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Since June 2017, I’ve amassed 14 domains, accounts on four VPS providers, provisioned scores of servers, initiated a zillion sites and moved my own blog around from one domain and platform to the next at least half-dozen times. I rationalised each of these decisions in different ways:

• “The domain I have now doesn’t sound right to me – the one I’m looking at does”
• “The VPS I’m using was taken down by hackers for a week about a year go – I deserve to be on a safer one”
• “The CMS I’m on isn’t exactly pro-blogger, and I’m not sure if it’s going to be around 10 years from now – I should move”

… and combinations thereof.

All this time (basically the last 40 days), I’d succumbed to this strange restlessness that had me jumping from one rock on the internet to the next, relying on quick, almost-whimsical, decisions and plainly ignoring the fact that – hey – I’d been happily blogging on WordPress.com for the last 3,000+ days. Since June 30, I’d been so concerned about things like ‘keeping my blog on the web forever’ and blogging using just the ‘right’ tools that, somehow, I’d been able to completely disregard the fact that I’d had no complaints with WordPress.com for eight years straight.

Probable causes:

• Some more free time on my day job (good)
• Longstanding fascination with ICT (good)
• Taking readership, not readers, for granted (neutral – I’d have said ‘bad’ if I’d been proven wrong, but don’t treat this as an invitation to do so!)
• A lot of FOMO (terrible)

With this blog, I hope to get my shit together and also acknowledge the fact that I’m likely not the target demographic for most advertisements about “simplifying the publishing experience”, etc. For example, Ghost’s claim that its Markdown editor will ensure I write better because I don’t have to take my hands off my keyboard for formatting. As it happens, I don’t mind WYSIWYG editors at all; I know all the keyboard shortcuts. Another example: “WordPress is too cluttered, CMS X is very lean” – but the clutter has never bothered me. Yet another: “It’s better to have a self-hosted blog where you can control everything – including whether or not your blog stays online if the CMS it’s on shuts down.” But this same doubt can be had about hosting services as well – plus, again, WordPress seems to be doing just fine. And so forth.

On the other hand, what I’ve gained through all this is a better idea of how tech and (online) publishing intersect, the practices of VPS providers and the scope and price-points of various tools available to the serious blogger (see example below). I also figured out Git, Github/Gitlab Pages, AWS Lambda and the Ghost CLI, creating macros on Atom, and can now set up websites with Ghost, Jekyll, Hugo and Nanoc, apart from WordPress.

Finally: I’ve had some great readers who stuck on and read/shared/commented on my writing no matter that it was constantly on the move, thankfully. I owe it to them – if not anyone else – to be consistent and rooted. On that note, welcome to Synecdo𝛘 (si-nec-duh-khee). This is a fresh start (although it contains all that I’ve written since June 2012). I promise I’ll always be here – even if I’m elsewhere at the same time.

Example: It’s no longer possible to have a blog with

• Good design
• All the basic CMS features
• A staid reputation, and
• A large community around it

for free.

The ‘large community’ bit does eliminate a lot of the contenders, leaving behind Drupal, Ghost, Medium, Squarespace, Tumblr and WordPress. Drupal seems too complicated for the needs of blogging (more so than WP) and the absence of a hosted version makes the learning curve steeper. The feature-set on Medium is quite limited relative to the rest. Tumblr blogs are free but they’re also hard to take seriously.

WordPress.com has a free version but it doesn’t have support (except allowing you to post in the forums) and doesn’t allow custom domains. The lowest premium tier with both options costs $36 a year. Moreover, v.4.x seems to be having a severe identity crisis. WordPress.org, the self-hosted version, is too buggy to handle by yourself, especially if you want things to just work. The best among the good-and-affordable managed WordPress solutions I’ve been able to find is Flywheel, $15 a month.

SquareSpace has no free versions. It costs $16 a month or $144 a year. You can’t run SquareSpace by yourself either. It’s proprietary and there’s no open-source option. This is also why I don’t trust website-builders like Wix and Weebly.

Ghost also has no free versions. You could spin up a Ghost CMS on a VPS but the cheapest one (that I’m also willing to trust) is Vultr’s $2.5 option. But I’m not sure if its specs are enough to run the new Ghost v1.5 without hiccups. You could run with the $5/mo option available on Vultr, Digital Ocean, Linode or Lightsail, assuming you’re okay with using a CLI and managing the instance yourself (Digital Ocean is the only one that comes with a one-click install for Ghost but it’s applicable only from the $10/mo option). Ghost (Pro), the hosted version, costs at least $29 a month or $228 a year.

