“Science alone of all the subjects contains within itself the lesson of the danger of belief in the infallibility of the greatest teachers in the preceding generation. Learn from science that you must doubt the experts. As a matter of fact, I can also define science another way: Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.” — Richard Feynman

One of the brighter ones among those who came after Einstein cautioned us to guard against our blind faith in the infallibility of old masters. Taking my cue from that insight, I, for one, think that Einstein’s century is behind us now. I know, coming from a non-practicing physicist, who sold his soul to the finance industry, this declaration sounds crazy. Delusional even. But I do have my reasons to see Einstein’s ideas go.

Let’s start with this picture of a dot flying along a straight line (on the ceiling, so to speak). You are standing at the centre of the line in the bottom (on the floor, that is). If the dot was moving faster than light, how would you see it? Well, you wouldn’t see anything at all until the first ray of light from the dot reaches you. As the animation shows, the first ray will reach you when the dot is somewhere almost directly above you. The next rays you would see actually come from two different points in the line of flight of the dot — one before the first point, and one after. Thus, the way you would see it is, incredible as it may seem to you at first, as one dot appearing out of nowhere and then splitting and moving rather symmetrically away from that point. (It is just that the dot is flying so fast that by the time you get to see it, it is already gone past you, and the rays from both behind and ahead reach you at the same instant in time.Hope that statement makes it clearer, rather than more confusing.).

Why did I start with this animation of how the illusion of a symmetric object can happen? Well, we see a lot of active symmetric structures in the universe. For instance, look at this picture of Cygnus A. There is a “core” from which seem to emanate “features” that float away to the “lobes.” Doesn’t it look remarkably similar to what we would see based on the animation above? There are other examples in which some feature points or knots seem to move away from the core where they first appear at. We could come up with a clever model based on superluminality and how it would create illusionary symmetric objects in the heavens. We could, but nobody would believe us — because of Einstein. I know this — I tried to get my old physicist friends to consider this model. The response is always some variant of this, “Interesting, but it cannot work. It violates Lorentz invariance, doesn’t it?” LV being physics talk for Einstein’s insistence that nothing should go faster than light. Now that neutrinos can violate LV, why not me?

Of course, if it was only a qualitative agreement between symmetric shapes and superluminal celestial objects, my physics friends are right in ignoring me. There is much more. The lobes in Cygnus A, for instance, emit radiation in the radio frequency range. In fact, the sky as seen from a radio telescope looks materially different from what we see from an optical telescope. I could show that the spectral evolution of the radiation from this superluminal object fitted nicely with AGNs and another class of astrophysical phenomena, hitherto considered unrelated, called gamma ray bursts. In fact, I managed to publish this model a while ago under the title, “Are Radio Sources and Gamma Ray Bursts Luminal Booms?“.

You see, I need superluminality. Einstein being wrong is a pre-requisite of my being right. So it is the most respected scientist ever vs. yours faithfully, a blogger of the unreal kind. You do the math.

Such long odds, however, have never discouraged me, and I always rush in where the wiser angels fear to tread. So let me point out a couple of inconsistencies in SR. The derivation of the theory starts off by pointing out the effects of light travel time in time measurements. And later on in the theory, the distortions due to light travel time effects become part of the properties of space and time. (In fact, light travel time effects will make it impossible to have a superluminal dot on a ceiling, as in my animation above — not even a virtual one, where you take a laser pointer and turn it fast enough that the laser dot on the ceiling would move faster than light. It won’t.) But, as the theory is understood and practiced now, the light travel time effects are to be applied on top of the space and time distortions (which were due to the light travel time effects to begin with)! Physicists turn a blind eye to this glaring inconstancy because SR “works” — as I made very clear in my previous post in this series.

Another philosophical problem with the theory is that it is not testable. I know, I alluded to a large body of proof in its favor, but fundamentally, the special theory of relativity makes predictions about a uniformly moving frame of reference in the absence of gravity. There is no such thing. Even if there was, in order to verify the predictions (that a moving clock runs slower as in the twin paradox, for instance), you have to have acceleration somewhere in the verification process. Two clocks will have to come back to the same point to compare time. The moment you do that, at least one of the clocks has accelerated, and the proponents of the theory would say, “Ah, there is no problem here, the symmetry between the clocks is broken because of the acceleration.” People have argued back and forth about such thought experiments for an entire century, so I don’t want to get into it. I just want to point out that theory by itself is untestable, which should also mean that it is unprovable. Now that there is direct experimental evidence against the theory, may be people will take a closer look at these inconsistencies and decide that it is time to say bye-bye to Einstein.

The special theory of relativity is an extremely well-tested theory. Despite my personal reservations about it, the body of proof for the validity of SR is really enormous and the theory has stood the test of time — at least so far. But it is the integration of SR into the rest of modern physics that makes it all but impossible to write it off as a failed theory. In experimental high energy physics, for instance, we compute the rest mass of a particle as its identifying statistical signature. The way it works is this: in order to discover a heavy particle, you first detect its daughter particles (decay products, that is), measure their energies and momenta, add them up (as “4-vectors”), and compute the invariant mass of the system as the modulus of the aggregate energy-momentum vector. In accordance with SR, the invariant mass is the rest mass of the parent particle. You do this for many thousands of times and make a distribution (a “histogram”) and detect any statistically significant excess at any mass. Such an excess is the signature of the parent particle at that mass.

Almost every one of the particles in the particle data book that we know and love is detected using some variant of this method. So the whole Standard Model of particle physics is built on SR. In fact, almost all of modern physics (physics of the 20th century) is built on it. On the theory side, in the thirties, Dirac derived a framework to describe electrons. It combined SR and quantum mechanics in an elegant framework and predicted the existence of positrons, which bore out later on. Although considered incomplete because of its lack of sound physical backdrop, this “second quantization” and its subsequent experimental verification can be rightly seen as evidence for the rightness of SR.

Feynman took it further and completed the quantum electrodynamics (QED), which has been the most rigorously tested theory ever. To digress a bit, Feynman was once being shown around at CERN, and the guide (probably a prominent physicist himself) was explaining the experiments, their objectives etc. Then the guide suddenly remembered who he was talking to; after all, most of the CERN experiments were based on Feynman’s QED. Embarrassed, he said, “Of course, Dr. Feynman, you know all this. These are all to verify your predictions.” Feynman quipped, “Why, you don’t trust me?!” To get back to my point and reiterate it, the whole edifice of the standard model of particle physics is built on top of SR. Its success alone is enough to make it impossible for modern physics to discard SR.

So, if you take away SR, you don’t have the Standard Model and QED, and you don’t know how accelerator experiments and nuclear bombs work. The fact that they do is proof enough for the validity of SR, because the alternative (that we managed to build all these things without really knowing how they work) is just too weird. It’s not just the exotic (nuclear weaponry and CERN experiments), but the mundane that should convince us. Fluorescent lighting, laser pointers, LED, computers, mobile phones, GPS navigators, iPads — in short, all of modern technology is, in some way, a confirmation of SR.

So the OPERA result on observed superluminalily has to be wrong. But I would like it to be right. And I will explain why in my next post. Why everything we accept as a verification of SR could be a case of mass delusion — almost literally. Stay tuned!

