100 years with our closest star, the sun
Shubashree Desikan CHENNAI, MAY 06, 2017 18:55 IST
Layered structure The three datasets reveal different layers of the sun. (From left) The H-alpha reveals the filaments; the Ca-K, the chromosphere; the white light images, the photosphere and sunspots.
Indian Institute of Astrophysics releases digitised images of the sun for researchers and science enthusiasts Every day, since 1904, staff at the Kodaikanal Solar Observatory in Tamil Nadu have aimed their telescope at the sun, freezing the images of its disc. This data, spanning a hundred years and more, has now been digitised by astrophysicists from the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bengaluru, and made available to the public. Apart from use in academic studies of long term behaviour of the sun, the data can be used to better understand sunspot activity which impacts climate and affects telecommunication systems. It also throws light on major events in the past which had an impact on the earth’s magnetic field. “From that knowledge we may understand the current and future events with greater precision. This also allows us to predict future [sunspot] activity levels with better accuracy,” says Dipankar Banerjee, IIAP, the Principal Investigator. While ‘spectroheliograms’ were taken at the Kodai observatory since 1902, it was in 1909 that the data was used to discover the Evershed effect – that gases in the sunspots flowed radially outwards. The discovery by John Evershed put the KSO at par with the best observatories in the world. But its importance eventually declined as it was not upgraded or maintained. In a backhanded way, though, this turned out to be beneficial, because “the pictures had all been taken with the same instrument over the years, and this made it much easier to calibrate and digitise,” says Sudip Mandal, a Ph.D student who has worked on the project. The data is unique not only in that it spans a hundred years, but that there are three sets of images, taken using different filters – White light, H-alpha and Calcium-K. It is known that the sun has a layered structure, and each of these data sets exposes a different layer. Under white light filtering, the sun’s photosphere and the sunspots are visible, while the Calcium-K light can show layers some 2,000 km above this, in the chromosphere. The H-alpha images show up layers a little above the Calcium-K images. Features called “filaments” which are related to large expulsions of material from the sun’s surface can be viewed in the sets. Opening up the digitised data has attracted international attention: Max Planck Institute, Gottingen; National Astronomical Observatories of China, Beijing and Big Bear Solar Observatory, US are interested in studying the way the sun’s luminosity changes. Though the sun appears to have a steady brightness, its luminosity actually undergoes changes over time. Some of the groups. The Big Bear Solar Observatory and the Beijing teams are interested in the H-alpha data in order to study the filaments that can be observed in those shots. Within India, groups from IUCAA, Pune; Physical Research Laboratory, Ahmedabad; and IISER, Kolkata, want to make studies. A movie that the scientists made out of a sequence of hundreds of white light images shows how the sunspots appear and disappear periodically over an eleven-year cycle. Such movies offer immense possibilities for developing educational software, as classes of students can visually experience how the sun and the sunspots behave over the years. Just like CERN offers its data to science hobbyists, for analysis that does not require much training and yet cannot be carried out without human intervention, this data, too, could be used by science fora in India to build citizen science projects. The data was historically archived in photographic plates and film. After the digitisation, the images are preserved in high-resolution digital format. “We store it in FITS [flexible image transport system] which is the most commonly used digital file format,” clarifies Dr Banerjee. Digitising this has been a challenging task wthat involves not just reading and displaying the image but also extracting information – for instance differentiating a sunspot from artefacts such as a scratch or a fungal streak. “It can only be done using a lot of sophisticated mathematical tools. Some are available some we have had to develop to handle these challenges,” says Dr Banerjee. This data can be freely downloaded from https://kso.iiap.res.in and wis also available on request through the contact details given on this website. The project which was initiated about six years ago by S.S. Hasan, then the director of IIAP, has succeeded in converting to digitised format some sixty- seventy thousand images previously stored in photographic plates. The team includes scientists and the big team of research assistants at the Kodaikanal lab. At the moment, the group has released the “lowest level” or raw data and plans are on to eventually release the processed ones, too. https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/science/100-years-with-our-closest-star-the- sun/article18400934.ece
Assam keelback spotted for the first time in 129 years
Shubashree Desikan JULY 11, 2020 20:05 IST
Elusive vertebrate: The female snake was spotted in a muddy stream in the Poba reserve forest | Photo Credit: Abhijit Das
The team also recorded 400 plants, 270 butterflies, 25 amphibians and 44 reptiles, 239 birds and at least 20 mammals The Assam keelback snake has been sighted by a team from the Wildlife Institute of India, Dehradun, for the first time since 1869. This snake was spotted in 2018 by zoologist Abhijit Das when he, along with a team, was retracing the Abor expedition – an iconic expedition that took place from 1911-1912 that had yielded a rich list of flora and fauna of the Assam region. After due identification, the find has been described in a paper published recently in the journal Vertebrate Zoology.
Rewarding expedition The Abor expedition had covered a 130 km stretch along the Siang river from the base camp at Kobo Chapori (elevation approximately 121 metres above sea level) to the head quarter at Yembung ( about 3,500 metres above sea level) and beyond. “The staggering zoological result includes description of 244 species and 14 genera new to science,” says Dr Das. In the latest expedition which traced out the route of the earlier one, too, the researchers were not disappointed. As Dr. Das recounts, “We recorded 400 plants, 270 butterflies, 66 odonates, 25 amphibians and 44 reptiles, 239 birds and at least 20 mammals.” The survey started from Poba reserved forest located at the interstate border of Assam and Arunachal Pradesh on September 30, 2018. “I spotted the snake as I was following a small muddy stream deep inside evergreen forest,” says Dr. Das. “Generally, in a forest you have a forest floor with leaf-litter, but here was a special habitat, consisting of stream and swamp within the forest, which attracted me.” Unlike other snakes, this one took shelter under water, below the fallen leaf-litter, a very special way to avoid attention.
Preserved specimens First known as Hebius pealii this snake was named after Edward Peal, a British tea planter who first collected two specimens of this snake from upper Assam, 129 years ago. Of the two collected specimens, one was preserved in the Zoological Survey of India, Kolkata, and the other was kept in the Natural History Museum in London. Since the former specimen had disintegrated, the team had to compare the present specimen they found with the one kept in the Natural History Museum, London. Had that specimen gone bad, making the identification would have been that much more difficult. The Assam keelback is so far known only to inhabit Sivasagar in Upper Assam and Poba in Assam-Arunachal border. So, as far as present knowledge goes, it is an endemic snake of Upper Assam. Through a molecular study, the team has shown that this snake belongs to the genus Herpetoreas, which has only three other known members, and not Hebius. This is also the first description of a live snake and its colouration. This is the first female Assam keelback to have been found. “So, we now know how male and female may differ in morphological characters,” says Dr Das. https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/science/assam-keelback-spotted-for-the-first-time-in-129- years/article32052652.ece ‘A Fragmented Feminism: The Life and Letters of Anandibai Joshee’ review: A voice all her own
Shubashree Desikan JULY 04, 2020 16:55 IST
A life in letters of Anandibai Joshee, who struggled against all odds to become the first trained woman doctor from India and achieved much in a short span On March 31, 1865, in Pune, a girl child was born to Gangabai and Ganpatrao Joshi — their fifth child, whom they named Yamuna. On her ninth birthday, March 31, 1874, she was married to Gopalrao Joshee, a widower of about 26, employed as a postmaster at Thane. She was from then known as Anandibai — a name chosen for her by her husband Gopalrao. In her short life of just 22 years, she made history by becoming the first Indian woman to be trained as a medical doctor, at the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia. Consumed by tuberculosis, she died in 1887, soon after her return to India with an MD degree in medicine (1886). She had accepted an offer to take charge of the Edward Albert Memorial Hospital in Kolhapur, which unfortunately never materialised. In many ways, her life was similar to that of Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887 -1920) who shook the world of mathematics, but died young of tuberculosis aggravated by malnourishment and lack of care. Certainly, her achievements ought to be celebrated as no less a feat.
Against patriarchy The book Fragmented Feminism chronicles the time from which Yamuna became Anandibai until the day she died. The book reveals Anandibai as she was — through her own letters and in her own voice, with helpful annotations by the author Meera Kosambi and three editors — Ram Ramaswamy, Madhavi Kolhatkar and Aban Mukherji. It reveals her flowering individuality, determination and agency in the face of a strongly patriarchal culture, a domineering, volatile husband and the travails of living in an unfamiliar land so far from home. The letters also underline the impact of this patriarchy on her. In her stint away from home, she appears to have thrown off the shackles of her caste pride and deep-seated nationalism, conservatism. Two passages from the book are worth mentioning here as a sample of the cultural milieu of the time and the pressure she might have felt in being married to a person with the complex character of Gopalrao. The first is about a public address in 1883 in India that she chose to make herself — “Why do I go to America?” — in which she addresses six questions that were posed to her often. She states: “In my humble opinion there is a growing need for Hindu lady doctors in India, and I volunteer to qualify myself for one.” To the question “Are there no means to study in India?” she replies thus: “[T]he instructors who teach these classes are conservative and to some extent jealous... That is characteristic of the male sex. We must put up with this inconvenience until we have a class of educated ladies to relieve these men.” This is a bold indictment of the gender question in education, at a time when women’s education was not a priority.
Inspiring journey The second passage that highlights the environment she lived in and how she dealt with it is from a letter written to her husband after reaching America. She is full of reasoning and entreaty: “Don’t misunderstand and make me suffer so. It is very difficult to decide whether your treatment of me was good or bad. If you ask me I would say it was both... Hitting me with broken pieces of wood at the tender age of ten, flinging chairs and books at me and threatening to leave me when I was twelve, and inflicting other strange punishments on me when I was fourteen — all these were too severe for the age, body and mind at each respective stage...” It was against all these odds that Anandibai became the first Indian woman doctor. Ironically, when she was dying, the healing power of this very trade was denied her, as the book reveals. In India, Kesari and The Mahratta, run by Bal Gangadhar Tilak, were quick to take up stories on the Joshees who were portrayed as social reformers. Pandita Ramabai, on the other hand, who had travelled to England for her education and converted to Christianity there, was strongly criticised by this section, even though she was doing well. Ramabai was invited by Anandibai’s mentor, Dean Bodley, for the latter’s graduation ceremony, and Ramabai travelled to America just for this. Anandibai wrote of Ramabai thus: “...her courage has outweighed that of the sternest and bravest warrior.” This book is a deep, frank look at a life of endeavour and difficult journeys, both literal and metaphorical, cross-cultural interaction, purpose and providence — a worthy one to collect. A Fragmented Feminism: The Life and Letters of Anandibai Joshee; Meera Kosambi, Edited by Ram Ramaswamy & Others, Routledge, ₹995. https://www.thehindu.com/books/books-reviews/a-fragmented-feminism-the-life-and-letters-of- anandibai-joshee-review-a-voice-all-her-own/article31978846.ece A forty-year-old puzzle about the stars is solved
Shubashree Desikan CHENNAI:, JULY 08, 2020 20:09 IST
About 40 years ago, a few stars were spotted in the Milky Way that were lithium-rich.
Study led by Indian astrophysicists challenges the present understanding of nucleosynthesis in stars A forty-year-old puzzle regarding the production of lithium in stars has been solved by Indian researchers. Stars, as per known mechanisms of evolution, actually destroy lithium as they evolve into red giants. Planets were known to have more lithium than their stars — as is the case with the Earth-Sun pair. However, leading to a contradiction, some stars were found that were lithium- rich. The new work by Bharat Kumar, currently a post doctoral fellow at the National Astronomical Observatories of China, Beijing, and an international team of co-workers shows that, in fact, when stars grow beyond their Red Giant stage into what is known as the Red Clump stage, they produce lithium in what is known as a Helium Flash and this is what enriches them with lithium. The study has been published in the journal Nature Astronomy on July 7.
Lithium’s interesting story Lithium, a light element commonly used today in communication device technology, has an interesting story. It was first produced in the Big Bang, around 13.7 billion years ago when the universe came into being, along with other elements. While the abundance of other elements grew millions of times, the present abundance of lithium in the universe is only four times the original [Big Bang] value. It is actually destroyed in the stars. The Sun, for instance, has about a factor of 100 lower amount of lithium than the Earth. About 40 years ago, a few large stars were spotted that were lithium-rich. This was followed by further discoveries of lithium-rich stars, and that posed a puzzle — if stars do not produce lithium, how do some stars develop to become lithium rich? “The planet engulfment theory was quite popular. For example, Earth-like planets may increase the star’s lithium content when they plunge into [their] star’s atmosphere when the latter become Red Giants. I was not comfortable with this idea,” said Professor Eswar Reddy, Director of India Thirty Meter Telescope Centre, Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bengaluru, who led the study. Prof. Reddy has been working on this puzzle for nearly 20 years now, and had, along with his students, devised a method of measuring lithium content using low-resolution spectra in a large number of stars, with facilities provided at the Indian Institute of Astrophysics.
Over 200,000 stars For the present study, the group studied over 200,000 stars using the Galactic Archaeology survey of the Anglo-Australian Telescope, Australia. “This is a dedicated facility for obtaining high-resolution spectra for a large number of stars,” explains Prof. Reddy. This is the first study to demonstrate that lithium abundance enhancement among low mass giant stars is common. Until now, it was believed that only about 1% of giants are lithium rich. Secondly, the team has shown that as the star evolves beyond the Red Giant stage, and before it reaches the Red Clump stage, there is a helium flash which produces an abundance of lithium. Lastly, they set a lower limit for helium abundance which will classify the star as “lithium-rich”. This value is about 250 times lower than the previous limit. The study challenges the present understanding of nucleosynthesis in stars. “Our next study may concentrate on helium-flash nucleosynthesis and how lithium escapes from destruction in the interior of stars and dredges-up to the surface,” said Prof. Reddy. https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/science/a-forty-year-old-puzzle-about-the-stars-is- solved/article32024070.ece Visual perception is not just making a replica, says neuroscientist Vilayanur S. Ramachandran Shubashree Desikan CHENNAI, MAY 23, 2020 17:51 IST
uro scientist. File | Photo Credit: R. Ragu
The first step to causing a revolution in science is to smell out an anomaly, notes Professor Vilayanur S. Ramachandran Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, neuroscientist, has made path-breaking advances in the study of the human brain. During the lockdown, this writer got to talk [on Skype] with Prof. Ramachandran, Director of the Centre for Brain and Cognition, University of California, San Diego, and Professor of Biology at the Salk Institute, about how he studies and analyses his patients. Here is his analysis of an astonishing case study — of a patient who saw everything upside down. He describes the logic behind the method he adopts in investigating even the oddest symptoms that some patients manifest: “First, is he really experiencing the symptoms or making it up — for insurance claims? Second, if real, what’s causing it in the brain? Third, in addition to explaining his curious symptoms, what can it tell us about normal brain function and what are its broader implications? Fourth, can you cure the patient?” The human brain is normally programmed — either by genes or by feedback — to see things the correct side up. “If I showed you a book with a familiar picture, of, say, Mahatma Gandhi or Jawaharlal Nehru, and it was upside down, you would not recognise it. You would only recognise the person if it were the right side up. That is the way your brain is wired,” he explains.
