A hanging

A notable hanging took place last week. Ajmal Kasab, the butcher of Bombay, the only survivor of the group of ten attackers of 26/11, was hanged in Yerawada jail, with tight security and the utmost secrecy, after the due process of law had run its course. The nation woke on the morning of 21 st November to find the news of the hanging running across the ticker tape of the morning's news, just as they had seen the news of the attacks, and the never to be forgotten image of Kasab, swaggering with an automatic gun, dealing out death in all directions at Chattrapati Shivaji Terminus, in 2008. Both the Home Minister of Maharashtra, R.R. Patil and the Home Minister of India, Sushil Kumar Shinde, soon came on TV to confirm the news, each emphasising that the judicial process had been carried out to its last step.

The execution provoked mixed reactions, from the public, as well as the near and dear ones of the victims. There were those who experienced closure, and those, notably the father of the NSG commando Sandeep Unnikrishnan, who died in action in countering this operation, who said no one's death can be rejoiced over even if it was a legal necessity. It was universally agreed that Kasab, agent of death as  he was, was only a puppet, and his deadly puppet masters, the real perpetrators of terror, remained  at large, and outside the reach of justice. However, it could be said that justice had been done, even if in small and partial measure. It is interesting to remember, that George Orwell, the writer of the original As I Please, had written a piece with an identical title, a hanging. We wonder what his take would have been, on the case at hand. His customary clarity of thought might have yielded useful insight on the moral morass of the efficacy of capital punishment, even for a case like this. Meanwhile the debate goes on from the newspapers to the tea stalls.

This Monday, it will be four years from those three days of horror, that left 164 people dead, and a city shattered, but proud of the quiet heroism of its ordinary citizens. In their memory,

 "And some there be, which have no memorial; who are perished, as though they had never been".

We won't forget.
This blog post is by Neelima Gupte and Sumathi Rao.

For an earlier post  by Rahul Basu on the Mumbai attacks see this link.

Cyclone Nilam

Here is a highly local one. Cyclone Nilam is approaching Chennai rapidly. It's been raining since morning. The streets are full of water, although our local drainage has held up so far, no waterlogging, merely the usual potholes full of water. However, the eye of the storm passes us only tomorrow evening, so who knows what the situation will be tomorrow.  If past experience is any guide, there was the year we were marooned on an island, viz. our fourth floor flat, and all the neighbourhood kids had a wonderful time with a boat. There was also the year when two evacuations were necessary thanks to cyclone Nisha (see here). There was another year when the municipal authorities released water from the lake and it overflowed in the streets, so that the main roads became waterways. That was the same year that my first year class phoned to report that they were marooned in their hostel, and could class be cancelled? (They had boats, but paper ones! Judging by the background noise, a great time was being had by all.  They were only nineteen, after all!)        

Here's Nilam. She looks pretty fierce and is approaching pretty fast, 100 kmph,  and will hit us sometime tomorrow evening, as per the met office.  Hopefully, Nilam will wander off into the Bay of Bengal, as other cyclones  have, in the past, and leave us in peace! Watch this space for further updates. Meanwhile, bring out the candles.

This blog post is by Neelima Gupte.

Update: Nilam came and went. It saw landfall at about 5.30 p.m on Wednesday evening. There were very strong winds from 4.00 p.m to 9.30 p.m, when, as it happens, all of us were trying to get home with varying degrees of adventure. TNEB tripped the power supply till morning, at least in our parts. This was inconvenient,  but no one got electrocuted at least. Many idiot thrill seekers stood on the beach, watching an oil tanker run aground, and its life boat, which had 22 people in it, capsize. The fishermen, valiant guardian angels of Chennai's treacherous shores,  managed to rescue quite a few, but six are still missing. The threatened rains did not arrive. Life was normal from this morning. In short, cyclone Nilam was a phuska bar (failed firework). We are truly thankful for this failure!

Birthday wishes!

In a country where the birthdays of political leaders are celebrated with much pomp and fanfare (think Mayawati!) , there was a quiet birthday celebration last week. Of course, the nature of the celebration was appropriate for the personality of the birthday person, India's third longest serving prime minister, Dr. Manmohan Singh. Singh completed 80 years of his life on 26th September, although this is only notionally his birthday. The events of his life are a true indication  of the extent to  which chance and destiny shapes even the lives of highly able and intelligent people.

