Voices

I watched Interstellar two days after it was released on a lazy Sunday morning with a big fat tub of popcorn and one of my closest friends with me in a chilly multiplex.That isn't where our story begins though. That Friday when the movie was released  my brother had threatened to spill the bean and later on after watching it all I heard from him was something akin to a 'Meh'. So much for expectations ! Being from a place where you overhear people discuss string theory over steamy idlis I had the opportunity to talk to a few very different people about the movie. One of my friends who is an aspiring physicist told me that he found the movie appalling. It would have been okay if it had chosen to show light sabres or warp or any impossibility like the Star Trek/Wars series which might be explained by future technology and is put in an already non-realistic environment. However interstellar had goofed up already know things; it had shown things that we know fo...

I'm just done with the last book in the Magician's trilogy by Lev Grossman : "The Magician's Land".  It wouldn't be fair if I did not write about the whole series, but that will have to wait for another day. I'm a big fan of fantasy series and have tried my hand at reading many; Harry Potter, HPMOR, Inheritance Cycle, Narnia, Radiance and Luminosity and so on.. Magician's is one of the few that stood out. The qualities that made it stand out such as the gritty reality you encounter in each book, the humanness and imperfections of each character, questions on what this alternate reality would do to the human world and what would people with such a power do with their lives (unlike the pursuit of say, defeating a mysterious dark lord and nothing thereafter!), are still there in the last book. It achieves what many series' fail to do: it lets the main character grow up naturally and become someone else, someone different from who set o...

Credits : Photos.com A couple snuggled into each other on a park bench, a four year old boy swinging between the arms of his parents, two boys threading through the traffic in their grey uniforms, shouting at each other and anyone who cares to listen or the baby girl above in the arms of her father; these are some of the things that most of us see, most probably more often that not. How people interact with each other is perhaps one of the most interesting things you can observe (without creeping them out, of course!), that too tirelessly. I do this too, when I feel lost or confused about things going on in my life (more on that later) but that isn't what this post is attributed to; it is to point out a few rather worrying unifying features I've found in my country's social fabric. Made more worrisome by the fact that it is like long-term depression; you've had it for so long that it feels like a part of yourself. I don't know how much of this is...

Before I go back to the adventures with tetrahedrane, I thought I would take a short break to talk about group theory. I started learning group theory seriously some time back, as a part of chemistry course. Till now I had seen notations like \(D_{h}\)and \(T_{d}\) and had secretly wondered what they were with a vague feeling that they somehow represented what the molecule looked like. My footing in rigorous math is at best questionable, so pardon me wherever I might not be that precise. Groups are an abstract collections of things/objects (as it might be evident from the name) with a particular operations defines between elements (like addition or multiplication) that obey particular properties. The most obvious and oldest of groups are things known as rotation groups. They are what they sound like: groups which are collection of all the rotations you can do. For example Euler's theorem says that any rotations of an object be it a chair or a planet where a point in the body r...

I came across this very interesting hydrocarbon a couple of weeks back. It's called a platonic hydrocarbon; not the platonic of platonic relationships that of platonic solids of the diamond and methane fame :).  A platonic solid is quite symmetric like a cube,;the loose definition being that the number or faces intersecting at each vertex is the same and each face has the same shape and proportions like square faces of a cube. Time for the first look ! Looks very simple doesn't it ? Now you would be wondering if you have seen this somewhere ? If someone had told you that x or y was made with tetrahedrane and in a weak moment you forgot ? Don't worry ;) No one has seen this because it hasn't been made yet. Yes, this simple molecule has been eluding people in lab coats and goggles for quite some time. The reasons for this are quite interesting. The simple answer is that the molecule has angle strain, and while you're at it, truckloads and truckloads of i...

Yes you heard it right !, I'm back, finally ! I had a vision sneak upon me, like how it did on Peter Parker in Amazing Spider man 2. He's sitting at home, looking at photos of Mary, reminiscing, sullen and definitely not spider man. He comes across a video of her speaking about the future and he realizes that the world is still out there. Despite her not being a part of it, its still beautiful, and it still needs spider man. I had a similar epiphany today. I realized that despite what happened, despite how broken I feel, there is tomorrow. There are places waiting to be explored, theorems and molecules waiting to be discovered and stories waiting to be told. I might not be the same person who I was, but I hope this time I become something more, someone more deep and passionate. I want to wake up each day and jump out of my bed; literally ! :D

For a long a long time a particular feeling had been rearing its my head in my life again and again. It wasn't sad or depressing, just a bit unsettling, an unspoken feeling that something isn't quite right, that there is a pawn somewhere on the board, out of place, waiting to be taken. Over and over it would disappear and I would think it went away because I figured out why: but always it came back. I don't know if this is one of those moments of temporary madness when I feel I have it all down, but I feel its real and if it is I'm in for a tough but exciting journey that I am about to embark on even though my current abilities are at best, questionable. This will be, hopefully ( what I would do without this word ! :) ) first of many posts that are to come, sort of a travelogue ! I know this calls for a bigger prologue, but now the prospects of completing the journey are quite slim and I don't want to spoil it with expectations. I apologize for all the shortcomings...

 I don't remember when I read my first fantasy novel. As far as my recollection goes, those distant days have gone into the dark mists of time and never wandered back. Hearing my father narrate the adventures of Mowgli, Baloo, Bagheera and of course Kaa is one of my earliest memories. After that the worlds which I have been a part of are too many to list yet I will try to list a few :), Eragon Cycle all the way to 'Inheritance', Ameer Hamsa and Mahabharatha and its cohorts (of very questionable beliefs when I look back upon them), bits of Harry Potter and Percy Jackson, Magicians Series by Lev Grossman, Firefly, Avatar, Jumanji and recently HPMOR (Harry Potter and Methods of Rationality). It would be a great injustice to discount the works like 'Around the World in 80 days', 'Nautilus' , SHE and Ayesha , House MD ( :D) and numerous others of this league. Even though they're not called fantasy per se, they do transport you to a different world full of ...