The constancy (and the resultant inviolability) of the speed of light, of course, comes from Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity, or SR. This theory is an extension of a simple idea. In fact, Einstein’s genius is in his ability to carry a simple idea to its logically inevitable, albeit counter-intuitive (to the point of being illogical!) conclusion. In the case of SR, he picks an idea so obvious — that the laws of physics should be independent of the state of motion. If you are in a train going at a constant speed, for instance, you can’t tell whether you are moving or not (if you close the windows, that is). The statement “You can’t tell” can be recast in physics as, “There is no experiment you can device to detect your state of motion.” This should be obvious, right? After all, if the laws kept changing every time you moved about, it is as good as having no laws at all.

Then came Maxwell. He wrote down the equations of electricity and magnetism, thereby elegantly unifying them. The equations state, using fancy vector notations, that a changing magnetic field will create an electric field, and a changing electric field will create a magnetic field, which is roughly how a car alternator and an electric motor work. These elegant equations have a wave solution.

The existence of a wave solution is no surprise, since a changing electric field generates a magnetic field, which in turn generates an electric field, which generates a magnetic filed and so on ad infinitum. What is surprising is the fact that the speed of propagation of this wave predicted by Maxwell’s equations is c, the speed of light. So it was natural to suppose that light was a form of electromagnetic radiation, which means that if you take a magnet and jiggle it fast enough, you will get light moving away from you at c – if we accept that light is indeed EM wave.

What is infinitely more fundamental is the question whether Maxwell’s equations are actually laws of physics. It is hard to argue that they aren’t. Then the follow-up question is whether these equations should obey the axiom that all laws of physics are supposed to obey — namely they should be independent of the state of motion. Again, hard to see why not. Then how do we modify Maxwell’s equations such that they are independent of motion? This is the project Einstein took on under the fancy name, “Covariant formulation of Maxwell’s equations,” and published the most famous physics article ever with an even fancier title, “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies.” We now call it the Special Theory of Relativity, or SR.

To get a bit technical, Maxwell’s equations have the space derivatives of electric and magnetic fields relating to the time derivatives of charges and currents. In other words, space and time are related through the equations. And the wave solution to these equations with the propagation speed of c becomes a constraint on the properties of space and time. This is a simple philosophical look on SR, more than a physics analysis.

Einstein’s approach was to employ a series of thought experiments to establish that you needed a light signal to sync clocks and hypothesize that the speed of light had to be constant in all moving frames of reference. In other words, the speed of light is independent of the state of motion, as it has to be if Maxwell’s equations are to be laws of physics.

This aspect of the theory is supremely counter-intuitive, which is physics lingo to say something is hard to believe. In the case of the speed of light, you take a ray of light, run along with it at a high speed, and measure its speed, you still get c. Run against it and measure it — still c. To achieve this constancy, Einstein rewrote the equations of velocity addition and subtraction. On consequence of these rewritten equations is that nothing can go faster than light.

This is my long-winded description of the context in which the speed violation measured at OPERA has to be seen. If the violation is confirmed, we have a few unpleasant choices to pick from:

1. Electrodynamics (Maxwell’s equations) is not invariant under motion.
2. Light is not really electromagnetic in nature.
3. SR is not the right covariant formulation of electrodynamics.

The first choice is patently unacceptable because it is tantamount to stating that electrodynamics is not physics. A moving motor (e.g., if you take your electric razor on a flight) would behave differently from a static one (you may not be able to shave). The second choice also is quite absurd. In addition to the numeric equality between the speed of the waves from Maxwell’s equations and the measured value of c, we do have other compelling reasons why we should believe that light is EM waves. Radio waves induce electric signals in an antenna, light knocks of electrons, microwaves can excite water molecules and cook food and so on.

The only real choice we are left with is the last one — which is to say SR is wrong. Why not discard SR? More reasons than a blog post can summarize, but I’ll try to summarize them any way in my next post.

But (ah, there is always a “but”), the workflow in iPhoto can create a problem for some. It expects you to shoot pictures, connect your camera to your Mac, move the photos from the camera to the Mac, enhance/edit and share (Facebook, flickr) or print or make photo books. This flow (with some face recognition, red-eye removal, event/album creation etc.) works like a charm — if you are just starting out with your new digital camera. What if you already have 20,000 old photos and scans on your old computer (in “My Pictures”)?

This is the problem I was faced with when I started playing with iPhoto. I pride myself in anticipating such problems. So, I decided to import my old library very carefully. While importing “My Pictures” (which was fairly organized to begin with), I went through it folder by folder, dragging-and-dropping them on iPhoto and, at the same time, labeling them (and the photos therein) with what I thought were appropriate colors. (I used the “Get Info” function in Finder for color labels.) I thought I was being clever, but I ended up with a fine (but colorful) mess, with my folders and photos sporting random colors. It looked impossible to compare and figure out and where my 20,000 photos got imported to in iPhoto; so I decided to write my very first Mac App — iPhotoTagger. It took me about a week to write it, but it sorted out my photo worries. Now I want to sell it and make some money.

Here is what it does. It first goes through your iPhoto library and catalogs what you have there. It then scans the folder you specify and compares the photos in there with those in your library. If a photo is found exactly once, it will get a Green label, so that it stands out when you browse to it in your Finder (which is Mac-talk for Windows Explorer). Similarly, if the photo appears more than once in your iPhoto library, it will be tagged in Yellow. And, going the extra-mile, iPhotoTagger will color your folder Green if all the photos within have been imported into your iPhoto library. Those folders that have been partially imported will be tagged Yellow.

The photo comparison is done using Exif data, and is fairly accurate. Note that iPhotoTagger doesn’t modify anything within your iPhoto library. Doing so would be unwise. It merely reads the library to gather information.

This first version (V1.0) is released to test the waters, as it were, and is priced at $1.99. If there is enough interest, I will work on V2.0 with improved performance (using Perl and SQLite, if you must know). I will price it at $2.99. And, if the interest doesn’t wane, a V3.0 (for $3.99) will appear with a proper help file, performance pane, options to choose your own color scheme, SpotLight comments (and, if you must know, probably rewritten in Objective-C). Before you rush to send me money, please know that iPhotoTagger requires Snow Leopard and Lion (OS-X 10.6 and 10.7). If in doubt, you can download the lite version and play with it. It is fully functional, and will create lists of photos/folders to be tagged in Green and Yellow, but won’t actually tag them.

This post is an edited version of my responses in a Webinar panel-discussion organized by Wiley-Finance and FinCAD. The freely available Webcast is linked in the post, and contains responses from the other participants — Paul Wilmott and Espen Huag. An expanded version of this post may later appear as an article in the Wilmott Magazine.

What is Risk?

When we use the word Risk in normal conversation, it has a negative connotation — risk of getting hit by a car, for instance; but not the risk of winning a lottery. In finance, risk is both positive and negative. At times, you want the exposure to a certain kind of risk to counterbalance some other exposure; at times, you are looking for the returns associated with a certain risk. Risk, in this context, is almost identical to the mathematical concept of probability.

But even in finance, you have one kind of risk that is always negative — it is Operational Risk. My professional interest right now is in minimizing the operational risk associated with trading and computational platforms.

How do you measure Risk?

Measuring risk ultimately boils down to estimating the probability of a loss as a function of something — typically the intensity of the loss and time. So it’s like asking — What’s the probability of losing a million dollars or two million dollars tomorrow or the day after?

The question whether we can measure risk is another way of asking whether we can figure out this probability function. In certain cases, we believe we can — in Market Risk, for instance, we have very good models for this function. Credit Risk is different story — although we thought we could measure it, we learned the hard way that we probably could not.

