Atoms within atoms

On By VMIn Scicomm

It’s a matter of some irony that forces that act across larger distances also give rise to lots of empty space – although the more you think about it, the more it makes sense. The force of gravity, for example, can act across millions of kilometres but this only means two massive objects can still influence each across this distance instead of having to get closer to do so. Thus, you have galaxies with a lot more space between stars than stars themselves.

The electromagnetic force, like the force of gravity, also follows an inverse-square law: its strength falls off as the square of the distance – but never fully reaches zero. So you can have an atom with a nucleus of protons and neutrons held tightly together but electrons located so far away that each atom is more than 90% empty space.

In fact, you can use the rules of subatomic physics to make atoms even more vacuous. Electrons orbit the nucleus in an atom at fixed distances, and when an electron gains some energy, it jumps into a higher orbit. Physicists have been able to excite electrons to such high energies that the atom itself becomes thousands of times larger than an atom of hydrogen.

This is the deceptively simple setting for the Rydberg polaron: the atom inside another atom, with some features added.

In January 2018, physicists from Austria, Brazil, Switzerland and the US reported creating the first Rydberg polaron in the lab, based on theoretical predictions that another group of researchers had advanced in October 2015. The concept, as usual, is far simpler than the execution, so exploring the latter should provide a good sense of the former.

The January 2018 group first created a Bose-Einstein condensate, a state of matter in which a dilute gas of particles called bosons is maintained in an ultra-cold container. Bosons are particles whose quantum spin takes integer values. (Other particles called fermions have half-integer spin). As the container is cooled to near absolute zero, the bosons begin to collectively display quantum mechanical phenomena at the macroscopic scale, essentially becoming a new form of matter and displaying certain properties that no other form of matter has been known to exhibit.

Atoms of strontium-84, -86 and -88 have zero spin, so the physicists used them to create the condensate. Next, they used lasers to bombard some strontium atoms with photons to impart energy to electrons in the outermost orbits (a.k.a. valence electrons), forcing them to jump to an even higher orbit. Effectively, the atom expands, becoming a so-called Rydberg atom[1]. In this state, if the distance between the nucleus and an excited electron is greater than the average distance between the other strontium atoms in the condensate, then some of the other atoms could technically fit into the Rydberg atom, forming the atom-within-an-atom.

[1] Rydberg atoms are called so because many of their properties depend on the value of the principal quantum number, which the Swedish physicist Johannes Robert Rydberg first (inadvertently) described in a formula in 1888.

Rydberg atoms are gigantic relative to other atoms; some are even bigger than a virus, and their interactions with their surroundings can be observed under a simple light microscope. They are relatively long-lived, in that the excited electron decays to its ground state slowly. Astronomers have found them in outer space. However, Rydberg atoms are also fragile: because the electron is already so far from the nucleus, any other particles in the vicinity, even a weak electromagnetic field or a slightly warmer temperature could easily knock the excited electron out of the Rydberg atom and end the Rydberg state.

Some clever physicists took advantage of this property and used Rydberg atoms as sensitive detectors of single photons of light. They won the Nobel Prize for physics for such work in 2011.

However, simply sticking one atom inside a Rydberg atom doth not a Rydberg polaron make. A polaron is a quasiparticle, which means it isn’t an actual particle by itself, as the –on suffix might suggest, but an entity that scientists study as if it were a particle. Quasiparticles are thus useful because they simplify the study of more complicated entities by allowing scientists to apply the rules of particle physics to arrive at equally correct solutions.

This said, a polaron is a quasiparticle that’s also a particle. Specifically, physicists describe the properties and behaviour of electrons inside a solid as polarons because as the electrons interact with the atomic lattice, they behave in a way that electrons usually don’t. So polarons combine the study of electrons and electrons-interacting-with-atoms into a single subject.

Similarly, a Rydberg polaron is formed when the electron inside the Rydberg atom interacts with the trapped strontium atom. While an atom within an atom is cool enough, the January 2018 group wanted to create a Rydberg polaron because it’s considered to be a new state of matter – and they succeeded. The physicists found that the excited electron did develop a loose interaction with the strontium atoms lying between itself and the Rydberg atom’s nucleus – so loose that even as they interacted, the electron could still remain part of the Rydberg atom without getting kicked out.