Visual perception Visual perception is not just making a replica. Prof. Ramachandran explains: “You learn in school that your eye is like a camera lens and that it inverts the image and your brain sets it right by inverting it again. But this is wrong, because there is no picture in the brain. We accepted the explanation in school but it’s wrong, unless the teacher were being metaphorical.” Studying perceptual and cognitive deficits opens the way to understanding consciousness, emotions, seeing, recognising, everything, he adds, warming up to the topic on hand — the patient who was saying that he was seeing things upside down. “We showed him a matrix of faces in a computer screen, most of them were right side up and one was upside down. In normal people the brain is immediately able to discover the upside-down image. But if only one is right side up and all the rest are upside down, the brain is unable to identify which is the right-side up face. We found that unlike normal people, he was better at discriminating inverted faces than upright faces. I suspect that this may be because his face recognition centre buried in the temporal lobes is only partially damaged. When the wave of neural activity first arrives, it cannot avoid triggering the partial activation and partial engagement of the face- recognition module — but given the damage in the module, it fails completely. If an upside down face is viewed, the triggering doesn’t occur so you are ‘allowed’ to switch strategies and try using other tricks — like point- by-point comparison of features to determine the extent of similarity,” he elaborates. He goes on to describe an experimental scheme called Johansson’s point light walker. It is a minimal drawing consisting of bright points, and when the light points move in synchronicity, the brain constructs a human ‘walker’ from it. If we turn the ‘point-light walker’ image upside down, the brain does not complete the image to make out a person from the points. But with this patient who claims to see things upside down, it’s just the other way around. He cannot see the ‘walker’ when they are right side up but sees them when the screen is place upside down. Now why does this happen, and what is wrong with the brain?
Early image As Prof. Ramachandran says, very early, during image processing, in the retina, the brain maintains some image characteristic. Then the signal branches into many sets. One set goes to the parietal lobes (side areas) of the brain, others to the temporal lobes (slightly below), the occipital lobes, and so on. “The main two branches are the ones that go to the temporal and parietal lobes. I call the top branch the ‘how stream’ or ‘how pathway’ and the bottom one the ‘what pathway’,” he says, proceeding to outline the process of visual perception. If the “how pathway” is damaged, in a bilateral stroke, for instance, then the patient can still recognise objects. But if you ask him to grab it, he reaches out in a different direction, unable to grab the object even though he can recognise it. After extensive treatment he can acquire the ability to do this correctly. On the other hand, if the “what pathway” is damaged, the converse happens. Another possibility is that that both the ventral and dorsal (parietal lobe, “how pathway”) streams were affected equally. But then he started recovering his dorsal stream functions by re-learning it. “Like, he reaches out his hand to pick up something and when it is wrong he re-learns the whole thing. After being crude and slow at first, after the re-learning process, he is able to point and place his hand correctly,” says Prof. Ramachandran. For the ventral stream, however, such a learning process cannot happen because there is no feedback. For instance, when trying to identify different faces, he does not get any immediate internal feedback, so he cannot re-learn them. Now, this gives a good explanation but there is still one problem. Why is he seeing things upside down? If the pathway is damaged, he should see things randomly, so why is he seeing them upside down?
Primitive mechanism He himself answers the question: “The only thing I can think of is that there is a primitive (evolutionarily ancient mechanism), default mechanism in the brain which allows something like rotation or inversion to occur before further processing, and his brain has partially reverted to that mode.’ He adds, quickly, “But that’s not really an explanation.” As for a cure, that is still some distance away. “We need to do some brain imaging – not a fishing expedition as it often is, but to rule out or confirm our ideas,” he concludes.
Research matters In an answer to a query on what matters in research, he recalls how Francis Crick would always advise people to look at the big problems. “When you are doing research, there is also a tendency to get trapped in cul de sacs of knowledge. You referee each other’s papers and pat each other on the back. It sounds cynical, but a lot of science is done that way. You should not become part of a club, you should do your own thing,” he says. On the other hand he is also a firm believer in the idea that nature is not conspiring to make important problems difficult. “DNA [structure] was a very important problem but it turned out to be quite easy actually to solve, once Jim Watson, Francis. Crick and Rosalind. Franklin put their minds to it.” he declares, smiling. “Crick was a formidable presence here during the two decades when we were colleagues at the UCSD, and an inspiration to all of us, but many others were also informal mentors — my brother, Ravi, whose idealistic and romantic world view rubbed off on me, and O.L. Braddick, Colin Blakemore and, especially, Richard Gregory and John Pettigrew. Prof. Ramachandran’s stance is this: “If you have some new observation that will not fit the current picture of science, which threatens to upset this huge cathedral people have built — Copernican, Newtonian, Einsteinian and Heisenbergian, or even smaller edifices — you must then not hesitate to tear it down and start from the scratch. Young scientists should aim for such a revolution. You don’t want to be a bricklayer but a revolutionary.”
Revolutionary science How does one cause a revolution in science? The first step is in smelling out an anomaly. “First, if you have an anomaly, you have to see if its genuine or not. An anomaly is like the smell of burning rubber — you get the sense that something is not okay,” he says, giving the example of the discovery of the theory of continental drift. He says, “A child can see that the west coast of Africa fits the east coast of South America like a bit of a jigsaw puzzle. Till mid-twentieth century, people were saying it is a coincidence. Until one person came along and said it was more than that.” Then came finding fossils on the two coastlines, for example, a 250-million-year-old freshwater lizard called the Mesosaurus. He elaborates, “There are also freshwater snail fossils. How did they get there? You find sauropod bones on the west coast of Africa, the same ones you find on the other side also. But still no one can imagine terra firma drifting.” Later, this was explained using the theory of continental drift. “The evidence was staring at them in the face, no one disputed the facts but it was all a matter of interpretation,” he says. “Don’t give up a theory, however absurd it may seem, because you can’t think of a mechanism or because it doesn’t fit in with the big picture. The mechanism may not have been found yet. In fact, it may lead you to find a new mechanism which hasn’t been thought of so far,” he advises.
Bacterial transformation experiment To illustrate this, he describes how a British group had an experiment in which they showed bacterial transformation. In the lab, with two types (A, smooth and virulent, and B, rough and non-virulent strains) of the bacterium Streptococcus pneumoniae, they saw Strain B developing a smooth capsule like Strain A and becoming virulent. [Not knowing the mechanism at work, they concluded Strain B was turning into Strain A.] It was published in an important journal, but hardly anyone paid attention to this. “It was a important result, but because it was just bacteria, no one paid attention. Then along comes [Oswald T.] Avery. He showed that you don’t even need to incubate them together. He just took the juice [extract] from one species and incubated the other strain with the same, and he showed that the species would transform, laying the foundation of molecular genetics.” Prof. Ramachandran describes how [Erwin] Schrodinger asks what this chemical is (Schrodinger wrote about this in his influential book What is life?) — it is the DNA. In the book, “He [Schrodinger] asks what is the other evidence that it is indeed the DNA that is the genetic material.” But Avery had stumbled upon this years ago with the experiment on bacteria. “Now why did people ignore Avery? Because they couldn’t think of a mechanism. So my argument is — don’t throw away something just because you cannot think of a mechanism,” he concludes. “The other criterion for carrying out research is that of simplicity and elegance,” he says. “There is an aesthetic dimension to science. It seems not to hold true these days, as we become more part of the corporate world. We are tainted with … utility,” Prof. Ramachandran adds, almost as an afterthought.
https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/health/visual-perception-is-not-just-making-a-replica- says-neuroscientist-vilayanur-s-ramachandran/article31653810.ece Ramanujan’s legacy used in signal processing, black hole physics
Shubashree Desikan DECEMBER 22, 2019 07:30 IST
Still relevant: Srinivasa Ramanujan’s mathematics now finds applications in areas not known during his lifetime. | Photo Credit: M_SRINATH
Due to the remarkable originality and power of Ramanujan’s genius, the ideas he created a century ago are now finding applications in diverse contexts There is no question about the fact that mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan has left behind a rich legacy of problems for mathematicians to solve. In his short life of little over 32 years, he reached unimaginable heights. What is surprising is that his mathematics, done over a hundred years ago, finds applications today in areas other than pure mathematics, which were not even established during his time (22 December 1887 – 26 April 1920). Two among these are signal processing and Black Hole physics.
Signal processing Examples of signals that are processed digitally include obvious ones like speech and music and more research-oriented ones such as DNA and protein sequences. All these have certain patterns that repeat over and over again and are called periodic patterns. For example, a DNA molecule is made up of a 4 bases (Adenine Guanine, Thymine and Cytosine). Sometimes, a sequence, say AGT, keeps repeating several times in a region of the DNA. In real life, more complex repeating patterns may need to be identified as they bear significance to health conditions. So, in signal processing, one thing we are interested in is extracting and identifying such periodic information.
Identifying and separating the periodic portion is much like using a sieve to separate particles of different sizes. A mathematical operation akin to a sieve is used to separate out the periodic regions in the signal. Some of the best- known methods to extract periodic components in signals involve Fourier analysis. Using Ramanujan Sums for this process is much less known. “A Ramanujan Sum is a sequence like c(1), c(2), c(3) ... This sequence itself repeats periodically... It was thought, by a number of authors before me, to be useful in identifying periodic components in signals, much the same as sines and cosines are used in Fourier analysis,” says P.P. Vaidyanathan who has developed these ideas over the last decade. He is the Kiyo and Eiko Tomiyasu Professor of Electrical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology, U.S.
Communication from far Prof. Vaidyanathan came across this work in a manner that illustrates how friendly connections play a role in the development of science. Several years ago, mathematicians H. Gopalakrishna Gadiyar and R. Padma, from VIT, Vellore, were studying the twin prime problem when they observed that some arithmetical function which captures the properties of the primes should have a Ramanujan-Fourier Series. They sent their paper to Bhaskar Ramamurthi, Director of IIT Madras, who in turn forwarded the paper to Prof. Vaidyanathan, a friend from his graduate days. Intrigued by the Ramanujan Sum mentioned in the paper, Prof. Vaidyanathan delved deep into it and developed the concept of “Ramanujan subspaces.” These ideas were further developed by his doctoral student Srikanth Tenneti who showed that using these gave a method that worked better than Fourier analysis when the region of periodicity is short. “A number of extensions using two- and higher-dimensional generalisations for images and video, and extensions for non-integer (whole number) periods,” are on the cards, according to Prof. Vaidyanathan.
Partitions of a number Ramanujan’s interest in the number of ways one can partition an integer (a whole number) is famous. For instance, the integer 3 can be written as 1+1+1 or 2+1. Thus, there are two ways of partitioning the integer 3. As the integer to be partitioned gets larger and larger, it becomes difficult to compute the number of ways to partition it. The seemingly simple mathematical calculation is related to a very sophisticated method to reveal the properties of black holes, as has been established by physicist Atish Dabholkar, who is now Director, International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy, and Assistant Director General of UNESCO. Ramanujan related this counting problem to some special functions called “modular forms”. A modular form is symmetric, in the sense that it does not change, under a set of mathematical operations called “modular symmetry”. “A geometric analogy for such a function would be a circle which does not change its shape under rotations [circular symmetry],” explains Prof. Dabholkar. “Using this symmetry, Ramanujan and G.H. Hardy found a beautiful formula to compute the number of partitions of any integer.”
Nearly modular forms In his famous letter to Hardy in 1919, Ramanujan introduced the “mock theta functions” and observed that they were “almost modular”. “A geometric analogy would be a ‘mock circle’ that is nearly circular but with a small blip,” explains Prof. Dabholkar. “It is not easy to explain precisely what a ‘blip’ is, similarly, ‘almost modular’ remained a mystery for close to a century,” he adds. Following the work of mathematician Sanders P. Zwegers in 2002, in which he introduced “mock modular forms,” giving a precise definition of what “almost modular” means, Prof Dabholkar’s paper with Sameer Murthy and Don Zagier made the connection between mock modular forms and Black Hole physics.
Black Hole entropy A separate concept in physics, entropy, explains why heat flows from a hot body to a cold body and not the other way around. The results of Ramanujan and Hardy on partitions and the former’s subsequent work on what are called mock theta functions have come to play an important role in understanding the very quantum structure of spacetime – in particular the quantum entropy of a type of Black Hole in string theory, according to Prof. Dabholkar. Stephen Hawking showed that when you take into account quantum effects, a Black Hole is not quite black, it is rather like a hot piece of metal that is slowly emitting Hawking radiation. Thus, one can associate thermodynamic quantities like temperature and entropy to a Black Hole. “Mock modular forms are beginning to appear more and more in many areas of physics... Our work has also had unexpected applications in new topics in mathematics such as ‘Umbral Moonshine’, which are quite unrelated to black holes,” explains Prof. Dabholkar. “It is a tribute to the remarkable originality and power of Ramanujan’s genius that the ideas he created a century ago are now finding applications in such diverse contexts,” he says.
https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/science/ramanujans-legacy-used-in-signal-processing- black-hole-physics/article30367891.ece The science behind this year's Nobel prize for Physics | Podcast
Shubashree Desikan
https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/science/the-science-behind-this-years-nobel-prize-for- physics-podcast/article29692565.ece The Hindu Science Quiz: Of women, science and the Nobels
A.S. Nazir Ahamed Shubashree Desikan OCTOBER 14, 2019 08:30 IST
How many women have won the Nobel Prize in the science fields? Which science discipline has produced the highest number of women laureates? For answers and more interesting questions take this quiz. Correct answers are highlighted in green. Click on the correct answer for further reading on the topic.
https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/science/the-hindu-science-quiz-of-women-science-and-the- nobels/article29676229.ece American Academy of Arts and Sciences elects three Indians
Shubashree Desikan
APRIL 30, 2020 01:38 IST
Shobhana Narasimhan. | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement Three Indians have been elected for the prestigious membership of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences this year. Two of them are in the sciences: Biman Bagchi from the Solid State and Structural Chemistry Unit of the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, and Shobhana Narasimhan from the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR), Bengaluru. Kavita Singh, from the School of Arts and Aesthetics at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, has been selected for the Humanities and Arts stream. The prestigious International Honorary Membership counts Albert Einstein, Akira Kurosawa, Nelson Mandela and Charles Darwin among some of its past members, and the elected members aim to work together to solve problems faced by the world at large. “I’m overwhelmed, to tell the truth,” Prof. Narasimhan told The Hindu, when asked about her election to the Academy. Amitabh Joshi, an evolutionary biologist and senior scientist at JNCASR expressed his delight at his colleague’s election to the prestigious academy. “She is a person with many broader interests, which range into the theatre, arts and literature. She has also done a lot of work for empowering women in science, especially in Africa,” he added. A Fellow of the National Science Academy of India, Allahabad, with an illustrious career in condensed matter physics, Prof. Narasimhan has also had a keen interest in inclusivity in science, particularly physics, and conducted workshops for the development of women scientists including at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics, at Trieste in Italy. “A science career requires many skills, such as networking, negotiating, projecting yourself, writing cover letters, replying to referee reports, preparing good slides and so on,” said Prof. Narasimhan. “Most men have mentors who in a friendly chat will guide them on these matters. At our workshops for early career women from all parts of the developing countries, we deal with these aspects,” she added, observing that it was very likely that these aspects of her work had played as much of a role as her scientific achievements in getting her elected to the Academy. Prof. Bagchi, a theoretical physical chemist, was awarded the Humboldt Science Prize for 2019 and holds the National Science Chair for physics and chemistry. He is the author of three books including ‘Statistical Mechanics for Chemistry and Materials Science’ and ‘Water in Biological and Chemical Processes’. He fondly recalled his father’s influence in shaping him. “He was very different and the atmosphere of books that I grew up in, in a suburb of Kolkata really shaped me,” said Prof. Bagchi, who is also a Fellow of all the three science academies of India.
https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/american-academy-of-arts-and-sciences-elects-three- indians/article31467713.ece Indian scientists join the battle against COVID-19
Shubashree Desikan
CHENNAI, MARCH 27, 2020 23:12 IST
Scientists in India are working on analyses and apps in response to the coronavirus pandemic.
