Category Archives: Topical

Includes posts on physics, philosophy, sciences, quantitative finance, economics, environment etc.

Humor, Physics

The Physics of Romance

Let me give you a physics lesson. During your high school days, you may have learned that an atom has a nucleus and a bunch of electrons. The nucleus has protons and neutrons, which are like the basic building blocks of matter along with the electrons, they told you. Well, they lied to you. Neutrons and protons are not basic; they have smaller building blocks within, called quarks, which have some electric charge. More importantly, they have another kind of charge, which physicists call color, for no particular reason.

These color charges have a weird property. As you pull them apart, the attraction between them increases, which is totally unlike electric charges. So, if you try to pull two quarks apart beyond a very small distance, you have to put in so much energy that you start creating new pairs of quarks (a quantum weirdness, which we will ignore for now). You will never see a naked single quark. You will never see its true color. This quirk of quarks has a fancy name: Quark or Color Confinement. On the other hand, when quarks get closer together, they have little effect on each other. This also has a fancy name – Asymptotic Freedom.

Neutrons and protons have three quarks each, which roam free within a tiny space, giving the impression of them (neutrons and protons) being fundamental particles, within the confines of which they (the quarks) act totally cool, and don’t even feel the presence of one another.  The moment you try to pry one out though, the system of three quarks resists fiercely. If you insist and try harder, you do pry something out. You never get one quark though, but a pair which soon becomes a big ugly mess. And, if you were into that kind of stuff (as my old friends at CERN are), you would spend the rest of your days trying to figure out what happened.

What does it all have to do with romance? Well, not much really. But you wouldn’t have read this far if I hadn’t put that word in the title, would you? It is just that certain developments in my personal life have made me look inward and think. Now, don’t get too inquisitive, don’t pry 🙂

To me, any kind of thought process is best carried out through analogies and patterns, however contrived and tortured they may seem to normal people. Here is an example of such a desperate search for patterns, and another misanthropic one. And one about life itself. I think it is the sign of a true scientist, but then again, it is only my opinion – a rather self-serving one at that.

Back to romancing the quark – I think some people, maybe you, enjoy the same kind of relaxed ease or asymptotic freedom as long as the color force of romance is weak. This ease makes you romantically desirable. But the moment the romantic force begins to make itself felt, you tense up. Unholy thoughts and feelings, such as insecurity and jealousy, begin to pop up, much like the pair production when quarks try to escape their confinement. The descending darkness makes you dislike yourself. And of course, when you don’t like yourself, nobody else is going to like you either and you soon end up in your romantic singlet confinement, after having spawned a stable pairing or an unstable mess for the object of your affection. You are then free once again to enjoy your asymptotic ease, and the cycle continues. Such is the life of a quark, asymptotically free and universally desired, but eternally confined to singlet states devoid of color and romance. That, my friend, is the physics behind romance.

Disclaimer: This study was conducted with a sample size of one and no control group. Make of it what you will.

Life and Death, Philosophy

Mud and Me

Life and death has been a recurring theme on my blog. Confronted with our mortality, a common stance we assume is one of anger. Hearing of such a stance recently, I thought I would expand on my notion of gratitude in this writeup, liberally paraphrased from Shelly Kagan’s lectures on this subject.

Gratitude is best described in mystical terms, where we have a generous, benevolent giver (namely God) and a receiver (such as ourselves). A mystic poem that Kagan quoted goes like this (paraphrasing again, of course): God was a bit bored, so he created the universe and all the beauty in it, like the sun and the stars, beaches and mountains, forests and lakes, snow and waterfalls, and so on. At the end of this creation, God wanted an audience. So he looked at some mud on the ground and said, “Sit up and see all this beauty that I have created.” And I sat up and looked. Then I saw. I saw the beauty, not only in love and life and pleasure and happiness and everything nice and great, but also in loss and grief and misery and struggles, in all things bad and mean as well.

I cannot even begin to tell you how grateful I am that I got to be the mud that sat up and saw it all. All this beauty. So much of it that it hurts if we allow ourselves to see it. I got to experience the pleasures and the pride, and the pangs and the anguish. I got a glimpse of God’s own thoughts, written in these immense volumes of beauty. Imagine, if my parents had gotten amorous a minute earlier or later, I wouldn’t have been, and all this beauty would have been lost to me. How can I be anything but grateful for this singular fortune, this supreme gift?

What does it matter that my awareness of all this beauty will cease in 20 or so years? Or tomorrow? I see it now. My experience at this point in time is etched in eternity. It is mine. For now. And for ever.

This little bit about eternity is my dim understanding of an old song, but it is also an oblique commentary on the different outlooks of life. The western outlook is that life is a gift to be appreciated, a container to be filled with as many great things that we can muster in this short blink during which it lasts.

But we, of the East, beg to differ. We view life as a burden or suffering (as in Buddhism), or as a difficult patch in the cycle of life and death. We deal with it by not getting too attached to life and its pleasures.

When I say “we,” I am not sure I include myself in it. Well, may be I do. I see the beauty in detachment as well, in actions performed devoid of any attachment to their fruits or glory, in kindness for its own sake, in a life lived to its fullest, but oriented toward a salvation that is the very antithesis of life. I see beauty in our petty fights and our noble gestures, in our worldly worries and our heavenly pursuits. In everything that adds a little piece to this grand collage, a little square to this magnificent Persian rug, a little shade to this dome of many-colored glass, staining the white radiance of eternity. And I am grateful that I get to see it all.

Life and Death, Philosophy

Binding Books

When I was about 15, oh so long ago now, I had this crazy hobby of book binding, which is like the process of turning a paperback into a hardcover, or adding a hardcover to an exercise book. With the mild OCD that I have, I do get a bit carried away with such things, and no books around me or in my dad’s collection were spared. I collaborated with a local printing press to access their cutting machine and local stationery stores to research on various techniques and acquire supplies. My crowning moment was when I did a “full-calico” binding on a rather useless book that my dad had recently purchased.
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Parenting, Philosophy, Work and Life

When Your Child is as Big as You

My mom used to say that when your child is as big as you, you have to treat them with respect. What she actually said was that you had to address them using a respectful form of “you,” which doesn’t make any sense in English, but may work in Hindi or French. It worked poetically well in Malayalam. I was reminded of this maternal pearl of wisdom recently when I was watching a movie with my son.

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Life and Death, Philosophy

Contradictions

Life is full of contradictions.

I am attending a research retreat on mindfulness and contemplative practices at the beautiful Garrison Institute. I am learning a lot of interesting things, and meeting a lot of like-minded and excellent people – the kind of people with whom I could have deep conversation about the unreal nature of reality, unlike most people from other walks of life would politely and tactfully excuse themselves when I get a bit unreal.

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Life and Death, Philosophy

Twilight Years

At some point in our life, we come to accept the fact we are closer to death than life. What lies ahead is definitely less significant than what is left behind. These are the twilight years, and I have come to accept them. With darkness descending over the horizons, and the long shadows of misspent years and evaded human conditions slithering all around me, I peer into the void, into an eternity of silence and dreamlessness. It is almost time.

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Philosophy, Physics, Science

Interpretation of Special Relativity

When we looked at Quantum Mechanics, we talked about its various interpretations. The reason we have such interpretations, I said, is that QM deals with a reality that we have no access to, through our sensory and perceptual apparatuses. On the other hand, Special Relativity is about macro objects in motion, and we have no problem imagining such things. So why would we need to have an interpretation? The answer is a subtle one.
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