In effect, since the Rydberg atom and the strontium atoms inside it influence each other’s behaviour, they altogether made up one larger complicated assemblage of protons, neutrons and electrons – a.k.a. a Rydberg polaron.

Being on the NSI podcast

On By VMIn Scicomm1 Comment

Narayan Prasad, the CEO of SatSearch, hosts a popular podcast called NewSpace India. Every episode, he hosts one person and they talk about something related to the Indian and international space programmes. I was the guest for the episode published January 17, available to listen here (on transistor.fm), in which NP and I discussed India’s space journalism scene and ISRO’s public outreach policies.

Addendum: Where I’m talking about the comparisons between Jonathan McDowell and T.S. Kelso in the West and members of the ISRO subreddit, I repeatedly come back to the ‘not enough information’ bit. But later, I realised I should’ve added that McDowell and Kelso, and others, were probably encouraged to pursue their hobbies by access to knowledge and freely available information whereas India’s space-sleuths, so to speak, seem to be prompted more by the lack of information and knowledge about the national spaceflight programme.

So the former is a productive exercise whereas the latter is compensatory, and whose members’ efforts can be spared – or put to better use in other directions – if only ISRO spoke up more.

Another thing is that I may have overstated the extent to which I’m willing to forgive ISRO its PR fumbles because it’s an outreach noob. I meant to say that if ISRO can be cut any kind of slack, it would have to be on this front alone – but even then not much, and certainly not to any extent that would cede enough room for it to engage in the sort of coverup exercise it did with the CY-2 fiasco in September 2019.

NP is among the most knowledgable members of India’s space science and spaceflight communities, and has consulted for ISRO as well as a number of private companies on policy, strategy and business. I regularly follow his articles and his podcast, and I recommend you do too if you want to get a handle on the ins and outs of India’s modern spaceflight endeavour. The podcast is also available on Apple, Spotify and other platforms.

Science v. tech, à la Cixin Liu

On By VMIn Culture, Science

A fascinating observation by Cixin Liu in an interview in Public Books, to John Plotz and translated by Pu Wang (numbers added):

… technology precedes science. (1) Way before the rise of modern science, there were so many technologies, so many technological innovations. But today technology is deeply embedded in the development of science. Basically, in our contemporary world, science sets a glass ceiling for technology. The degree of technological development is predetermined by the advances of science. (2) … What is remarkably interesting is how technology becomes so interconnected with science. In the ancient Greek world, science develops out of logic and reason. There is no reliance on technology. The big game changer is Galileo’s method of doing experiments in order to prove a theory and then putting theory back into experimentation. After Galileo, science had to rely on technology. … Today, the frontiers of physics are totally conditioned on the developments of technology. This is unprecedented. (3)

Perhaps an archaeology or palaeontology enthusiast might have regular chances to see the word ‘technology’ used to refer to Stone Age tools, Bronze Age pots and pans, etc. but I have almost always encountered these objects only as ‘relics’ or such in the popular literature. It’s easy to forget (1) because we have become so accustomed to thinking of technology as pieces of machines with complex electrical, electronic, hydraulic, motive, etc. components. I’m unsure of the extent to which this is an expression of my own ignorance but I’m convinced that our contemporary view of and use of technology, together with the fetishisation of science and engineering education over the humanities and social sciences, also plays a hand in maintaining this ignorance.

The expression of (2) is also quite uncommon, especially in India, where the government’s overbearing preference for applied research has undermined blue-sky studies in favour of already-translated technologies with obvious commercial and developmental advantages. So when I think of ‘science and technology’ as a body of knowledge about various features of the natural universe, I immediately think of science as the long-ranging, exploratory exercise that lays the railway tracks into the future that the train of technology can later ride. Ergo, less glass ceiling and predetermination, and more springboard and liberation. Cixin’s next words offer the requisite elucidatory context: advances in particle physics are currently limited by the size of the particle collider we can build.

