A lot about our biology is intertwined with our culture. When such an association is encountered for the first time, it could sound interesting, intriguing even, but with time, it becomes an evident relationship because our culture plays an important role in our upbringing. For example, think about how the body’s olfactory wiring affects what we think about cow-dung.
Broadly speaking, scatological odors snub any inclination on the individual’s part to approach the source or even think about it for prolonged periods. Talking about excrement quells taste buds at the dinner table and there is an immediate response in the form of revulsion.
Blech!
However, what could cause such a response is not a closed question. One answer that makes sense is that the brain interprets that excrement will be poisonous if consumed in any amount, and so turns the mind away from engaging with it in any fashion so as to minimize the risk of poisoning.
At the same time, in India, cow-dung is regularly used as fuel for cooking-fires and also for a multitude of ritualistic purposes. There is no revulsion of any sort amongst those who handle it, and if there had been any in the past, it could have been subdued.
If any test exists to exclude familiarity and false convictions, and establish that the excrement-poison relationship has been eliminated in the individual’s mind, this argument could be true.
How often do we do things just because someone else we used to idolize did them in the past? When will we start doing things in the present such that they’re the best things for us to do in the present?
More often than not, the environment to nurture success is given more importance than an environment in which failures can be tolerated, let alone dealt with constructively. More often than not (pardon me), the fear of failure trumps the allure of success.
How often have you seen that girl who makes you stop whatever you’re doing, and just marshal all your faculties into attention so you can ensure you never, ever forget her face again? It happened to me for the first time earlier this evening.
I was at a coffee shop after having shopped for books at a clearance sale with my uncle and his daughter; it was 2 in the afternoon. I automatically sat down in the chair in the corner, where I’d be beside the least traffic in all the room while being able to look at people’s faces. I didn’t notice her at first – I didn’t notice anyone at first – and was just looking around. Once I and my uncle and my cousin had placed the orders, I ruffled through my haul and was wondering which book I’d read first when I saw her.
She was sitting facing her friend who was right behind my uncle. Ergo, I was facing her, albeit from about 15 feet away. She wore a dark blue top, indigo-blue jeans, her skin the colour of dark chocolate, her lips a faded maroon. She was gorgeous, with large, expressive eyes, their jet-black irises pregnant with excitement every time she smiled, her jawbone angling into her chin below her cheeks with that subtle abruptness that speaks arresting relief but stops short of outright sharpness.
I couldn’t keep staring at her – I already knew she knew I was looking at her as often as I could – so I did so in bouts, but never quite letting her out of my sight. She sat cross-legged and constantly turned her head away from her friend to look out the window, at what I couldn’t fathom. Perhaps she liked how the skies were clouding over as I did, but I suppose that’s just wishful thinking. She smiled often, too, the corners of her mouth stretching into her supple cheeks.
She had a delicate elegance about her, the sort you do when you’re handling books that are centuries old, or artifacts to which you attach too much sentimental value. In fact, it was the sort of elegance which you swear you won’t do anything to injure the moment you notice it, the sort of elegance that tells you that it’s a given that she’s going to be graceful.
All this while, my uncle and my cousin were going on about how her college life was going to be – she starts tomorrow. They expected me to impart all my lessons that I learnt while I was in college. But looking at the Girl in Blue, though, I couldn’t think of anything. Luckily, before they could get too pushy, my sandwich arrived. I ate in silence; my eyes, however, were clamouring.
I knew I might not ever see her again. I also knew for sure that I wasn’t the sort of guy to interrupt their conversation and tell her I thought she was incredibly pretty. For added measure, I was also fighting a battle with myself: one half of me wanted me to whip my phone out, take a quick picture, upload the image to the web, and attempt to identify that awesome face. The other half, of course, emerged triumphant. I’m still not happy with that half.
When her and her friend’s orders arrived, her friend did something silly: the mango-shake she’d called for was too sugary, so she slid down the couch to talk to the waiter, conveniently blocking my view of my interest. I mean, who does something like that?! Anyway, the four minutes of visual silence that followed almost blinded me to all else. Reluctantly, I took the time to clarify all of my cousin’s doubts. Just when I thought I would have to intervene and somehow persuade the girl to slide back down the couch, she moved by herself.
