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Four p.m. I was blinking out of my afternoon siesta and scrolling down my Twitter feed catching up on whatever I’d missed when an RT by Thony Christie caught me quite by surprise: “Mathematics genius Maryam Mirzakhani has passed away”. It really jolted me out of my reverie. I vaguely remembered her fair, soft face, a pair of blue eyes, from an image in the news from two, maybe three years ago.

Words from a Quanta profile flashed in my mind, another by The Guardian about her wanting to become a writer… Yet another by someone else more obscure about the significance of the moment. A woman had won the Fields Medal! Were we celebrating or ruing the fact that it had taken, what, eight decades? And then I felt that twinge of shame I – we? – have become so good at ignoring: how many Indian women mathematicians did I know? And how many mathematicians did I – again, we? – know outside of the rosters of various prizes?

What caught me by surprise was the outpouring of grief – by people I met over the course of the evening, by people on Facebook and Twitter, by people I never knew knew about Maryam Mirzakhani or any of her work. But they did, showing up as if crawling out of the woodwork. They knew her as a brilliant young mathematician. They spoke of her as an inspiration for millions of girls and even more mathematicians besides. They collectively called her loss tragic, shared articles and anecdotes, and revealed what little joy they had tucked away in August 2014.

In a sense, the experience was an affirmation that even if the world moved on, if readers and listeners seemed to not care as much when Mirzakhani won the Fields Medal, they would remember. It was as if people were looking out, noticing some souls out of the corner of their eyes, lodging their names in some corner of their memories, not airing them too much but preserving them, remembering, and mourning when they pass on.

RIP, Maryam.

Featured image credit: Stanford University.

Gwyneth Paltrow’s goop, a wellness brand that has recently come under fire for advertising almost-certainly pseudoscientific “lifestyle” products like $66 jade eggs for women to insert into their vaginas to strengthen their pelvic floors, put up three notes in their defence: two by doctors and one by ‘Team goop’. The ‘Team goop’ note was the usual defence of pseudoscience that we’re all familiar with: that they’re keeping an open mind and seeking autonomous control over their bodies while remaining blissfully deaf to how this diverts the limited resources of many misinformed people who are desperately seeking solutions to health problems away from legitimate, and more reliable, solutions as well as to the capitalist overtones of their beliefs, an irony given Paltrow & co. insist the alternating modes they’re parroting are “Eastern traditions”.

Some of the coverage that goop receives suggests that women are lemmings, ready to jump off a cliff whenever one of our doctors discusses checking for EBV, or Candida, or low levels of vitamin D—or, heaven forbid, take a walk barefoot. As women, we chafe at the idea that we are not intelligent enough to read something and take what serves us, and leave what does not. We simply want information; we want autonomy over our health. That’s why we do unfiltered Q&As, so you can hear directly from doctors; we see no reason to interpret or influence what they’re saying, to tell you what to think.

And speaking of doctors, we are drawn to physicians who are interested in both Western and Eastern modalities and incorporate the best from both, as they generally believe that while traditional medicine can be really good at saving lives, functional medicine is more adept at tackling issues that are chronic. These are the doctors we regularly feature on goop: doctors who publish in peer-reviewed journals; doctors who trained at the best institutions; doctors who are repeatedly at the forefront of medicine; doctors who persistently and aggressively maintain an open mind. The thing about science and medicine is that it evolves all the time. Studies and beliefs that we held sacred even in the last decade have since been proven to be unequivocally false, and sometimes even harmful. Meanwhile, other advances in science and medicine continue to change and save lives. It is not a perfect system; it is a human system.

(The part in bold – not sure where that dichotomy comes from.)