Other options include static-site generators (SSGs) like Hugo and Jekyll, which can be run on Gitlab and Github, respectively, but not unless you’re okay with having to manage every last detail of your blog’s setup. Similarly, unless you’ve a certain bent of mind, the publishing experience isn’t entirely smooth either. The harder alternative is to host SSGs on the cloud.

In sum: The option with the most peace of mind at the lowest cost seems to be WordPress.com’s $36 a year plan. Many veterans of blogging believe that there is some wisdom in moving to the self-hosted version especially because you can then have the “mutiny of identity”. In this case, there are three options:

1. Self-hosted WP: Linode’s $5/mo (better support than Vultr while Lightsail throttles their servers when CPU usage climbs). Downside: Installing WP is a pain.
2. Managed WP: Flywheel’s $15 a month offering (because WordPress.org is less secure than WordPress.com tends to be and you’ll find all the extra help useful).
3. WordPress.com: the $99 a year ‘Premium’ plan (comes with excellent customisation options). Downside: WordPress doesn’t offer monthly billing, so you’re expected to be able to spend $99 at a time.

Two Indian scientists who passed away recently – Yash Pal and Pushpa Mittra Bhargava – spent a large part of their lives ensuring that lay people had access to bona fide scientific material and that our appreciation of science, and nature, stemmed from a realistic understanding of its inherent beauty.

When they died, we celebrated them and their efforts as if we were going to remember them for posterity, as if we were going to honour their legacies by committing ourselves to their advice. But, it seems, just for a day. Sample this Financial Express headline:

And here’s an excerpt from the ‘story’:

So, what is the ”logic” behind certain practices associated with the lunar eclipse among Hindus? The Hindus believe that the cycles of the moon have an impact on the human body. Renowned spiritual leader Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev has shared his insights on his blog regarding this.

“The cycles of the moon have an impact on the human system, physically, psychologically and energy wise. During lunar eclipses, what would happen in 28 days over a full lunar cycle happens subtly over a course of two to three hours…in terms of energy, the earth’s energy mistakes this eclipse as a full cycle of the moon. Certain things happen in the planet where anything that has moved away from its natural condition will deteriorate very fast. That is why there is a change in the way cooked food is before and after the eclipse. What was nourishing food turns into poison, it is better to keep the stomach empty at this time,” Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev has written on his blog.

There isn’t a shred of science presented in the article, which seems to have been put together to appease a section of the audience that is more concerned about following rituals than anything else. Eating during an eclipse, or any celestial event of any kind, doesn’t affect the body. This is not to say that fasting as an observance – whether for a day or a month, out of faith or in pursuit of some kind of ‘detoxification’ – does not have effects. It may. But to fast because the Moon or the planets will “affect” the human body is absurd. The responsible thing for the publication to do would have been to help people understand this. That neither are chemistries thrown out of whack nor are biological processes suspended.

In fact, the only things kicked out of their natural order appear to be the editors of Financial Express, their gullible readers and, of course, Jaggi Vasudev. Incidentally, the latter’s respect for allegedly natural forces hasn’t stopped him from illegally constructing over 125,000 sq. metres of real estate in Coimbatore – which a retired judge of the Madras high court has said will pollute the Noyyal river and affect the “entire western region of Tamil Nadu”.

A sad irony in all of this is that one of Yash Pal’s more famous contributions to the narrative of popular science in India concerned a solar eclipse. To quote from the obituary that Gauhar Raza wrote in The Wire:

In the early 1980s, when a total solar eclipse shadowed India’s north, Doordarshan had issued repeated warnings that people should not go out in the open. These warnings were based on half-cooked scientific knowledge and religious superstitions. Most cities and villages witnessed what could be called a total curfew. During the eclipse, many people were confined to their houses and performed religious ceremonies. But by 1995, things had changed largely thanks to the efforts of the People’s Science Movement – as had Doordarshan, thanks to Pal’s efforts.

For the first time, in more than 3,000 years of our history, people came out in large numbers and watched and celebrated total solar eclipses all over the country. I remember Pal had been on Doordarshan explaining the natural phenomenon, and at one point almost shouted at the cameraperson when he realised the camera was facing him when it should’ve been pointing at the Sun. Most people appearing on the national channel would have preferred their face for maximum time instead of any other image. But here was a committed scientist who wanted the nation to witness the eclipse, a beautiful natural phenomenon that people had missed for centuries due to superstitions.