I could see the Girl in Blue again. Oh, what a sight! By then, I was just looking at her whenever I could, no longer devoting any effort in considering what would be appropriate. How ironical then that I might’ve precipitated her leaving: she got up just as I caught her staring out the window at some car below. It strikes me now that that car could’ve been a boyfriend’s – fathers don’t have orange Suzuki Swifts with a matte-finish – but right then, at that moment, nothing could’ve swayed me from my apotheosization of her.
As she left, she turned to look at me. Our eyes met. My life flashed before mine. I’m sure she, however, saw a creep. I didn’t care. I still don’t care. Some moments are well-known not to happen too often, the sort of moments that work away at your memory, displacing one after another as they lock themselves within cages that you hope will last a lifetime, memories that jolt you out of one reality and into another, where it is a picture within your cranium no more but a sensation that suffocates you. That sweet release…
Her legs were slender, like reeds pulsing with life, and she was tall, but not that tall. I, of course, by then had forgotten what sort of girls I liked and what sort of girls simply wouldn’t work out. In my cranium, the sensation was filling up. Needless to say that I was distressed as she stepped out of the room and climbed down the flight of stairs. Oh, that’s when I noticed her friend: ugly. Never mind.
I know I will forget the face of the Girl in Blue. I will ravish it with my mind’s eye over the course of two days, maybe three, and then, I know it will start to morph into other faces, faces more memorable than they are simply gorgeous because they belong to loved ones whom I hurt in the past. Her face will dissolve into the narrow space of a name, and then a date, and then simply an inkling. Until then, I will think about her.
And until the end of eternity, I will have this piece to remind me of the truth of the moment when I saw her.
Every once in a while, a (revolutionary-in-hindsight) scientific discovery is made that’s at first treated as an anomaly, and then verified. Once established as a credible find, it goes through a period where it is subject to great curiosity and intriguing reality checks – whether it was a one-time thing, if it can actually be reproduced under different circumstances at different locations, if it has properties that can be tracked through different electrical, mechanical and chemical circumstances.
After surviving such tests, the once-discovery then enters a period of dormancy: while researchers look for ways to apply their find’s properties to solve real-world problems, science must go on and it does. What starts as a gentle trickle of academic papers soon cascades into a shower, and suddenly, one finds an explosion of interest on the subject against a background of “old” research. Everybody starts to recognize the find’s importance and realize its impending ubiquity – inside laboratories as well as outside. Eventually, this accumulating interest and the growing conviction of the possibility of a better, “enhanced” world of engineering drives investment, first private, then public, then more private again.
Enter graphene. Personally, I am very excited by graphene as such because of its extremely simple structure: it’s a planar arrangement of carbon atoms a layer thick positioned in a honeycomb lattice. That’s it; however, the wonderful capabilities that it has stacked up in the eye of engineers and physicists worldwide since 2004, the year of it’s experimental discovery, is mind-blowing. In the fields of electronics, mensuration, superconductivity, biochemistry, and condensed-matter physics, the attention it currently draws is a historic high.
Graphene’s star-power, so to speak, lies in its electronic and crystalline quality. More than 70 years ago, the physicist Lev Landau had argued that lower-dimensional crystal lattices, such as that of graphene, are thermodynamically unstable: at some fixed temperature, the distances through which the energetic atoms vibrated would cross the length of the interatomic distance, resulting in the lattice breaking down into islands, a process called “dissolving”. Graphene broke this argument by displaying extremely small interatomic distances, which translated as improved electron-sharing to form strong covalent bonds that didn’t break even at elevated temperatures.
As Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, experimental discoverers of graphene and joint winners of the 2010 Nobel Prize in physics, wrote in 2007:
The relativistic-like description of electron waves on honeycomb lattices has been known theoretically for many years, never failing to attract attention, and the experimental discovery of graphene now provides a way to probe quantum electrodynamics (QED) phenomena by measuring graphene’s electronic properties.
(On a tabletop for cryin’ out loud.)