The question how effective the measure is, is, in my view, like asking ourselves, “What do we do with a probability number?” If I do a fancy calculation and tell you that you have 27.3% probability of losing one million tomorrow, what do you do with that piece of information? Probability has a reasonable meaning only a statistical sense, in high-frequency events or large ensembles. Risk events, almost by definition, are low-frequency events and a probability number may have only limited practical use. But as a pricing tool, accurate probability is great, especially when you price instruments with deep market liquidity.

Innovation in Risk Management.

Innovation in Risk comes in two flavors — one is on the risk taking side, which is in pricing, warehousing risk and so on. On this front, we do it well, or at least we think we are doing it well, and innovation in pricing and modeling is active. The flip side of it is, of course, risk management. Here, I think innovation lags actually behind catastrophic events. Once we have a financial crisis, for instance, we do a post-mortem, figure out what went wrong and try to implement safety guards. But the next failure, of course, is going to come from some other, totally, unexpected angle.

What is the role of Risk Management in a bank?

Risk taking and risk management are two aspects of a bank’s day-to-day business. These two aspects seem in conflict with each other, but the conflict is no accident. It is through fine-tuning this conflict that a bank implements its risk appetite. It is like a dynamic equilibrium that can be tweaked as desired.

What is the role of vendors?

In my experience, vendors seem to influence the processes rather than the methodologies of risk management, and indeed of modeling. A vended system, however customizable it may be, comes with its own assumptions about the workflow, lifecycle management etc. The processes built around the system will have to adapt to these assumptions. This is not a bad thing. At the very least, popular vended systems serve to standardize risk management practices.

As my writings started appearing in different magazines and newspapers as regular columns, I wanted to collect them in one place — as an anthology of the internet kind, as it were. That’s how my blog was born. The motivation to continue blogging comes from the memory of how my first book, The Unreal Universe, took shape out of the random notes I started writing on scrap books. I believe the ideas that cross anybody’s mind often get forgotten and lost unless they are written down. A blog is a convenient platform to put them down. And, since the blog is rather public, you take some care and effort to express yourself well.

Do you have any plans for the blog in the future?

I will keep blogging, roughly at the rate of one post a week or so. I don’t have any big plans for the blog per se, but I do have some other Internet ideas that may spring from my blog.

Philosophy is usually seen as a very high concept, intellectual subject. Do you think that it can have a greater impact in the world at large?

This is a question that troubled me for a while. And I wrote a post on it, which may answer it to the best of my ability. To repeat myself a bit, philosophy is merely a description of whatever intellectual pursuits that we indulge in. It is just that we don’t often see it that way. For instance, if you are doing physics, you think that you are quite far removed from philosophy. The philosophical spins that you put on a theory in physics is mostly an afterthought, it is believed. But there are instances where you can actually apply philosophy to solve problems in physics, and come up with new theories. This indeed is the theme of my book, The Unreal Universe. It asks the question, if some object flew by faster than the speed of light, what would it look like? With the recent discovery that solid matter does travel faster than light, I feel vindicated and look forward to further developments in physics.

Do you think many college students are attracted to philosophy? What would make them choose to major in it?

In today’s world, I am afraid philosophy is supremely irrelevant. So it may be difficult to get our youngsters interested in philosophy. I feel that one can hope to improve its relevance by pointing out the interconnections between whatever it is that we do and the intellectual aspects behind it. Would that make them choose to major in it? In a world driven by excesses, it may not be enough. Then again, it is world where articulation is often mistaken for accomplishments. Perhaps philosophy can help you articulate better, sound really cool and impress that girl you have been after — to put it crudely.

More seriously, though, what I said about the irrelevance of philosophy can be said about, say, physics as well, despite the fact that it gives you computers and iPads. For instance, when Copernicus came up with the notion that the earth is revolving around the sun rather than the other way round, profound though this revelation was, in what way did it change our daily life? Do you really have to know this piece of information to live your life? This irrelevance of such profound facts and theories bothered scientists like Richard Feynman.

What kind of advice or recommendations would you give to someone who is interested in philosophy, and who would like to start learning more about it?

I started my path toward philosophy via physics. I think philosophy by itself is too detached from anything else that you cannot really start with it. You have to find your way toward it from whatever your work entails, and then expand from there. At least, that’s how I did it, and that way made it very real. When you ask yourself a question like what is space (so that you can understand what it means to say that space contracts, for instance), the answers you get are very relevant. They are not some philosophical gibberish. I think similar paths to relevance exist in all fields. See for example how Pirsig brought out the notion of quality in his work, not as an abstract definition, but as an all-consuming (and eventually dangerous) obsession.

In my view, philosophy is a wrapper around multiple silos of human endeavor. It helps you see the links among seemingly unrelated fields, such as cognitive neuroscience and special relativity. Of what practical use is this knowledge, I cannot tell you. Then again, of what practical use is life itself?

Seriously, sauce is king (to use Bollywood lingo) in French cuisine, so I found it shocking when I saw this on BBC that more and more French chefs were resorting to factory-manufactured sauces. Even the slices of boiled eggs garnishing their overpriced salads come in a cylindrical form wrapped in plastic. How could this be? How could they use mass-produced garbage and pretend to be serving up the finest gastronomical experiences?

Sure, we can see corporate and personal greed driving the policies to cut corners and use the cheapest of ingredients. But there is a small technology success story here. A few years ago, I read in the newspaper that they found fake chicken eggs in some Chinese supermarkets. They were “fresh” eggs, with shells, yolks, whites and everything. You could even make omelets with them. Imagine that — a real chicken egg probably costs only a few cents to produce. But someone could set up a manufacturing process that could churn out fake eggs cheaper than that. You have to admire the ingenuity involved — unless, of course, you have to eat those eggs.

The trouble with our times is that this unpalatable ingenuity is all pervasive. It is the norm, not the exception. We see it in tainted paints on toys, harmful garbage processed into fast food (or even fine-dining, apparently), poison in baby food, imaginative fine-print on financial papers and “EULAs”, substandard components and shoddy workmanship in critical machinery — on every facet of our modern life. Given such a backdrop, how do we know that the “organic” produce, though we pay four times as much for it, is any different from the normal produce? To put it all down to the faceless corporate greed, as most of us tend to do, is a bit simplistic. Going one step further to see our own collective greed in the corporate behavior (as I proudly did a couple of times) is also perhaps trivial. What are corporates these days, if not collections of people like you and me?

There is something deeper and more troubling in all this. I have some disjointed thoughts, and will try to write it up in an ongoing series. I suspect these thoughts of mine are going to sound similar to the luddite ones un-popularized by the infamous Unabomber. His idea was that our normal animalistic instincts of the hunter-gatherer kind are being stifled by the modern societies we have developed into. And, in his view, this unwelcome transformation and the consequent tension and stress can be countered only by an anarchical destruction of the propagators of our so-called development — namely, universities and other technology generators. Hence the bombing of innocent professors and such.

Clearly, I don’t agree with this luddite ideology, for if I did, I would have to first bomb myself! I’m nursing a far less destructive line of thought. Our technological advances and their unintended backlashes, with ever-increasing frequency and amplitude, remind me of something that fascinated my geeky mind — the phase transition between structured (laminar) and chaotic (turbulent) states in physical systems (when flow rates cross a certain threshold, for instance). Are we approaching such a threshold of phase transition in our social systems and societal structures? In my moody luddite moments, I feel certain that we are.