Where are these “people in large numbers” today? Have they now transformed into the “2.7k shares” that the Financial Express article blares? Perhaps some shared it to ridicule it; either way, the article is a reminder of what Pal and Bhargava were up against in their lifetime and the unfinished agenda they left behind.

Twilight of rationalism

Between the murders of anti-superstition activists Narendra Dabholkar and Govind Pansare and rationalist M.M. Kalburgi, and the promotion of pseudoscience centred around cow-urine and other pet Hindutva themes, rationalism in India is clearly under strain. The Centre regularly interferes in the affairs of universities and colleges known to encourage contrarian thinking. The effect: many voices have been threatened into silence that could have otherwise spoken up against pseudoscience and superstitions that often only serve to cement Hindutva majoritarianism. The most harmful manifestation of this has been the glorification of cows and the demonisation of those who “harm” them.

On August 2, a Dalit woman was lynched in Agra by a mob that accused her of being a ‘witch’ (or a ghost, according to another report) who wanted to cut off the braids of young women. Hindustan Times reported, “In rural parts of Agra, people are making hand impressions of henna and turmeric at the entrance of their houses, while others are putting up lemon and chillies ‘to ward off the evil barber’.” Since then, allegations have surfaced of a ‘malevolent barber’ being on the loose from Aligarh and Delhi. In Jodhpur and Bikaner, WhatsApp messages about a group of ‘shapeshifting’ godmen intent on cutting the braids of young women for their rituals made the rounds a month before four people were lynched to death by a mob in Jharkhand. The victims were accused of attempting to kidnap children for similar rituals; they weren’t doing any such thing.

Some Hindu superstitions hold that shaving off a woman’s hair can bring ill-luck or bereavement, and that growing it out can help “emit Shakti waves”. And because we’re worried about losing them, we’re creating demons out of thin air.

Indian ministers have since 2014 made various dubious claims about the feats of “ancient India” and the supernatural abilities of bovine (let’s call them for what they are) shit and piss. This includes Prime Minister Narendra Modi as well. With such brazen disparagement of scientific thinking prevalent in the corridors of power, it is no surprise that government initiatives have been mooted to promote untested forms of medicine and healthcare, against such devastating diseases as diabetes and cancer.

In April 2017, the Department of Science and Technology even proposed that a ‘national steering committee’ be set up to “scientifically validate” the effects of consuming panchgavya – a five-part concoction of cow dung, cow urine, milk, curd and ghee. The committee will have no less than 19 members working over three years. Meanwhile, the funding for eliminating tuberculosis, which India has promised to do by 2025, was cut by Rs 13 crore earlier this year.

Rise of doublespeak

As Modi’s star has risen, it has also elevated the fortunes of Baba Ramdev, a yoga guru turned FMCG player. The company he leads, called Patanjali, purchased a series of newspaper ads in 2015 that made many unrealistic claims about the quality and provenance of its products. Bhargava had written at the time for The Wire:

The ad says, “After an intense research of 25 years, and conducting tests on over 1 crore people, our Ayurveda Mission is to give a healthy lifestyle to the people of the country successfully.” If “intense” research has been carried out for 25 years, it must have been done by research scientists in an institution and the results put in public domain – for example, by publishing them in respected periodicals as is the practice universally. No such publication is mentioned in the ad or is known to exist. In the absence of any such publication, one may legitimately ask: who were these scientists and what were their qualifications? What was the name and location of the institute? What was the research methodology used? Even if you have all the test results of one individual recorded on one page, for one crore individuals you would need at least one crore pages of recorded data; with 300 pages per volume,  the number of volumes of data would be well over thirty thousand. Where are they? Will Ramdev answer these questions? In fact, should not answers to at least some of these questions have been provided in the ad to make it credible, especially when the claim that is being made would seem to be extremely unlikely to be correct on the face of it?

Whatever lessons we claimed to have learnt from rationalists is rendered hollow in the face of the monumental doublespeak that India has been confronted with, and our seeming inability to surmount it. On the one hand, the political establishment promises growth and development by leveraging space applications and information technology – both of which rely on cutting-edge advancements in the likes of physics, mathematics and computing. But on the other, it promotes irrationality and pseudoscience. Nowhere was this hypocrisy more evident than in a recent Mann Ki Baat episode, when Modi soliloquised that “man should revere nature” and “be one with it” – even as he has led his government’s efforts to reduce environmental impact assessments to “a mere formality”.