What’s more, because of a tendency to localize electrons faster than could conventional devices, using lasers to activate the photoelectric effect in graphene resulted in electric currents (i.e., moving electrons) forming within picoseconds (photons in the laser pulse knocked out electrons, which then traveled to the nearest location in the lattice where it could settle down, leaving a “hole” in its wake that would pull in the next electron, and so forth). Just because of this, graphene could make for an excellent photodetector, capable of picking up on small “amounts” of eM radiation quickly.
An enhanced current generation rate could also be read as a better electron-transfer rate, with big implications for artificial photosynthesis. The conversion of carbon dioxide to formic acid requires a catalyst that operates in the visible range to provide electrons to an enzyme that its coupled with. The enzyme then reacts with the carbon dioxide to yield the acid. Graphene, a team of South Korean scientists observed in early July, played the role of that catalyst with higher efficiency than its peers in the visible range of the eM spectrum, as well as offering up a higher surface area over which electron-transfer could occur.
Another potential area of application is in the design and development of non-volatile magnetic memories for higher efficiency computers. A computer usually has two kinds of memories: a faster, volatile memory that can store data only when connected to a power source, and a non-volatile memory that stores data even when power to it is switched off. A lot of the power consumed by computers is spent in transferring data between these two memories during operation. This leads to an undesirable difference arising between a computer’s optimum efficiency and its operational efficiency. To solve for this, a Singaporean team of scientists hit upon the use of two electrically conducting films separated by an insulating layer to develop a magnetic resistance between them on application of a spin-polarized electric field to them.
The resistance is highest when the direction of the magnetic field is anti-parallel (i.e., pointing in opposite directions) in the two films, and lowest when the field is parallel. This sandwiching arrangement is subsequently divided into cells, with each cell possessing some magnetic resistance in which data is stored. For maximal data storage, the fields would have to be anti-parallel as well as that the films’ material spin-polarizability high. Here again, graphene was found to be a suitable material. In fact, in much the same vein, this wonder of an allotrope could also have some role to play in replacing existing tunnel-junctions materials such as aluminium oxide and magnesium oxide because of its lower electrical resistance per unit area, absence of surface defects, prohibition of interdiffusion at interfaces, and uniform thickness.
In essence, graphene doesn’t only replace existing materials to enhance a product’s (or process’s) mechanical and electrical properties, but also brings along an opportunity to redefine what the product can do and what it could evolve into in the future. In this regard, it far surpasses existing results of research in materials engineering: instead of forging swords, scientists working with graphene can now forge the battle itself. This isn’t surprising at all considering graphene’s properties are most effective for nano-electromechanical applications (there have been talks of a graphene-based room-temperature superconductor). More precise measurements of their values should open up a trove of new fields, and possible hiding locations of similar materials, altogether.
I read about this development about a week ago, and I still don’t know what I think about it. As a feat of engineering it is beyond par-excellence, and that is where I stop to take a few breaths… The engineer’s intentions may halt with attempting to understand how the heart beats, but in creating (or recreating?) something as relatively simple as a swimming silicone-jellyfish, he seems to have stumbled upon a nexus where the multiple wills of nature meet and participate without conflict in the fashion of a life-form.
Let’s say there are two people talking: X and Y. X has three kinds of knowledge: Basic, Pertinent, Abstracted. Y has only two kinds of knowledge: Basic, Pertinent.
S1: If Y argues that X’s knowledge of the abstracted does not qualify him to be more knowledgeable than Y on qualitative terms because it is not useful knowledge,
S2: If X argues that Y’s lack of knowledge of the abstracted qualifies X to be regarded as qualitatively more knowledgeable than Y, and refutes Y by claiming Y cannot judge the usefulness of knowledge of the abstracted because Y does not have it,
A1: If Y counter-claims that X’s refutation of Y is simply because X possesses some other kind of knowledge and hopes that it will be useful,
C: Then Y’s independence of the knowledge of the abstracted and X’s dependence on the knowledge of the abstracted are either
C1: Meaningless
C2: Meaningful; if meaningful, then cannot be established in terms consistent with the other’s perception because there will always be reasonable circumstances in which the claimant can be tautological and the defendant, contradictory (i.e., incompleteness).
