Genie in the bottle

 I have a Genie who is everywhere in my room. But when I call upon the Genie, it collapses to a single location, and stays at that location before diffusing back to fill the entire room. Just one call, and it collapses to a point, no matter how large the room is. Is it possible? How can a person educated in science say such non-sensical things? But replace Genie with "electron" and this idea forms the basic tenet of quantum mechanics. This is called collapse of the wavefunction. It has been estabished as the truth through numerous experiments. It defies our common experience of the macroscopic world. 

I have two Genies now - one on Mars and one on Venus. They have equal probability of being red or blue. But, if I look at the Genie on Mars and it turns out as red, the Genie on Venus will also turn out red - without doubt. How is it possible?  Of course, I am talking about entanglement. It's a pretty mind-boggling concept. Now, entanglement has become the basis of quantum computers. The world around us is more strange than our perception of it. What else is out there? I believe a lot - because these ideas have been recently discovered, and these are sprouts of a few genius minds. There may be concepts that our little minds can never fanthom. 

Hogwarts in India

 The Hogwarts Express comes to a halt and wizard students get off to start their new school year. They enter the Grand Hall and the dining room, and large quantities of delicious food of different varieties appear on the table magically. In the later years, the students learn that it is the house elves who are toiling hard to prepare the food in an underground, hidden kitchen. Magic! Something that we will never witness in real life. Wrong! It is part of our daily lives in India. Whenever I am visiting New Delhi, I find that things and services are magically made available by just a tap on an app or a phone call - whether you want to have a Bangalore biryani, a Lucknow kachori, a pan as soon as you have finished your meal, or would like someone to pick up a package and deliver it in a day to another city. India is a world of wizards and house elves. The house elves run door-to-door delivering services at breakneck speeds. The wizards are tapping the right apps like charms from their wand.  

Childhood memories wrapped in a research paper

 Last week, my student emailed me a research paper that was relevant to her work. Upon opening the paper, I found that it was written by two professors of IIT Bombay in the late 1980s. It is an elegant paper, so much so that we are finding it useful for the research being done in 2023, and I wondered about the amazing work that these professors did with little resources. But, the research paper also brought back the happy childhood memories - I sitting on the floor of my home in Delhi on a summer day, and wind blowing through the open gallery doors into our drawing room. Some dust on the floor. The coolness of the floor making it a comfortable place to sit. I wondered how important it is for a childhood to be happy. When you encounter something that takes you back to your old memories, and you feel happy, content, and then remember a funny event that happened during those days and you start laughing. 

Kunal Kamra and the Chocolate Factory

On the onset, I would first acknowledge that Kunal Kamra is a winner. No doubt about it. Otherwise, why would I be writing a blog on him. He calls himself a comedian. But he lacks the quintessential quality of being a comedian - humor. How do I know? I recently watched his invective-laden attempt at a stand-up comedy. Did not find him funny at all. Of course, I watched him because of the stunt he pulled off so successfully a few months back. Few months back, nobody knew KK. One day, KK was supposed to be flying to Lucknow. It was just like any other normal day. Little did he know that his flight ticket was bigger than what Charlie had won for the chocolate factory. It was bigger to him than the Peter-Parker-bit-by-spider-turned-into-spiderman event. Edit: "few months" is now a few years. This blog was originally written some years back. 

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.

Ramanujan and Shakuntala Devi

Ramanujan had a phenomenal ability in mathematical logic. Shakuntala Devi had the ability to perform mind-boggling calculations at a breath-taking pace.We can learn many things from knowing that humans like Ramanujan and Shakuntala existed. One is that there is a configuration of our brain that can result in such super-human abilities. Both Ramanujan and Shakuntala lived pretty normal life otherwise. This tells us is that a normal brain is not at a Pareto optimal level. Which is good news because it means that one does not have to sacrifice any mental functionality to achieve the abilities of Ramanujan or Shakuntala Devi. Another observation - they were both born in pre-independent India in poor families. Ramanujan received his education nothing out of the ordinary. Shakuntala Devi was not formally educated in school. This implies that starting your kids early in the tried-and-tested mechanisms of teaching so that they are successful in school early in their lives may not be optimal. It is low-risk strategy which will dumb down kids.

Brain is a physical object after-all. And, it operates by sending signals between its millions of neurons. This implies that there is a certain connectivity and configuration of neutrons that can allow one to think like Ramanujan or do calculations like Shakuntala. Can we design such a brain? Not at present, but maybe in the future. What do we need? We need to first figure out what is the critical size of the configuration of neurons that needs to be trained. Ideally, one would like to tailor the entire brain, but that may not be practically feasible. Once we know the critical size of connections that we need to optimize, then we need to figure out what to optimize. Which configuration results in a Ramanujan brain? Is that configuration unique? It is most likely not unique, because, first, in that case the probability of existence of Ramanujan becomes diminishingly small. Secondly, that would mean that any new experience or learning would change this configuration and the brain will become sub-optimal again. So, an ensemble of configurations should work. Great! But, what is the objective function that should be optimized? I do not think we know the answer of this one as well. Once we have figured out these questions, then it comes to the logistic part of physically designing such a configuration. How do we assemble neurons in a configuration? We will probably not start attaching single neuron to others from scratch. That's not possible. We will probably need to scan thousands of brains for their connectivity and select candidates that have closely related networks. This exercise will also tell us if the brain's ability correlates positively as we move towards the optimal configuration in a continuous manner, or will we see a step-change in the intelligence. If the process of optimization of networks is invasive, one needs to somehow grow that brain in-vitro. Then, we start optimizing the connections.