Just paying lip-service to Pal and Bhargava is pointless, even counterproductive. It is at best a cheap pass to be able to claim that we remember their teachings when in fact we have nothing to show for it. The best way to remember them by would be to emulate their sensibilities and, at every opportunity, to extricate our senses from the fevered grip of ignorance and blind faith.

The Wire, August 8, 2017

I’ve just checked out the Ghost 1.0 CMS. The upgrade from v. 0.11.9 happened last evening and since then I’ve been crawling through the new UI on the front- and back-ends. The back-end has always looked quite polished on Ghost but now it’s starting to look a bit sophisticated as well.

Upgrading to v. 1.0 was an interesting experience, at least for me, because for about nine years (before moving to Ghost earlier this year), I’d been blogging on WordPress. And like most of you know, WordPress has a shitload of controls for authors. Ghost’s raison d’être itself was that it would be a much more publishing-focused CMS that would do away with many of these controls, which had found place in WordPress because WordPress wanted to be the “CMS for all”.

So, whatever it was like to move from WordPress to Ghost the first time (on v. 0.11.9) was reflected in what it was like to go from Ghost 0.11.9 to 1.0, considering 1.0 was such a major upgrade for Ghost. It forced me to think about which aspects of the CMS I regularly used, which ones I prized, and how changes in their UI/UX affected the way I worked. Some quick points:

• Casper 2.0.2 (the new default theme) looks and feels clean, although the homepage is too magaziney. I suspect this is because Ghost has been trying to woo journalists, and thus
  • Casper 2 imposes a display hierarchy on the homepage,
  • Forces the author to find/use images to go with each post,
  • Highlights the first para of each post, a.k.a. the lede (to avoid which I’ll be using an ‘x’ at the top of every post), and
  • Ghost has fetched the ‘excerpt’ field out of the advanced area in the post editor area and into the basic settings sidebar

  This makes me concerned about whether Ghost in the future will ditch bloggers and refashion itself as a journalism-centric platform. Let’s hope not, and also that theme modification controls (in the CMS) are in Ghost’s future. Favourite feature for the moment: the big body font-size on article display pages. Worst feature: the even bigger font-size for blockquotes.

• I get into my groove when writing a piece faster if I’m using the right font. And WordPress really began to mess with the font in its WYSIWYG editor since about last year, when the font being used on the theme would be used within the editor, too. Usually, the font I find it easier to read with (Georgia) is not the font I find it easier to write with (sans-serif fonts). Ghost 0.11.9, I was glad to see, wasn’t trying to do any such thing. However, v 1.0 is: the front-end body font and the back-end Markdown preview font are both Georgia. (The Monaco font applied to the Markdown text is not really pleasing to the eyes.)
• V. 1.0 is still buggy in some ways, which I suppose is to be expected. But I was disappointed that the upgrade happened while Ghost’s developers still haven’t fixed the subscriptions feature. I really don’t see what the point is in collecting emails nowif I’m not going to be allowed to start sending emails right away as well. This annoys me more so because, on v. 1.0, clicking the ‘Subscribe’ button on the homepage opens a full-screen subscription message + input field that blots out everything else. So much just to collect emails?
• Earlier, when you published a post, then made some change and hit ‘Update’, it was a single click. Now it’s two clicks: clicking ‘Update’ and then clicking ‘Update’ again. And it’s three if you want to update and unpublish the piece at the same time, although I wonder how many writers want to do this. Is this also a journalism thing?

I hope the folks at Ghost bear in mind that many expect the exercise of blogging to have much less friction than publishing-as-a-journalist does. Ideally, publishing a good-looking blog post would be a four-step process: headline, body, tags, publish. I shouldn’t be penalised for not using images or not bothering with an excerpt. Sure, a developer might be able to fix all of the issues I’m talking about because Ghost is after all an open source product. But I’m not a developer – nor are many other Ghost users.

• Kudos for
  • Not compromising on the ease of navigating the CMS (usually when a UI gets more options, it starts to turn into a maze)
  • Optional ‘night shift’ mode on the back-end was a nice touch – how about implementing it on the front-end as well?
  • Good idea listing recent posts with the same tag in the ‘related posts’ area at the end of each post

Featured image credit: Alexas_Fotos/pixabay.