Effectively, this conclusion signifies the incapacity of anybody, through any logical means, to establish that there exists an absolute perception that everyone adheres to concerning an arbitrary object.
Here, the assumptions are
V1: That the object being perceived may be engaged with the human senses through the knowledge of the object’s function and purpose
V2: That the act of perceiving is contingent upon pre-existing knowledge and isn’t therefore a “learning experience”
V3: That there is no way to demonstrate the usefulness of any knowledge independent of the perception modality (i.e., if there is no way to establish literally and meaningfully the significance of some knowledge – in the form of grammatically secured sentences or actions – then that knowledge pertains to a logically inconsistent hypothesis. E.g., sentiments.)
Q: Are truths simply objective reasons whose truth-values may or may not be verifiable?
A:
This question seems to possess a native paradox, but that simply arises from a logical error in the semantics: we can’t address unverifiable statements as “truths”. Instead, they are logically contingent statements.
Even so: As Wittgenstein says in the preface of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, “In order to draw a limit of thinking, we should have to think both sides of this limit.” Similarly, in order to establish the objectivity of a statement, its subjectivity must be conclusively denied as well as its independence of subjective considerations verified.
The attainment of these conditions can be explored through Sir Ayer’s verification principle, the tenets of which were established in his 1926 opus, Language, Truth and Logic. However, it must be noted that Ayer denied, reasonably, that unempirical hypotheses may be formed on the basis of empirical engagements with reality. By extension, there exists an inherent denial of any transcendent reality, which in turn eliminates the presence of any objective truths.
At the same time, however, there exist objective literal truths, which are closer to being tautologies than truths themselves simply because they are a repetition of meaning whose propositional variables are actually fixed and whose truth-value is also fixed.
During an argument, negation and affirmation are used to establish the value of a propositional formula. The formula could be any statement whose propositional variables can assume different values. For instance, the statement S has an unverified propositional value.
S: Smoking is disagreeable; drinking is agreeable.
To some, S will make sense while, to some others, S won’t make any sense at all. In order to establish the truth-value of S, we explore the existence of a logical system that is consistent with the value of S being both true and false. This is unlikely because it contradicts our logical framework itself. Then, the next step is to understand the structure of a logical system in which S is either true or false and such that the value of one propositional variable impacts the value of the second propositional variable directly.
In other words, we make S a formula with two variables, X and Y, and find out how the values of X and Y are consistent/inconsistent with each other while they exist in the framework of the same set of logical principles.
S: X • Y
If we now hypothesize that X cannot retain its value while Y’s value is held fixed, then we pursue the negation of this hypothesis in order to establish that S is true. If we affirm the hypothesis, then we will prove that S is false. In the course of either of these arguments, we repeatedly hypothesize and evaluate the truth-value of each, and proceed until we have with a hypothesis that corroborates or denies the parent hypothesis and so renders the statement as either true or false.
However, if a rhetorical tautology cannot be assumed to constitute a reason (because it is a repetition of meaning), and if Wittgenstein’s proposition that tautologies are statements deducible logically and therefore meaningless is true, then the tenets of propositional logic are neither tautologies nor analytic truths.
Moreover, no literal significance can be assigned to logically valid statements according to Sir Ayer! In this context, the existence of any literal significance of logically valid statements depends not on their analytic proposition but their synthetic proposition – as affirmed by Sir Ayer. (Here, according to George Berkeley: “esse est percipi”!)
Curiosity can be devastating on the pocket. Curiosity without complete awareness has the likelihood of turning fatal.
At first, for example, there was nothing. Then, there was a book called The Feynman Lectures on Physics (Vol. 3) (Rs. 214) in class XII. Then, there was great interest centered on the man named Richard Feynman, and so, another book followed: Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Rs. 346) By the time I’d finished reading it, I was introduced to that argumentative British coot named David Hume, whose Selected Essays (Rs. 425) sparked my initial wonderment on logical positivism as well as torpor-inducing verbosity (in these terms, his only peer is Thomas Pynchon (Against the Day, Rs. 800), and I often wonder why many call for his nomination for a Nobel Prize in literature. The Prize is awarded to good writers, right? Sure, he writes grandiose stuff and explores sensations and times abstract to everyone else with heart-warming clarity, but by god do you have to have a big attention span to digest it! In contrast: Vargas Llosa!).
