Ramblings

I was just on the phone talking to Harshini, and she was telling me about the discussion they had in BU today. I asked her, " What do you think about quantum mechanics?", and she said " What do you mean?". I told her that somehow deep down inside I felt Quantum Mechanics was wrong. I really don't know much about Quantum Mechanics to actually say that but then it was just a kind of an intuitive feeling. Anyway, she replied saying, " You Einsteinians!".
Well, I may be a little biased but then I have my reasons. When I first started out reading popular articles as a kid who was fascinated by science, it was quantum mechanics and string theory that seemed more appealing ( the things about teleportation, extra dimensions etc). To be fair, relativity had its own attractions. I started working on special relativity first I guess because of its mathematical simplicity. It's just amazing being able to show that time slows when things move just using high school algebra. But, I have NO idea about how or what drove me to even consider working something as sophisticated as the general theory of relativity. Not to say that I know much about it, I really don't. Considering that I was very weak ( still am ) at mathematics and school physics, it surprises me to no end that I actually had the guts to work out a few things in gtr. I think it was its beauty that blinded me and I just couldn't see any of my weaknesses or any other problems in front of it. I don't know what Einstein's Field equations mean, but still when I look at them I get goosebumps all over me.

How could a man, sitting in a patent office, having never even looked through a binocular predict that the planet mercury's orbit will undergo a shift and give precise calculations showing it? How could he predict that GRAVITY could bend the path of LIGHT? That Gravity could slow down TIME? And the technology was far from even being able to confirm these predictions. And all he knew was that Newton's laws worked pretty well and that the speed of light is same for all inertial observers. To be fair, he also knew that Galileo showed that objects of different masses fall with the same acceleration. Who would have thought that a few facts like these could lead to a theory that predicted black holes, to be only confirmed a few years ago.  Unparalleled elegance, I would say.

I find it really hard to find that I don't have many around me to discuss this with wonderful thing with. Sometimes it seems that happiness is only real when shared. I was the happiest while talking about it during the lecture sessions in BU. Well, I don't think that's going to happen for a while. Entrance exams coming up. Prof. Vishweshwara, Joseph Samuel, Lee Smolin, Carlo Rovelli, Abhay Ashtekar are a few people I know who have done it all in relativity. What I would give to just exchange a few words with them. I was crazy about Chandrashekar sir the moment I heard he had seen Lee Smolin.

Lee Smolin and Carlo rovelli are currently working on Quantum Gravity. Rovelli formulated a new approach known as Relational Quantum Mechanics. Abhay Ashtekar formulated general relativity by creating self-dual variables so that you could have a hamiltonian (a.k.a Ashtekar Variables). And Lee smolin, well, you will be hearing a lot about him from me, and a I will be quoting a lot from his books. And here is the first,
from his book, The Trouble With Physics,

" This is the story of a quest to understand nature at its deepest level. Its protagonists are the scientists who are labouring to extend our knowledge of the basic laws of physics. The period of time I will address - roughly since 1975 - is the span of my own professional career as a theoretical physicist. It may also be the strangest and most frustrating period in the history of physics since Kepler and Galileo began the practise of our craft four hundred years ago.
The story I will tell could be read by some as a tragedy. To put it bluntly - and to give away the punch line - we have failed. We inherited a science, physics, that had been progressing so fast for long that it was often taken as the model for how other kinds of science should be done. For more than two centuries, until the present period, our understanding of the laws of nature expanded rapidly. But today, despite our best efforts, what we know for certain about these laws is no more than what we knew back in the 1970's.
How unusual is it for three decades to pass without major progress in fundamental physics? Even if we look back more than two hundred years, to a time when science was the concern mostly of wealthy amateurs, it is unprecedented. Since at least the late eighteenth century, significant progress has been made on crucial questions every quarter century".   - Lee Smolin (The Trouble With Physics)

Well, in a less elaborate way, all this can be said by quoting G Ramchandra's one sentence "Yen agillapa." We laughed it off then but I think its time for us to do something. Is it the Education system? Is it the research Institutes? Do we even Care?
How long is it just going to be about clearing entrance exams and worrying about how many papers are being submitted per month?
Ofcourse, there are a lot of us who are very optimistic about the system and that it is changing. But I guess hope is a luxury we cannot afford right now. It seems the time has come to use our strengths and collective differences in a harmonious way. To what end? I don't know. But it's the journey that matters, not the destination.