Featuring Paul Wilmott, Espen Haug and Manoj Thulasidas

PLEASE JOIN US FOR THIS FREE WEBINAR PRESENTED BY FINCAD AND WILEY GLOBAL FINANCE

How do you identify, measure and model risk, and more importantly, what changes need to be implemented to improve the long-term profitability and sustainability of our financial institutions? Take a unique opportunity to join globally recognised and respected experts in the field, Paul Wilmott, Espen Haug and Manoj Thulasidas in a free, one hour online roundtable discussion to debate the key issues and to find answers to questions to improve financial risk modelling.

Join our experts as they address these fundamental financial risk questions:

• What is risk?
• How do we measure and quantify risk in quantitative finance? Is this effective?
• Is it possible to model risk?
• Define innovation in risk management. Where does it take place? Where should it take place?
• How do new ideas see the light of day? How are they applied to the industry, and how should they be applied?
• How is risk management implemented in modern investment banking? Is there a better way?

Our panel of internationally respected experts include Dr Paul Wilmott, founder of the prestigious Certificate in Quantitative Finance (CQF) and Wilmott.com, Editor-in-Chief of Wilmott Magazine, and author of highly acclaimed books including the best-selling Paul Wilmott On Quantitative Finance; Dr Espen Gaarder Haug who has more than 20 years of experience in Derivatives research and trading and is author of The Complete Guide of Option Pricing Formulas and Derivatives: Models on Models; and Dr Manoj Thulasidas, a physicist-turned-quant who works as a senior quantitative professional at Standard Chartered Bank in Singapore and is author of Principles of Quantitative Development.

This debate will be critical for all chief risk officers, credit and market risk managers, asset liability managers, financial engineers, front office traders, risk analysts, quants and academics.

Anyway, the Singapore Grandpa (a cousin to my paternal grandfather) was quite fond of my father, who was among the first University graduates from that part of Kerala. He got him a Parker pen from Singapore as a graduation gift. Some fifteen years later, this pen would teach me a lesson that is still not fully learned four decades on.

My father was rather proud of this pen, its quality and sturdiness, and was bragging to his friends once. “Even if I wanted to break it, I wouldn’t be able to!” he said, without noticing his son (yours faithfully), all of four years then with only a limited understanding of hypothetical conditionals of this kind. Next evening, when he came back from work, I was waiting for him at the door, beaming with pride, holding his precious pen thoroughly crushed. “Dad, dad, I did it! I managed to break your pen for you!”

Heart-broken as my father must have been, he didn’t even raise his voice. He asked, “What did you do that for, son?” using the overly affectionate Malayalam word for “son”. I was only too eager to explain. “You said yesterday that you have been trying to break it, but couldn’t. I did it for you!” Rather short on language skills, I was already a bit too long on physics. I had placed the pen near the hinges of a door and used the lever action by closing it to accomplish my mission of breaking the pen. In fact, I remembered this incident when I was trying to explain to my wife (short on physics) why the door stopper placed close to the hinges was breaking the floor tiles rather than stopping the door.

My father tried to fix the Parker pen with scotch tape (which was called cellophane tape at that time) and rubber bands. Later, he managed to replace the body of the pen although he could never quite fix the leaking ink. I still have the pen, and this enduring lesson in infinite patience.

Two and half years ago, my father passed away. During the ensuing soul-searching, this close friend of mine remarked, “Well, now that you know what it takes, how well do you think you are doing?” I don’t think I am doing that well, for some lessons, even when fully learned, are just too hard to put in practice.

Listening to these lectures filled me with another kind of dread. I realized once again how ignorant I am, and how much there is to know, think and figure out, and how little time is left to do all that. Perhaps this recognition of my ignorance is a sign of growing wisdom, if we can believe Socrates. At least I hope it is.

One thing I had some misconceptions about (or an incomplete understanding of) was this concept of dualism. Growing up in India, I heard a lot about our monistic philosophy called Advaita. The word means not-two, and I understood it as the rejection of the Brahman and Maya distinction. To illustrate it with an example, say you sense something — like you see these words in front of you on your computer screen. Are these words and the computer screen out there really? If I were to somehow generate the neuronal firing patterns that create this sensation in you, you would see these words even if they were not there. This is easy to understand; after all, this is the main thesis of the movie Matrix. So what you see is merely a construct in your brain; it is Maya or part of the Matrix. What is causing the sensory inputs is presumably Brahman. So, to me, Advaita meant trusting only the realness of Brahman while rejecting Maya. Now, after reading a bit more, I’m not sure that was an accurate description at all. Perhaps that is why Ranga criticized me long time ago.

In Western philosophy, there is a different and more obvious kind of dualism. It is the age-old mind-matter distinction. What is mind made of? Most of us think of mind (those who think of it, that is) as a computer program running on our brain. In other words, mind is software, brain is hardware. They are two different kinds of things. After all, we pay separately for hardware (Dell) and software (Microsoft). Since we think of them as two, ours is an inherently dualistic view. Before the time of computers, Descartes thought of this problem and said there was a mental substance and a physical substance. So this view is called Cartesian Dualism. (By the way, Cartesian coordinates in analytic geometry came from Descartes as well — a fact that might enhance our respect for him.) It is a view that has vast ramifications in all branches of philosophy, from metaphysics to theology. It leads to the concepts of spirit and souls, God, afterlife, reincarnation etc., with their inescapable implications on morality.

There are philosophers who reject this notion of Cartesian dualism. John Searle is one of them. They embrace a view that mind is an emergent property of the brain. An emergent property (more fancily called an epiphenomenon) is something that happens incidentally along with the main phenomenon, but is neither the cause nor the effect of it. An emergent property in physics that we are familiar with is temperature, which is a measure of the average velocity of a bunch of molecules. You cannot define temperature unless you have a statistically significant collection of molecules. Searle uses the wetness of water as his example to illustrate emergence of properties. You cannot have a wet water molecule or a dry one, but when you put a lot of water molecules together you get wetness. Similarly, mind emerges from the physical substance of the brain through physical processes. So all the properties that we ascribe to mind are to be explained away as physical interactions. There is only one kind of substance, which is physical. So this monistic philosophy is called physicalism. Physicalism is part of materialism (not to be confused with its current meaning — what we mean by a material girl, for instance).

You know, the trouble with philosophy is that there are so many isms that you lose track of what is going on in this wild jungle of jargonism. If I coined the word unrealism to go with my blog and promoted it as a branch of philosophy, or better yet, a Singaporean school of thought, I’m sure I can make it stick. Or perhaps it is already an accepted domain?

All kidding aside, the view that everything on the mental side of life, such as consciousness, thoughts, ideals etc., is a manifestation of physical interactions (I’m restating the definition of physicalism here, as you can see) enjoys certain currency among contemporary philosophers. Both Kagan and Searle readily accept this view, for example. But this view is in conflict with what the ancient Greek philosophers like Socrates, Plato and Aristotle thought. They all believed in some form of continued existence of a mental substance, be it the soul, spirit or whatever. All major religions have some variant of this dualism embedded in their beliefs. (I think Plato’s dualism is of a different kind — a real, imperfect world where we live on the one hand, and an ideal perfect world of forms on the other where the souls and Gods live. More on that later.) After all, God has to be made up of a spiritual “substance” other than a pure physical substance. Or how could he not be subject to the physical laws that we, mere mortals, can comprehend?

Nothing in philosophy is totally disconnected from one another. A fundamental stance such as dualism or monism that you take in dealing with the questions on consciousness, cognition and mind has ramifications in what kind of life you lead (Ethics), how you define reality (Metaphysics), and how you know these things (Epistemology). Through its influence on religions, it may even impact our political power struggles of our troubled times. If you think about it long enough, you can connect the dualist/monist distinction even to aesthetics. After all, Richard Pirsig did just that in his Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

As they say, if the only tool you have is a hammer, all problems begin to look like nails. My tool right now is philosophy, so I see little philosophical nails everywhere.