I realized that if I had to follow what Hume had to say, and then Rawls, and then Sen (The Idea of Justice, Rs. 374) and Kuhn (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Rs. 169 – the subject of my PG-diploma’s thesis) and Kant, and then Schopenhauer, Berkeley and Wittgenstein, I’d either have to study philosophy after school and spend the rest of my days in penurate thought or I’d have to become rich and spend the rest of my days buying books while not focusing on work.
An optimum course of action presented itself. I had to specialize.
But how does one choose the title of that school of thought that one finds agreeable without perusing the doctrines of all the schools on offer? I was back to square one. Then, someone suggested reading The Story of Philosophy (Rs. 230) by Will Durant. When I picked up a copy at a roadside bookstore, I suspected its innards had been pirated, too: the book would have been more suited in the hands of one in need of a quick-reference tool; the book didn’t think; the book wasn’t the interlocutor I was hoping it would be.
I wanted dialogue, I wanted dialectic in the context of Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus‘ thesis (Systems of Speculative Ethics as translated by Alfred Edersheim, 1854 – corresponding to System of Speculative Philosophy by G.W.F. Hegel). I wanted the evolution of Plato (The Republic, Rs. 200), Aristotle (Poetics, Rs. 200), Marcus Aurelius (Meditations, Rs. 200). That was when I chanced upon George Berkeley’s Principles of Human Knowledge (Rs.225)and Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous (Rs. 709). Epistemology began then to take shape; until that moment, however, it was difficult to understand the inherently understood element as anything but active-thought. It’s ontology started to become clear – and not like it did in the context of The Architecture of Language by A. Noam Chomsky (Rs. 175), which, to me, still was the crowning glory of naturalist thought.
Where does the knowledge, “the truth”, of law arise from? What is the modality within which it finds realization? Could there exist an epistemological variable (empirically speaking) the evaluation of which represents a difference between the cognitive value of a statement of truth and that of a statement of law? Are truths simply objective reasons whose truth-value may or may not be verifiable?
Upon the consumption of each book, a pattern became evident: all philosophers, and their every hypothesis, converged on some closely interrelated quantum mechanical concepts.
Are the mind and body one? Does there exist an absolute frame of reference? Is there a unified theory at all?
Around the same time, I came to the conclusion that advanced physics held the answers to most ontological questions – as I have come to understand it must. Somewhere-somewhen in the continuum, the observable and the unobservable have to converge, coalesce into a single proto-form, their constituents fuse in the environment afforded them to yield their proto-reactants. Otherwise, the first law of thermodynamics would stand violated!
However, keeping up with quantum mechanics would be difficult for one very obvious reason: I was a rookie, and it was a contemporary area of intense research. To solve for this, I started with studying the subject’s most pragmatic parts: Introduction to Quantum Mechanics by Powell & Crasemann (Rs. 220), Solid State Physics by Ashcroft & Mermin (Rs. 420), Quantum Electrodynamics by Richard Feynman (Rs. 266), and Electromagnetic Systems and Radiating Waves by Jordan & Balmain (Rs. 207) were handy viaducts. Not like there weren’t any terrors in between, such as Lecture Notes on Elementary Topology and Geometryby Singer & Thorpe.
At the same time, exotic discoveries were being made: at particle colliders, optical research facilities, within deep space by ground-based interstellar probes, within the minds of souls more curious than mine. Good for me, the literature corresponding to all these discoveries was to be found in one place: the arXiv pre-print servers (the access to which costs all of nothing). These discoveries included quantum teleportation, room-temperature superconductivity, supercomputers, metamaterials, and advancements in ferromagnetic storage systems.
(I also was responsible for discovering some phenomena exotic purely to me in this period: cellular automata and computation theory – which I experimented with using Golly and Mirek’s Cellebration, and fuzzy logic systems and their application in robotics – experimented with using the Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio.)