(3) However, he may not be able to justify his view beyond specific examples simply because, to draw from the words of a theoretical physicist from many years ago – that they “require only a pen and paper to work” – it is possible to predict the world for a much lower cost than one would incur to build and study the future.

Plotz subsequently, but thankfully briefly, loses the plot when he asks Cixin whether he thinks mathematics belongs in science, and to which Cixin provides a circuitous non-answer that somehow misses the obvious: science’s historical preeminence began when natural philosophers began to encode their observations in a build-as-you-go, yet largely self-consistent, mathematical language (my favourite instance is the invention of non-Euclidean geometry that enabled the theories of relativity). So instead of belonging within one of the two, mathematics is – among other things – better viewed as a bridge.

The mad world

On By VMIn Culture

Kate Wagner writes in The Baffler:

What makes industrial landscapes unique is that they fascinate regardless of whether they’re operating. The hellish Moloch of a petrochemical refinery is as captivating as one of the many abandoned factories one passes by train, and vice versa. That doesn’t mean, though, that all industrial landscapes are created equal. Urban manufacturing factories are considered beautiful—tastefully articulated on the outside, their large windows flooding their vast internal volumes with light; they are frequently rehabilitated into spaces for living and retail or otherwise colonized by local universities. The dilapidated factory, crumbling and overgrown by vegetation, now inhabits that strange space between natural and man-made, historical and contemporary, lovely and sad. The power plant, mine, or refinery invokes strong feelings of awe and fear. And then there are some, such as the Superfund site—remediated or not—whose parklike appearance and sinister ambience remains aesthetically elusive.

One line from my education years that I think will always stick with me was uttered, perhaps in throwaway fashion, by an excellent teacher nonetheless moving on to a larger point: “Ugliness is marked by erasure.” Wagner’s lines above suggest our need for beauty extends even to landmarks of peacetime disaster, such as abandoned factories, railway stations, refineries, etc. because their particular way of being broken and dead contains stories, and lessons, that a pile of collapsed masonry or a heap of trash would not. Apparently there is a beauty in the way they have failed, contained in features of their architecture and design that have managed to rise, or stay, above the arbitrary chaos of unorganised disaster. They are, in other words, haunted by the memory of control.

But as Wagner walks further down this path, in search of the origins of our sense of the picturesque, I’d like to turn back – to an older piece in The Baffler, by J.C. Hallman in September 2016, that questioned the role and purpose of tradition and the influence of scholarship in creating art (as in paintings and stuff). His subject was ‘art brut’, “variously translated as ‘raw,’ ‘rough,’ or ‘outsider’ art” and which stresses “that the work of individual, untutored practitioners trumps all the usual conventions of artistic legacy-building, including the analytic categories of art criticism.” After a helpful prelude – “I prefer dramatic chronicles of the shift from ignorance to knowledge, from innocence to experience” – Hallman elaborates:

… [the painters’] stories … seem calculated to undermine the steady commercial march of art as depicted in high-end auction catalogs[.] In lieu of a stately succession of movements, schools, and styles, art brut gives us an array of butchers and scientists and soldiers and housewives who suddenly went crazy and then produced huge bodies of work—most often for discrete periods of time, three years or eight years or fourteen years—before falling silent and eking out the rest of their isolated, artless lives.

He then draws from the notes of Jean Dubuffet, the French painter, and William James, the American psychologist, to make the case that if only we sidestepped the need for art to be in conversation with other art and/or to respond to this or that perspective on human reality, we could be awakened to shapes, arrangements and layouts that exist beyond what we have been able to explain, and reveal a picture unadulterated by the humans need for control and meaning.

Could this idea be extended to Wagner’s “infrastructural tragedy” as well? That is, whereas a factory embodies the designs foisted by dynamic relationships between demand and supply, and motivated by the storied ambitions of industrialism – and its abandonment the latter’s myopia, hubris and impermanence – what does a structure whose pillars and trusses have been spared the burden of human wants look like? It’s likely such a structure doesn’t exist: no point imposing the violence of our visions upon the world when those visions are empty.