A postscript to the opinions v. reportage question, and why I’m not a fan of a label saying ‘Opinion’ atop oped pieces on a news website:

Many consider the opposite of balance to be imbalance, and the opposite of being neutral to be biased – or vice versa, in both cases. We don’t stop to consider situations in which being neutral is an unhealthy privilege, and situations in which being ‘balanced’ means to dignify an opinion so hegemonic or authoritarian that it shouldn’t have taken root in a democracy in the first place.

The kind of pieces in which I’d imagine some form of “neutral and objective” middle ground exists are pieces dealing with (relatively) simple stories or when dealing with complex issues in really simple ways. To paraphrase the words of a friend, “These are not the sort of pieces that eventually define us”. For example, notwithstanding the uncertainties inherent in the practice of science itself, a science reporter can be eminently expected to arrive at one version of the truth because, at some level, that is the expectation of (natural) science itself. “What caused this disease? The X bug.” End of story. But it’s downright fallacious to extrapolate this into areas where politics and sociology dominate.

We need to acknowledge a hierarchy of complexity in the products of journalism, and further acknowledge that neutrality is a fair expectation only towards the base of that hierarchy.

I’m all for reporters being asked to present both sides of the story therewith – but they should also remain aware that as they take on issues more sophisticated, issues in which they can’t remain spectators removed from the proceedings, issues that are coloured by who we are and how we choose to participate in them, they can’t assume the “both sides of the story” rule will still hold. It will hold less and less, until it holds not at all.

Journalists are not ethnographers, who are duty-bound to remain “scientific” in their assessment of a situation. Journalism has always been orders of magnitude more political than ethnography has (there’s a reason only one of them is called an estate by itself), and also less subject to the terms of science. By all means, present both sides of the story when a gated community in South Delhi complains that their ward’s councillor isn’t doing enough to get rid of mosquitoes – but don’t tell me you’re going to try to stay balanced when “gated community” is replaced with “slum of Dalits”.

On the other hand, from the simplest to the toughest stories, the one rule that will always hold from the base of that hierarchy to its pinnacle, that will always have your back, is to be biased but to be honest about having that bias. Because the truth is that there is seldom just one truth out there.

Thanks for the conversation, N.S.

Featured image credit: bogitw/pixabay.

Something leapt in my heart when I read Kangana Ranaut’s latest repartee to Saif Ali Khan’s misguided notes on nepotism and eugenics. There were many reasons for this but one in particular was to see the name ‘Terence Tao’ mentioned among the examples Ranaut picked to describe the world’s smartest people (flipside: no women on the list):

You also spoke of eugenics — which means controlled breeding of the human race. So far, I believe that the human race hasn’t found the DNA that can pass on greatness and excellence. If it had, we would’ve loved to repeat the greatness of Einstein, Da Vinci, Shakespeare, Vivekananda, Stephen Hawking, Terence Tao, Daniel Day-Lewis, or Gerhard Richter.

The names of Einstein and Hawking are so popular that people include them in rosters of greatness often without being aware of what they have achieved. Tao, on the other hand, isn’t yet that well-known. Not everyone has heard of him, and most of those who have are likely to be aware of his stature as a mathematician.

This isn’t any kind of a comment on Ranaut, who has done everyone a good turn with her letter, but more a confession of my own cynicism. Cynicism that people are likelier than not to know the name of Einstein than of Tao, of Isaac Newton than of Pierre-Simon Laplace, of even Rosalind Franklin than of Rosalyn Yalow.

Featured image credit: jinsngjung/pixabay.

Featured image: Four of the 66 antennae of the ALMA array. Credit: Carlos Padilla – AUI/NRAO.

Editions one, two, three, four, five, six, seven and eight

In edition #8 of ‘why Titan is awesome’, we visited a lake near Titan’s north pole, named Ligeia Mare, and how it could sport long lines of tiny – ~2 cm – waves. In a new study, scientists have uncovered evidence that Ligeia Mare also has enough vinyl cyanide dissolved in its waters liquid methane to be able to form 30 million biological cells per millilitre.

Does this mean we know that there’s life on Titan?⁺ No. We only know that if there is life on Titan in the form of microbes, then there could be 30 million cells per millilitre of Ligeia Mare with membranes composed of vinyl cyanide (with the additional assumption that each of these cells is 10 micrometers wide). But in spite of the particularity of this statement, it’s an exciting discovery nonetheless. To make it, scientists did not use the Cassini probe, although they were inspired enough to undertake follow-up studies by Cassini data published in 2007 that showed signs of vinyl cyanide in Titan’s atmosphere.

