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.

Slouching towards Eureka

Today might be Eureka day, i.e. CERN might announce the discovery of the Higgs particle.  Or instead, they may announce better bounds and non- Standard Model physics! Fermilab yesterday confirmed that a detailed analysis of their Tevatron data supports strongly (2.9 sigma) all the indications that the Higgs is lurking in the expected range (115-135 GeV) via b-b-bar decays , but no one has the magic 5 sigma result yet.


Meanwhile particle physicists are all excited and waiting for the web-cast from CERN. Hopefully it will be a faster than the December one. In case you want a blow by blow account, here is the link to the Cosmic Variance blog from Discover magazine.


More later today, when we find out  the real score.

5 sigma result at 125 GeV! Is this it? 


This blog post is by Neelima Gupte and Sumathi Rao.

Half the sky

Once again, one of those who hold up half the sky, has reached the skies. Liu Yang becomes the first Chinese woman to go up in space, in a Shenzhou-9 space craft that blasted off the Gobi desert. Thirty three year old Liu is a member of the Chinese air force, and is a crack fighter pilot, and once safely piloted home a jet, whose engine blades got smashed in a bird hit. She is supposed to carry out medical experiments in the current mission, and hopefully the ice-cold composure she demonstrated in the bird hit emergency won't be put to a test.

The elite roll-call of women who have been to space now stands at 57, with three Russians, one Iranian, two Canadians, two Japanese, one Korean, one Frenchwoman, and all the rest being Americans, including two women of Indian origin, Kalpana Chawla and Sunita Williams. The roll call is pretty long, and the best remembered ones include Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman, as well as the first civilian, and also the first Soviet woman in space, in 1963; and Sally Ride (`Ride, Sally Ride'), the first American woman in space,  in 1983. Everything was not a triumphal ride, Judith Resnick and Christa McAuliffe, who was not an astronaut, but a school teacher, were two of the seven who died in the Challenger disaster in 1986, and Kalpana Chawla, more recently in the Columbia disaster in 2003. This post is a tribute to their memory, as well as a toast to Liu Yang, the latest addition to this illustrious list. All the best, Major Liu, and a safe journey home.

This blog post is by Neelima Gupte and Sumathi rao.