One effort seeks to explain concepts in regional languages Several Indian scientists have come together to form a Google group to address some of the concerns that the COVID-19 outbreak has thrown up. Indian Scientists’ Response to CoViD-19 (ISRC) is a voluntary group of scientists who regularly discuss the rapidly evolving situation with its dire need for science communication. “The scientific community has a social and democratic responsibility in the current situation, both in terms of analysing the situation and reaching out to the public. While governmental bodies make their decisions and professional scientific academies take principled stands, there is a need for individuals in the scientific community to also help individually and collectively,” says R. Ramanujam, the spokesperson of the group and a computer scientist with The Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai. Also read: The race to find a cure for COVID-19 With nearly 200 members, the group has scientists from institutions such as the NCBS, the IISc, the TIFR, the IITs, the IISERs and many others. The group aims to study existing and available data to bring out analyses that will support the Central, State and local governments in carrying out their tasks. Several working groups have been formed by the scientists. They include one on hoax busting to address disinformation spreading with respect to the coronavirus and one on science popularisation to develop material that explains concepts such as home quarantine. Other groups work on resources in Indian languages, mathematical models and apps. Also read: COVID-19 and the great Chinese puzzle “The group is not a forum for medical advice, and definitely no unverified claims. All analysis should be evidence-based,” the group says. It is active on Twitter with the handle @IndSciCOVID, which is managed by Reeteka Sud, who works in genomics and stem cells at NIMHANS, Bengaluru. Sutirth Dey, an evolutionary biologist based in Pune and editor of Confluence, an online forum provided by the Indian Academy of Sciences, has made available translations in 15 languages of the e- book, The Pandemic Notebook, which was originally published by The Hindu in English.
Mapping spaces One of the ideas discussed by the group is to develop an app that can map spaces that can be used as shelters and share the data with the State government. “We have got in touch with the Tamil Nadu State Health Systems Reforms Office and told them that we are willing to develop any app that they feel the need for,”says K.V. Subrahmanyam, a computer scientist with The Chennai Mathematical Institute. Kameswari Chebrolu, a faculty member from the department of computer science at IIT Bombay, has helped adapt a platform she developed along with graduate students over the past two years to help in the present crisis. This platform works through two channels — phone and WhatsApp to connect people in need with those who can provide help. In the context of the COVID-19 outbreak, it can connect patients or people with symptoms to doctors. It may also connect elderly people with volunteers from NGOs to assist in chores such as grocery shopping. Currently, the group is in talks with King Edward Memorial Hospital in Mumbai towards developing this service for them. “We expect that the platform and apps will be functional by early next week,” says Prof. Chebrolu. https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/health/indian-scientists-join-the-battle-against-covid- 19/article31186982.ece
The Sun brings out a fresh batch of sunspots
Shubashree Desikan
MARCH 07, 2020 20:55 IST
Not sedate: Huge solar flares and coronal mass ejections spew material from the solar surface into outer space | Photo Credit: SOHO
The sunspots identified by researchers from IISER Kolkata herald the start of a new solar cycle Sun spots are relatively cooler spots on the Sun’s surface. Their number waxes and wanes in cycles that last 11 years approximately. We are currently at the minimum of one such cycle. Amidst claims that the Sun would “go silent” and not give out sunspots for an extended period, a group from IISER Kolkata has shown that the next sunspot cycle has begun and the Sun has indeed spoken. Their results were published in Research Notes of the American Astronomical Society. From our safe distance of about 148 million km, the Sun appears to be sedate and constant. However, huge solar flares and coronal mass ejections spew material from its surface into outer space. They originate from sunspots, an important phenomenon that people have been following for hundreds of years. Sunspots occur in pairs, with a leader and a follower. They originate deep within the Sun and become visible when they pop out. Their number is not constant but shows a minimum and then rises up to a maximum and then falls again in what is called the solar cycle. So far, astronomers have documented 24 such cycles, the last one ended in 2019.
Start of cycle 25 Following a weakening trend in activity over the last few cycles, there were predictions that the Sun would go silent into a grand minimum in activity, with the disappearance of cycles. However, a team from IISER Kolkata has shown that there are signs that cycle 25 has just begun. They used the data from the instrument Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager aboard NASA’s space-based Solar Dynamics Observatory for their calculations. “There has been a lot of controversy about solar cycle 25 stemming from observations of a weakening trend in solar activity over the past three sunspot cycles. This has led to speculation that the solar cycle is about to die and we are going to enter a grand minimum in solar activity lasting many decades. Some groups have claimed that this would give rise to a mini ice age and cooling of global climate,” says Dibyendu Nandi of IISER Kolkata who led the effort. “Our findings indicate that sunspot cycle 25 fields have already started appearing, implying that we are going to have a solar cycle. Speculation and predictions of a grand minimum are unfounded.”
Maunder minimum Why is this so important to us on earth? After all the sunspots look small and are hardly even visible to us. Contrary to this, sunspot activity may be correlated with climate on earth. In the period between 1645 and 1715, sun spot activity had come to a halt on the Sun – a phenomenon referred to as the Maunder minimum. This coincided with extremely cold weather globally. So sunspots may have a relevance to climate on earth. Such links are tenuous, but definitely solar activity affects space weather, which can have an impact on space-based satellites, GPS, power grids and so on.
Solar dynamo Given the high temperatures in the Sun, matter exists there in the form of plasma, where the electrons are stripped away from the nuclei. The Sun is made of hot ionised plasma whose motions generate magnetic fields in the solar interior by harnessing the energy of the plasma flows. This mechanism is known as the solar dynamo mechanism (or magnetohydrodynamic dynamo mechanism). “Simply stated, it is a process by which kinetic energy of plasma motions is converted to magnetic energy, which generates the magnetised sunspots, giving rise to the solar cycle,” explains Prof. Nandi. Because of the nature of the solar dynamo, the part of its magnetic field that gives rise to sunspots reverses direction when it moves from one solar cycle to another. This can be inferred by observing when the relative orientation of the sunspot pairs flip. Studying 74 such pairs of magnetic regions, the researchers find that in 41 the orientation corresponds to cycle 24, and in 33 the orientation corresponds to cycle 25. Thus they conclude that the Sunspot cycle 25 is brewing within the solar interior. “Small magnetic regions and a few full grown sunspots with the magnetic polarity orientation that is expected of sunspot cycle 25 have already started appearing on the solar surface. This means that we have either already seen the start of sunspot cycle 25 or it is just about to start,” says Prof. Nandi. https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/science/the-sun-brings-out-a-fresh-batch-of- sunspots/article31010533.ece Shape of Sun’s corona accurately predicted Shubashree Desikan
DECEMBER 28, 2019 17:45 IST
Good match: The LASCO instrument’s observation overlaid on the large scale coronal magnetic field lines predicted by the team. The advance prediction gives a large window of preparedness for space weather variations Solar physicists from Centre for Excellence in Space Sciences (CESSI), IISER Kolkata, have succeeded in predicting the shape of Sun’s corona at the time of the annular eclipse on December 25. The corona is the outermost part of the Sun’s atmosphere. This is the second successful prediction, counting the last solar eclipse that was viewed from South America on July 2 this year. While the earlier prediction differed slightly from the actual image, this time, it has been pretty close to the real thing. This was imaged by NASA and European Space Agency’s space-based Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) using the LASCO instrument. “For the South American Eclipse of 2 July, our predicted streamer tilts were slightly larger than observed at large distances from the Sun. This time, it is far better. We are still trying to figure out why this worked so well this time,” says Dibyendu Nandi, who is a professor and Principal Investigator at CESSI.
Predicting in advance The Predictive Solar Surface Flux Transport model developed by the CESSI team can predict the shape of the corona well in advance. Prantika Bhowmik, now at Durham University, UK, developed this model with Dr Nandi. “Our previous research indicates that we can predict the large-scale structure of the Sun’s corona up to two months in advance. This is great, because this gives advance knowledge and a large window of preparedness for space weather driven by coronal magnetic fields,” says Dr. Nandi. Space weather consists of the varying conditions such as solar wind and is different from weather on earth.
Space weather “The dynamic events on the Sun can affect Earth’s outer atmosphere and our technologies, leading to disruption in communication and navigation networks (GPS). These are more frequent during solar maxima and pose a threat to space reliant technology and astronauts,” says Soumyaranjan Dash, PhD student at IISER Kolkata who works on this model. This time, they had used inputs and made the prediction 43 days ahead of the eclipse. “The only way to verify these models is to either have photographs taken during the eclipse which captures the Sun’s corona or use space- or ground-based instruments which use an artificial disc to occult the Sun’s surface to make the faint corona visible,” Dr Nandi adds in an email to The Hindu. This time, since this was an annular eclipse with a ring of bright solar surface visible, the corona was not directly observable. The only option was to use a coronagraph with an occulting disc. “The only functional one in the world is in Hawaii in Mount Mauna Loa which has been having bad weather. Also it was night in Hawaii when the eclipse happened,” he adds. So the researchers used the images generated by the space based coronagraph instrument LASCO on board the SOHO satellite.
https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/science/shape-of-suns-corona-accurately- predicted/article30420269.ece Gravitational wave disturbances: how will India contribute to LIGO?
Shubashree Desikan
JULY 21, 2019 00:02 IST
An aerial view of the LIGO detector site near Livingston, Louisiana, U.S. that was released by Caltech/MIT/LIGO Laboratory in 2016. | Photo Credit: LIGO Laboratory
Why is it important for the country to join the global network studying gravitational waves? What will it achieve? The story so far: On September 14, 2015, the two LIGO detectors in the U.S., at Livingston in Louisiana, and Hanford in Washington, registered a disturbance that was not unlike the chirp of a bird. It was due to gravitational waves travelling outwards from a point 1.3 billion light years away from the earth. At this point, two massive black holes with masses 29 and 36 times that of the sun had merged to give off gravitational wave disturbances. Black holes are exotic objects that we know little about, but their immense gravitational pull which traps even the fastest object in the world, which is light, is legendary. When objects with such an immense gravity merge, the disturbance is felt by the very fabric of space time and travels outward from the merger, not unlike ripples on a pond surface. Thus, gravitational waves have been described as “ripples in the fabric of space time”. Following the 2015 detection, which later won the Physics Nobel (2017), the two LIGO detectors detected seven such binary black hole merger events before they were joined by the European Virgo detector in 2017. The two facilities have now detected 10 events. The Japanese detector, KAGRA, or Kamioka Gravitational-wave Detector, is expected to join the international network soon. In the meantime, in a collaboration with LIGO, a gravitational wave detector is being set up in India. The LIGO India project is expected to join the international network in a first science run in 2025.
What are the LIGO detectors? The acronym LIGO stands for Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory. LIGO consists of a pair of huge interferometers, each having two arms which are 4 km long. Remarkable precision is needed to detect a signal as faint as a gravitational wave, and the two LIGO detectors work as one unit to ensure this. Naturally, this requires weeding out noise very carefully, for when such a faint signal is being detected, even a slight human presence near the detector could derail the experiment by drowning out the signal. LIGO, unlike usual telescopes, does not “see” the incoming ripples in spacetime. It does not even need to, because gravitational waves are not a part of electromagnetic spectrum or light. They are not light waves but a different phenomenon altogether — a stretching of spacetime due to immense gravity. A single LIGO detector cannot confidently detect this disturbance on its own. At least two detectors are needed. This is because the signal is so weak that even a random noise could give out a signal that can mislead one into thinking a genuine gravitational wave has been detected. It is because two detectors have detected the faint signal in coincidence that the observer is convinced it is a genuine reading and not noise.
What is the need to have another detector in India? Right now, with just three detectors, there is huge uncertainty in determining where in the sky the disturbance came from. Observations from a new detector in a far-off position will help locate the source of the gravitational waves more accurately.
What are the possible sources of gravitational waves? Mergers of black holes or neutron stars, rapidly rotating neutron stars, supernova explosions and the remnants of the disturbance caused by the formation of the universe, the Big Bang itself, are the strongest sources. There can be many other sources, but these are likely to be too weak to detect.
Why does one study gravitational waves? As a largely unknown and fundamental phenomenon, gravitational waves are interesting to scientists. But once many more detectors are in place, the study also offers a new way to map out the universe, using gravitational-wave astronomy. Perhaps one day we will have such accurate detection facilities that signatures of gravitational waves bouncing off celestial objects can help us detect and map them.
What do we know about LIGO India? LIGO India will come up in Maharashtra, near Aundha in Hingoli district. Most of the land has been acquired, and the small balance is going through a slightly longer acquisition procedure. The project is formally in the construction phase, with the building design conceptualised. Says Tarun Souradeep, spokesperson for LIGO India, “We are close to finalising the civil infrastructure drawings. The plans for immense vacuum infrastructure have been conceptualized, reviewed and are in an advanced stage.”
Will LIGO India be different from LIGO itself? Like the LIGO detectors, the one at LIGO India will also have two arms of 4 km length. But while there are similarities there will be differences too. Being an ultra-high precision large-scale apparatus, LIGO India is expected to show a unique “temperament” determined by the local site characteristics. In an email to The Hindu, Dr. Souradeep, says, “LIGO India and its complex feedback control loops to high sensitivity will follow a fairly independent track and poses an exciting full-scale challenge. Under a memorandum of understanding, the National Geophysical Research Institute is carrying out a year-long, multiple-station seismic survey campaign at the LIGO India site to characterise the local properties. This is in addition to the elaborate geotechnical and geophysical survey completed earlier this year.”
