is at best 0.1 dB/km for S band radiation passing through dense clouds. The X band that spans 7-11 GHz is susceptible to greater attenuation, up to nearly 10x when passing through dense clouds.
However, rainfall attenuates S band radiation more than cloud-cover does. According to the same paper, radio waves with frequencies in the range 3-5 GHz are attenuated by up to 5-70-times as much as L band radiation when the rainfall rate is between 50 mm/hr and 150 mm/hr, resp. (apparently possible between December and March over Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province).
Does this mean Modi was partly right? No, for the following reasons, which should clarify that the point of my piece was also different: The way Modi phrased his comment suggested his opinion came from a place of relative ignorance. The fact that the BJP Twitter handle tweeted and then deleted it shows they had no idea what they were talking about. So to claim Modi could have been right is disingenuous when he himself attributed it to “raw wisdom”, and made no effort to be clear or coherent despite the fact that he was on national television talking about national defence.
Instead, I believe he was simply fortunate that his comment in this case was sufficiently vague to allow him to be right. And given his utterances in the last five years, I have no reason to believe he was in the know; if he was, that is not what he would have said. Finally, it was also silly to suggest the IAF hadn’t already thought about sources of attenuation. It is the foundation of this conviction that I felt compelled to criticise, for reasons I discussed in my piece:
It has become clear that education has little to do with spewing pseudoscience … and a lot to do with brooking challenge and dissent. If the patriarch of a middle-class household is going to claim that the cosmic arrangement of a few stars thousands of light-years away is why he was fired that day, the absence of a counter-voice is only going to legitimise his spurious beliefs. And when Prime Minister Modi is this man, and it would seem he is, the simple dissemination of facts is not going to cure our society of this problem.
I am not a person jo saare vigyan ko jaanta ho – lekin maine kaha itne cloud hain, baarish ho rahi hai ki ek benefit hain ki hum radar se bach sakte hain.
I am not a person who knows knows all of science, but I said that there is so much cloud cover and rain, which could be advantageous in escaping from radar.
(Hat-tip to my colleague Devirupa M.).
Here is what he might as well have said:
“I am not a person who knows everything about science, but I am going to keep talking because I am pretty sure what I am going to say next is going to make sense. This is because I am not a person who knows everything about science but who believes he knows something, and that that something is likely to be true simply by virtue of the fact that I – I – know it.”
“I am going to claim to know something even as I am going to claim the humility for having acknowledged that I do not claim to know everything. This is not entirely straightforward because said humility will subtly but surely attest to my knowledgeability. Should I have claimed to have known everything, on the other hand, the implied hubris would have coloured the perception of my knowledge. Id est, I do not know everything but I know something, and that something is likely to be true because I do not know everything. How? Humility. And I rock.”
“I said that clouds and rain could help shield radar with such conviction as to be able to claim – publicly, no less – with no evident self-doubt that I said so. Indeed, this is because no one else in the room guffawed in response to my suggestion as much as I had been emboldened to suggest it because no one else in the room is likely to have thought it up.”
“I have said ‘all of science’ because I recognise it as a body of knowledge fenced-off from non-specialists by its specialised language, by its practitioners, their beliefs and social attitudes, and by the not-easily-accessible institutions in which scientific knowledge is acquired and organised. I will not attempt to scale these walls because they are inherently unscalable but I will assume – by some convolution of inductive reasoning – that I can leap over them.”
“Hear ye, as I broadcast my belief, as well as ‘science’ is difficult to know and that I – the supreme leader – have conquered some of it, that ‘science’ is a complex maze with tall walls, where knowledge from one side cannot percolate through the barriers into the other. What is on one side must remain there; if they didn’t, and if knowing something about one thing allowed one to know something about another, then would it not have seemed ridiculous for me to announce that I claim to know how radar works when it would have promptly suggested that I know not two whits about how electromagnetic radiation and water vapour interact, that – oh! – I believe rainbows are unicorn farts, that a prism represents mystical alien technology, that cellphone signals are broadcast by satellites screaming messages towards the ground, and that we spend billions of dollars on developing reconnaissance technology that couldn’t do what amateur radio operators did in the 1920s.”