Physics also can provide beautiful semantic contexts to the empty formalisms of advanced mathematics. Look at Minkowski space and Riemannian geometry, for instance, and how Einstein turned them into descriptions of our perceived reality. In addition to providing semantics to mathematical formalism, science also promotes a worldview based on critical thinking and a ferociously scrupulous scientific integrity. It is an attitude of examining one’s conclusions, assumptions and hypotheses mercilessly to convince oneself that nothing has been overlooked. Nowhere is this nitpicking obsession more evident than in experimental physics. Physicists report their measurements with two sets of errors — a statistical error representing the fact that they have made only a finite number of observations, and a systematic error that is supposed to account for the inaccuracies in methodology, assumptions etc.

We may find it interesting to look at the counterpart of this scientific integrity in our neck of the woods — quantitative finance, which decorates the syntactical edifice of stochastic calculus with dollar-and-cents semantics, of a kind that ends up in annual reports and generates performance bonuses. One might even say that it has a profound impact on the global economy as a whole. Given this impact, how do we assign errors and confidence levels to our results? To illustrate it with an example, when a trading system reports the P/L of a trade as, say, seven million, is it $7,000,000 +/- $5,000,000 or is it $7,000, 000 +/- $5000? The latter, clearly, holds more value for the financial institution and should be rewarded more than the former. We are aware of it. We estimate the errors in terms of the volatility and sensitivities of the returns and apply P/L reserves. But how do we handle other systematic errors? How do we measure the impact of our assumptions on market liquidity, information symmetry etc., and assign dollar values to the resulting errors? If we had been scrupulous about error propagations of this, perhaps the financial crisis of 2008 would not have come about.

Although mathematicians are, in general, free of such critical self-doubts as physicists — precisely because of a total disconnect between their syntactical wizardry and its semantic contexts, in my opinion — there are some who take the validity of their assumptions almost too seriously. I remember this professor of mine who taught us mathematical induction. After proving some minor theorem using it on the blackboard (yes it was before the era of whiteboards), he asked us whether he had proved it. We said, sure, he had done it right front of us. He then said, “Ah, but you should ask yourselves if mathematical induction is right.” If I think of him as a great mathematician, it is perhaps only because of the common romantic fancy of ours that glorifies our past teachers. But I am fairly certain that the recognition of the possible fallacy in my glorification is a direct result of the seeds he planted with his statement.

My professor may have taken this self-doubt business too far; it is perhaps not healthy or practical to question the very backdrop of our rationality and logic. What is more important is to ensure the sanity of the results we arrive at, employing the formidable syntactical machinery at our disposal. The only way to maintain an attitude of healthy self-doubt and the consequent sanity checks is to jealously guard the connection between the patterns of reality and the formalisms in mathematics. And that, in my opinion, would be the right way to develop a love for math as well.

Most people carry their thumbies around so that they can access their files from any computer they happen to find themselves in front of. If these computers are not your habitual computers (ie, your wife’s notebook, kids’ pc, office computer etc.), the virtual DropBox may not totally obviate the necessity of a real thumbdrive. For random computers, virtual just doesn’t cut it. But if you are a person of habits and shuttle from one regular computer to another, DropBox is actually a lot better than a real USB drive. All you have to do is to install DropBox on all those machines, which don’t even have to be of the same kind — they can be Macs, PCs, Linux boxes etc. (In fact, DropBox can be installed on your mobile devices as well, although how you will use it is far from clear.) Once you install DropBox, you will have a special folder (or directory) where you can save stuff. This special folder/directory is, in reality, nothing but a regular one. Just that there is a background program monitoring it and syncing it magically with a server (which is on a cloud), and with all other computers where you have DropBox installed under your credentials. Better yet, if your computers share a local network, DropBox uses it to sync among them in practically no time.

Here is video I found on YouTube on what DropBox can do for you:

In addition to this file synchronization, DropBox is an offline mirror of your synced files. So if you keep your important files in the DropBox folder, they will survive for ever. This is an advantage that no physical, real thumbdrive can offer you. With real thumbdrives, I personally have lost files (despite the fact that I am fairly religious about regular copies and mirrors) due to USB drives dying on me. With DropBox, it will never happen. You have local copies on all the computers where you have DropBox running and a remote copy on a cloud server.

But you might say, “Ha, that is the problem — how can I put my personal files on some remote location where anybody can look at them?” Well, DropBox says that they use industry-standard encryption that they themselves cannot unlock without your password. I chose to trust them. After all, even if they could decrypt it, how can they troll terabytes of data in random formats in the hope of finding your account number or whatever? Besides, if you are really worried about the security, you can always create a TrueCrypt volume in DropBox.

Another use you can put DropBox to is in keeping your application data synced between computers. This works best with Macs and symbolic links. For instance, if you have a MacBook and an iMac, you can put your address book in your DropBox directory, create a symbolic link from the normal location (in ~/Library/ApplicationData/Mail.app) and expect to see the same address book in both the computers. Similar trick will work with other applications as well. I have tried it with my offline blogging software (ecto) and my development environment (NetBeans).

Want more reasons to sign up? Well, you can also share files with other users. Suppose your spouse has a DropBox of her own, and you want to share some photos with her. This can be easily arranged. And I believe the photos folder in DropBox behaves like a gallery, although I haven’t tested it.

So, if you find these reasons to have a virtual thumbdrive in addition to (or instead of) a real physical one, do sign up for DropBox via any of the million links on this page. Did I tell you that if your friends signed up using your link, you would get 250MB extra for each referral?

My point is that it is my love for math that lets me do a large number of things fairly well. As a writer, for instance, I have done rather well. But I attribute my success to a certain mathematical ability rather than literary talent.  I would never start a book with something like, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” As an opening sentence, by all the mathematical rules of writing I have formulated for myself, this one just doesn’t measure up. Yet we all know that Dickens’s opening, following no rules of mine, is perhaps the best in English literature. I will probably cook up something similar someday because I see how it summarizes the book, and highlights the disparity between the haves and the have-nots mirrored in the contrasting lead characters and so on. In other words, I see how it works and may assimilate it into my cookbook of rules (if I can ever figure out how), and the process of assimilation is mathematical in nature, especially when it is a conscious effort. Similar fuzzy rule-based approaches can help you be a reasonably clever artist, employee, manager or anything that you set your sights on, which is why I once bragged to my wife that I could learn Indian classical music despite the fact that I am practically tone-deaf.

So loving math is a probably a good thing, in spite of its apparent disadvantage vis-a-vis cheerleaders. But I am yet to address my central theme — how do we actively encourage and develop a love for math among the next generation? I am not talking about making people good at math; I’m not concerned with teaching techniques per se. I think Singapore already does a good job with that. But to get people to like math the same way they like, say, their music or cars or cigarettes or football takes a bit more imagination. I think we can accomplish it by keeping the underlying patterns on the foreground. So instead of telling my children that 1/4 is bigger than 1/6 because 4 is smaller than 6, I say to them, “You order one pizza for some kids. Do you think each will get more if we had four kids or six kids sharing it?”

From my earlier example on geographic distances and degrees, I fancy my daughter will one day figure out that each degree (or about 100km — corrected by 5% and 6%) means four minutes of jet lag. She might even wonder why 60 appears in degrees and minutes and seconds, and learn something about number system basis and so on. Mathematics really does lead to a richer perspective on life. All it takes on our part is perhaps only to share the pleasure of enjoying this richness. At least, that’s my hope.