Much of what we think we know about Titan comes from computational models generated by labs on Earth. Some of the data for these models comes from space-borne observatories like Cassini and powerful telescopes on the ground. The remaining data is predicted by scientists based on what they know about how a a large body like Titan evolves over time. Even in the new study, published in the journal Science Advances on July 28, scientists used telescopes – technically called antennae – part of the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array (ALMA), Chile, to infer that there is a certain quantity of vinyl cyanide in Titan’s atmosphere. But as the abstract of their paper continues:

Radiative transfer modeling suggests that most of the C₂H₃CN emission originates at altitudes of ≳200 km, in agreement with recent photochemical models. The vertical column densities implied by our best-fitting models lie in the range of 3.7 × 10¹³ to 1.4 × 10¹⁴ cm⁻². The corresponding production rate of vinyl cyanide and its saturation mole fraction imply the availability of sufficient dissolved material to form ~10⁷ cell membranes/cm³ in Titan’s sea Ligeia Mare.

The presence of vinyl cyanide itself does not indicate that cell membranes will be formed with it. Instead, this thesis is based on a study published in 2015, which said that the integrity of cell membranes forming in cold methane lakes – like the ones on Titan – would depend on certain electrochemical properties of molecules of nitrogen. The study’s authors referred to such membranes as ‘azotosomes’ – akin to the liposomevesicles that make up all cell membranes on Earth. And the new study’s authors surmise that vinyl cyanide is one such molecule of nitrogen that could lead to the formation of azotosomes (‘azote’ is the French name for nitrogen).

Image: What ALMA saw. The blue ring is Titan; the vertical dot-dashed blue line is the polar axis and the dashed white line represents Titan’s equator. The colour intensity denotes the flux density of the vinyl cyanide emission. Source: Palmer et al., Sci. Adv. 2017;3: e1700022

Another feature of the study that provides wonderful insight into how Titan ‘works’ is where the vinyl cyanide forms. The scientists used a photochemical model to determine this using data obtained by Cassini and ALMA, and figured the substance was forming at least 200 km above Titan’s surface, in the reaction:

CN^– + C₂H₄ → C₂H₃CN + H
(cyanide ion + ethylene → vinyl cyanide + hydrogen)

At a lower altitude (~100 km), their models also predicted that vinyl cyanide was forming in much lower quantities by the reaction:

HCN + C₂H₃ → C₂H₃CN + H
(Hydrogen cyanide + vinyl radical → vinyl cyanide + hydrogen)

From there, it is carried in a steady stream by “a rain of haze particles” to the surface. This isn’t new: Titan is the only body in the Solar System, apart from Earth, known to have a fully functional counterpart of our water cycle; there, it is a methane cycle. To obtain all this data, scientists used ALMA to record 11 observations of Titan as the moon transited the antennae’s gaze between February and May 2014, when it was between 8.9 and 9.7 AU (1.3 and 1.4 billion km) away.

Ah, Titan.

⁺This assessment excludes questions arising from the possibility that there is an ocean of liquid water and ammonia some 55-80 km below Titan’s surface.

Recently, an international team of researchers claimed that it had discovered particles called Majorana fermions in a topological superconductor. The international press went gaga but, unfortunately, there wasn’t much discussion on whether what had been found was a particle or a quasiparticle. Many news outlets assumed that they were one and the same – but they’re really not. One physicist even thinks that the quasiparticle that was found in the superconductor could’ve been of synthetic origin, not natural. I asked condensed-matter physicist Vijay Shenoy, whose lab at IISc has been doing some great work on topological materials, about this. His replies are presented in full below.

Can all quasiparticles be treated as particles?

VS: The idea of a ‘quasiparticle’ is a very subtle one. At the risk of being technical, let me try this:

An excitation is called a particle if, for a given momentum of the excitation, there is a well-defined energy. Quite remarkably, this definition of a particle embodies what we conventionally think of as a particle: small hard things that move about.

Now, to an example. Consider a system made of atoms at a very low density. It will be in a gaseous state. Due to their kinetic energy, the atoms will be freely moving about. Such a system has particle-like excitations. These particle-like excitations correspond to the behaviour of individual atoms.

