07 May 2013
A Significant Remorse
Written on 7 May 2013
Regrets are good, aren’t they? They make you if you take them seriously. But this happens in space. But no possibilities whatsoever without the time facet of our puzzling space-time! Time usually demotivates you with its constant winning in the race. I fell into a similar regret recently. I felt I lost my time.
I had an electricity problem at my place last weekend, and like most Indians do, I called for an electrician. He spent about 45 minutes in uncovering all the switch boards, plug inlets, ceiling fan connections, on the walls, on the ceiling and allover. The problem was that a light in our kitchen was burnt regularly. And he found that a network of wires was misconnected in one of our bedrooms which caused the problem in kitchen. He explained in his lay terms why and how the problem persisted. I was amazed.
He was not even halfway educated, formally. But he was so perfect in searching, finding and solving the root cause of a problem. I had 2 questions in my mind bee-buzzing and troubling me for the rest of the day. My wife understood what I was going through, but did not react, maybe because she was in a similar situation. Indian housewife culture doesn’t give her the practice of even thinking of these issues. But I shared with her my frustration, she was full of empathy.
One, why did I have to call for an electrician, without even attempting to see what went wrong? I had the necessary equipment in my hold. Then why did I choose for an alternative? I am sure it was not laziness, as I just finished fitting the heavy dismantled king size bed in the bedroom. What then is wrong with my attitude?
Two, by the time I got the first question running around, I understood what exactly was troubling me. What troubled me was the fact that I am a physics graduate with considerable amount of research experience. Needless to say, my head started crunching into my shoulders further than before and my shoulders drooped. On what grounds that electrician who cannot write even a blog article like me could defy and unfit me so brutally?
Another thing, following this incident, I wrote a wonderful promotional article for an official cause recently, and I got it reviewed and edited by one my leaders. The point is, we both belong to similar age, but educated in two different countries. How on earth this person is so perfect with such writing and editing abilities when we both had similar qualifications and experiences? All these things led me to an understanding. I did not allow my education touch me. Meaning, I never applied it the way it was supposed to be.
I remember from my experience of spending quite some time in the US, a family in a small remote town of Mississippi. The family consists of a married couple at their sweet sixties, as their children got well settled far away. They are two-fold happy in their life: one, as their children are well settled; two, they got their space back after a long tiring journey of settling their children, which most of us loose when kids come into our picture frame. This old couple has a grand but cute wooden villa on a small hilltop of altitude not more than 50 m from the ground around it. They own the whole hill very flat in its appearance. They have a car garage in the backyard, as the husband is crazy in mantling and dismantling cars. To an utter shock, when I met them, he recently purchased a Chevrolet racing engine and fitted it into his 1955 model antique coupe. He gave it to me for a drive too and explained how I should kick the gas (accelerator) especially on a racing engine. Holding the steering after hitting hard on the gas was an out-of-the-world experience.
And they owned one angelic garden beside the house grown and escorted by the lady lord. They own 4 cars besides a caravan. They have too many wall-hangings, ceiling-hangings, decorative sculptures made of wood all over the space. The point is, almost everything I mentioned above including the whole body of the house, the couple constructed them with their own hands without a third person. Especially the husband can do plumbing, carpentry, electric works, mechanical works, professional works, cooking, writing, racing, and swimming besides high quality pun and sense of humor.
I also remember one of my British friends asked me one day to drill a hole into a podium when we both were trying to set up the stage for a professional event at the workplace. I said,
“What?”
It was something I never did. But he trained me and I finally did it. So my work experience increased by 3 holes on a wooden podium.
Two things to meditate on: one, I did not allow my education affect me; and two, I was only taught but I was not trained.
Do you want me say anything more? How different is our education here from countries like US, UK, Japan or Europe? This is the difference. In India, we have a handful of people who fall in this kind of truly-educated bracket. I am not one of them. Can I ever be in future?
Yes I can. At least if I drive my 2 year old daughter into this bracket!
13 Feb 2013
A Test to our Imagination
Written on 13 Feb 2013. Originally published @ Durofy
It’s all in the center!