Science writer Graham Farmelo interviewed Edward Witten, the mathematical physicist extraordinaire, in the summer of 2018. The full interview is available to listen here (27 minutes) and, thanks to Sabine Hossenfelder, to read here. I simply wanted to remark on one very small portion of it, where Farmelo says of Witten:
Apparently he showed up at Princeton University wanting to do a PhD in theoretical physics and they wisely took him on after he made short work of some preliminary exams. Boy did he learn quickly. One of the instructors tasked with teaching him in the lab told me that within three weeks Witten’s questions on the experiments went from basic to brilliant to Nobel level. As a postdoc at Harvard, Witten became acquainted with several of the theorist pioneers of this model including Steven Weinberg, Shelly Glashow, Howard Georgi, and Sydney Coleman, who helped interest the young Witten in the mathematics of these new theories.
“Basic to brilliant to Nobel level” struck me as a curious way to frame increasing complexity. The Nobel Prizes have indeed awarded work characterised by a certain kind of cleverness and informed creativity, but I don’t believe that has ever been a guiding principle. Instead, the prizes recognise inventions, discoveries and ideas that have contributed to the material and/or intellectual development of humankind.
However, Witten’s instructor is also right, at least in the context of physics, where “Nobel level” seems to be a point on the axes of complexity as much as meaningfulness (as provided by the prizes’ existential creed) because physics research has become so overwhelmingly specialised. As a result, newer ideas that extend older ones cannot escape the complexity clause if they’re also hoping to make the world a better place. All the easier ideas have already come and gone.
Rajinikanth’s film 2.0, which released last year, was recently uploaded on Amazon Prime and I finally watched it in its entirety. It is a dumpster-fire of masculinity, sexism and misogyny, which is not surprising after Petta was what it was. 2.0 also goes one step further and confuses fantasy for license to peddle pseudoscience, ultimately creating a movie that really tests the extent to which its viewers can suspend their disbelief.
One of the movie’s principal claims is that people possess “auras” composed of particles called “micro-photons” and that the “auras” have some kind of energy potential. Rajinikanth’s character then elaborates that a Russian scientist named Frank Baranowski has produced proof of their existence, that these “auras” can be rendered visible through a (simple) technique called Kirlian photography. The problem here is that a) everyone trusts the white guy more, and b) Frank Baranowski actually exists, and he’s been saying that people have “auras” and that godmen have bigger ones!
Fantasy is a form of fiction marked by creative imagination, frequently set in worlds and among peoples whose specific features have been invented to accentuate some narrative element that the author wishes to employ for effect. There are several types of stories within this parent genre that illustrate the different degrees to which fantastic elements make an appearance. But irrespective of their relative extremeness, fantasy stories are not classified as pseudoscience even though they may claim scientific value within the fiction’s narrative because they don’t attempt to explain the fantastic using the real. They explain the fantastic – should they have to – using only the fantastic.
Consider the example of Flatland, first published in 1884. In this book, the author Edwin Abbott Abbott describes a two-dimensional realm populated by men, who are lines, and women, who are points. It was intended as an allegory of life in the Victorian era and did not make specific claims as to the existence of such a realm in our physical universe. It remained allegorical from start to finish.
On the other hand, the Harry Potter series describes a secret world of wizardry hidden from our own by cleverly disguised magical barriers. Its books harbour as significant an element of the real as they do of the imagined, but when the fantastic is employed, the author makes no effort to ensure it is not mistaken for nonfiction because it is evident. This illustrates how even when the real and the imagined coexist, the author makes no attempts to breach the line that divides them, keeping the series in the same genre as Flatland. So while Harry, Ron and Hermione cross the magical gate into platform 9 3/4, the audience is given no reason to assume such a world really exists.
Different works of fantasy do this in different ways. A Song of Ice and Fire preserves the laws of physics so that dragons flap their wings like birds do to fly but is completely disinterested in how they might have evolved. Hulk and Spider-Man resort to ludicrous methods to make heroes of their protagonists but aside from some gibberish involving the words “radiation” and/or “gamma rays”, it isn’t clear why these men are what they are. Iron Man III asked us to believe one man built a particle accelerator in his basement and pushed right up against the wall between belief and disbelief.
But 2.0 tears this wall down, most pronouncedly in its attempts to explain what it believes is true. It seeks to justify itself and its choices using (questionable) information together with epistemological biases from the real world that make it seem as if its claims are legitimate. This is in bad faith: in the foreseeable future, there are always going to be people in the audience who may not be fully aware of where the real ends and the fantastic begins. But while fantasy fiction – as discussed – has always harboured the necessary implicit safeguards to maintain its qualification as such, S. Shankar – 2.0‘s writer and director – has ignored them and cheated.
The times demand pellucidity, so: Auras don’t exist. Micro-photons don’t exist. Neither auras nor micro-photons can be scientifically verified, insofar as science is defined as a way to systematically discover new information about the world and free it from cognitive biases to the extent possible. Frank Baranowski is mistaken. The products of Kirlian photography can be explained using a well-understood phenomenon called coronal discharge.