What is the technology being developed in India for LIGO India? Some of it includes design and fabrication of ultra stable laser, quantum measurement techniques, handling of complex control system for enforcing precision control, large-scale ultra-high vacuum technology, data analysis and machine learning. This is not a complete list and the development of such indigenous technology is likely to result in many spin-offs for industry and research.
https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/technology/how-will-india-contribute-to-ligo/article28621498.ece A case for content
Shubashree Desikan
DECEMBER 19, 2018 00:15 IST
Scientific papers should be judged by their content and not by the journals in which they appear The best scientific research is not necessarily published in the most popular mainstream journals, and history has many examples to prove this. In 1986, when J. Georg Bednorz and K. Alex Müller made a breakthrough with their discovery of high temperature superconductivity in a ceramic material, they did not publish their results in the sought-after journals. They chose to publish in a journal that was not very well known: Zeitschrift für Physik B. Their discovery was awarded the Nobel prize in 1987. In many cases, this is not a matter of choice. Lynn Margulis’s efforts to publish her influential 1967 paper, “On the origin of mitosing cells”, were remarkable: The paper was rejected by 12 journals before being accepted by the Journal of Theoretical Biology. Now, it is considered the work that brought to focus the endosymbiotic theory of organelle origins. This is the theory that mitochondria, the power houses of cells, were initially independent free-living cells and they got into a symbiotic relationship with larger cellular beings to form a new organism. Originally proposed by microbiologist Ivan Wallin in the 1920s, the theory needed Margulis’s tenacity to gain acceptance. Personal bias can also nudge a piece of scientific work towards lesser-known journals. The landmark paper of Ronald A. Fisher, “The correlation between relatives on the supposition of Mendelian inheritance”, has been so influential that geneticists are celebrating the centenary of its publication this year. It was initially submitted to the Royal Society of London. It was withdrawn following inordinate delay and unfavourable reviews and was finally published in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. “The paper laid the foundations of the field of quantitative genetics,” says evolutionary biologist Amitabh Joshi of JNCASR, Bengaluru. Some important work from Russian groups was neglected because the work either never appeared in western journals or appeared only much later in translation. “One example is the work of Vadim Berezinskii on two- dimensional phase transitions, which appeared two years before the work of John M. Kosterlitz and David J. Thouless,” says biophysicist Gautam Menon of the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai. “It was referred to as the KT transition, and both [Kosterlitz and Thouless] were awarded the Nobel prize close to four decades later. By then Berezinskii had died, so could not have received the prize, although the transition is now increasingly referred to as the BKT transition in his honour.” The lesson that these cases underscore is that it is easy to miss important scientific works, if only the name of the journal in which they are published is considered a marker of their consequence. History suggests that it is better to judge papers by their content. The writer covers science for The Hindu
https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/a-case-for-content/article25775077.ece Genes implicated in bipolar disorder identified
Shubashree Desikan
SEPTEMBER 21, 2019 19:36 IST
Models of head showing different parts of the brain. | Photo Credit: Reuters
The team studied a large family with many affected members and identified the relevant gene variations linked to the disorder A study by researchers from the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR) and the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS), in Bengaluru, identifies two specific genes which may be related to bipolar disorder, a neuropsychiatric disorder that has been studied widely.
Decade-long study While there are strong indications that genetics plays a role in it, the specific genes whose mutations result in the individual being affected are difficult to identify. In a paper published recently in the journal Bipolar Disorders, the team describes their decade-long work studying four generations of a family with several members in each generation affected. In all, 28 members of one family were genotyped, and of these 11 were affected by bipolar disorder. Genes and psychiatry When asked about the challenges involved in carrying out the study, Prof. Anuranjan Anand, from JNCASR, an author of the paper, says in an email to The Hindu, “A variety of genetic parameters and models of the disorder needed to be tested. Further, disease-gene mapping is very sensitive to genetic parameters and defining this in a psychiatric disorder like BPD is a challenge.”
Bipolar disorder is an illness that affects about 0.8% of the global population. Also known as manic-depressive illness, it is characterised by mood swings, irrational behaviour and phases of mania or extreme highs, and at other times, phases of depression. The figures in India are not definitely known due to lack of reporting and diagnosis and poor documentation. However, judging by the global estimate, a significant number of Indians could be affected by this disease. “If in a family there are multiple members with the disorder, then what is shared among the ill members, and not shared by the unaffected members may help identify the gene,” says Dr Sanjeev Jain from NIMHANS, one of the authors of the paper. “However, since the human genome is over three billion base pairs [long], we use a number of markers to identify which region of the genome is shared, and look up the gene in that region.” He is quick to clarify that with psychiatric genetics, not all those at risk may develop the disease. “The experiment involves doing thousands of genotyping reactions and a large amount of sequencing of reactions for a large family with several affected members,” says Prof. Anand. The group identified regions within chromosome 1 and chromosome 6 and, subsequently, found that variants of two genes (KANK4 and CAP2) were the likely candidates. “We sequenced all the genes in the region, compared them to databases of the world, and of south Asians, and control samples from here, as well as other patients from here, and then zeroed in on the two variants,” says Dr Jain.
Gene family KANK1, one of the KANK family of genes, has been implicated in cerebral palsy, spastic quadriplegia-2 and steroid resistant nephritic syndrome, according to the authors of the paper. “Other genes in the KANK family have been linked to diseases, so it is likely that this variant in KANK4, too, may be linked to disease,” says Dr Jain.
Rare variants The authors also describe that these mutations in KANK4 and CAP2 are rare variants. These occur in less than 1% of the population, often fewer than one in a thousand. As Prof. Anan puts it, “Today there are nearly 150 families across the world with structures like this. These give us a toe-hold into biology, illuminating clinical molecular mechanisms involved.” The study suggests understanding the consequences of this variation in biological processes in the brain and further analysis of these two genes in people with bipolar disorder will be beneficial and help understand the biological aspects of the disease. https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/science/genes-implicated-in-bipolar-disorder- identified/article29477785.ece Linked by light
Shubashree Desikan
JULY 03, 2018 00:02 IST
The scope of quantum optics is still unknown, and plans for future research are vast Since the late 19th century, when Max Planck modelled radiation emitted by a black body, the idea that light has a particle nature has come a long way. Albert Einstein won a Nobel prize in 1921 for his paper on the photoelectric effect, in which he developed the idea of light as quanta, or photons. For a long time after this, scientists were mainly interested in the quantum theory of matter. The development of laser science made possible the study of light as governed by quantum theory. Important contributions to statistical properties of light were made by scientists such as E.C.G. Sudarshan and Roy Glauber. Today, quantum optics powers many discoveries and its full potential can only be guessed at. The most ambitious attempt to date to unpack this potential might come from a paper entitled: “Light, the Universe and everything – 12 Herculean tasks for quantum cowboys and black diamond skiers”. Its 32 authors from 10 countries (three of them Nobel Laureates) attempt to set benchmarks in the field of quantum optics. The paper, a first-of-its-kind activity, touches on recent findings such as detection of gravitational waves by the team at LIGO, or the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, that literally shook the world in 2015. It also dwells on exotic subjects such as the “time crystal”, and the importance of “nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond”, which can help in building quantum computers of the future. Crystals are solids that show a repeating arrangement in space of a basic structure known as the unit cell. Time crystals (systems that repeat their crystal structure not just in space but also in time) were first proposed by Frank Wilczek, one of the authors of the paper, and who also shared the 2004 Nobel Prize in physics. In 2017, time crystals were demonstrated in a laboratory setting. “A beating heart is a time crystal in the broadest, purely mathematical sense,” writes Professor Wilczek in the paper. The questions he poses for research are around whether there are time liquids, glasses and quasicrystals and whether we could imagine a world where there is a time-dependent parallel to the properties of crystalline solids that we know. Astrophysics aficionados may be thrilled by Nobel physicist, Rainer Weiss’s contribution to the paper as well; he explores what gravitational waves might reveal about black holes, neutron stars and supernovae. Climate change and global warming are addressed by Prof. Goong Chen in the section, “What is the most urgent undertaking in science and technology?” He asks whether it is possible to “mimic, speed-up or even improve” photosynthesis by making use of nonlinear shortcuts to the chemical processes of carbon capture. Plans for future research that the authors have outlined could excite not only scientists but also science enthusiasts and sci-fiction writers across the world. The writer is a science editor at The Hindu in Chennai https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/linked-by- light/article24314762.ece What are exoplanets, and what is ‘dark’ matter?
Shubashree Desikan
OCTOBER 13, 2019 00:02 IST
How the 2019 Physics Nobel winners answered some of the age- old questions. The story so far: On Tuesday, October 8, the royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that the Nobel Prize in Physics would go to three people: One half of it would be shared by Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz of the University of Geneva, for discovering for the first time a planet outside our solar system orbiting a Sun-like star; the other half would go to James Peebles, Princeton University, for his contribution to physical cosmology. The scientists were awarded for discoveries that added “new perspectives on our place in the universe”.
What are exoplanets? Since when have people been looking for them? The word planet is a general term that describes any celestial body that moves around a star. Well, there are also “rogue” planets that do not orbit stars. An exoplanet is a planet outside our solar system. It is an extrasolar planet. Nicolaus Copernicus (1473 – 1543) was the first to put the Sun at the centre, with planets like earth moving around it. This was literally an earth-shaking theory, because before that, people imagined the earth to be at the centre of the universe. The Copernican revolution was followed by the Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno in the sixteenth century and later Sir Isaac Newton shattering the uniqueness of the Sun’s position by predicting that many stars could have planets orbiting them. But were they all like our world? How far were they? No one knew. But that was when people started searching for and imagining worlds other than our own.
Why did it take so long for exoplanets to be discovered? 51 Pegasi b was the first exoplanet to be discovered by Mayor and Queloz in December, 1995. The delay was due to the lack of good telescopes or a suitable method. Indirect methods that used slight wobbling in the orbits of binary stars or variations in the brightness of isolated stars – none yielded correct results and was rejected by the astronomy community.
What were Indian astronomers doing? The very first, significant “false alarm” came from no place other than Chennai, then known as Madras. Captain William Stephen Jacob who was the director of the Madras Observatory (The East India Observatory at Madras) from 1849 to 1858, made this “finding” in 1855. He was studying the binary star (a pair of stars that orbit each other) named 70 Ophiuchi and noticed a slight difference in the orbital motions of the pair. He attributed this to the presence of a planet orbiting them. He published this result in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. His findings were corroborated by astronomer Thomas Jefferson Jackson See who even deduced that the planet would take 36 years to orbit the stars. Sadly, however, both of their calculations were later shown to have mistakes. This story is narrated in the book Worlds Beyond Our Own, by Prof. Sujan Sengupta, of the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bengaluru. Incidentally, the Madras observatory later evolved into the Indian Institute of Astrophysics. What kind of a planet is 51 Pegasi b? Is it habitable? The constellation Pegasus has a star 51 Pegasi which is some 50 light years away from earth. On October 6, 1995, the prize-winning duo discovered a planet orbiting it. It was named 51 Pegasi b, as per astronomical conventions. It is a gas giant, about half the size of Jupiter, which is why it was given the name Dimidium, meaning one-half. It orbits its star in just four days. It is unlikely that we can survive that.
How many such exoplanets have been discovered? Who maintains a list of exoplanets? According to the NASA exoplanet archive, as of October 10, 2019, there are 4,073 confirmed exoplanets. This webpage hosts one of the archives that has such lists and data. Today, there are not just ground-based telescopes but space missions that search for exoplanets, such as the Kepler Space Telescope.
Why did James Peebles get the Prize? In the beginning was the Big Bang, about 13.8 billion years ago. No one knows much about the earliest states of the universe, but theories hold that it was a compact, hot and opaque particle soup. About 400,000 years after the Big Bang, the universe expanded and cooled to a few thousand degrees Celsius. This caused it to become transparent, allowing light to pass through it. This ancient afterglow of the Big Bang, the remnants of which still can be observed, is known as the cosmic microwave background (CMB). The universe continued to expand and cool and its present temperature is close to 2 kelvin. That is, approximately minus 271 degrees Celsius. Microwaves have wavelengths in the range of millimetres which has been long compared to visible light. The CMB consists of light in the microwave range because the expansion of the universe stretched the light so much. Microwave radiation is invisible light. The CMB was detected first in 1964, winning for its discoverers a Nobel Prize in 1978. Peebles realised that measuring the CMB’s temperature could provide information about how much matter had been created in the Big Bang. He also saw that the release of this light played a role in how matter could form clumps creating what we now see as galaxies. This was a major breakthrough. This discovery by Peebles heralded a new era of cosmology. Many questions — how old is the universe? What is its fate? How much matter and energy does it contain? These could be answered by studying the variation of the CMB. The news release of the Nobel academy describes these variations as wavelets on the sea surface — small from a distance but significant when close.
What is Peebles’ role in understanding dark matter? For that matter, what is ‘dark’ matter? By measuring the speeds of rotating galaxies, scientists were able to see that a lot of mass needed to be there that would hold the galaxies together with the strength of their gravitational attraction. Before Peebles intervened, the missing mass was attributed to neutrinos. Peebles instead said this is due to a hitherto unknown type of “dark” matter particles. However, while they could “see” a portion of this mass, a large part of it could not be seen. Hence the mass missing from view was named “dark” matter. It is to be understood that in this case “seeing” is not being used in the sense that the matter in question is very far away and hence cannot be seen. It means that even though this matter is all around us, close as well as far away, we only feel it through its gravity, but we cannot see it through other interactions. This is because it does not interact with light. About 25% of the mass of the universe is made up of dark matter. Scientists have set up large experiments across the world to capture traces of dark matter particles.
What is dark energy? In 1998, it was discovered that the universe is expanding and that this expansion was gaining speed or accelerating. There had to be an “invisible” energy that was driving this. Calculations showed that this dark energy – so called because it did not interact with the observed mass – makes up about 70% of the universe.
https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/science/unravelling-the-secrets-of-the- universe/article29668182.ece New method better estimates melting of debris-covered Himalayan glaciers
Shubashree Desikan
JANUARY 11, 2020 18:59 IST
Handy tool: To study the melting of the glacier the researchers planted 60 bamboo stakes below 4,600 metres elevation.
The debris partially insulates the glacier from the warm exterior thereby slowing down the melting A study of the Satopanth glacier in order to model the melting of debris- covered glaciers has been carried out by a group of Indian researchers. Their new method gives a better estimate of the glacier’s melting than existing ones. Studying debris-laden Himalayan glaciers is important from the point of view of how climate change affects them. About 20% of Himalayan glaciers are debris-laden, and their dynamics are very different from the ones without debris cover. The study was published in Journal of Glaciology.
Effect of debris In glaciers without a debris cover, the rate of melting increases as the elevation decreases. However, in glaciers covered with debris, the thick cover partially insulates the glacier from the warm exterior and thereby slows down the melting. The thickness of the debris cover, by and large, increases as the glacier flows down. This works against the general trend that the lower the elevation, the higher the rate of melting. Matters are further complicated because the thickness of the debris cover is not uniform but fluctuates randomly. This line of research was initiated by H.C. Nainwal of the Geology Department, Hemwati Nandan Bahuguna Garhwal University, in 2004. Initially it constituted studies of paleoglaciation and monitoring the fronts of Satopanth and Bhagirath Kharak glaciers. “Full scale glaciological observations began in 2013,” says R Shankar of The Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai, and an author of the paper. Prof. Shankar and Argha Banerjee, now with IISER Pune, are interested in developing a model to describe the dynamics of debris-laden glaciers like the Satopanth. The collaboration happened almost by chance: “I was planning a motorcycling trip in Garhwal, including a visit to Gangotri in 2007. I came across a paper by [Harish Chandra] Nainwal in Current Science on the geomorphology of Gangotri valley and took a copy along to see what it was like on the field,” says Prof. Shankar. This brought them, and Dr Banerjee, together to discuss Satopanth. Along the way, they realised that it was an important problem to model the dynamics of debris-covered glaciers.
Studying Satopanth Satopanth glacier is located in Garhwal in Central Himalaya, in Uttarakhand. It is the origin of the river Alaknanda, one of the two main tributaries of the Ganga. The other tributary is Bhagirathi, which originates from the Gangotri glacier. These two rivers join at Devprayag, around 70 km upstream of Rishikesh. Downstream of Devprayag, the river is called Ganga. To study the melting, the team planted nearly 60 bamboo stakes in the Satopanth glacier, most of which were placed in ten transverse lines below 4,600 metres elevation. The initial depth of the bamboo stakes was noted down, and periodic measurements were made over the course of three years to assess how much ice had melted. Nearly 1,000 measurements were made, mainly by Sunil Singh Shah, the first author of the paper.