When you start off with a small website, you typically go with what they call “shared hosting” — the economy class of web hosting soltuion. You register a domain name (such as thulasidas.com) for $20 or $30 and look around for a place on the web to put your pages. You can find this kind of hosting for under $10 a month. (For instance, Arvixe has a package for as low as $4 a month, with a free domain name registration thrown in.) Most of these providers advertise unlimited bandwidth, unlimited storage, unlimited databases etc. Well, don’t believe everything you see on the Internet; you get what you pay for. If you read the fine print before clicking “here” to accept the 30 page-long terms and conditions, you would see that unlimited really means limited.

For those who have played around with web development at home, shared hosting is like having XAMPP installed on your home computer with multiple users accessing it. Sure, the provider may have a mighty powerful computer, huge storage space and large pipe to the Internet or whatever, but it is still sharing. This means that your own particular needs cannot be easily accommodated, especially if it looks as though you might hog an unfair share of the “unlimited” resources, which is what happened with my provider. I needed a “CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE” privilege for a particular application, and my host said, “No way dude.”

Shared hosting comes in different packages, of course. Business, Pro, Ultimate etc. — they are all merely advertising buzzwords, essentially describing different sizes of the share of the resources you will get. The next upgrade is another buzzword — Cloud Hosting. Here, the resources are still shared. But apparently they reside on geographically dispersed data centers, optimized and scalable through some kind of grid technology. This type of hosting is considered better because, if you run out of resources, the hosting program can allocate more. For instance, if you suddenly have a traffic spike because of your funny post going viral on facebook and digg, the cloud could easily handle it. They will, of course, charge you more, but in the shared hosting scenario, they would probably lock you out temporarily. To me, cloud hosting sounds like shared hosting with some of the resource constraints removed. It is like sharing a pie, but with all the ingredients on hand, so that if you run out, they can quickly bake some more for you.

The “business class” of web hosting is VPS or Virtual Private Server. Here, you have a server (albeit a virtual one) for yourself. Since you “own” this server, you can do whatever you like with it — you have “root” access. And the advertised resources are, more or less, dedicated to you. This is like having a VirtualBox running on your home PC where you have installed XAMPP. The only downside is that you don’t know how many other VirtualBoxes are running on the computer where your VPS is running. So the share of the resources you actually get to enjoy may be different from the the so-called “dedicated” ones. For root access and quasi-dedicated resources, you pay a premium. VPS costs roughly ten times as much as shared hosting. Arvixe, for instance, has a VPS package for $40 a month, which is what I signed up for.

VPS hosting comes with service level agreements that typically state 99.9% uptime or availability. It is important to note that this uptime refers, not to your instance of VPS, but to the server that hosts the virtual servers. Since you are the boss of your VPS, if it crashes, it is largely your problem. Your provider may offer a “fully managed” service (Arvixe does), but that usually means you can ask them to do some admin work and seek advice. In my case, my VPS started hanging (because of some FastCGI issues before I decided to move to DSO for PHP support so that APC worked — I know, lots of techie jargon, but I am laying the groundwork for my next post on server management). When I asked the support to help diagnose the problem, they said, “It is hanging because your server is spawning too many PHP processes. Anything I can help you with?” Accurate statement, I must admit, but not necessarily the kind of help you are looking for. They were saying, ultimately, the VPS server was my baby, and I would have to take care of it.

If you are real high-flying webmaster, the type of hosting you should go for is a fully dedicated one. This is kind of like the first class or private jet kind of situation in my analogy. This hosting option will run you a considerable cost, anywhere from $200 to several thousands per month. For that kind of money, what you will get is a powerful server (well, at least for the costlier ones of these plans) housed in a datacenter with redundant power supplies and so on. Dedicated hosting, in other words, is a real private server, as opposed to a virtual one.

I have no direct experience with a hosted dedicated server, but I do have a couple of servers running at home for development purposes. I run two computers with XAMPP (one real and one on a VirtualBox on my iMac) or and two with MAMP. And I presume the dedicated-server experience is going to be similar — a server at your beck and call with resources earmarked for you, running whatever it is that you would like run.

Somewhat spread out over shared and VPS hosting is what they call a reseller account. This type of hosting essentially sets you up as a small web hosting provider (presumably in a shared hosting mode, as described above) yourself. This can be interesting if you want to make a few bucks on the side. Arvixe, for instance, offers you a reseller package for $20, and promises to look after enduser support themselves. Of course, when you actually resell to your potential customers, you may want to make sure your offering has something better than what they can get directly from the company either in terms of pricing or features. Otherwise, it wouldn’t make much sense for them to come to you, would it?

So there. That is the spectrum of hosting options you have. All you need to do is to figure out where in this spectrum your needs fall, and choose accordingly. If you end up choosing Arvixe (a wise choice), I would be grateful if you do so using one of my affiliate links.

I was always among people who liked math. I remember my high school days where one of my friends would do the long multiplication and division during physics experiments, while I would team up with another friend to look up logarithms and try to beat the first dude, who almost always won. It didn’t really matter who won; the mere fact that we would device games like that as teenagers perhaps portended a cheerleader-less future. As it turned out, the long-multiplication guy grew up to be a highly placed banker in the Middle East, no doubt thanks to his talents not of the cheerleader-phobic, math-phelic kind.

When I moved to IIT, this mathematical geekiness reached a whole new level. Even among the general geekiness that permeated the IIT air, I remember a couple of guys who stood out. There was “Devious” who also had the dubious honor of introducing me to my virgin Kingfisher, and “Pain” would drawl a very pained “Obviously Yaar!” when we, the lesser geeks, failed to readily follow a his particular line of mathematical acrobatics.

All of us had a love for math. But, where did it come from? And how in the world would I make it a general educational tool? Imparting the love math to one kid is not too difficult; you just make it fun. The other day when I was driving around with my daughter, she described some shape (actually the bump on her grandmother’s forehead) as half-a-ball. I told her that it was actually a hemisphere. Then I highlighted to her that we were going to the southern hemisphere (New Zealand) for our vacation the next day, on the other side of the globe compared to Europe, which was why it was summer there. And finally, I told her Singapore was on the equator. My daughter likes to correct people, so she said, no, it wasn’t. I told her that we were about 0.8 degrees to the north of the equator (I hope I was right), and saw my opening. I asked her what the circumference of a circle was, and told her that the radius of the earth was about 6000km, and worked out that we were about 80km to the north of the equator, which was nothing compared to 36,000km great circle around the earth. Then we worked out that we made a 5% approximation on the value of pi, so the correct number was about 84km. I could have told her we made another 6% approximation on the radius, the number would be more like 90km. It was fun for her to work out these things. I fancy her love for math has been augmented a bit.

This gotcha got me during a test migration of my old posts to the new server. I had over 130 posts to migrate. When I moved them to the new blog on the new server, they looked like new posts. To the unforgiving logic of a computer (that defies common sense and manages to foul up life), this pronouncement of newness is accurate, I have to admit — they were indeed new posts on the new server. So, on the 10th of January, my regular readers who had signed up for updates received over 100 email notifications about “new posts” on my blog. Needless to say I started getting angry emails from my annoyed regulars demanding that I remove their names from my “list.excessive” (as one of them put it). If you were one of those who got excessive emails, please accept my apologies. Rest assured that I have turned off email notifications, and I will look and hard into the innards of my blog before turning it back on. And when I do turn it on, I will prominently provide a link in each message to subscribe or unsubscribe yourself.