Seems like a weird title doesn't it ? For those of you who are familiar with the painfully struggling manga Bleach, this name is an inadequate effort to emulate the awesome sounding "Shattered Shaft 2" :)  And sadly, my situation is not much different from Ichigo's. He was trapped in a well with his soul severed from his body and if he did not get out of the well within a specified time (sounds very very impossible ) he would turn into a monster feeding on other people. (Some people read manga, get over it !) A very scary thought looming in my mind is the fact that I can compare everything in the sentence above to the mess/opportunity (I know I'm being way too optimistic here, still :) ), from the top of my head. For those of you who are wondering what this might be about, I'll phrase it simply in my sister's words "More than my fair share of shit coming my way in life". I had written something a few months back in December when I was in ...

One day I read something a person whom I loved a lot wrote about autumn. I remember wondering then ‘Wow, it would be nice to talk to the person who wrote this!’ I did it talk to that person but more often than not I could only see the face that hid that wonderful person whom I had seen through that writing. However I still do immensely like that short yet crispy piece of prose about autumn and that is what got me writing this :) I had come here this morning, thinking I would begin my slightly dreadful-yet-exciting battle with Reif to understand Statistical Mechanics, sitting under a tree, away from all the worries of the world. When I got here, I was greeted by a mat of golden flowers, chess boarded by leaking sunlight, a light breeze and smells and sounds of ancient and majestic trees on a glorious day. I sat down and was greeted by a confluence of light and colors! A tall Gulmohar battling with a centenarian pavement and winning, not a bit behind in its full blown orang...

Facing identity crises is one of the ongoing battles of all our lives. Our sense of identity is supposed to be (and I think it is to some extant) something that makes us humans. A large part of our life is spent trying to define who we are. All of us Batman fans will never forget the line " It's not who we are underneath, but what we do that defines us. " In a sense it is funny how we struggle and work in cubicles and take to streets just to define who we are. How would life have been if there was no sense of identity ? Moving on that from very interesting question I want to talk about (a bit selfishly I admit :D ) about an identity crisis that is quite different from others. I have my fair share of the the age related ones but this one is quite different. I can only start talking about it by not talking about it :D These are some of the photos I took last time I went home. Walking into the sunset in the last photo are my parents <3. This is where...

What is time ? Such an elementary question isn't it ? Time one thing that every human being on this planet share. I don't think there will be any language that doesn't have a word for time. We have an intuitive understanding of time as something that moves in one direction at an assumed uniform speed and we have no choice but to move forward with it. If you were to try and explain what is time more specifically, you would find it extremely hard because there is nothing else like it in our sphere of experience. Time is time, you don't have other words can break that down anymore. In science till the time of Einstein and Lorentz, time was assumed an invariant and absolute quantity, meaning that it 'flowed' past at a uniform rate and which was shared by everyone. Think of a cosmic network of clocks with everyone or at each point in space, set to the same time and time moving forward at the same rate for everyone so that their clocks would agree at any point. T...

Only sound that punctuated the silence was the not so distant blare of horns and screeches of brakes of trucks and cars on the nearby road. No wind blew to rustle the leaves. I had had a pretty hard day, spending most of it on my legs which were accustomed to sitting for the past few years. It was hot and sweltering and there seemed to be no way out of it. On top of this, the idea of having Aloe Vera tea had, not surprisingly backfired, soaking me even more. There was a ton of work to do and I couldn't muster myself to even lift a pencil. Then it happened. It all began with an innocuous swish of wind rattling my window panes. It only took a moment for me to recognize the good old wind which used to blow in May during my childhood, the one which got all of us out into the porch in anticipation :) It blew again and again and the tamarind leaves danced in anticipation shattering the silence into thousand broken pieces. It fell drop by drop, slow at first and then a torrent coolin...

Its been a long time since I've written anything here because I'm having too much on my plate now, and even now my plate hasn't cleared up that much, but I need this. I don't know if I'll be able to actually write this, to say what I really want to say, to go to the end because its associated with so many things I've been trying to make sense of, to get over or to see past if possible; the kind of things that keep you awake in your bed at 2'o'clock in the night after the lights go out. What is trust ? Its probably futile to put try put trust in a straightjacket since it is so many different things for different people. So I'll focus on one very subtle kind of thing that I see as trust and which I feel goes often unnoticed.This kind of trust cannot exist without at least two parties, so we'll have to go back to look at how we interact with people to get an idea of what this subtle aspect of trust is. We as human beings have systems like mir...

'Physical Reality', sounds strange doesn't it ? Is there a reality that is not physical ? You think to yourself; 'This could be one of those strange terms that specialists who come to speak on Chnadrayan or LHC might use!'. Luckily it isn't. It's just a complex word for Feynman's Red ball that does weird stuff. One of the things I love to do is to read up Physics. After being introduced to 'Advanced Physics' so to speak (well better than +2 at least) I have found it to be full of equations of all kind. You want to model a pendulum swinging or a coconut falling, you just make a few (or a lot sometimes :) ) assumptions, then write down equations which deals with whatever quantities you want and try to solve them and what they say. Looking at this, it is quite tempting to say that solving equations is physics. Even I did think that for a while. But now what I've started to think (might be wrong though) is that equations just summarize a pictu...