Manmohan Singh was born in 1932 in the district of  Gah, now  in Pakistan, and came over with his family to India in 1947, like many other families displaced by partition. He studied economics at Panjab University, then in Hoshiarpur, and excelled as a student, leading to postgraduate studies, and a Ph.D. at Oxford. His initial career was that of a distinguished academic and U.N. official,  and his mild mannered demeanour is still consistent with that phase.However, fate had planned for him a larger role in the life of the nation. Lalit Narain Mishra, who then headed the Ministry of Foreign Trade, inducted him as economic adviser to the ministry. Then the distinguished bureaucratic positions came one after the other, including stints at the Planning commission and as Governor of the Reserve bank. Then fate stepped in again. The economic crisis of 1991, brought Manmohan Singh in as Finance minister to initiate, implement and preside over the economic liberalisation of India. The rest was history.  Under the new policies, the nation made strides that would have looked unbelievable, just a decade  before. That, however, was far from being the end of his tryst with destiny. In 2004,Sonia Gandhi, having led the United Progressive Alliance to a convincing victory, decided not to take up electoral office, leaving the Prime Ministership to the soft spoken Singh.In 2005, under Singh's prime ministership came the historic Indo-US nuclear deal, which finally accepted India's membership to the exclusive nuclear club, and ended the era of international nuclear sanctions. This was another historic moment in the life of the nation, and again it took place under Singh's stewardship.                                                       

The year 2009 saw the UPA return to power again, with Singh again as the prime minister. However, recent times have not been happy. The government has been plagued by scandal after scandal, by insurgency and strife, by terrorism and destruction. The worlds' economies have taken a beating with the inevitable consequences for India, a slowing down of growth, and a serious dampening of the optimism that the nation had enjoyed, about its own  future, since the nineties. The prime minister's own image has taken a beating, with the press and the public having turned hostile to a once admired figure. Is this the end, or will the tide turn again? Singh has come back, with a new slew of measures, and some bitter pills, going some way towards fulfilling the promises left to keep. Whether or not the measures will work, only time can tell. Meanwhile we can only hope they will, otherwise the doomsday prophets and the vultures will be proved right. Best of luck, Dr. Singh, for a steady hand at the wheel. You need it, and so do we!

This blog post is by Neelima Gupte and Sumathi Rao.

Neil Armstrong 05/08/1930-25/08/2012

Last weekend brought around the news of another take-off. Neil Armstrong, the first man from Earth to step on another celestial body, left this earth forever on August 25th. To anyone who had watched the grey, grainy footage of two men in bulky astronaut gear moving awkwardly on the powdery surface at the edge of the Sea of Tranquility, on July 21, 1969, it is the end of an era of exploration and excitement. The unmanned planetary probes of the present day, despite their utility and ingenuity are not quite the same.

 The man who said, `This is a small step for man, a giant leap for mankind', (and is widely suspected of having fluffed his lines), was a more than worthy representative of the species. An aeronautical engineer, a crack test pilot, a Korean war hero, a veteran astronaut,   a good family man, and a boy scout to boot (he even sent greetings to his local scout troupe from Columbia,  the mission ship of Apollo 11), he was an embodiment of the American dream. After his historic mission, he held senior administrative positions in NASA, but found them tedious, and left NASA for a professorship in Aeronautical Engineering at the University of Cincinnati, as well as the directorship of several companies.  His loss is mourned by not just his immediate family, but by everyone who has looked at the sky and recalled that mankind is no longer confined to this Earth.


Rest in Peace.

This blog post is by Neelima Gupte and Sumathi Rao. 

For a song of those times, click here.

Ashoke Sen wins the Milner prize

Of course it is already there in all the newspapers, but this blog is particularly delighted to report that the Indian string theorist Prof. Ashoke Sen is one of the first recipients of the new Yuri Milner Prize for Fundamental Physics. This is a prize to honour path breaking research in areas of theoretical physics. The prize is worth 3 million dollars to each recipient, nine of them this year. However, as Ashoke pointed out in a very down to earth interview in the Times of India, the purpose of the prize is  to bring recognition to fundamental work in theoretical physics. Unlike the Nobel which requires experimental verification of proposed hypothesis, the Fundamental Prize does not and, in doing so, it urges physicists to take inspired leaps that might not be immediately verifiable.

What is the work that the prize has been given for? Ashoke says, `The prize was given for my work on strong weak coupling duality symmetry, or in short, S-duality. While many symmetries are easy to
 recognize, S-duality symmetry is hard to recognize since it relates a weakly coupled theory for which a lot is known, to a strongly coupled theory for which little is known. My work in the mid 90's involved devising specific strategy for detecting such symmetries, and I used it to find strong evidence for S-duality in a class of field theories and string theories. Later this strategy was used by others to discover many more such symmetries, and eventually led to the realization that the five different string theories known at that time are all related by such duality symmetries and hence actually describe different limits of the same underlying theory.'