As you grow your web footprint and your blog traffic, you are going to have to move to a bigger server. In my case, I decided to go with Arvixe because of the excellent reviews I found on the web. The decision of what type of hosting you need makes for an interesting topic, which will be my next post.

Before we go any further, I should confess that I write this post with a bit of an ulterior motive. What that motive is is something I will divulge towards the end of this post.

Let me start by saying that I am no noob when it comes to computers. I started my long love affair with computing and programming in 1983. Those late night bicycle rides to CLT and stacks of Fortran cards – those were fun-filled adventures. We would submit the stack to the IBM 370 operators early in the morning and get the output in the evening. So the turn around time for each bug fix would be a day, which I think made us fairly careful programmers. I remember writing a program for printing out a calendar, one page per month, spaced and aligned properly. Useless really, because the printout would be on A3 size feed rolls with holes on the sides, and the font was a dirty Courier type of point size 12 in light blue-black, barely legible at normal reading distance. But it was fun. Unfortunately I made a mistake in the loop nesting and the calendar came out all messed up. Worse, the operator, who was stingy about the paper usage, interrupted the output on the fourth month and advised me to stop doing it. I knew that he could not interrupt it if I used only one Fortran PRINT statement and rewrote the program to do it that way. I got the output, but on the January page, there was this hand-written missive, “Try it once more and I will cancel your account.” At that point I ceased and desisted.

I started using email in the late eighties on a cluster of Vaxstations that belonged to the high-energy physics group at Syracuse University. At first, we could send email only to users on the same cluster, with DecNet addresses like VAX05::MONETI. And a year later, when I could send a mail to my friend in the next building with an address like IN%”naresh@ee.syr.edu” or something (the “IN” signifying Internet), I was mighty impressed with the pace at which technology was progressing. Little did I know that a few short years later, there would be usenet, Mosaic and e-commerce. And that I would be writing books on financial computing and WordPress plugins in PHP.

Despite keeping pace with computing technology most of my life, I have begun to feel that technology is slowly breaking free and drifting away from me. I still don’t have a twitter account, and I visit my Facebook only once a month or so. More to the point of this post, I am embarrassed to admit that I had no clue what this cloud computing was all about. Until I got my MacBook Air, thanks to my dear wife who likes to play sugar mama once in a while. I always had this problem of synchronizing my documents among the four or five PCs and Macs I regularly work with. With a USB drive and extreme care, I could manage it, but the MBA was the proverbial straw that broke my camel of a back. (By the way, did you know this Iranian proverb – “Every time the came shits, it’s not dates”?) I figured that there had to be better way. I had played with Google Apps for a while now, although I didn’t realize that it was cloud computing.

What I wanted to do was a bit more involved than office applications. I wanted to work on my hobby PHP projects from different computers. This means something like XAMPP or MAMPP along with NetBeans on all the computers I work with. But how do I keep the source code sync’ed? Thmbdrives and backup/sync programs? Not elegant, and hardly seamless. Then I hit upon the perfect solution – Dropbox! This way, you store the source files on the network (using Amazon S3, apparently, but that is beside the point), and see a directory (folder for those who haven’t obeyed Steve Jobbs and gone back to the Mac) that looks like suspiciously local. In fact, it is a local directory – just that there is a program running on the background syncing it with your folder on the cloud.

Dropbox! gives you 2GB of network storage free, which I find quite adequate for any normal user. (That sounds like the famous last words by Bill Gates, doesn’t it? “64KB of memory should be enough for anyone!”) And, you can get 250MB extra for every successful referral you make. That brings me to my ulterior motive – all the links to Dropbox! on this post are actually referral links. When you sign up and start using it by clicking on one of them, I get 250MB extra. Don’t worry, you get 250MB extra as well. So I can grow my online storage up to 8GB, which should keep me happy for a long time, unless I want to store my photos and video there, in which case I will upgrade my Dropbox! account to a paid service.

Apart from giving me extra space, there are many reasons you should really check out Dropbox!. I will write more on those reasons later, but let me list them here.
1. Sync your (Mac) address book among your Macs.
2. Multiple synced backups of your precious data.
3. Transparent use for IDEs such as Netbeans.
Some of these reasons are addressed only by following some tips and tricks, which I will write about.

By the way, we Indian writers like to use expressions like ulterior motives and vested interests. Do you think it is because we always have some?

In most things we do, there is a feedback, and we can use the feedback improve ourselves. For instance, if we do poorly at work, our bonuses and paychecks suffer, and we can, if we want to, work harder or smarter to remedy the situation. In our dealings with our children, the feedback is very subtle or even absent. We have to be very sensitive and observant to catch it. For instance, when my daughter was less than a year old, I noticed that she wouldn’t make eye contact when I came back late from work or when her mother came back from a business trip. To this day, I am not entirely sure that it was an expression of disapproval on her part, or fanciful imagination on mine.

Even when the children are old enough to be articulate, their feedback is often subtle to non-existent because the don’t know how to judge us, the parents. You see, they have no yardstick, no standards by which to assess our parenting qualities. We are the only parents they ever have and, for all our follies, it is very hard for them to find any faults with us. So we have to measure up to a much taller standard — our own.

Coupled with this unvoiced feedback is the huge sense of injustice that our little unfairnesses can inflict on our children’s little hearts. As Dickens put in one of his books, small injustices loom large in the small world of a child. (I am sure he put it a lot better; I am paraphrasing.) We have to appreciate the need to be painstakingly and scrupulously fair with our children. I am not talking about being fair between children, but between us and a child. Don’t hold them to rules that you are not willing to live by. These rules can be small — like don’t watch TV while eating. If you like your TV with your dinner, don’t expect the kids to stick to the dining table. They do what we do, not always what we say.

In fact, imitating our habits and mannerisms is part of their charm for us. By nature and nurture, our kids mirror our looks and actions. If we don’t like what we see in the mirror and complain about it, we are often barking up the wrong tree. In order to improve the image, we have to improve ourselves. We have to live up to a high level of integrity and honesty. Nothing else works.

Another essential virtue for a parent is patience. In today’s busy world, with thousands of thoughts and cares and distractions all vying for our attention, it is always a tussle to be, for instance, a good blogger, a good corporate player, a good spouse and, at the same time, a good parent. One way out of this is to dedicate a certain amount of quality time for our parenting Karma. This may be the only practical advice in this post — so pay attention now. Set aside half an hour (or whatever time you can) every day for your little ones. During this time, focus your undivided attention your kids. No TV, no Internet, no phone calls — only you and your kids. If you can do it on a fairly regular basis, your kids will remember you for a long time after you are gone.

Our children are our legacy. They are what we leave behind. And they are, in many ways, our own reflections — our little addition, little pieces of colored glass in the dome of many-colored glass staining the white radiance of eternity. Let’s try to leave behind as perfect a reflection as we can.

Thinking again about all the sermonizing I did in this post, I find that it is not so specific to being a good parent. It is more about being a good person. I guess what they say (in the Zen way of looking at things) is true — how do you paint a perfect painting? Be perfect and then just paint. How to be a good parent? Be good, and then be a parent! Goodness happens in the stillness of perfection and peace where even “bad” things are good. This statement is perhaps mystical enough to wind up this post with.

Now, this effect raises an interesting question — what is the “real” thing that we see? If seeing is believing, the stuff that we see should be the real thing. Then again, we know of the light travel time effect. So we should correct what we see before believing it. What then does “seeing” mean? When we say we see something, what do we really mean?