Better estimate They computed the sub-debris melting of the glacier by interpolating the collected data as a function of thickness of the debris and averaging over debris thickness distribution over different parts of the glacier. This is to be contrasted with the conventional method where the collected data is interpolated as a function of elevation. The new method introduced by the group worked better at estimating the dynamics of the glacier than the conventional method. They also repeated the estimation after leaving out several of the data points and restricting the data to about 25 stakes. They could still get better results than the conventional method. “This established a clear advantage of the new method. The estimates were seen to be more robust when a reduction in the number of stakes was applied,” says Prof. Shankar. Using a more detailed measurement of the debris thickness variation would make the estimate more accurate, the authors write in the paper.
https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/science/new-method-better-estimates-melting-of-debris-covered- himalayan-glaciers/article30544381.ece A new way of getting a sense of how time flows
Shubashree Desikan
FEBRUARY 08, 2020 20:04 IST
Energy transfer: The milk swirls in large blobs, dissolves into smaller blobs, then gets dispersed in the coffee decoction. | Photo Credit: Dannko
The way energy flows can determine the direction of the ‘arrow of time’ Time, as we experience it, flows only in one direction – forward. We cannot easily reverse the ‘arrow of time’ as it is called. An example is that it is easy to squeeze a toothpaste container and bring out the paste, but well-nigh impossible to push it back without making a mess. It is a fascinating exercise to see how physicists view this concept.
Physics and time The laws of elementary particle physics remain the same when time is reversed. That is, take the questions which govern gravitational, electromagnetic and strong-nuclear forces and replace “t” by “–t” and the equations are invariant. Does this mean that time reversal is indeed a possibility? We do not see it in practice, hence there must be something defining the arrow of time. This is the second law of thermodynamics, which says that a quantity known as the entropy of the system will either remain a constant or increase with time. The entropy is directly related to the disorder in a system. The more the entropy the greater the disorder. So, we can break an egg and go from an ordered state into a disordered state, but the reverse – broken bits of egg joining to form a whole – does not happen. Thus, the direction of increasing entropy determines the arrow of time. This is a popular way of defining the arrow of time.
Energetics and time Professor Mahendra K. Verma from the Physics Department of IIT Kanpur has come up with a different way of defining the arrow of time, which is described in a paper published in The European Physical Journal B. The concept is readily illustrated taking the example of milk being stirred into coffee decoction in a cup. First the milk swirls in large blobs, then it dissolves into smaller and smaller blobs until it gets dispersed in the decoction. Therefore, there is a transfer of milk from large blobs to smaller blobs and then to still smaller blobs. In the same way, energy gets transferred from a large scale to the small scale, there by defining a direction for the arrow of time. Such alternative definitions of arrow of time are needed, for example, in cosmology to explain cosmological models like the oscillating universe. According to this model, the universe, which we know to be expanding, will reach a maximum size and then start contracting once again due to gravity. In such a contracting phase, entropy may actually decrease. If this happens, it will mean the arrow of time defined using entropy will reverse, and that sounds physically impossible.
Oscillating universe “The second law of thermodynamics encounters difficulties in explaining cosmological arrow of time for oscillating universe. However, energy transfers can predict the arrow of time for the collapsing universe,” says Prof. Verma. In a gravitating system, such as the collapsing universe, cluster or star formation is somewhat similar to the formation of cyclones or hurricanes. “[In contrast to the example of coffee] here the energy flows from small scales to large scales. For such systems, the clustering or structure formation is in the forward direction of time,” he adds in explanation.
https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/science/a-new-way-of-getting-a-sense-of-how-time- flows/article30771313.ece Musth does not necessarily give younger, male Asian elephants an edge
Shubashree Desikan
DECEMBER 28, 2019 17:47 IST
Roving male: Ghatotgaja, a male aged above 45 years, sighted in musth. Temporal gland secretion is visible as a dark stain behind and slightly above the eye.
Going into musth is a roving strategy primarily advantageous to old males not to young males A seven-year study of Asian elephants from Nagarahole-Bandipur, a population centred around the Kabini region, yields interesting patterns of male elephant behaviour when in musth. Hormonal levels give musth males high energy and aggression levels and this state is often correlated with a propensity to mate. In two papers published in Journal of Mammology and Gajah, the team from Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR), Bengaluru, probes how this works in the Kabini population.
Elephants in musth When an elephant is in a musth state, its urine shows increased testosterone levels. Also, temporin, a thick secretion, flows from the temporal ducts situated midway between their eyes and ears. Sometimes, the elephant dribbles urine as well. They hardly feed during musth and are more focussed on finding fertile females. They move from female to female, checking if she is fertile or not. Males enter into musth (show signs of musth) when there are in good body condition, and lost body condition over the time they are in musth because they are hardly feeding. Moreover, males can also mate when they are not in musth (they do not have to enter musth in order to mate). Therefore, people have been interested in finding out how exactly musth helps as a reproductive strategy since it is a very expensive strategy. One way in which musth might give an advantage is that it might help to break a "queue" so to say of which male elephant is allowed to mate. It is also possible that musth allows for males to have greater energy and to rove (roam) over larger areas, which then gives males the opportunity to sample more females than nonmusth males. Data were collected by a seven-member team. The team members drove along pre-selected routes for nearly 12 hours starting early morning and took photos and videos whenever they sighted elephants on these paths. “We aged all the elephants based on relative height, and ratio of head size to body size, and identified all the individuals based on ear, back and tail characteristics since we have a database based on long-term monitoring,” says P. Keerthipriya, a research associate at the Evolutionary and Integrative Biology Unit, JNCASR. Which individual male whether in musth or not was associated with which female was recorded.
No apparent advantage The key findings of the group are that young (15-30 years old) males in musth did not have an advantage over older (over 30 years) non-musth males in terms of access to females. Old musth males had an advantage over old non- musth males, and also showed a roving strategy which allows for searching for multiple females. Therefore, musth seems to be a roving strategy that is primarily advantageous to old males and not to young males. They also found that Kabini has a lower proportion of musth sightings compared to earlier studies from Kaziranga and Mudumalai. “Kabini has fewer males in the over-45 age class than Kaziranga and Mudumalai…. Hence the number of males of the 45 plus age-class seems to influence the occurrence of musth,” says Dr. Keerthipriya. Female elephants have a four-month oestrous cycle in which they are ovulating for three or four days only. Thus, for a male to find an ovulating female and mate with her is, even normally, a rare occurrence. Further, if the female should get pregnant, she is out of circulation for about five years, because the pregnancy lasts two years and then she is lactating for over two- and-half years. Therefore, females are a rare resource for males seeking to produce offspring. Therefore, male mating strategies become very important in such a species.
Competing males In this context, the obvious feature is the high degree of competition that exists among males to select and mate with the few available females. This study analyses how musth might affect this competition. “The young males probably have to wait it out and invest in growth rather than reproduction while the competition is mostly among the old males,” says T.N.C. Vidya of the Evolutionary and Integrative Biology Unit, JNCASR, under whose leadership the work was done. “The low occurrence of musth in Kabini brings up interesting questions about how paternity will be distributed among males in Kabini, which is now being studied,” says Dr Vidya. https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/science/musth-does-not-necessarily-give-younger-male-asian- elephants-an-edge/article30420272.ece LIGO team detects second merger of two neutron stars
Shubashree Desikan
CHENNAI, JANUARY 08, 2020 10:13 IST
Photo of merging neutron stars as conceived by artist | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement
The total mass of the system is so high it suggests an unusual formation process for the binary Gravitational wave signals detected by the LIGO detector at Livingstone, Louisiana, on April 25, 2019, are likely due to the collision of two neutron stars, a new study reveals. This is the first time the group is making an announcement based on signal detected by only one of three active detectors in the world. The total mass of the binary system is estimated to lie between 3.3 and 3.7 times the mass of the Sun. This value lies well above what is “normal” for binary neutron star pairs in our galaxy. One possibility for this is that the neutron stars formed separately and later drifted together to form a binary star pair, though this cannot be confirmed by the data. The pair of neutron stars most likely collided at a distance of 520 million light years away, as inferred by the data. This combined mass is much larger than that of any known binary neutron star system that we know till date in the Milky Way. The team, therefore, cannot rule out the possibility that one, or even both, of the members of the binary system is a black hole. However, the most straightforward explanation is that the pair consists of neutron stars. “This event is weaker than the first binary neutron star detection in August 2017 and hence does not allow precise measurement of the composition of the stars. Therefore, the possibility of one or both components being black hole(s) cannot be ruled out. Either this is the heaviest binary neutron star system observed till date or the lightest binary containing a black hole. Though the former agrees better with the conventional wisdom, the latter cannot be ruled out, which is what is exciting about this event,” says Prof. K.G. Arun of the Chennai Mathematical Institute, who is one of the authors of the paper that has been submitted to The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The LIGO system consists of two detectors – one at Hanford, Washington, and the other at Livingstone, Louisiana. At the time of detection of this signal, dubbed GW190425, the detector at Hanford was offline and did not detect any signal. However, a strong signal was detected by LIGO Livingstone. The European Virgo detector was also taking readings at this time; however, the signal received by it was not above the detection threshold. This is because the detector has a lower sensitivity than the LIGO detectors and also perhaps the event occurred in a part of the sky that was not very accessible to it. This merger was detected in the third observing run of the LIGO detectors, which started on April 1, 2019, and is still going on. Between observing runs, the detectors are offline and are upgraded with technology to improve their sensitivities. In the second run (November 2016 – August 2017), the detectors detected the first neutron star merger on August 17, 2017. This was accompanied by a gamma ray burst, a brilliant flash of light, which was picked up by electromagnetic detectors across the world. The important thing about the latest described merger – GW190425 – is that there was no such electromagnetic counterpart either. Given all these constraints, the LIGO scientists were able to locate the event to a point that could lie within about 20% of the sky. This is a wide range of uncertainty. In comparison, the earlier event (GW170817) was located within 0.04% of the sky, nearly 500 times improved accuracy. This is because that signal was picked up by three detectors each located far away from the other, and accuracy improves with the number of such faraway detectors. Finally, the fact that now two neutron star mergers have been spotted has also been used by the team to predict a rate of neutron star mergers as 250-2810 per gigaparsec-cubed per year.
https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/science/ligo-team-detects-second-merger-of-two-neutron- stars/article30510613.ece The education system needs change, not fine-tuning: Kasturirangan on the draft NEP
Shubashree Desikan JUNE 27, 2019 01:18 IST
The draft National Education Policy was released by the government recently. Here is the first part of an interview with Dr. K. Kasturirangan, the chairperson of the drafting committee and former head of ISRO. Here he talks about the formation of the committee, the school system and why such radical reforms are needed.
Read the second part of the interview here.
Could you tell me a bit about how the committee was constituted? How was the document made? It’s a great pleasure to talk to The Hindu. The work on the present policy started in Srimathi Smriti Irani’s time. An enormous exercise was mounted during her time to elicit opinions from a wide cross-section of society. That was an exhaustive exercise spread over I think three to four years. Then they set up this committee of TSR Subramaniam to look into it. Parallelly, there was a report that came out of the ministry of human resource development (MHRD). This formed the basis for the way in which the policy had to be framed. Dramatic changes have happened in the last twenty-five years. Changes have taken place economically socially, strategic demands, many other… certainly the country has moved much further. Into a 2 trillion economy moving towards a five trillion economy. Also a digitalized society is around the corner. Are we prepared for that kind of thing?. In this context I was called by the minister – at that time it was Prakash Javadekar. There were some issues with the Subramaniam report which we were asked to revisit. We also had the MHRD report and the earlier homework. We were asked to use all this and come up with a report which does not have issues of this kind, and which can also withstand the next twenty years of India’s development. And with fine tuning it can even go up to thirty years. But when we studied it, the members felt what was needed was not a fine- tuning of the existing policies but a relook in its totality. So, we virtually started from a clean slate but without overlooking the fact that there were lot of information and ideas in the old ones.
It suggests a number of radical changes to existing system, for instance, the draft policy talks of the 3-8 age group as the foundational stage of education. Studies have shown that in the 3-5 age group, generalization is just setting in, their bodily growth and sensory experience is very different from the 5-8 group. Is this addressed anywhere in the policy? The child’s brain starts developing the day the child enters this world. You have the 0-3 period when it tries to comprehend sound, making a meaning of it, trying to learn the mother tongue, in its own way. There is a traditional way in which a child is taught at home, creating sounds, creating communication in a peculiar way a child will appreciate. These are all part of the training it gets at home. 3-6 years, is the time when the brain grows very fast. By six years, 85% of the brain has already matured. This is a very critical period of learning time. In this period according to how you stimulate appropriate regions of the brain, you will see child [develops different aptitudes] These are all because of differential stimulation the brain receives with respect to the ability to learn from the outside world. This is quite a realistic way in which the brain evolves. The child cannot be blamed for this. By the age of eight or so, there were differences in the growth, because of the way in which it has been taught. The education is tuned for a linear growth, whereas this [development] is not linear. This is an important aspect which has been overlooked.
Are you not talking of school preparedness rather than child development? The two are not unrelated. At 3 years, you have ability for play based thinking activity based and play based, which are not regular learning. That is what makes the child grow further in early learning.
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I talked about brain growth and how it becomes saturated if you don’t take advantage of it. The fact is you have to correct these differences in brain growth by ensuring you have a specialized attention. The foundational period is a critical period. It is where we ensure that the child enters higher [3-8] classes fully prepared. This is a developmentally appropriate education which we carry forward into the next three years and the next three years. Slowly you move into more communication, and the ability to look into books and then ability to interact with teachers. These are what we try to move towards with an outcome-based assessment. You spoke about the Kothari recommendation of school complexes. While it sounds good in the urban and semi- urban terrain. But what about the varied terrains where access can be a significant problem? You mention that cycles may be provided and so on. But is this feasible. Think of a Dalit family who lives in a remote area. Is it a good idea to close down an existing school and provide a school complex which is far away? It is not about closing down existing schools. Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan had put forth that within specified distance there should be a school. If you really look at it, schools have come up. But there are many schools which have only six students. There are many schools in which there is only one teacher. This is not the idea of a school education. There is no playground, there is no idea of a societal interface with the child. That is not expected in the policy we have drawn. Wherever you have a cluster – maybe urban and peri-urban [areas] – certainly we can move on this concept [school complexes] a little fast… You talked about Dalits – for that matter, any underprivileged people, we need to make sure by 2025-2026 that there is no illiterate left in this country. We will cover literacy and numeracy in our school system by 2025, if I remember that number. We need to upgrade schools, bring in more teachers - this is not possible with five children and ten children. We need to make the complexes through existing system by improving it, with minimal norms for a school in terms of teachers, ability of teacher to learn and upgrade themselves, work with anganwadi and other systems in the nearby places, work with middle and high schools elsewhere. But slowly move them into working together and people in the community can also be mentors to the schools. Currently, community connectivity with schools is practically nothing. We need to bring that culture. It will grow fast in the most easy places. But that will give information on how to operate in the more complex systems. We are not talking about overnight change. We cannot do that in a huge country with such a diversity. Geographically, if they are not easily connected, we have to provide those kinds of facilities like cycle or some other. But that is how development of India is. Most importantly teachers are not isolated people any longer. They can internally decide on many things. These are ways in which we should move into the next step of an optimal, viable and efficient education system.
