Writing

 I am planning to write something everyday. That's a difficult job when there is so much stuff to take care of. But, writing is important. It is difficult to write something that is catches a reader's attention. My first year in the US, we had some friends over at our house and one of them forgot their first three books of Harry Potter at my home. The next day me and my roommate were going to the library to study.  I was waiting near the door for my friend when he was collecting his stuff. As I had nothing better to do (there were no smartphones at that time), I picked up the 1st Harry Potter book. I had barely read a paragraph and I was hooked. There was no stopping then. I ended up reading the first six books and eagerly waited for the last one to be released. That's the power of writing. I have always felt that one important thing that kids should learn early is how to read. If one has the ability to read and comprehend, then they have to power to get back in their studies if they are behind. But, I now feel that along with a good ability to read, one should develop the ability to write coherent essays early in their childhood and should continue to write. That's a great skill. A typical research proposal is 15 pages long, but it is so difficult to write. A reason is that to write the research ideas that you are still cultivating, you need to understand what has already been done. That requires a whole lot of reading before you start writing. Once you have the ideas in mind, you put them on paper - something interesting happens then. The mere act of writing the research approach that you have in mind allows you to scrutinize the idea. Something that appears clear in mind often comes out muddy when written. It is something like introspection. We do not introspect for most hours of the day, but we almost always have some thoughts in our mind. So, most of our thoughts are never scrutinized. And so one never evaluates the subconscious emotions behind those thoughts. Nor one evaluates the biases hidden in these thoughts. If we write all our thoughts, we are making them more concrete, and revisiting them slowly. That's when the thoughts get evaluated. A friend of mine is a painter. He asked me, "do you know how many paintings did Picasso paint?". "No idea". He gave me some numbers to work on - suppose one paints X paintings per week, then how many paintings will the person paint? What he was telling me was that Picasso was Picasso because he had painted some insane number of paintings in his life. Some became masterpieces. But, you do not start by painting masterpieces. You paint and paint, like a running train. You get better and better at it. Your paintings become deeper and more elaborate. There is no act of humans that does not require persistent work.

History of Science

 March 2007. I looked out of the window of the airplane to see the snow-covered fields of Denver, Colorado where I was flying in to attend my first American Physical Society (APS) annual conference. I was quite determined to make good of this opportunity. I had the plan to attend all talks related to "behavior of water in confinement", which was my research project at that time. Next on the priority list was all talks related to protein adsorption and protein folding, followed by talks on new simulation methods. If I would not find talks on any of these topics during a time-slot then I had decided to attend any session that captures my curiosity. That was the plan and I followed it quite religiously for the first three days. On the afternoon of the fourth day, I did come across a time-slot wherein I could not find any talks related to the topics of my interest. So, I selected a session which sounded interesting, while totally not related to my field of research. I do not recall the name of the session, but this session has remained vividly in my memory for the last 14 years. The researchers were performing experiments in which they were dropping strips of paper from a height and were using slow-motion camera to capture the motion of the strips. They were developing numerical solutions to describe the motion of strips of paper falling down in air. Interestingly, this work was sponsored by DARPA - the research division of the army of the United States. NASA has been sending missions to moon and far-away planets, F-16 and 18s are soaring the skies and we do not understand how a strip of paper falls under the action of gravity in air. Interesting. The session led an indelible impression on me. It is important to understand what we know and what we do not. The scientists know that there are simple-looking phenomena that we do not understand. Interestingly, it is the non-scientists who think that we know a lot more than we actually do. When I started my graduate studies, I got to know that Prof. X works on studying the properties of water. Water! Don't we know everything about water already? I asked myself. Fast forward five years and I attended a conference on water where the leading scientists of the world were arguing about the structure of water and the debate got hot a few times. 

Our theories, our knowledge of science is constantly being updated and what we think of something as true today may turn out to be quite wrong in the future. It may be useful to learn about how scientific ideas evolved over time. Most of us know about the story of ether that was thought to be permeating the empty space, or the story of black-body radiation that led to quantum mechanics. Around a century back, scientists believed that chemical reactions occur because different molecules have different shapes - hydrogen is a ball, oxygen is donut shaped and so two hydrogen balls fit well on both sides of the donut to form water. We now know that this picture is incorrect but I would be careful to say whether our current picture is completely correct. I think I have painted a gloomy picture. Should we throw away our science books? No! Our precision and accuracy of experimentally probing physical systems have been steadily improving. Computational research has grown quite rapidly and is aiding our understanding. We may not completely understand quantum mechanics, but we do have a mathematical structure for it that describes quantum phenomena quite accurately. The number of people pursuing research has been growing. The amount of research money being invested has also been overall rising at the global level. Research is shared digitally and is not obscurely available only in few libraries of the world. At Intel, we used to say that "not all zeros are the same", implying that at the start of a new technology, even though our yield for working microprocessors remains zero for long periods, but we keep making improvements in removing defects. Similarly, all "lack of understanding" is not the same.