In fact, the jade eggs are less problematic than goop’s other misdemeanours, such as advertising “healing stickers” that goop said was backed by NASA tech – and which NASA called BS on. It’s bad enough that an org with goop’s clout and money is going to market snake oil but it’s worse if it’s going to bill itself as a marketplace for all snake-oil vendors. Anyway, goop’s principal target in their tirade was Jen Gunter, an articulate doctor with a blog, a peculiar choice given the brand and Paltrow have both come under worse fire by major news outlets with millions of social media followers. Good job picking on the small people. And late last evening (or early this morning IST), Gunter published the post everyone was waiting for:

Regarding Aviva Room [doctor #2] I have frankly never heard of her, but she appears to be a vaccine skeptic so there’s that. Dr. Steven Gundry [doctor #1], however, is a special kind of patriarchal prick. I have devoted one sentence in my writing career to his pet project lectins and somehow this earned me a proper mansplaining about both potty mouth and evidence based medicine. Dr. Gundry even wants me to know he is pals with Dr. Oz (that is where I burst out laughing on the train), yes, he brags about being associated with the same Dr. Oz who was scolded by a Senate panel for abusing his national platform to push snake oil. …

To GOOP I say medicine is not subjective. There are facts and biological plausibility. Of course there are unknowns, but not in the way you present it. For example it is fact that sea sponges contain dirt and are completely untested for menstruation. It is highly biologically plausible that sea sponges could have a significant risk of toxic shock syndrome as they may be more absorbent than tampons, may introduce more oxygen than tampons, and be impossible to clean in a way that removes the toxic shock syndrome toxin or even staph aureus. If you disagree with this information it doesn’t mean you have a different opinion, it means you are choosing to be uninformed or the potential risk of being uninformed matters less to you. Subjective would be preferring tampons with a plastic applicator over a cardboard one.

To use a phrase coined by Tim Caulfield, a health law and policy professor at the University of Alberta, it seems the tragedies that “science-free celebrities” perpetrate usually centre around believing that there’s more than one way to interpret what constitutes scientific evidence, taking the suspicion of Western medicine to another level while assuming it has had no successes, taking feminism to mean anything that’s pro-women while ignoring the need to empower women, and wearing the traditionalism of Eastern medicine as a cloak to hide from not being able to produce scientific evidence.

Featured image credit: YouTube.

https://twitter.com/JenLucPiquant/status/884814806666153986

The first time an object has been teleported from Earth to orbit, and it smashes quantum records. https://t.co/KQNgZpCGLq

— MIT Technology Review (@techreview) July 11, 2017

Last month, Chinese researchers announced that they had performed two amazing feats. First, they had performed an experiment recreating the spooky phenomenon called quantum entanglement. To borrow a clunky but sufficient explanation from the MIT Tech Review article tweeted above:

[Entanglement] occurs when two quantum objects, such as photons, form at the same instant and point in space and so share the same existence. In technical terms, they are described by the same wave function. The curious thing about entanglement is that this shared existence continues even when the photons are separated by vast distances. So a measurement on one immediately influences the state of the other, regardless of the distance between them.

While the phenomenon has been demonstrated in (not-large) labs around the world, the Chinese launched a satellite adept at receiving and measuring the properties of photons, and then created pairs of entangled particles from the ground and fired one half of them to the satellite. When they measured the properties of one of these photons, the other photon also changed accordingly. Effectively, they’d realised entanglement over more than 500 km.

The second feat they performed was to generate some information – and not just bland photons – and instantaneously access that information through the use of entangled photons across large distances. This feat made for the first proper precursor to an information transfer system protected by quantum cryptography, which isn’t susceptible to conventional means of hacking because there is no information flow, just instantaneous information access at the two endpoints of a channel.

Now, while both experiments were great, neither the Tech Review article nor BBC article got it completely right. Both their headlines speak of an object having been teleported; this is wrong. No objects were teleported but information was, and this is a crucial difference because the advent of quantum entanglement has not changed what it means to be teleported. In the continuing regular use of the word, teleportation requires the selfsame object to disappear, or disintegrate, at one point and reappear at another instantaneously. It is the travel of the object through a large distance in space but almost no distance in time. The Chinese photons did not do this. The information contained by them did.

Two afterthoughts:

1. Would acknowledging this difference have made for a less “sexy” headline? E.g., Information teleported to Earth’s orbit. I don’t think so. I think it sounds just as cool because teleportation is always cool.
2. If you’re thinking the headlines might just be admissible because you subscribe to the physicist John Wheeler’s idea that “everything is information”, you’re wrong. Relevant bit:

… as the physicist Rolf Landauer liked to say, all information is physical – that is, all information is embodied in physical things or processes – but that doesn’t mean that all things physical are reducible to information. The concept of information makes no sense in the absence of something to be informed – that is, a conscious observer capable of choice, or free will.