Now consider the system at a higher density. The atoms will be strongly interacting with each other and, therefore, make up a solid. You will never “see” these atoms as low-energy excitations. There will now be new type of excitations that are made of the collective motion of atoms and which will be particle-like (since there is a well-defined energy for a given momentum). These particle-like excitations are called phonons. Note that the phonon excitation is very different from the atom that makes up the solid. For example, phonons carry sound within a solid – but when the sound propagates, you don’t have atoms being carried from place to place!

A ‘quasiparticle’ excitation is one that is very nearly a particle-like excitation: for the given momentum, it is a small spread of energy about some average value. The manifestation is such that, for practical purposes, if you watch this excitation over longer durations, it will behave like a particle in an experiment…

Other examples: neutrons and protons are particle-like excitations of the quark-gluon system!

If I find a quasiparticle with certain unique properties, can I also be sure that I will also be able to find a particle with the same properties?

VS: I assume by “find a particle” you mean like a ‘fundamental particle’. I know examples where this is (as far as we know) not true. For example, the 1/3-filled Landau level has Laughlin quasiparticles that have a charge 1/3rd that of an electron! Other filling factors will have excitations with other fractional charges. We do not know any fundamental particle that could have these properties.

Actually, the idea of a ‘fundamental particle’ is itself not a very useful concept in physics. Something may look fundamental to us at scales of energies that are accessible to us – but if we probe at higher energy scales, we may see that it is also made up of other even more fundamental things (neutrons/protons are really quarks held together by gluons). We will then say that the original ‘fundamental particle’ is a quasiparticle excitation of the system of ‘even more fundamental things’! You could actually ask where this will end, at what energy scales… We really do not know the answer to this question. This is why the concept of a ‘fundamental particle’ is not a very useful concept in physics.

(Note: There’s some text beyond the postscript at the bottom.)

A recent discussion with some of my peers alerted me to a need I’ve either been deaf to or just don’t buy: readers, at least some of them, prefer to be presented with a clear distinction between opinion and reported pieces on a news website. Now, I’m not sure how anyone can draw a clear line between these two kinds of pieces. Even in a news report, there is a subjective choice being made by the reporter in her choice of interviewees, sources, topics, etc. And in many areas of media coverage – both geographically (India, US, Europe, etc.) and topically (politics, finance, science, etc.) – these choices have to be made very carefully because even a small misstep can land the report on the wrong side of the political spectrum. You, its author, will at least be branded “insensitive” etc.

Hell, even when I’m writing about topological phases of matter, I consider it a matter of opinion when I choose to speak about the Indian context or not, when I choose to highlight practical applications or not.

To me, everything is contested, to the point that there no longer seems to be any point in making a distinction between opinion and reportage if my opinion is going to be just my voice in my piece and my reportage is going to be just my choice of voices in my piece. A more important, and more meaningful, declaration to make would be that of my own PoV. That is, for me to tell the reader that I, Vasudevan Mukunth, am on the political Left more than half the time, that I believe we shouldn’t always talk about the applications of research because I think that debases the ‘wonder’ and ‘curiosity’ aspects of science⁺, that in fact I don’t think there is an opinion-neutral position when it comes to covering certain topics, e.g. GM foods, etc.

By not making a distinction between opinion and reportage, I believe the reader will also be forced to consider each piece more seriously. Instead of declaring upfront that a following piece is an oped, it would be better to follow certain rules of writing that allow an uninitiated reader to separate facts from opinions. I say this based on two assumptions, the second more important than the first:

1. Facts are immutable
2. The reader should know better

By the latter, I mean that the reader should question everything she reads, learn only to trust a few well-defined sources, and understand overall that the presumption of there being a single truth regarding anything in this world is a myth. This is true even in science – or should I say more so in science, thanks to there being more at stake when scientists promise a single truth to an audience that usually doesn’t know better. To me, the act of conveying the news stopped being stripped of opinions at least three years ago. And to others – wanting to have a caution of some sort that a piece contains opinions is in some sense a confession that you think news reports are otherwise not opinionated. That’s disappointing.

TL;DR: A label like ‘opinion’ is only a horse-blinder.

⁺In a developed nation with higher levels of social security, spending on blue sky research is, from the vantage point of a populist, more “forgivable” than it is to her counterpart in a developing nation, where the level of social security is lower. Would this not affect how we choose to portray the purpose of scientific research in the mainstream media?