Do you have some insight into why the stated aims have not been achieved by earlier systems so far. Is the crisis of learning in the country only due to mismanagement, the fact that people in the system have not realized that literacy and numeracy are fundamental, the non-viability of having small schools… are these the fundamental reasons? We wanted to create schools so that everyone has access – every few kilometres or so, like the drinking water mission every 1.6 km – These kind of numbers are put. These are based on input definitions of what a system should be. If I took a building of so much area, we already think we have established a system of education. But the story of education goes much beyond buildings and infrastructure. Our concept is an outcome-based education. Not only school but everywhere. Input gets less [importance]. It is feasible, and we have consulted people who were part of school education policies and systems in this country. They feel this is something we should move. We have put a lot of importance on volunteers, local people. They will motivate the parents, telling them “You should go and study in that school”. Overall culture needs to change. Ultimately this will go because everyone wants a good education. But we don’t want to slow down this. You mentioned the complexity of the country. There are several iniquities which cannot be ignored. Why does the policy have just half a page on education of Dalits and OBCs. At different places we have touched upon the education of underprivileged classes. Including setting up of special education scholarships for them, special teachers being selected out of them for local requirement – don’t see just the title of Dalit or underprivileged and read the paragraph under that. Read across the document and you will see in several places we revisit this question with respect to that area. We had a special person from Indira Gandhi National Tribal University at Amarakantak – professor Kattimani. He has a real depth of knowledge about tribal education and what we should do. It has transformed into major policy decisions in this document. I don’t think anyone has gone into such depth on tribal and underprivileged education as we have done.
Typical problems faced by Dalit children is different in nature from that faced by economically backward people from a different caste. Do you address this? We have not tried to create a silo of this kind. You know, if you bring the entire solution of a Dalit student into the educational process, I feel it may be a tall order for education to deal with it. For this is a societal problem in the broader context. What we have tried to make sure is that Dalits do not suffer for want of opportunities. What are the opportunities? Access to education – you can go to nearby places and study as good as others. We have not made any distinction of it. Secondly, Dalits will get 100 per cent scholarship. Many small concessions the government gives will all be retained, and, if necessary, they will be upgraded. But to bring in Dalits everytime… even they may not like being treated like that. I know many people who are doing well in society. They are proud of living as responsible and active members of the society. I use them all the time in my mind to make sure we don’t unnecessarily draw lines. I think today, in a modern India and the way we are looking at people, these [differences] are slowly going to melt. A twenty-year programme like this for a ten-trillion economy – dalits will be enjoying probably the best status in this country with their own intelligence, efforts etc. I think they will be asking for no special concession. This is my personal feeling. But we have not assumed that in trying to make sure that this education is accessible to them from all angles – financial, cultural, social and many other parameters. They are no less qualified than anyone and there are no less opportunities for them compared to other segments. That much we have taken note of. If there are any particular areas, we would like the public to tell us to strengthen this area.
About board exams: In the present system everything depends on the board exam so it is considered a “high stakes” feature and hence adds to the stress of children. But the suggested frequency is three board exams in a semester for eight semesters. Isn’t the load being increased far more? They can take the board exams as soon as they are through with a particular area. If they are not happy with the outcome of that exam, in another six months they can take it again. There is nothing sacrosanct about writing it at a particular time and doing well and that their whole future is ruined if they don’t perform well [once]. Right now we have put down two or three times a year. Once this [the examination] is completely digitized, the youngster can walk into a place and give the exam. And if he finds it is a good mark he has got, he has completed. Another aspect is that he gets more and more credits as he passes more exams, these credits can be carried forward. So through a method of crediting your activity, flexibility in taking the exam, [which will become] even more flexible with time, we think this system provides the minimal pressure. And we do away with rote learning – it is a formative test. A more general thing is that learning should be enjoyed. It should not be a punishment for the student.
But can this not be achieved with in the existing system? Because even given the many exams and the flexibility, it is the cumulative performance that will matter when going to the undergraduate level. IS it not that the “high stakes” is due to there being few available undergraduate programmes and the resultant heavy competition? Why not just expand that within the existing system? Existing system has intrinsic issues. There are several thousand, or even more, schools having merely six or eight students. Or having only one teacher. What kind of model can you develop around this? Not that they are not good. CBSE is a very good system, we have government schools. There are some good private schools which have got their own role to play. But if you look at it with respect to a rural area or underprivileged area, there is much to be done. We are changing things. A four-year secondary education is not parallel to the secondary education we are accustomed to. There is a three-month connecting period to higher education. You [the student] are trying to enter into a new regime of higher education by making sure that whatever is the gap between what you have learnt in school in terms of sciences, humanities, arts and crafts, social sciences, as well as limited professional and vocational education [is bridged]. The school examination system has to be changed. The examination system is difficult because youngsters are stressed by the rote-learning approach. Teachers have to be retrained or even new teachers have to be brought in because the pedagogy is going to be very different. The curriculum has to be looked at. If you look at the whole system it has to undergo a change, so fine tuning the existing system to achieve the level of aspiration projected here doesn’t look to be feasible, prima facie. In the second part of the interview, Dr Kasturirangan speaks about centralisation of the educational system, the public school concept, modifications of the college and university systems, research and more.
https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/interview/the-education-system-needs-change-not-fine-tuning- kasturirangan-on-the-draft-nep/article28159674.ece
Black Holes: what are we seeing when we see one? | Podcast https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/science/black-holes-what-are-we-seeing-when-we-see-one- podcast/article26823582.ece Ooty’s muon detection facility measures potential of thundercloud
Shubashree Desikan MARCH 23, 2019 19:05 IST
At 1.3 gigavolts, this cloud had ten times higher potential than the previous record in a cloud For the first time in the world, researchers at the GRAPES-3 muon telescope facility in Ooty have measured the electrical potential, size and height of a thundercloud that passed overhead on December 1, 2014. At 1.3 gigavolts (GV), this cloud had 10 times higher potential than the previous record in a cloud. This is not because clouds with such high potentials are a rarity, but rather, because the methods of detection have not been successful so far.
Cloud structure Clouds have negative charges along their lower side and positive charges on top and can be several kilometres thick. If balloons are used to measure the potential difference between the top and bottom, they will take hours to traverse the distance. Unfortunately, thunderstorms last only for about 15-20 minutes, and this method fails. The Ooty group did not really set out to measure the cloud’s potential. Sunil Gupta from TIFR, Mumbai and corresponding author of the paper published in Physical Review Letters, says that he was first intrigued by the way the muon intensity dipped briefly in a manner correlated with the thunderstorm. Though it was known that thunderstorms had an effect on muon intensity, it had not been probed in detail earlier. Dr Gupta urged the researchers in his team to study this carefully.
Threshold of detection Muons and other particles are produced when cosmic rays bombard air particles surrounding the earth. The muons produced can have positive or negative charge. When a positively charged muon falls through a cloud, it loses energy. If its energy falls below 1 giga electron volt (GeV), which is the threshold of detection of the GRAPES-3 muon telescope, it goes undetected. On the contrary, a negatively charged muon gains energy when falling through the cloud and gets detected. Since there are more positive than negative muons produced in nature, the two effects don’t cancel out, and a net change in intensity is detected. From April 2011 to December 2014, the group studied the variation of muon intensity during 184 thunderstorms. In seven events they came across thunderclouds that corresponded to a large change in muon intensity, of above 0.4%. They also simultaneously monitored the profiles of the clouds using four ground-based electric field monitors. Only the cloud that crossed on December 1, 2014, had a profile that was simple enough to simulate. Using a computer simulation and the observed muon intensity variations, the group worked out the relationship with the electric potential of the cloud. They calculated that the potential of the cloud they were studying was approximately 1.3 GV. “To best of our knowledge no one has ever measured potential, size and height of a thundercloud simultaneously. That is the reason for all the excitement,” says Dr Gupta.
Clue to puzzle Dr Gupta and his colleagues surmise that this method can be used to solve a 25-year-old puzzle of terrestrial gamma ray bursts — huge flashes of light that accompany lightnings, but which have not been explained in theory until now. Learning about the properties of thunderclouds can be useful in navigation of aircraft and preventing short circuits. This serendipitous discovery might provide the means to making headway in this direction. https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/science/ootys-muon-detection-facility-measures-potential-of- thundercloud/article26619932.ece LIGO offers clues to black hole physics
Shubashree Desikan
CHENNAI , AUGUST 22, 2019 03:30 IST
Artist’s rendition of a neutron star on the cusp of being swallowed by a black hole. | Photo Credit: Dana Berry/NASA
Gravitational wave emanating from a possible collision with a neuron star detected About 900 million years ago, there was a collision between a black hole and another compact object which resulted in gravitational waves being spewed out into space. The LIGO and VIRGO collaborations which look for gravitational waves emanating from such events have picked up this signal. Astrophysicists are keenly analysing this signal, as it could signify new insights into black hole physics or hold promise for developing gravitational wave astronomy. On August 14, the LIGO collaboration announced a ‘super-event’ alert on its GraceDB (Gravitational Wave Candidate Event Database). The event, dubbed S190814bv, after the date of its discovery, has sent waves of excitement through the astrophysics community because it is unlike any that has been detected so far. “Early analysis suggests these originated from the collision of a black hole with ‘something else’,” says Karan Jani, astrophysicist and LIGO scientist at Vanderbilt University, U.S. The ‘something else’ here could be a neutron star or a black hole of low mass. Either way there are new things to be learnt. “This signal has been located within about 20 square degrees in the sky and major telescopes across the globe are currently following up on this,” says Mr. Jani. “It is clear that this is a real gravitational wave signal, produced by the merger of two compact objects [neutron stars or black holes]. But whether the second object object (in the binary) is a neutron star or black hole can be established only at the end of a careful analysis, which is currently ongoing,” says P. Ajith, astrophysicist from International Centre for Theoretical Sciences, Bengaluru, and a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration. Watch | All about black holes What we know about black holes
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If the second object is a neutron star, it would be fascinating not just because such a merger has never been seen earlier. The extreme gravity of the black hole would shred the neutron star, releasing, in addition to gravitational waves, light in the form of gamma rays, X-rays, Ultraviolet rays and so on. Telescopes around the world look out for such electromagnetic counterparts to gravitational waves. Two of India’s telescopes — Astrosat which is very sensitive to X-ray flashes from such objects and the GROWTH-India optical telescope at Ladakh — seem to have missed observing the event. “Unfortunately, Astrosat was in the ‘South Atlantic Anomaly’ (SAA) at the time of the event, and the instruments were switched off,” says Varun Bhalerao of IIT Bombay, who is a part of the Astrosat team. “SAA is a region above the South Atlantic ocean where there are a large number of charged particles that can damage sensitive instruments. All space telescopes are shut down when they pass through the SAA, and Astrosat is no exception,” he explains. As the sky had been cloudy in Ladakh for many days, that telescope did not get any observations on this event either. If the other possibility turns out to be correct and it is a merger of two black holes, then the second black hole would have to have a mass smaller than allowed by current theories. “If confirmed, this will significantly advance our understanding of black hole population in the universe,” says Mr. Jani. https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/science/ligo-offers-clues-to-black-hole- physics/article29214274.ece The deep and far of science
Shubashree Desikan JULY 24, 2018 00:15 IST
Why it is important to be informed on progress in basic science One of the greatest challenges in science communication is to understand the significance of the phenomena being written about. While science writers are often asked how their subject impacts life and people, the simple answer when writing about basic sciences is that it’s too early for that assessment. That, however, does not take away from the fact that the research in question could be groundbreaking. For cases where this answer does not suffice, here are some reasons to appreciate writing on basic science that go pasts the ‘so what’ reaction. The most exciting discoveries in science are those that significantly deepen existing knowledge about familiar phenomena. There is another category of discoveries that uncovers a brick on the metaphorical wall that blocks scientists from seeing far into the unknown. All scientific research falls in between these two points. The closer the discovery is to pushing the limits of knowledge, the more its significance, and the more it is loved by science writers, for the discovery is that much easier to grapple with. Two discoveries exemplify this point: one was the August 17, 2017 detection of the merging of two neutron stars, achieved by studying gravitational waves that the stars set off when merging. The other is the puzzle posed by the transient discovered by Stephen Smartt using the Hawaii-based ATLAS telescope, on June 16 this year. The transient was called AT2018cow and nicknamed the ‘cow’ because of the last three letters of its official label. The neutron star merger was the fifth time a gravitational wave signal had been detected by observatories on earth. It was a known area, yet this was markedly different from earlier observed mergers of black holes. “The new siren sang for 100 seconds at frequencies climbing to thousands of cycles per second,” said an article in Science. And after the collapse there was a brilliant flash of light — the kilonova — observed experimentally for the first time. This time more than the two detectors of LIGO were at work. The Pisa-based VIRGO detector had joined in, and by a process called triangulation, scientists were able to localise this event in the sky as never before. While the window had already been opened by earlier discoveries, this event deepened existing knowledge significantly. The ‘cow’, on the other hand, appears to be an unknown in every sense of the word. While astronomers guess that it might be a type Ic supernova, they are not completely sure. The race is on to find out what exactly it is. Perhaps neither of these discoveries would really touch our lives were we to insist that research always must have an immediacy or be useful. But when you contemplate how far human endeavour has reached beyond what it can perceive with bare hands and naked senses, the wonder begins. The writer covers science for The Hindu and is based in Chennai https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/the-deep-and-far-of-science/article24497089.ece Math is awesome, math culture is terrible
Shubashree Desikan
AUGUST 23, 2016, 20:54IST
Thinking and pursuing ideas is something you do for and by yourself. Just ask Newton and the solitude of his apple orchard. In academia, though, the purity of philosophical ideation can sometimes be overwhelmed by the pressures of a political environment.
PhD theses can become popular because they are based on groundbreaking work. They can also go viral because of the way they are written and the very spirit of the whole process, and Piper Harron’s thesis is one such.
Based on her work in algebraic number theory, which she carried out in Princeton University, guided by Manjul Bhargava, Piper Harron wrote a thesis in which each section is divided into three parts. A section of laysplanations for ones who are outsiders to math but willing to put in the effort to read; technical sections for math students and the third part for professional mathematicians. She went into this effort because as she says in this interview, “to be happy with math, you have to really learn to love the process.”