Featured image credit: skeeze/pixabay.

Call me nitpicky or misguided but, as silly as this WhatsApp message sounds…

… how many people stop to check how cabin pressure really works? Clearly the message is wrong but where does our impression that “it’s wrong” come from? Does it come from the fact that

1. it’s an unqualified WhatsApp forward?
2. its author appears to be a ‘bhakt’?
3. our experience travelling on flights seems so very at odds with what’s being described?, or
4. one knowing how cabin pressure is maintained on aircrafts?

I think it’s a combination of the first three, and the third one more so, and I admit I’m quite cynical that it’s the fourth one. This isn’t an accusation that some people don’t know that air comes in from somewhere and leaves from elsewhere, and that there’s a pump that regulates this – but more a suspicion that, to the same people, the “somewhere” and the “elsewhere” might be irrelevant parts of the explanation.

Consider the following. There are two possible kinds of rebuttals to the WhatsApp message. First, the intuitive, and possibly experiential, kind that contrasts the great – and anecdotal – complexity of keeping an aircraft airborne and the almost abject mundanity of the drag caused by flatulent passengers. Second, the more technical kind that describes how an aircraft works with an engineer’s rectitude and, on occasion, authority. The first kind is a recourse to faith; the second is a recourse to knowledge. My contention is that the first kind (also as an encapsulation of the first three reasons from above) excuses us from dealing with the science and the engineering in a way that imposes some cognitive stress, which the second kind does.

When you receive such a WhatsApp message, the point is to disqualify it through the most effective means possible; from the outset, there is no diktat as to how it can be achieved (even if I’d disagree on principle), there is a preference for the faith-based mode of reasoning over the knowledge-based mode of reasoning. And over time, this preference builds tendency, which builds into bias through ignorance.

“What’s the point of learning the science?” Learning how cabin pressure is maintained (see below) isn’t going to help you in any way (unless your work has something to do with it) – but it is the lowest epistemological substrate upon which all faith-based reasoning on the topic can be founded. This isn’t to indemnify science against its many flaws as much as to suggest that without the foundation of knowledge-based reasoning, faith-based reasoning turns meaningless, and that the other way will never come to be. So why not begin with an awareness of the engineering behind maintaining cabin pressure so we remain forever sure about the provenance of our faith in it, at least?

Maintaining cabin pressure

The “somewhere” that the air comes into the cabin is first sucked in from the atmosphere by ‘taps’ installed on jet-engine compressors. They are then processed for humans by modifying their humidity and temperature using air-cycle machines, and fed into the fuselage. The “elsewhere” that air leaves the fuselage from is the set of outflow valves at the rear end of the aircraft. The air-cycle machines work constantly while the outflow valves regulate pressure within the cabin by opening and shutting accordingly.

When more air is let out than what’s coming in, the cabin will depressurise, and vice versa. This is because the ratio of cabin pressure to the aircraft’s ambient pressure is allowed to vary within only a certain range (and not too drastically when it does) as well as because the cabin itself will have been designed to be able to withstand a maximum pressure. The outflow valves are controlled by a computer.

Featured image credit: LittleVisuals/pixabay.

CERN gets new Guinness World Records title, symmetry:

The typical Guinness World Record has to be measurable and breakable. However, the organization also awards significant milestones for different subjects. The first proof of the existence of the Higgs boson, initially announced in 2012, made major news both within the particle physics community and beyond, prompting two Guinness World Records consultants to suggest including the discovery. “I think anything we can do to encourage people into science is a good thing,” says Craig Glenday, editor-in-chief of Guinness World Records. “We’re largely a book that celebrates great achievements, so it’s a good way of saying science is great and should be celebrated.”

Then, two paragraphs later…

“It sort of depresses me that people think Guinness World Records is only fat people and bearded women,” Glenday says. “That’s why it’s really important that we have records like this, because it shows we are prepared to look at the whole scope of what’s happening in the world.”