Indeed, ignoring its abject inability to surprise viewers given its cast of actors, 2.0 would have been a perfectly fine entertainer in the convention of Tamil cinema’s hero-fixated entertainers if it had dispensed with the self-justification. Shankar had to have known this, as much as he had to have known that the silver screen, for all its potential, is not an interface for dialogue. It is a one-way broadcast medium that does not brook disagreement in any forms other than commerce.
And by working his “aura” BS into a feature film in a way that betrays fantasy fiction’s purpose, Shankar has perpetrated what is at best a sleight of hand on 2.0‘s viewers, and a fraud at worst. I’m inclined to believe it’s fraud.
A black hole’s gravitational influence is a twisted – and twisting – thing, with many parts to it. We all know about the event horizon because of its wondrous ability to capture ‘even light’ within its envelope, keeping everything within trapped in absolute darkness for as long as the black hole lives. But beyond the event horizon, there is another region with equally – if not more – wondrous abilities that distorts the perception of reality in its own, unique ways. Since both their abilities are enabled by gravity, let’s begin there.
The gravitational force is actually an effect that objects seem to experience because of the shape of the spacetime continuum. All objects move on the continuum’s surface, and when the surface is bent, an observer sees the object moving as if on a curve. Such deformations are caused by massive bodies: the heavier a body, the more it bends the continuum around itself. So to the observer, it seems as if the heavy body is causing the lighter object to orbit itself.
The Moon orbits Earth because Earth’s mass has bent the spacetime continuum around itself. In effect, the Moon is simply moving on the continuum’s surface, and it seems to be circling around Earth because of the shape of the continuum in that region. Credit: Mysid/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0
Depending on the mass of the deforming body, this effect can be felt across vast distances. For example, Pluto orbits the Sun at an average distance of 5.9 billion km. So Pluto’s average orbit indicates the deformation that an object as heavy as Pluto experiences due to the Sun (and other planets as well as the Kuiper belt) at that distance. According to the laws of Newtonian gravitation, the force’s strength falls off by the square of the distance. So if the force between two bodies is X at a distance of Y, it will be X/4 at a distance of 2Y (assuming the gravitational constant is the same at Y and 2Y). However, the strength never falls to zero unless the objects are infinitely far from each other.
Now, if Pluto wanted (for some fantastical reason) to exit its orbit, it would have to move at a certain velocity to escape it. Say it was the Death Star there instead of Pluto, and the Death Star has thrusters. It would have to fire those thrusters to accelerate itself to such an extent that its speed grows beyond the limit at which the Sun can hold Pluto there by its gravity.
The fundamental set up is the same when it comes to a black hole, but the numbers are more extreme. When you look at a black hole, you’re actually seeing its event horizon. The black hole’s gravitational pull itself emanates from a point at its centre called the singularity. This singularity deforms the spacetime continuum in unimaginable ways, although it becomes more and more imaginable the farther you get from the centre.
The event horizon is the distance at which the continuum is deformed in such a way that you’d have to travel faster than at the speed of light to escape it – i.e., if you were caught right at the event horizon, even travelling at exactly the speed of light will only keep you on the event horizon, and not let you zip off into space. (Put differently: this would allow us to work out the speed of light in a given universe using the rules of basic gravitational physics and the sizes of black holes in that universe.)
This is also why the event horizon is the thing you see when you see a black hole: it’s a literal horizon of events. Events occurring on one side can’t be seen on the other because the light that carries the information that you ‘see’ can’t cross it or return. This in turn should prompt the question whether there is a region of space around the black hole where its gravitational effects can be felt but which doesn’t demarcate ‘points of no return’. The answer is yes; it’s called the ergosphere.
The name itself casts a very utilitarian gaze upon the idea – that it’s the region of space from which you can extract work from the black hole – but it’s true. The ergosphere is the region wherein the spacetime continuum has been deformed by the black hole to such an extent that you can enter it and leave if you travelled fast enough (but less than at the speed of light). However, even if the black hole’s effects from the singularity to the event horizon are outright warped, and the event horizon itself is an important – albeit arbitrary – boundary, the black hole’s effects in the ergosphere are still mind-bending.