The prologue itself, which may be read at >Piper Harron’s webpage, is remarkable and has been described as a manifesto by some. To quote from the prologue to her thesis: “Respected research math is dominated by men of a certain attitude. Even allowing for individual variation, there is still a tendency towards an oppressive atmosphere, which is carefully maintained and even championed by those who find it conducive to success. As any good grad student would do, I tried to fit in, mathematically. I absorbed the atmosphere and took attitudes to heart. I was miserable, and on the verge of failure. The problem was not individuals, but a system of self-preservation that, from the outside, feels like a long string of betrayals, some big, some small, perpetrated by your only support system. When I physically removed myself from the situation, I did not know where I was or what to do. First thought: FREEDOM!!!! Second thought: but what about the others like me, who don’t do math the “right way” but could still greatly contribute to the community? I combined those two thoughts and started from zero on my thesis. What resulted was a thesis written for those who do not feel that they are encouraged to be themselves. People who, for instance, try to read a math paper and think, “Oh my goodness what on earth does any of this mean why can’t they just say what they mean????” rather than, “Ah, what lovely results!” (I can’t even pretend to know how “normal” mathematicians feel when they read math, but I know it’s not how I feel.) My thesis is, in many ways, not very serious, sometimes sarcastic, brutally honest, and very me. It is my art. It is myself. It is also as mathematically complete as I could honestly make it. I’m unwilling to pretend that all manner of ways of thinking are equally encouraged, or that there aren’t very real issues of lack of diversity. It is not my place to make the system comfortable with itself. This may be challenging for happy mathematicians to read through; my only hope is that the challenge is accepted.” Piper Harron’s experience in Princeton is unique — for the major part of her time as a PhD student there, she was the only black research scholar studying pure math. And her thesis is unique, in its structure and its description of the process of doing math. In contrast to widespread impressions, it shows how math, too, can be communicated to anyone who has interest. For example, the introduction begins with a “layscape” of the problem, which begins thus. “Every thesis is a question and (very long) answer. My question in layspeak is: ‘How many’ ‘shapes’ of certain degree n ‘number fields’ are there? The naive short answer is: Infinitely many! But of course, though true, that is not nearly enough information. What we will show is that the infinitely many shapes we find are actually ‘equidistributed’ with respect to the ‘space of shapes’. In other words, if you think of the collection of possible shapes as being a blob (a ‘space’), then wherever you look in this blob, you will find shapes of number fields in equal quantity. Equivalently, though somewhat less to my liking, a thesis is a claim and a (very long) proof. My equivalent claim in layspeak is: ‘Shapes’ of certain degree n ‘number fields’ become ‘equidistributed’ when ordered by ‘absolute discriminant.’ In what follows I hope to do enough ‘laysplanations’ to make the whole argument approximately readable by approximately anyone. Approximately. In addition to laysplaining and ‘mathsplaining,’ I will also, where appropriate and not too horrifying, have some ‘weedsplanations’ where I wade into the weeds with examples and explicit calculations, sometimes with extra laysplanations that were not strictly necessary to the main argument….”
The entire thesis may be found >here. In a world where mathematicians have difficulty in communicating their work even to other mathematicians, here was someone who was aiming to make her thesis so approachable. Here is a transcript of a chat with Piper Harron over email…
How did you choose this topic for research?
I didn’t. I got to grad school knowing I wanted to do “number theory,” and I discovered I hated analysis, so “algebraic number theory” it was. Beyond these vague notions i did not have any real interests. I spent my pre-exams time figuratively drowning. When I passed, I asked Manjul if he'd be my advisor and he was like: “Are you sure? What is it you want to work on?” I didn’t have an answer. I had taken eight math classes before I got to grad school — none of them grad courses. The things I studied for generals didn’t make it obvious what I’d want to work on. Princeton is — I don’t know — it was not made for me, but my “peers” had taken 20-30 classes before starting grad school. They had taken grad courses. They entered with aspirations, it seemed that's what the program was geared for.
I spent a lot of time there trying to justify my existence, and one aspect of that was the dreaded Mathematical Interest thing. So I met with another Prof. to make sure I didn’t want to work with him. I didn’t. Manjul agreed to be my advisor. He gave me this problem.
How did you find your feet in such a situation?
Heh, what do you mean? I'm not sure I did.
Why do you say that?
I guess I feel like I’ve been operating on survival mode more than anything else. I haven’t felt like I was in charge of my life or making free choices, really, just kind of reacting.
You have written about this in your blog. What was it that was wrong with graduate school?
I mean, my situation was really unique and Princeton is also somewhat unusual.
Lots of people can relate to my words, which means something!
Also do you think this is a problem with the way math is taught.
I think that there are biases.
There's the idea of the genius mathematician. There's the idea that math is fixed, you get it or you don’t; that there’s a right way to think about things. I think this is fairly pervasive with math. I think Princeton accepted me because they thought I might be a genius. They weren’t prepared for me not to be. They seemed to be willing to make allowances for me, but they wouldn’t tell me upfront. My sanity was not on their radar. I went to the hospital one day because I almost fainted in the student union. At the end, it was determined to be stress-related, and I was like “Stress? What?!” I thought it was unbelievable, but at the same time tears started falling and I’m like “Oh! Okay, maybe I’m stressed… maybe the fact that I’ve been waking up without an alarm after six hours of sleep isn’t a sign of my overwhelming awesomeness.” There was nothing in place at Princeton that explained the advisor-advisee relationship. No guidelines, everything was so free, and I assume that was to let the geniuses flourish.
When did you start to make sense of this and how did you handle it then. Did you get help from your advisor?
I didn’t make sense of anything until well after I left Princeton.
When was that?
I was at Princeton 2003 – 2009.
Okay.
I don't know that there was any “racism” in terms of like racial discrimination per se. Being the only black person I saw in the department would have certainly contributed to my feelings of isolation, but I was “color-blind” when I was there. I was still internalising everything. Sexism was a bigger factor: The culture was sexist. But you know, there was a woman’s group there, I just didn’t like it. So I entered grad school still trying to be normal. I didn’t want to be singled out for my race or gender, so the few times someone tried to help me for those reasons I rejected it, which I now regret. But i really didn't understand oppression at the time. Nobody had told me about institutionalised oppression or that intentions didn’t matter. I think Princeton's "freedom" and lack of guidelines and structure will disproportionately hurt marginalized people... and so, in that sense, I can fairly call it racist or sexist. When you recognise that these are structural issues and not personal issues, it's easy to call out oppression. I still get hung up at times thinking that racism or sexism is about a bad person doing consciously bad things, but it isn't. It's about the exclusion of women and racial minorities by any means. And of course implicit bias against women and people of color is rampant. You asked about my advisor. One of the bits of cultural knowledge I picked up as a grad student was that you don’t want your advisor to think you're unintelligent. So try asking for help after that’s been put in your head.
Yeah that’s right, but isn’t it the part of the advisor to sense that his/her student is finding the atmosphere stifling and needs help?
I’d like to think so. I was Manjul’s first student, though, and his experience was far different from mine. When he was taking time off from meeting his advisor, it was so he could be brilliant in some secret way. When I took time off from meeting my advisor it was because I was struggling/lost/giving up.
I don’t think you can rely on individual professors to know how to be good advisors — I mean, especially in Princeton. They hire professors who’ve never had to apply for jobs [ laughs] They hire professors who, maybe, didn’t need their advisors, you know?
I see what you mean... I think the language bothered you a lot — you say you stopped talking math to your peers.
Yeah, it was emotionally taxing. I am finally at a place where I can talk to my husband about math. And that took a lot of work.
“That's trivial, right?” — that’s the kind of thing a mathematician might say. And it’s like why are you saying this to me? If i thought it was trivial I most definitely would not have said it. What is the "right?" there for. Just to make it sound like you didn't say it? Or to explain something to me they’ll make an analogy to something even more over my head. Because it’s more important that they force The Right Way of thinking about it on me, than that I actually understand or can make a meaningful connection.
So your way out was that you came out of Princeton... yet you went back to write your thesis — what gave you the energy to do this? And your thesis is so differently structured...
I wrote my thesis on my own, away from Princeton. Every time I left Princeton, I remembered that I did like math. It was never math’s fault that I was miserable. I still wanted to learn it. So, if Princeton wasn’t kicking me out, if Manjul was still going to help me, then I still wanted to try to graduate.
I met with Manjul two years after I left Princeton, and we worked out our paper together. Initially, my thesis was just supposed to be about quartic number fields (the cubic result was already known), but since Manjul had first given me this problem, he’d published the necessary work for quintic number fields. So, doing the whole argument for n = 3,4,5 was his idea, and so after we wrote that paper, the idea was that I would turn that into a thesis. He told me I just needed to “add background,” but I didn't even know what that was. What constitutes background? I didn’t know anything. My grasp of any of it was like I could hold a few ideas of it in my head at a time, but if I set it down and went back to it later, I’d be confused all over again. So I had to write something for me to even understand what was going on, and I decided that would be my thesis. And you know, I had kids. I learned about the world, got angry at systems of inequality, got angry at the status quo. So when I started the last version of my thesis, It was not from a positive, inclusive point of view. It was from a screw-the-system point of view. I stopped caring about doing it the right way. And my friend, at some point, was like, “This is a bad idea,” because it was taking me so long and at any moment Princeton could have said, “Never mind, you're finished”. And, even when I was done, there was the possibility they'd reject it.
But I didn’t feel like I had a choice. I already had one kid, and I was pregnant, and there was no way I could be motivated to write something I didn’t like. Anyway, what would be the point of throwing together a thesis quickly and then embarrassing myself in front of my advisor when I couldn’t defend it? When I finished it and emailed it to my advisor, I was pretty much like “HERE, ha ha. This is my thesis, I can delete some of it to graduate if you want, but this is what I’m printing for me and my family.” He was like, “Whoa there — ha ha.” We had a back and forth about certain things. I didn’t really understand what his problem was at first. It seemed like he just didn’t have a good sense of humor. But, later, I realised that he was actually thinking that mathematicians and grad students would read it, whereas I had written them off. So I didn’t take out any of the stuff that he mentioned, but I added things. I thought about my audience. I thought about what I wanted grad students to know. And so, in that way, he was instrumental in the final product. The prologue that people like so much, I just wrote it for myself, to organise my thoughts when I was thinking, “ Okay am I actually going to go through this whole thing and make sure I’m consistent?” But then after I wrote it I was like, “ Never mind, this will just be my prologue.” That was the last thing I wrote.
But it's brilliant... writing different sections for people with different levels of understanding is so cool.
Thanks!
Each section was for me, though. I needed the laysplanations to know what was going on, but I was responsible for the math, too — ha ha. So I had to write the math sections. And the weeds were extra things I needed to understand from a math perspective, not just big/lay picture. The weird thing about this situation is people are talking to me now, asking me questions, as if I was ever thinking about other people. I wasn’t! I was thinking about myself, and I think that’s something that happens to marginalised groups — being totally selfish can be revolutionary. I was thinking about your asking about racism and sexism at Princeton. I think the biggest way I saw their racism and sexism was in their apathy. The world is racist and sexist. Princeton doesn’t have to do anything to have their math department be oppressive. The problem is the apathy. That they have no problem having so few people of color in their department; they have no problem having so few women. They probably thought they were doing better because there were “more” women than twenty years ago. They don’t want to change anything. They don’t want to look at themselves. Maybe they invite more women, but they do nothing to change the environment to make it hospitable for marginalised people.
As you say, it’s not just Princeton, and it is an apathy that is part of many institutions. What has been the reaction to your thesis? Did people come forth to talk to you
Yeah, I get emails from people. It’s amazing to hear from people who say that my thesis actually helps them. Like they feel less alone or they feel validated. More than one person has said it made them cry. At my defense, one of the professors on my committee said he really liked how I showed the process; that most students don’t see the process of doing research. So, I think there are many different levels of appreciation. It seems a lot of people wish there was more — honestly? — going on. But that doesn’t mean people with power care. It remains to be seen what will happen.
Did you go back to Princeton after writing your thesis — to talk to people and so on?
I was only there for my defense, which was a week before I put it online. Nobody knew what was going to happen, just that I’d done something interesting.
I have found it interesting that there are professors at various schools recommending my thesis to their students. But, I mean, the change that needs to happen is very big and deep — people’s values need to change. A viral thesis is not gonna do that.
How important is it to be able to talk math to your peers and superiors when working as a graduate student?
Well! At Princeton they say it’s really important. It’s part of how they advertise themselves. Certainly, it can be impossible to learn math from texts and research papers, forget about it. Ha ha. And, yeah, if I hadn’t been married to a number theorist, and if I hadn’t had (female) number theorist friends to talk to, I don't think I would have finished. I hadn’t considered the importance of social interactions and how inherent racism/sexism makes this a burden for marginalised students. I mean, I don’t know exactly how a department is supposed to deal with that, but to just say that it’s really important to talk to your peers, and then have one woman of color and two other women in a group of fourteen, with very few women on faculty — that’s a problem.
What are you planning to do, now that your thesis is done... more math? Math writing? What lies ahead?
When I finished my thesis, I was saying goodbye to math. I’m home with the kids now, planning to home-school. I figured maybe I’d learn more math when they were a bit older and less needy, and then maybe I’d get a lecturer position or something.
But after my thesis became popular, and I made all these like-minded math friends (after pretty much avoiding math people), I decided to try to get back into academia.
So, we will see if they let me. I plan on applying for grants in the fall and jobs if I don’t already have one.
If academia will take me in as is (not pretending to fit in), that’s my plan. Otherwise, I’ll fall back on my other project — which was, I was gonna write a book about racism in the United States. I plan to keep writing, though. It takes me so long to learn math, i don’t see myself writing math that isn’t related to my work. I love universities and campuses and helping students, so I don’t think I’d want to be a math writer outside of academia, and how would I learn the math anyway, heh? One thing that I’ve learned is how much gets erased. Like how students don't see the process of doing math — that’s erasure — and all the history I didn’t know about. The history we teach kids in the U.S. is whitewashed, people’s struggles are erased or made more friendly to the status quo. So many things that would help us — that would help all of us — are just erased before we can benefit from them. It leaves you feeling lost, trying to reinvent the wheel. It’s inefficient. It makes progress difficult.
So true.
And though certain people certainly “benefit” from this, I think overall we’re all less. I watched this >documentary of black American history, and I was shocked at how intellectual black Americans have always been, always talking about their struggles, always analysing their situation. But in my lifetime that was erased and on TV black Americans are just either in trouble with the law or poor. They never show us black people speaking out on black issues. (Well, now we have Black Lives Matter) and I feel like that cost me personally. So, one thing i hope to do is to give back what has been erased That’s why i complain all the time ☺ I think it’s helpful to see what they don’t want you to see, and to know that the obstacles you face are real and are totally unfair and that there's a history behind the obstacles you face.
Would you like to say something to students who love math as kids and are are bright and eager to pursue math in university and research?
Ha ha ha… um… I’m always torn between MATH IS AWESOME and Math Culture Is Terrible. We need more different people in math. We need different ways of thinking in math. It is exciting to do research and to have access to other people doing research. I would ask them to please get rid of the notion of mathematical genius. They may have great ideas or have a way of thinking that currently makes math harder or easier but that is irrelevant. Math is work, as is everything. They should feel good about the work they put in, regardless of the results. Results will come over time, but to be happy with math, you have to really learn to love the process. And I think that’s hard because as a kid you might get pushed into math because you’re quick at grasping algorithms; that’s not math. Kids who think math is easy should seek math that is hard. Kids who think math is hard should keep at it if they enjoy it. I guess I hope for more of a community where we appreciate everyone's contributions. And that has to include our own. https://www.thehindu.com/thread/arts-culture-society/article9022211.ece
Hope Indian youth take up research in sciences: Fields Medal winner
Shubashree Desikan AUGUST 13, 2014 15:10 IST
Fields Medal winner Manjul Bhargava.