Just what I was thinking. The Higgs boson discovery announcement received a staggering amount of press coverage (and my first science byline). Whether or not people understood what it was really about, a lot of them were talking about it. Even today, five years down the line, its name remains synonymous in a surprisingly faithful way with high-energy physics, the LHC, elementary particles, etc. So particle physicists aren’t depressed about what the Higgs boson has become because it hasn’t acquired a reputation that needs fixing (I’m obviously ignoring the idiots who thought it had something to do with divinity). By associating themselves with it, it’s the Guinness World Records that stands to gain (or gain more, if you prefer). That “science is great and should be celebrated” is… a wonderful excuse? 🙂

Aside: For a second, the headline made me wonder if CERN was celebrating the boson’s inclusion in the Guinness books the same way many achievements are benchmarked in India. For example, it’s heartening when a 25-year-old pulls a car with his thumbs, gets himself his 15 minutes and then uses that time to make a statement that improves his life in some way – but when a state-sponsored, state-organised event guns for a place in the record books just to be able to make the news, it feels misguided – though not wrong. You could still argue that such a goal could be used to galvanise its participants. What is properly wrong is using patents to claim a form of medical treatment is valid. And you’d think nobody would gain from such an association, but hey.

I need to write what I’m going to to remind myself, and perhaps others, of a few things. In the last few weeks, it became important for me – as a member of the community of liberals in India – to give a fuck about the many lynchings throughout the country, typically perpetrated by Hindu mobs against Muslims and Dalits for producing, carrying, transporting or consuming beef. While neither being a Muslim/Dalit nor eating beef is illegal in India, as Mitali Saran so astutely pointed out on July 2, falling in either category has increasingly meant that its members should abide by the mob’s justice. To protest these lynchings, thousands of citizens in 10 cities across India participated in protests organised on June 28 and July 1. On June 29, after the first round of protests, the country’s prime minister for the first time denounced the lynch mobs. It felt like something had happened – although not as much as anyone would’ve liked.

In this environment, it was so easy to find relevance, to easily strike up conversations with people and opine on Twitter and my blog, and have it read and talked about. Now that things have subsided just a little, it feels to me as if I’m emerging from within a mist into an area of rarified air, where I can feel the struggle for relevance returning to me. I’m the science editor of The Wire, which – I’m no longer unsure of uttering – has a formidable science section (if you’re willing to ignore the ebb-and-flow nature of its publishing cycle). As much as I’m proud to be able to say this, I wish I could bring you inside my head and show you how difficult it is to maintain it. Here’s a preview.

(It’s a ramble. You’ve been warned. You don’t get to complain at the end that I’ve rambled.)

Self-motivation

One of the biggest demands running a science section will make on you is to be excited from within, without external motivations, to be continuously awed by incremental advancements in research and discoveries because that is how science progresses. In a country whose news diet is fed by political and economic developments that move along as if they’re being chased by dogs, covering science sticks out like a sore thumb: it continues to move along at the pace at which it must; what makes this worse is that in order for science to remain popular as an intangible commodity – at par with the fervour with which political news is consumed, for example – it demands that the appreciation of it increase. How is that ever going to happen?

I’m writing this to remind myself that it is not just science-that-affects-the-people that counts even if these are the science stories that sell more than others. I’m writing this to remind myself that, in fact, it takes a certain problematic attitude to market science stories. For example, I have felt shame at having prostituted stories about LIGO-India by pointing it at chest-thumping jingoists who always have such a remarkable appetite for all the good things Indians have done. I’d like to remind myself that, when I feel depressed and worthless, I write stories about ISRO (usually critical) knowing full well that having that four-letter acronym in the headline is enough to propel a story into The Wire‘s daily most-reads. I’d like to remind myself that it often feels offensive to be committed to a story that you know isn’t going to perform well but that you’re going to have to do it anyway because it will hopefully benefit someone. I’d like to remind myself of how difficult it can be to be this way.

(At this point, I’m not sure how many will agree with me when I say that people with mental health issues shouldn’t get into science journalism without thinking twice – although this post hasn’t really been about getting people to like me.)