Duality is well known in other contexts. In the context of the Ising model, a model of magnetic phenomena, the duality transformation is used to map phenomena at high temperatures to phenomena at low temperatures. The phenomena seen can be analysed by setting up perturbation expansions in terms of the temperature parameter, high temperature expansions at high temperatures, and low temperature expansions at low temperatures. Often the low temperature expansions are easy to analyse, and obey nice mathematical properties, whereas the high temperature once are not. Then duality can be used to map the insights obtained at low temperatures to understand the phenomena at high temperatures. In the case of gauge theories and string theories, the coupling, or the strength of interaction between particles plays the role of the temperature. Weakly coupled theories like electrodynamics, are well understood, strongly coupled ones like Quantum Chromodynamics are not. Here again, the duality transformation maps one extreme to another, and facilitates analysis. In the context of string theory, the generalization of the S-duality discovered by Ashoke,  reduced the multiplicity of models studied via the insight, that they were different limits of the same theory. 



We would like to finish with another quote from Ashoke. `In my opinion, a lot of Indian parents tend to dissuade their children from taking up physics, so for them an award like this might be an incentive, which is  not necessarily a bad thing. However, if the youth were to start getting into physics only to have access to the prize money, then that would defeat the purpose.'

This blog post is by Neelima Gupte and Sumathi Rao.

(I would like to add a few personal lines. Ashoke is a close friend of Rahul as well as myself, and is of course, Sumathi's husband. This is a very proud day for all of us. -Neelima.)

Coming slip events cast their electrical shadows

It has long been said that coming events cast their shadows before. Forecasting disasters has long been the mainstay of oracles, soothsayers and astrologers. Unfortunately, all the aforementioned are about to be out of work. Scientists have found clues which can help to predict disasters, at least of the kind that can be classified as slip events. Avalanches, earthquakes and fractures frequently occur as a consequence of surfaces sliding on each other and undergoing a sudden slip, and are considered to be examples of slip events.

N. Nirmal Thyagu, an alumnus of IIT Madras, now at the University of Rutgers, and coworkers Troy Shinbrot and Nam H. Kim, found that  packing granular powders in a rotating cylinder gives rise to avalanche events, a fact which is well known to those who study granular media.
The bursts originate from tiny flaws in the structure of the densely packed powder which propagate towards the surface as the cylinder revolves, eventually resulting in a crack that shears off a portion of the powder from the main body. However, the new discovery came when they stuck a voltage probe inside the powder, (Tylenol, in case anyone is giving themselves a headache identifying the powder), having first cleared the cylinder of static electricity. The probe recorded a voltage spike as considerable as 100 volts, about five seconds before the actual avalanche, or slip event occurs. These five seconds, by which the precursor event (the voltage spike) precedes the actual event (the avalanche), should be compared with the time scale of the avalanche itself, which lasts about 19 seconds. Troy Shinbrot, who led the group, got this idea from earthquake folklore, which has always told stories of lightning and other electrical disturbances preceding earthquakes. The table top experiment set up at Rutgers confirmed this. Similar prediction is possible for events that involve the  impending failure of granular materials, as in cascades in silos, concrete bridge collapses, and  perhaps even earthquakes. 

Journal reference:  Proceedings of the Natural Academy of sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1121596109

Popular articles: Science News, New Scientist, Phys. Org.

This blog post is by Neelima Gupte and Sumathi Rao.

The Higgs is here

As promised, here is the upshot of today's press conference at CERN. They did stick their necks out after all, although with caveats and caution, as befitting careful experimental physicists. The press release said, “We observe in our data clear signs of a new particle, at the level of 5 sigma, in the mass region around 126 GeV. The outstanding performance of the LHC and ATLAS and the huge efforts of many people have brought us to this exciting stage,” said ATLAS experiment spokesperson Fabiola Gianotti,“but a little more time is needed to prepare these results for publication.”

 The spokesperson for the other experiment was equally clear and equally cautious. "The results are preliminary but the 5 sigma signal at around 125 GeV we’re seeing is dramatic. This is indeed a new particle. We know it must be a boson and it’s the heaviest boson ever found,” said CMS experiment spokesperson Joe Incandela.“The implications are very significant and it is precisely for this reason that we must be extremely diligent in all of our studies and cross-checks."

There is no doubt that a new boson has been found, with Higgs like properties. The magic number 5 sigma is found by combining more than one decay mode, which some people cavil at. This may be the Standard model Higgs, or it may have properties beyond the Standard model. However, the bottom line is exactly what the Director General of CERN said. “We have reached a milestone in our understanding of nature,” said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer. “The discovery of a particle consistent with the Higgs boson opens the way to more detailed studies, requiring larger statistics, which will pin down the new particle’s properties, and is likely to shed light on other mysteries of our universe.”

This blog post is by Neelima Gupte and Sumathi Rao.

So there were fireworks on the 4th of July, after all!

 Tailpiece: A Higgs boson walks into a bar, and slaps a large denomination Euro note on the counter. `A big one', it says, ' I've been discovered'.  The bar tender says, `Are you the one they've been looking  for?' `Who cares? ' sniffs the boson. `If I'm not the one, it's even better'.


@ Rahul Siddharthan: Take a look at this link We blogged a lot on the Higgs last year, and a great deal of the story is here, jokes and all.