A part of this is due to an effect of rotating black holes called frame-dragging. Imagine you’re (an immortal elf) looking at Pluto orbiting the Sun from somewhere near Mercury, through a stationary window that’s between the orbits of Neptune and Pluto. If you keep looking through the window, you’ll see Pluto pass by once every 248 years. Apart from the fantasy elements, this scenario is also physically possible because the window is practically stationary. The part of the spacetime continuum on which it rests, so to speak, isn’t in motion itself due to the Sun’s rotation. That is, there is a negligible amount of frame-dragging.
But this wouldn’t be possible in the ergosphere of a rotating black hole. Say you’re just above the event horizon, looking through a window in the distance at an object orbiting the black hole at the inner edge of the ergosphere. Frame-dragging would absolutely prevent the window from being stationary, together with you and the object as well. This is because the black hole’s prodigious gravitational pull – i.e. prodigious deformation of the continuum – is such that it doesn’t just deform the continuum but also drags it along as it rotates, in the direction of its rotation, in a very pronounced way.
As a result of such frame-dragging, anything sitting on that part of the continuum also seems to be moved along even if it didn’t have any velocity in that direction to begin with. It would be as if looking at your friend walking west-east on a boat that’s moving east-west at the speed of light: for all practical purposes, she might as well be walking east-west! This is why a rotating black hole will force an object angling in towards the black hole’s ergosphere from the opposite direction to appear to switch and move along in the direction of its rotation.
The test particle, shown in red, first moves towards the ergosphere (in lilac) clockwise before frame-dragging forces it to seem to move anti-clockwise. Credit: Yukterez/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
Note the use of ‘appear’: the object won’t actually be forced to alter its direction towards that of the black hole’s rotation. However, the changing arrangement of spacetime in the region together with the light coming from the object towards the observer will make it seem that way.
If, by the effect of some compulsion, an object insists on appearing stationary inside the ergosphere, it can but there’s a catch. If it is inside the ergosphere but above the event horizon, the object has no option but to be frame-dragged. But just like the event horizon is the surface you’d travel for eternity if you travelled at the speed of light, the ergosphere also has a surface where you can avoid being frame-dragged if you were moving at the speed of light. This is simply called the ergosurface.
(Trivia: It’s possible to explain the effects of gravity outside the ergosurface using Newtonian physics. Inside it, however, you’ll need the theories of relativity.)
The location of both envelopes – the event horizon and the ergosurface – is determined by the speed of light. Their shapes are also determined by common factors: the black hole’s mass and angular momentum*. However, they aren’t affected similarly. For example, a non-rotating black hole will have a spherical event horizon but a rotating black hole will have an oblate event horizon. On the other hand, a non-rotating black hole will not have an ergosurface whereas a rotating black hole will have anything between an oblate and a pumpkin-shaped ergosurface.
Credit: Yukterez/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
These are just some of the reasons the shadow of the black hole at the centre of the M87 galaxy looked the way it did in the image composed by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). Aside from the way it was obtained (using techniques like VLBI), the image contains many distortions that originate from the black hole itself, so interpreting it isn’t a straightforward activity.
The EHT only recorded and studied radiation that could come away from the black hole, with a lot of matter accumulating beyond that point and falling into the hole. So what we’re looking at in sum is that hot and magnetised matter, all their radiation and the Doppler effects on them, the effects of the ergosphere frame-dragging them, and then the shadow of the event horizon.
The shadow (black) and event horizon and ergosphere (white) of a black hole rotating from left to right. At a = 0, the black isn’t rotating and at a = 1, it’s rotating maximally. Credit: Yukterez/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
The idea that you can extract work from within the ergosphere, thus giving the region its current name, can be traced to a few examples that different scientists have spelled out over the years. The three most-well-known examples are the Penrose mechanism, Hawking radiation, and the Blandford-Znajek process. The case of Hawking radiation is easiest to explain (only because it’s been done enough times in the popular press for one to be able to access it immediately), but understanding it provides insights into the Penrose alternative as well.
The vacuum of deep space isn’t a true vacuum: it contains some energy, including electromagnetic energy from distant stars, that is often transformed into a particle-antiparticle pair. That is, these particles are condensations of energy that pop into existence and pop back out as energy again (here’s a more detailed yet accessible primer) in a very short span of time. It’s possible that this process also happens near black holes simply because it can. And when it does, something strange follows.
If such a particle pair pops into existence right above the event horizon, one of them could fall into the black and the other will be pushed off into the ergosphere. This push-off happens because of the law of conservation of momentum, and the energy carried by the pushed particle will be a teeny, tiny bit transformed from the black hole’s mass. To a distant observer, it will look as if the black hole has just emitted a particle and lost a little bit of its mass to do so. Stephen Hawking and Jacob Bekenstein first predicted this phenomenon, since called Hawking radiation, in 1974. When this process happens over and over, over many eons, a black hole could possibly have lost all of its mass and evaporated completely into nothingness.