Brevity v. concision

To be perfectly honest – and I’m sorry in advance to those I think I’m going to offend – this abdication of science’s essence, of incrementalism more than anything else, is evident on both sides of the story: among readers as much as among producers. Newsrooms usually don’t introspect on why run-of-the-mill science stories don’t sell and how the can be made to, but this is hardly new. What is new, at least to me, is the surprising number of science writers and journalists obsessed with

1. Science as it intersects with politics and policy, and
2. Writing long-form pieces over shorter ones, especially about (1)

At this point, I couldn’t give less of a fuck for longer pieces, especially because they’re all the same: they’re concerned with science that is deemed to be worthy of anyone’s attention because it is affecting us directly. And I posit that they’ve kept us from recognising an important problem with science journalism in the country: it is becoming less and less concerned with the science itself; what has been identified as successful science journalism is simply a discussion – no matter how elaborate and/or nuanced – of how science impacts us. Instead, I’d love to read a piece reported over 5,000 words about molecules, experiments, ideas. That would be real science journalism, and really brave, too, for a writer to have been able to undertake such a thing.

I would love even more to read a 1,000-word news report on molecules, experiments and ideas. I want more reporters to struggle with introducing, explaining and dissecting them in a thousand words (here’s a challenge) because pieces of this length, more than anything else, allow editors to commission them more often, on a broader variety of things, and present them to the audience more frequently. Instead, a long-form story takes weeks to produce and can’t be paid for more than twice or thrice a month (unless you’re very-well-funded). And most of all, I fear that in seeking the glory that comes with stringing together 5,000-10,000 words with cogency and concision, reporters are forgetting the place of brevity as well.

Personal impact

I’m writing to remind myself that it’s okay to be selfish and that this entails the taking of two steps. First: to recognise, and help others recognise, that humankind’s scientificinvestigation of the natural universe – by which I mean the use of a certain method improved over millennia of study – forms a substantial portion of the materials of our cognition, sustenance and advance. Second: to recognise, and help others recognise, that science, as in the use of certain methods to elucidate the truth of something, ought not to give any fucks about being of relevance to us. While this may seem obvious to some, I don’t think enough of us have internalised this to the extent that we ought to. Consider the following example.

I’m writing this post to remind myself that it’s okay to want to write only about particle physics because that’s all I’m interested in reading. That it’s okay to want to write only about this even if I don’t have any strength to hope – that quantum chromodynamics will save the lives of Dalits, that Feynman diagrams will help repeal AFSPA, that the LHC will accelerate India’s economic growth, that the philosophies of fundamental particles will lead to the legalisation of same-sex marriage. I’m writing this post to remind myself – and anyone else willing to listen – that I haven’t been presented with any evidence whatsoever to purchase my faith in the possibility that the obscurities of particle physics will help humans in any way other than to enlighten them, that there is neither reward nor sanction in anxiously bookending every articulation of wonder with the hope that we will find a way to make money with all of our beliefs, discoveries and perceptions, that we will cure poverty, eliminate terrorism and conquer other worlds with it.

I may be a romantic fool to think so but we haven’t been in wonder freely. We should.

A fourth culture

The division of our culture is making us more obtuse than we need be: we can repair communications to some extent: but, as I have said before, we are not going to turn out men and women who understand as much of our world as Piero della Francesca did of his, or Pascal, or Goethe. With good fortune, however, we can educate a large proportion of our better minds so that they are not ignorant of imaginative experience, both in the arts and in science, nor ignorant neither of the endowments of applied science, of the remediable suffering of most of their fellow humans, and of the responsibilities which, once they are seen, cannot be denied.

– Charles Percy Snow, 1963

In the imagination of a developing nation, however, a marriage between the two cultures has translated into more of a constant, droning yearning, almost like a waterfall, where thinkers and doers alike expend their potential energy in attempts to make their scientific endeavours cascade into political relevance. It doesn’t feel like an equitable union – but more like the desperation to reconcile with a hegemon. In the 58 years since Snow’s famous Rede lecture, many public intellectuals have assessed why Snow’s Utopian vision of the world didn’t come true by 2000 like he had said it would; even others have stepped forward to identify a third culture – apart from the science types and the literary types. In the 1960s, Snow said it could be the social scientists. In the 2000s, a science journalist named Peter Dizikes claimed that the literary agent John Brockman had “promoted the notion of a ‘third culture’ to describe scientists – notably evolutionary biologists, psychologists and neuroscientists – who are ‘rendering visible the deeper meanings in our lives’ and superseding literary artists in their ability to ‘shape the thoughts of their generation.’”