Manjul Bhargava, one of the recipients of the Fields Medal, speaks about mathematics, music and more.
How does it feel to have won the Fields Medal? You are the first person of Indian origin to be getting it... It is of course a great honour; beyond that, it is a great source of inspiration and encouragement - not just for me, but for my students, collaborators, and colleagues who work with me. Hopefully, it is also be a source of inspiration for young people in India to take up research in the sciences!
You have grown up in Canada... did you have any cultural identity questions? Do you think of yourself as a Canadian, American, Indian or none of these or all of these? I was born in Canada, but grew up mostly in the U.S. in a very Indian home. I learned Hindi and Sanskrit, read Indian literature, and learned classical Indian music. I ate mostly Indian food! On the other hand, I grew up playing with American kids and went to school mostly in the U.S. I liked growing up in two cultures like that because it allowed me to pick and choose the best of both worlds. My Indian upbringing was very important to me. I also spent a lot of time in India growing up. Every three or four years, I would take off six months of school to spend it in India -- mostly in our hometown Jaipur -- with my grandparents. There I had the opportunity to truly live in India for extended periods of time, go to school there, brush up on my Hindi and Sanskrit, and learn tabla (as well as some sitar and vocal music). I particularly enjoyed celebrating all the Indian holidays as a child, and flying kites on Makar Sankranti. I feel very much at home in all three countries. So I definitely think of myself as all three – Canadian, American, and of course Indian.
How did you get interested in Tabla playing? You have learnt the Tabla from Ustad Zakir Husain... Can you tell us how this came about and what it means to you? I first started learning from my mother, who also plays the tabla. When I was maybe 3 years old, I used to hear my mother playing often, and I asked her to teach me to play a little bit. She tried to teach me the basic sound "na." She demonstrated the sound to me, and I tried to mimic her to reproduce the sound, but nothing came out. I was hooked! I always loved the beauty and the intricacy of the tabla sound and repertoire, and how it also perfectly complemented sounds on the sitar, or vocal, etc. I learned with my mom first, and then with Pandit Prem Prakash Sharma in Jaipur whenever I visited there. I met Zakir ji when I was an undergraduate at Harvard. He came to perform there when I was a third year student. I had the exciting opportunity to meet him afterwards at a reception, and he invited me to visit him in California (where he lives). I have had the great pleasure and privilege of learning from him a bit off and on since then. More than that, he has been a wonderful and inspirational friend, and he and his whole family -- in both California and Bombay -- have been such a huge source of love, encouragement, and support to me for so long, and I am very grateful to them for that. Do you collaborate with mathematicians in India? Do you have contacts with the institutes in India? For many years now, I have been an adjunct professor at TIFR-Mumbai (Tata Institute for Fundamental Research), IIT-Bombay, and the University of Hyderabad. I've spent a lot of time at these three institutes, especially at TIFR and IIT-B, over many years. I've lectured extensively to students at these institutes, as well as collaborated a lot with mathematicians there, such as with Eknath Ghate at TIFR (who recently won the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for mathematical sciences). I've also been involved in starting a new institute in Bangalore called "ICTS" (International Center for Theoretical Sciences). It will be inaugurated next year, and we hope it will be a great success. The director is Professor Spenta Wadia of TIFR, and the head of the International Advisory Board is Nobel Prize Winner Professor David Gross. So hopefully I will spend even more time in India after the inauguration next year!
Recently you have won prizes for your work on the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture which was listed as one of the seven millennium prize problems. Can you explain the significance of this work? In joint work with Christopher Skinner and Wei Zhang, we have shown that the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer Conjecture is true “most” of the time (more precisely, for more than 66.48 per cent of elliptic curves!). Previously, it was not known that it was true for more than 0 per cent. So that is significant progress, but it is still “not” a complete solution! Finishing a proof of the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer Conjecture would be a momentous achievement, and it is one of my favorite problems!, but it is not solved yet.
Do you believe that this is the best time to study math - for instance, number theory is now being applied in cryptography and so on? What does it take to do great mathematics? It is interesting that pure mathematicians, like myself, rarely think directly about applications. We are instead guided primarily by what directions we find most beautiful, elegant, or most promising. We tend to treat our discipline more as an art than as a science! And indeed, this is the attitude that allows us to be the most creative and productive. On the other hand, it is also true, historically, that the mathematics that has been the most applicable and important to society over the years has been the mathematics that scientists found while searching for beauty; and eventually all beautiful and elegant mathematics tends to find applications. That is why it is very important to fund basic science research. When science funding is only application-driven, it does not allow full freedom and creativity. Funding basic science allows a large interconnected database of scientific techniques and knowledge to accumulate, so that when a societal need arises, the science is ready to be applied and adapted to the purpose. Elliptic curves (and the related Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer Conjecture) are indeed a good example! They were first studied by pure mathematicians, but are now one of the most important mathematical objects in cryptography. So that is indeed exciting, but I just want to emphasize that they were exciting and central to number theory well before these applications were found; but it was inevitable that they would be found, given their fundamental nature. That is why elliptic curves have fascinated me! They are so fundamental in both pure and applied mathematics. Beyond advancing the subject of number theory in general, a heightened understanding of elliptic curves also has important implications in coding theory and cryptography. Encryption schemes, such as those used to protect our privacy when transmitting information online, often centrally involve the use of elliptic curves.
Math is generally considered a difficult subject but you have been enjoying math since your childhood. What aspect of your education could have contributed to this enjoyment? I've always enjoyed mathematics as far back as I can remember, since I was two or three years old. Since my mother was a mathematician, I always had her as a resource - I would always go and ask her questions and so I learned a lot from her. She was also a great source of encouragement - she always answered my questions enthusiastically, and always encouraged me to pursue whatever I was interested in - and that probably single-handedly contributed the most to my enjoyment of mathematics (and of all my interests)! https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/fields-medal-winner-manjul-bhargava-hope-indian-youth- take-up-research-in-sciences/article6312471.ece ‘Improving our knowledge of the world’
Shubashree Desikan OCTOBER 13, 2015 00:24 IST Arthur McDonald, a professor emeritus at Queen's University, poses for a photo at the university in Kingston, Ont., Tuesday, Oct. 6, 2015. McDonald and Takaaki Kajita of Japan are co-winners of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics Tuesday. McDonald and Kajita were honored for showing that the particles, called neutrinos, spontaneously change from one type to another. (Fred Chartrand/The Canadian Press via AP) | Photo Credit: Fred Chartrand
Nobel Laureate Arthur B. MacDonald on how the neutrino experiments can provide a fuller picture for the very basic laws of physics. On October 6, Takaaki Kajita, Chief Scientist of Super-Kamiokande Collaboration, University of Tokyo, and Arthur B. McDonald, chief scientist at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) Collaboration, Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for proving that neutrinos change identities or ‘flavours’ from one type to another over time.
Professor McDonald, in this email interview with Shubashree Desikan, speaks about the 17-year journey from the start of the SNO Collaboration to the prestigious moment of recognition. Excerpts: How does it feel to have won the Nobel Prize? Some physicists told me that it was widely anticipated that the observation of neutrino oscillations would win the Nobel this year.
Our SNO Collaboration was very pleased to have provided clear observation of neutrino oscillations for solar neutrino and to have verified models of the sun with great accuracy. However, having this strong international endorsement of the value of our work by a respected committee is very gratifying.
When you became the spokesperson for the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory in 1989, it was unusual then for Canada to make an investment of this magnitude on a basic science project. How did you convince them? At the time that our scientists were attempting to obtain approval of funding for this project, it was necessary to convince agencies in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. of the importance of the measurements that we could perform. It took a long time and involved technical demonstrations of the engineering feasibility of the design. With strong peer review of the importance of the basic science we were proposing (now proven by the awarding of the Nobel Prize), we were able to obtain the funding. The return on investment is a fundamental improvement in our knowledge of our world, excellent training of the best students who are attracted to such projects, and the innovative technology that had to be developed to accomplish this difficult experiment.
“ A major question remains about the ordering of the relative masses of neutrinos, which will be addressed with sensitivity by the India-based Neutrino Observatory detector. ” — Arthur McDonald
The SNO detector consists of a 12-m diameter transparent acrylic container holding 1,000 litres of ultrapure heavy water, which was supplied by Canada’s Department of Atomic Energy. Did this happen readily? Was there any worry that you could be carrying out secret research on nuclear weapons? Senior scientists at Atomic Energy of Canada understood the importance of the research that we would perform and recommended the loan near the beginning of our discussions. There was then a bit of worry from the public about the relationship of heavy water to nuclear reactors, etc. However, one of our scientists drank a glass of heavy water at a public meeting (with a bit of Scotch for flavour) and showed clearly that it was a safe substance. We also pointed out continually that we were creating one of the lowest radioactivity locations in the world, far from worries about high radioactivity.
What main questions remain about the neutrino and why is neutrino research important? What other experiments are being planned around the world? A major question remains about the ordering of the relative masses of neutrinos, which will be addressed with good sensitivity by the India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO) detector. In addition, the accurate values for other oscillation parameters that INO will provide will be important for developing detailed models of how finite mass neutrinos should be added to the Standard Model of elementary particles. Other questions that will be addressed in other experiments are the absolute masses of neutrinos and the asymmetry between matter and anti-matter in the universe that may be related to neutrino properties. Neutrino science is important because they (neutrinos), along with electrons and quarks, are the basic building blocks which we do not know how to sub- divide further. Therefore, understanding their properties is essential to complete our knowledge of the world at a very fundamental level. For example, the observation of finite neutrino masses determined by the SNO and Super-Kamiokande experiments goes beyond the Standard Model of elementary particles and may help provide a fuller picture for the very basic laws of physics.
How did the offer of the site for the observatory by INCO Ltd, the nickel mining company, come about? Again, after presentations by our scientists, senior members of the company management saw the importance of the science that could be done and recommended to their management that we be allowed to co-exist with ongoing mining operations at the mine. This strong support for the new international underground laboratory, SNOLAB, has continued with the present owner, Vale.
Did you have to develop any new engineering techniques or materials for the construction and support of the huge underground cavity? How did you ensure the stability of the rock above the underground observatory? It was the largest cavity of its type built at that depth, but INCO engineers provided a design of excavation and rock support techniques that were reviewed by a panel of international experts and found to be feasible. The cavity was very carefully instrumented and provided wonderful data, enabling INCO to pursue large cavities at great depth for their ongoing mining operations. Several old and new techniques were combined for ground control for the cavity, and they worked very well.
Would you say 17 years is a long time to work without an indication of whether you were on the right track? We knew that we could have a substantial impact on fundamental physics if we could carry out this major project and that inspired everyone working on the project throughout.
Looking back on over 30 years of your association with SNO, can you tell us what made it worth the while? Our collaboration set about understanding our universe more fully and with our results, we feel that we have made a major contribution to that. The Nobel Prize for our work is a confirmation by a body that we greatly respect that we have made a truly valuable contribution. When we were analysing our data, we purposely added in a known amount of false data, so that those doing the analysis could not be led to a pre-conceived result by the way they analyse the data. On one day when we had defined the best way to do the analysis, we lifted this “blindness condition,” removed the false events and all together were able to see our final results. The results were conclusive that solar neutrinos did change from one type to another and, therefore, do have a finite mass. That was a real “eureka” moment that every SNO collaborator remembers as a significant day in their scientific life. [email protected] https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/interview/interview-with-nobel-laureate-arthur- mcdonald/article7753948.ece Who was Maryam Mirzakhani?
Shubashree Desikan JULY 22, 2017 19:05 IST
This undated photo provided by Professor Maryam Mirzakhani via Stanford shows her on the university’s campus. On August 13, 2014, the Iranian-born Stanford University professor became the first woman to win the Fields Medal. The prize is awarded every four years to mathematicians 40 years old or younger. It was established in 1936. | Photo Credit: AP
In 2014, Maryam Mirzakhani, then 37-years-old, a mathematician working at Stanford University, became the first woman to win the Fields Medal since its inception in 1936. The Fields Medal is awarded to mathematicians under 40 who have made outstanding contributions to mathematics that hold future promise. Her death, on July 14, due to breast cancer when she was only 40, saddened the entire mathematics community.
Why is she important? Mirzakhani’s work straddled several branches of mathematics. She was intuitive and persistent. She would often take large sheets of paper and draw geometric patterns on them as she thought of the problem, prompting her daughter to think she was “painting again.” Manjul Bhargava of Princeton University told The Hindu that Mirzakhani was a “master of curved spaces.” As he explained in an email, “Everyone knows that the shortest distance between two points on a flat surface is a straight line. But if the surface is curved — for example, the surface of a ball or a doughnut — then the shortest distance [along the surface] between two points will also be along a curved path, and can thus be more complicated. Maryam proved many amazing theorems about such shortest paths — called geodesics — on curved surfaces, among many other remarkable results in geometry and beyond. Her work, and the research programmes she started, will have an impact on mathematics and physics for years to come.” She had an uncanny intuition for geometric problems, Professor Bhargava said, which she would solve through drawings that looked like beautiful doodles “but were in fact profound geometric insights that she would then make rigorous later on.” Mirzakhani was interested in complicated curved surfaces or hyperbolic geometry: for example, studying loops that don’t intersect; probing deeper to answer how many loops, which don’t intersect, are there of less than a given length on a curved surface.
What interested her? She worked with Alex Eskin to find a solution to the problem of understanding the trajectory of a billiard ball as it bounces around a table. In this, she generalised a work done by her doctoral adviser Curtis McMullen of Harvard University, also a Fields medallist. A consequence of her work was to give an entirely new proof of a conjecture made by leading string theorist Edward Witten (a 1990 Fields medallist). The first proof of this conjecture was given by Maxim Kontsevich in 1992; it was such a difficult thing to prove that this work itself, in part, won him the Fields Medal in 1998. Mirzakhani’s proof of Witten’s conjecture was by relating it to an “elementary problem of counting the number of geodesics on individual surfaces.” Mirzakhani worked aggressively and went for deep and fundamental problems, never reaching for the “low-hanging fruit.” It was her strong geometric intuition and her fluency in a range of diverse techniques that made it possible for her to tackle these problems. In the words of Professor McMullen, “Maryam was a brilliant mathematician who has left us far too soon, and who will continue to inspire others to follow in her path.”
What was her field of work? A tribute on the Stanford University website says she specialised in an area of mathematics that “read like a foreign language to those outside mathematics — moduli spaces, Teichmüller theory, hyperbolic geometry, Ergodic theory and symplectic geometry.” Each of these terms comes with a well-developed theory backing it and Mirzakhani’s work was both breaking new ground and building a bridge across these areas. In an interview to Quanta magazine, her collaborator Professor Eskin said her doctoral thesis was such that you could immediately recognise that it belonged in a textbook.
What do peers remember? An Iranian citizen, Mirzakhani grew up in Tehran in the post Iran-Iraq war period, “the lucky generation,” she said in a rare interview she gave to Quanta magazine. A private person, she was known to be humble and creative. “We overlapped at Harvard University early in our careers, and became instant friends then… Her work has just been so remarkable then and ever since; it was indeed a great honour for me to receive [the Fields Medal] together with her,” said Professor Bhargava. https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/science/who-was-maryam-mirzakhani/article19331845.ece