Update (three hours later):

A counterpoint, courtesy myself: Isn’t there some value in targeting a reader who wantsto read a piece of a certain type (e.g. one that can be classified as “reportage” over one that can be classified as “opinion) – and therefore in labelling a piece as “reportage” or “opinion”?

This is likely because the reportage/opinion distinction still exists in most readers’ minds, at least in the form of a bimodal distribution. One mode represents the sort of piece that has only one voice and few references; the other mode represents the sort of piece that has multiple voices, multiple references or both. And getting rid of this modality will be difficult, a major reason being that time is limited. Readers only want to spend a certain fraction of their day reading something, and in that time, publishers would like the readers to be able to find the pieces they want. So in order to improve their content’s discoverability, editors have to consider branding it “reportage”, “opinion” or whatever.

(And this in turn will lead to a self-fulfilling retrenchment of the “reportage”/”opinion” modality in the readers’ minds.)

Featured image credit: Schmid-Reportagen/pixabay.

You remember the criticism that former Indian men’s ODI cricket captain M.S. Dhoni received when a member of the press, Sam Ferris, asked him a question about his retirement during a presser, got invited to the front by the sportsman and got snubbed in front of everyone? Shortly after, Arun Venugopal wrote an open letter to Dhoni on ESPN Cricinfo:

At worst it was a clichéd question – if it makes you feel better the media gets clichéd answers all the time – but not one that deserved the patronising response it got. All it needed was a straightforward answer – “I don’t have plans to retire yet”, or “I will make it public when I plan to”, or even a “no comment,” if you really didn’t wish to answer it. You probably expected an Indian journalist to ask the question, because you trotted out the response anyway.

I don’t speak on behalf of all the journalists; I speak merely as one of many. You are free to ascribe any intent to any question, but our job is about seeking answers and reporting on them just as yours is playing cricket. Some would accuse us journalists of taking ourselves too seriously. I am all for taking the mickey, pulling a leg or two – just so long as mutual respect and professionalism is a two-way street.

§

Now, I grant you that playing tennis can be physically excruciating, that almost nobody likes getting unsolicited advice, that Wimbledon’s strict dress code for playing women is stupid and that hecklers are jerks.

But tell my why, it’s different from what Dhoni did – or even hilarious, as The West Australian claims – when another sportsperson, Kim Clijsters at Wimbledon, invites a critic from the stands to show him why he can’t play tennis and that that disqualifies him from offering suggestions from his seat. I say it’s worse, too, to make a point about some in-game strategy against a monumentally weaker opponent as well as to state that suggestions are not welcome, and that if they still seem forthcoming, they will be turned into jokes at the makers’ expense.

Does this mean journalists or critics can run their mouths against sportspersons? Absolutely not: they must recognise that the people on the field are trying to do their best and that no one’s trying to be lazy or a fool. However, the compact doesn’t end here: sportspersons must also recognise that not all journalists or apparent bystanders are fools or trolls. If they’re asking questions or making suggestions that the sportsperson disagrees with, then they can be asked to pipe down (if that’s appropriate), be told that the question/suggestion is meaningless or ignore it entirely.

“Ignore it entirely?! You think that’s easy?!” Of course not, but that doesn’t excuse you when you don’t do it; in fact, by all means, ask for brownie points that you held your composure and answered levelheadedly.

There is something to be said against criticism that does not emerge from lived experience – but it does not apply all the time, especially in situations that have acquired a diverse set of nuances. Not all pursuits are founded on physical labour. This is why armchair critics are not always privileged or in the wrong – and this is why you can’t always score an argumentative point by pointing out that one is an armchair critic. An extreme example: Much as some sportspersons might like to decry or even deny, the outcomes of some games can be predicted using techniques that ignore individual choices and rely instead on statistical possibilities that emerge from macroscopic analyses. This is why you have strategists who may themselves be lousy at playing a game but are quite good at predicting how it will evolve. You’ve watched/read Moneyball, you know what I’m talking about.

Finally, Clijsters was doubly wrong to have invited over that man in the stands onto the court, squeezed him into an outfit many sizes smaller and played against him. Irrespective of the validity of his suggestion, Clijsters turned him into a joke. I only applaud him for having been a sport about it, and not Clijsters because what she did was immature. I’m not sure if that man’s suggestion – something about playing a “body serve” – was valid but the question asked by Ferris was both politely phrased and perfectly valid. Neither non-participant deserved what they got – from the sportspersons, the media at large and from a majority of the video’s consumers.