To hurl a screw to the Earth’s core needs energies more than a billion times those required to leave a rocket out of our atmosphere.
Imagine that you are quite closer to the outer core of the earth and walking through a 5 kilometer long tunnel whose diameter is just a few centimeters above your height. For our easy reference, we make the trip from east to west, for instance. First thing to note here is, it is a tunnel so it is spherical. After traveling half the way, defining up-down, left-right and forward-backward becomes mindbogglingly difficult, if not downright impossible. (Don’t worry about the light; we make sure there is enough lighting system in there!)
Now let’s say, you reached the end of the 5 km length but it connects to another tunnel whose diameter is like a kilometer. That is to say, you have only two options ‘ one, to show your back to it thinking enough is enough; or two, to jump on a surface half a kilometer below you, almost an abyss. Believe that you are a superman with abnormal powers. So you decide to jump as you know nothing happens to you.
Here is the challenge! You do not possess powers sufficient to go against gravity or magnetic fields which are at their paramount performance there. All you know is if you jump, you must apparently fall, I mean fall down. You are just a step away from the edge of your little tunnel and you hit a small stone strong enough for it to fall into the new wider tunnel. Oooh! Surprise, surprise! In fact, eerie and scary! The stone did not go down, it went up. Glad that you actually observed it before jumping. For a moment, your vision and brain seemed to be deceiving and outsmarting your usual intellect. Now your face marks a wide open mouth, eye balls out of the eye lids and the neck upright into the ceiling. And you stay like that for another few minutes before you can recover.
How on earth a stone falling from a 500 m high would ‘fall up’ instead of falling down into the valley? Now you remember that you are equipped with a hardcore training in research methodology and you say, ‘Well, this must be my illusion. So it can be a hypothesis. I got to experimentally verify this now!’ Now you look for another stone and this time, you throw it with your own hands. Bewildering experience, the stone goes up again and touches the roof of the wide tunnel instead of falling on its ground. You repeated it with more than 10 such stones of various sizes and weights, all in vain. All stuck in the roof!
What must be happening?
Along with the questions, risks, decisions and ideas, I leave the rest of the story to the reader’s imagination. Moreover, we have not started this entire ambiguous conundrum with considerations such as the tunnels have their own magnetic properties, not even the stones. Neither had we considered the possibility of gravity being reversed once the tunnel’s boundary is crossed. We not even worried about any other specific pressure or temperature conditions there. We have not set any conditions for it will not leave you in a pool of questions. All we did is, like what could have happened if Newton was born again with his past life memory and found that an apple was going straight up from the tree, in place of falling on his head. So it is all up to you; you are Newton born again!
But the purpose of leaving you in such an edifice of imagination is to share about the scientific fact that pioneering seismologists, paleontologists and geologists (the varieties within a physicist) found about. With their invincible technologies and incredible computer simulations, they discovered that the magnetic field inside the Earth’s core keeps flipping over, that means, north becomes south and south becomes north, (think of a bar magnet for easy understanding) quite frequently. The scientists also ensure that this flip can cause in an overall flip in the entire planet’s magnetic field. This can make us call Canada-USA ring as the South America and Argentina pointed out somewhere in the North America on a modified map.
How unlikely does it seem? But it happens quite oft. The last time this flipping of magnetic field happened was quite recently, like some 800,000 years ago. The contemporary scientific growth has enabled scientists to unlock the wilder enigmas about the center of the Earth by building the Earth core models in the laboratory, attempting to recreate the Earth core’s conditions in a lob space. These models are furnished to maintain the temperatures and pressures on par with the same parameters in the original core. For example, one of these models was made to raise its inner temperature to the extent of the original numbers in the core, and it took 10 years to reach that heat. This model is being worked on in Hyogo, Japan.
Scientists all over the world pressingly express their opinion about our knowledge. We know much more about our outer space than the inner side of our cute blue planet, seemingly soft but unthinkably violent within. They also suggest that this is bound to happen as gaining the necessary knowledge about the Earth’s inner side costs colossal amounts of resources. Despite all this, human is self-motivated when it comes to understanding nature. We will never give up!