Seeing involves light, obviously. It is the finite (albeit very high) speed of light influences and distorts the way we see things. This fact should hardly come as a surprise because we do know that there is a delay in seeing objects like stars. What is surprising (and seldom highlighted) is that when it comes to seeing moving objects, we cannot back-calculate the same way we take out the delay in seeing the sun. If we see a celestial body moving at an improbably high speed, we cannot figure out how fast and in what direction it is “really” moving without making further assumptions. One way of handling this difficulty is to ascribe the distortions in our perception to the fundamental properties of the arena of physics — space and time. Another course of action is to accept the disconnection between our perception and the underlying “reality” and deal with it in some way.

This disconnect between what we see and what is out there is not unknown to many philosophical schools of thought. Phenomenalism, for instance, holds the view that space and time are not objective realities. They are merely the medium of our perception. All the phenomena that happen in space and time are merely bundles of our perception. In other words, space and time are cognitive constructs arising from perception. Thus, all the physical properties that we ascribe to space and time can only apply to the phenomenal reality (the reality as we sense it). The noumenal reality (which holds the physical causes of our perception), by contrast, remains beyond our cognitive reach.

One, almost accidental, difficulty in redefining the effects of the finite speed of light as the properties of space and time is that any effect that we do understand gets instantly relegated to the realm of optical illusions. For instance, the eight-minute delay in seeing the sun, because we can readily understand it and disassociate it from our perception using simple arithmetic, is considered a mere optical illusion. However, the distortions in our perception of fast moving objects, although originating from the same source are considered a property of space and time because they are more complex. At some point, we have to come to terms with the fact that when it comes to seeing the universe, there is no such thing as an optical illusion, which is probably what Goethe pointed out when he said, “Optical illusion is optical truth.”

The distinction (or lack thereof) between optical illusion and truth is one of the oldest debates in philosophy. After all, it is about the distinction between knowledge and reality. Knowledge is considered our view about something that, in reality, is “actually the case.” In other words, knowledge is a reflection, or a mental image of something external. In this picture, the external reality goes through a process of becoming our knowledge, which includes perception, cognitive activities, and the exercise of pure reason. This is the picture that physics has come to accept. While acknowledging that our perception may be imperfect, physics assumes that we can get closer and closer to the external reality through increasingly finer experimentation, and, more importantly, through better theorization. The Special and General Theories of Relativity are examples of brilliant applications of this view of reality where simple physical principles are relentlessly pursued using the formidable machine of pure reason to their logically inevitable conclusions.

But there is another, competing view of knowledge and reality that has been around for a long time. This is the view that regards perceived reality as an internal cognitive representation of our sensory inputs. In this view, knowledge and perceived reality are both internal cognitive constructs, although we have come to think of them as separate. What is external is not the reality as we perceive it, but an unknowable entity giving rise to the physical causes behind sensory inputs. In this school of thought, we build our reality in two, often overlapping, steps. The first step consists of the process of sensing, and the second one is that of cognitive and logical reasoning. We can apply this view of reality and knowledge to science, but in order do so, we have to guess the nature of the absolute reality, unknowable as it is.

The ramifications of these two different philosophical stances described above are tremendous. Since modern physics has embraced a non-phenomenalistic view of space and time, it finds itself at odds with that branch of philosophy. This chasm between philosophy and physics has grown to such a degree that the Nobel prize winning physicist, Steven Weinberg, wondered (in his book “Dreams of a Final Theory”) why the contribution from philosophy to physics have been so surprisingly small. It also prompts philosophers to make statements like, “Whether ‘noumenal reality causes phenomenal reality’ or whether ‘noumenal reality is independent of our sensing it’ or whether ‘we sense noumenal reality,’ the problem remains that the concept of noumenal reality is a totally redundant concept for the analysis of science.”

From the perspective of cognitive neuroscience, everything we see, sense, feel and think is the result of the neuronal interconnections in our brain and the tiny electrical signals in them. This view must be right. What else is there? All our thoughts and worries, knowledge and beliefs, ego and reality, life and death — everything is merely neuronal firings in the one and half kilograms of gooey, grey material that we call our brain. There is nothing else. Nothing!

In fact, this view of reality in neuroscience is an exact echo of phenomenalism, which considers everything a bundle of perception or mental constructs. Space and time are also cognitive constructs in our brain, like everything else. They are mental pictures our brains concoct out of the sensory inputs that our senses receive. Generated from our sensory perception and fabricated by our cognitive process, the space-time continuum is the arena of physics. Of all our senses, sight is by far the dominant one. The sensory input to sight is light. In a space created by the brain out of the light falling on our retinas (or on the photo sensors of the Hubble telescope), is it a surprise that nothing can travel faster than light?

This philosophical stance is the basis of my book, The Unreal Universe, which explores the common threads binding physics and philosophy. Such philosophical musings usually get a bad rap from us physicists. To physicists, philosophy is an entirely different field, another silo of knowledge, which holds no relevance to their endeavors. We need to change this belief and appreciate the overlap among different knowledge silos. It is in this overlap that we can expect to find great breakthroughs in human thought.

The twist to this story of light and reality is that we seem to have known all this for a long time. Classical philosophical schools seem to have thought along lines very similar to Einstein’s reasonings. The role of light in creating our reality or universe is at the heart of Western religious thinking. A universe devoid of light is not simply a world where you have switched off the lights. It is indeed a universe devoid of itself, a universe that doesn’t exist. It is in this context that we have to understand the wisdom behind the statement that “the earth was without form, and void” until God caused light to be, by saying “Let there be light.”

The Quran also says, “Allah is the light of the heavens and the earth,” which is mirrored in one of the ancient Hindu writings: “Lead me from darkness to light, lead me from the unreal to the real.” The role of light in taking us from the unreal void (the nothingness) to a reality was indeed understood for a long, long time. Is it possible that the ancient saints and prophets knew things that we are only now beginning to uncover with all our supposed advances in knowledge?

I know I may be rushing in where angels fear to tread, for reinterpreting the scriptures is a dangerous game. Such alien interpretations are seldom welcome in the theological circles. But I seek refuge in the fact that I am looking for concurrence in the metaphysical views of spiritual philosophies, without diminishing their mystical and theological value.

The parallels between the noumenal-phenomenal distinction in phenomenalism and the Brahman-Maya distinction in Advaita are hard to ignore. This time-tested wisdom on the nature of reality from the repertoire of spirituality is now being reinvented in modern neuroscience, which treats reality as a cognitive representation created by the brain. The brain uses the sensory inputs, memory, consciousness, and even language as ingredients in concocting our sense of reality. This view of reality, however, is something physics is yet to come to terms with. But to the extent that its arena (space and time) is a part of reality, physics is not immune to philosophy.

As we push the boundaries of our knowledge further and further, we are beginning to discover hitherto unsuspected and often surprising interconnections between different branches of human efforts. In the final analysis, how can the diverse domains of our knowledge be independent of each other when all our knowledge resides in our brain? Knowledge is a cognitive representation of our experiences. But then, so is reality; it is a cognitive representation of our sensory inputs. It is a fallacy to think that knowledge is our internal representation of an external reality, and therefore distinct from it. Knowledge and reality are both internal cognitive constructs, although we have come to think of them as separate.

Recognizing and making use of the interconnections among the different domains of human endeavor may be the catalyst for the next breakthrough in our collective wisdom that we have been waiting for.