The British mathematical physicist Roger Penrose proposed a somewhat similar idea that was also relatively more practicable (and was used in the film Interstellar as well). As Suvrat Raju, a theoretical physicist at ICTS Bangalore, explained to me: Say an object – like a boulder – is thrown into the ergosphere. When it nears the event horizon, it is caused by a deliberate mechanism to break up into two pieces such that one piece falls into the event horizon in the direction opposite to the black hole’s rotation. As a result, the other would get accelerated in its journey through the ergosphere by a ‘kick’ from the black hole.
If orchestrated correctly, the kicked piece can emerge from the ergosphere with more energy than it had going in – energy provided by the black hole by converting some of its mass. Scientists have already worked out the average achievable energy gain in each Penrose mechanism attempt to be around 21%.
“In classical processes, one can never reduce the area of the black hole, but the Penrose process can reduce its mass,” Suvrat further told me. “The science fiction fantasy is that a sufficiently advanced civilisation could use rotating black holes for waste-disposal and even get some energy out in the process through the Penrose process.”
The Blandford-Znajek process is less crude and more… involved. Say a star got a bit too close to a black hole and is being shredded into bits that fall into orbit around the event horizon. Friction between these bits heats them up to a very high temperature, pushing them into a plasma state of matter. These bits also harbour electric and magnetic fields, and the electric and magnetic field lines pass through them even as they swirl around the monster and fall closer and closer.
At this point, let me quote the following coursework material, by Daniel Nagasawa, Stanford University in 2011:
The premise itself is that the material accreting around a black hole would probably be magnetised and increasingly so as the material gets closer to the event horizon. In fact, the magnetic field is so large that it will accelerate an electron to the point where it will begin to radiate gamma-rays, provided that the electron is not beyond the event horizon. In essence, the black hole acts as a massive conductor spinning in a very large magnetic field produced by the accretion disk, where there is a voltage induced between the poles of the black hole and its equator. The ultimate result is that power is dissipated by the slowing down of the rotation of the black hole…
To extract energy in this scenario, one way – as posited by user CapnTrippy on Everything2 – is to build a superconductor orbiting over the black hole’s poles such that it can intercept and carry away some of the current flowing from the equator to the poles, instead of letting it be deposited in the plasma in the ergosphere. Vis-à-vis the black hole itself, this electrical energy has two sources: its rotational energy and that imbibed by the plasma. Since a black hole can carry up to 29% of its total mass as its rotational energy, that’s also the maximum possible energy that can be extracted in this process. It’s not great but it’s still fantastic because black holes often weigh enough to be able to supply power for ages on end. According to Nagasawa,
… for a 108 solar mass black hole with a 1 T magnetic field, the power generated is approximately 2.7 × 1038 W. In perspective, the annual energy consumption of the world is estimated around … 5 × 1020 J. The example case presented produces more energy in a single second than the entire globe consumes in a year. While this is a bold claim to make, it is only an example case where not all the energy produced is extractable as usable energy. However, at that point, even a system which is less than 10-15 % efficient would be sufficient to supply enough energy to power the world for a full year.
The Blandford-Znajek process remains a subject of active research to this day. A part of this is thankfully because of a reason that has little to do with powering Earth: relativistic jets. These are extremely powerful and narrow beams of radiation travelling at nearly the speed of light that astronomers have observed in space. Astrophysicists believe that the Blandford-Znajek process and the Penrose mechanism can together explain how they’re formed and shot off from the poles of supermassive rotating black holes, and travel billions of kilometres. In fact, the galaxy CGCG 049-033, located 680 million lightyears from Earth, is thought to host a black hole weighing 2 billion solar masses that’s shooting jets a staggering 1.5 million lightyears into space.
So next time you read about black holes, don’t let the event horizon steal all the limelight (even literally). There’s action and drama above its surface as well, where things are still visible while behaving in strange ways, where a gallery of plasma, energy fields and a moving continuum exposes the black hole’s gravitational artwork to the full view of the universe. Just remember that what you see is not what you get.
*This is a result of the no-hair conjecture: that all properties of all black holes can be determined by their mass, charge and angular momentum alone. However, because gravity is 1036 times weaker than the electromagnetic force, black holes with significant charge are thought not to exist, leaving only the mass and the angular momentum to influence their physical surroundings.
Featured image: This artist’s concept illustrates a supermassive black hole weighing millions to billions of times the mass of our Sun. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.