However, all three cultures seem to exclude those enterprises that don’t seek to better the human condition, as if there could be nothing loftier than pandering to the needs of humanity alone.

(Perhaps this obsession is fuelled by the conviction that without humans, the universe itself would not be able to contemplate itself, that without the technologies (which are, by definition, scientific knowledge applied to the benefit of humankind) and without the social and political organisation that has allowed me to access them, I wouldn’t be able to contemplate my own duties in a post-two-cultures world. But this sort of an argument is neither here nor there.)

Time to start the day. First item on the todo list: “Edit article about whales”.

Featured image credit: raczi25/pixabay.

Someone mentioned in passing that I should go for a run to break my writers’ block (18 days and counting) – so I did, after a LONG time. I lasted barely thirty minutes and felt pain in parts of my body that I’d forgotten existed, but it was still ten minutes longer than I typically last against against A.S. in a game of badminton and I was happy. In fact, I would’ve gone on for longer if my supposedly 4G connection hadn’t outlived its promise and paused in the middle of a gripping Radiolab episode about addictions. It was a bummer.

It was my first time listening to Radiolab even though dozens of (I don’t have so many) friends have been recommending it for a few a years now. I’m usually dismissive of the ability of any production, no matter its provenance or the credentials of its producers, to excite me. This has become so as much of research as it has of the creative nonfiction I once used to enjoy reading. My senses have become dulled and my appreciation, extremely reserved.

A new research paper? It takes less than a minute to be able to say if it’s actually exciting, exciting in the way incremental developments are or if it’s simply hype. A new feature article? A quick skim followed by a few seconds to recall the author’s previous work as well as the publication’s preferences is all I need to guess how it will conclude – and I’m usually right. Hell, it wouldn’t be amiss to say my disappointments reach into the compositions of sentences and stories: every device and technique seems rehashed, every agent’s visage immediately cracks open to reveal all its inspirations. This isn’t bragging; it’s a lament. I’ve lost the ability to be surprised and I don’t like it. It affects my own ability to craft suspense in the article and blog posts I write. It feeds my cynicism of the world.

Even Tamil cinema – which I particularly cherish for its often goofy plots and goofier characterisations – has failed. The last straw was Pichaikkaran (2016), which took so fecund a premise and trampled upon it. It feels as if nothing can surprise me anymore. T.M. had once used a phrase in a different context, but I think it applies here: I’ve lost all intellectual humility. And I’ve replaced it with an addiction to my own comprehension, wisdom and judgment. I often sit in one place and think myself into a well of darkness.

I’m not sure what could be to blame; my own depression comes first to mind but I don’t think it deserves to take the fall on this one. It’s probably the news I consume day in and day out, the confidence it feeds me about how the world will behave, how the world’s constituents will behave, tomorrow and in all the days after. It’s probably my job as an editor, to spot mistakes in the pieces I edit and figure out the best ways to fix them. It’s probably my lifestyle, most days spent mostly indoors, with my laptop, hacking WordPress and Ghost, figuring out VPSs. It’s most probably me, with my quest for imperfections and my newly inculcated worldview that celebrates their discovery.

All that I’ve said thus far is the background against which I’m evaluating my 30-minute stumble of a jog, and I’m quite pleased. My writers’ block is clearly broken. I’m hoping that, in the coming days, the thing to defeat my intellectual boastfulness – which had spread to physical exercise as well – will work against and break my lethargy. Somehow, I had never considered my physical body to be among those imperfections I was picking out – but even now I’m not sure if that’s the way to go either, and this is where I’m hoping Radiolab will help. The episode I’d chosen at random was quite splendid (The Fix). I can’t wait to hear how it will end, tomorrow evening at 5 pm.

Featured image credit: djedj/pixabay.