What did these discoveries have to do with Hume’s positivism? That I could stuff 1 gigabyte’s worth of data within an inch-long row of particles championed empiricism, I suppose, but beyond that, the concepts’ marriage seemed to demand the inception of a swath of interdisciplinary thought. I could not go back, however, so I ploughed on.
I was trapped in the spaces between books, between different moments in history, in time, a totalistic cellular automaton whose different avatars were simply different degrees of doubt.Because of reality’s denial of accommodation to manifestations of tautologies and contradictions, so was I trapped within the shortcomings of all men and women.
A Brief History of Time (Rs. 245) did not help – Hawking succeeded splendidly in leaving me with more questions than answers – (Gravitation and Cosmology: Principles and Applications of the General Theory of Relativity by Steven Weinberg (Rs. 525) answered some of them), The Language Instinct by Harvard-boy Steven Pinker (Rs. 450) charted the better courses of rationality into sociology and anthropology (whereas my intuition that Arundhati Roy would reward governance with a similar fashion of rational unknotting was proved expensively very right: Algebra of Infinite Justice, at Rs. 302, lays bare all the paradoxes that make India India).
For literature, of course, there were Orhan Pamuk and Umberto Eco, Lord Tennyson and Sylvia Plath, de Beauvoir, le Guin and Abbott (My Name is Red (Rs. … Whatever, it doesn’t matter!), The Name of the Rose, and The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loanaare to be cherished, especially the last for its non-linear narration and the strange parallels waiting to be drawn with hermeneutics, such as one delineated on by E.H. Carr in his What Is History?) to fall in love with (Plath’s works, of course, were an excursion into the unexplored… in a manner of speaking, just as le Guin’s imagination and Abbott’s commentary are labours unto the familiar).
Learn to like ebooks. Or turn poor.
Ultimately, that was all that I learnt. Quite romantic though that being an autodidact may sound, the assumption of its mantle involves the Herculean task of braiding all that one learns into a single spine of knowledge. The more you learn, the farther you are from where you started, the even more you have learnt, the more ambitious you get… I cannot foresee an end.
Currently, I am reading One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Soviet-era exile Alexander Solzhenitsyn (war-time dystopian fiction became a favourite along the way after reading a history of firearms in Russia, a history of science and technology in Islam, How Things Work gifted to me by my father when I was 11, and Science and Civilisation in China by Needham & Gwei-Djen (Rs. 6,374 – OK, now it matters)) and Current Trends in Science: Platinum Jubilee Edition – Indian Academy of Sciences, lent to me by Dr. G. Baskaran. At each stage, a lesson to be learnt about the universe is learnt, a minuscule piece told in the guise of one author’s experiences and deductions to fit into a supermassive framework of information that has to be used by another’s intelligence. A daunting task.
How many things will pass for money? Investment and disinvestment are both aimed at regulating growth from one sector to another, but at higher benefit-to-cost ratios, such moves will fail.
Two important cases in point: cap-and-trade in reducing GHG emissions and levying a fee to pursue unauthorized constructions (in cities like Chennai).
The confounding factors are posterity and space: once consumed, the machine cannot be reversed unless there is more investment/sanctioning.
Incorrigible, indeterminable, the stately constant walks alone: there are none to surmount her prevalence, none in whose company she may sit and chat and sip some tea. Of course, there was e, but e was a few worlds away at 2.71. She was truly by herself, a severe face of changelessness to poets and adventurers, a reassuring one of constancy to mathematicians and thinkers, a staid figure in an arena of labouring laws.
According to those loyal to her, however, the most beautiful of the daughters of Nature.
Pi. 3.14159…
Today is World Pi Approximation Day. It’s a day celebrating the value 22/7, which is as close as a crass fraction can get to beauty, a purveyor of simulacra, vile manufacturer of nostalgia, of polyurethane histories and plastic memories. Pi… cannot ever be fully understood, and isn’t meant to be. She walks in quiet grace, abandoning perfect arcs meandering in her wake, and it is there that mere mortals such as ourselves discover her shadow seeping into the infinite omnipotence.