But like the art brut auteurs in Hallman’s exposition, I’m drawn to the question as an ardent world-builder by what I find to be its enigmatic challenge. Just as the brutists’ madness slashed away at the web of method clouding their visions, what questions must the world-builder – the ultimate speculator – ask herself to arrive at a picture whose elements all lie outside anthropogenic considerations as well as outside nature itself? I suppose I am asking if, through this or a similar exercise, it would be possible for the human to arrive at the alien. Well, would it?1

1. This proposition, and the sense that its answer could lurk somewhere in the bounded cosmology of my psyche, inspires in my mind and consciousness an anxiety and trepidation I have thus far experienced only when faced with H.R. Giger’s art.

Free speech at the outer limits

On By VMIn Op-eds, Scicomm

On January 12, Peter W. Wood, president of an American organisation called the National Association of Scholars (NAS), wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal against attempts by one individual to prevent NAS from organising a conference on science’s reproducibility crisis.

As it turns out, the individual – Leonid Teytelman – has been fighting to highlight the fact that the conference is an attempt to use “the issue of scientific reproducibility as a Trojan horse to undermine trust in climate change research” (source), and that Wood’s claim to “hold to a rigorous standard of open-mindedness on controversial issues” extends only so far as upholding his own views, using the rest of his diatribe on the WSJ to slap down Teytelman’s contentions as an unfortunate byproduct of “cancel culture”.

We’ve all heard of this trope and those of us on Twitter are likely to have been part of one at some point in our lives. The reason I bring this up now is that Wood’s argument and WSJ’s willingness to offer itself as a platform together recall an important but largely unacknowledged reason tropes like this one continue to play out in public debates.

A friend recently expressed the same problem in a different conversation – that of India’s Central Civil Services (Conduct) Rules, 1964. These rules discourage government employees from commenting on government policies, schemes, etc. to the press without their supervisors’ okay or participating in political activities, and those who disobey them could be suspended from duty. However, public opposition to India’s new Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019, has been so pronounced that there appears to be renewed public acknowledgment of the idea that the right to protest is a fundamental right, even if the Constitution doesn’t explicitly encode it as such.

So after the government sought to use the CCS Rules to prevent its staff from participating in protests against itself, the Tripura high court ruled that simply showing up at protests doesn’t constitute a ‘political activity’ nor does it cede sufficient ground for suspension, dismissal, arrest, etc. This was obviously heartening news – but there was a catch.

As my friend, who is also a government employee, said, “Civil servants becoming openly political is harmful for the country. Then one doesn’t even have to maintain a façade of neutrality, and the government can’t run if it is busy quelling open rebellion in offices.” That is, to maintain a democracy, its outermost borders must be organised in a non-democratic system – a loose, but not unrecognisable, analogue of the argument that free speech and the slice of freedom it stands for cannot be absolute.

To quote from Laurie Penny’s timeless essay published in 2018, “Civility” – and its logics – “will never defeat fascism” or, presumably, its precursors. Freedom has borders and they are arbitrary by design, erected to keep some actors out even if those on the inside may agitate for unlimited freedom for everyone, and aspire to change their opponents’ minds through reason and civil conduct alone. The borders prevent harm to others and keep people from instigating violence – as the first amendment to the Indian Constitution, under Article 19(2), reminds us – and they just as well entitle us to refuse to debate those who won’t play by the same rules we do.

The liberal democrat’s conceit in this regard is two-pronged: first, that all issues can be resolved through reason (not limited to or necessarily including science), debate and civil conduct alone; second (this one more of a self-imposed penance), that one is obligated to engage in debate, and more generally that to disengage – from debate or from public life – is to abdicate one’s duties as a citizen. So the option to refuse to engage in debate might offend the liberal democrat’s commitment to free speech – for herself as well as others – but this ignores the fact that free speech itself can be productive or liberating only within the borders of democracy and not beyond its outer limits, where the fascists lurk.

And unless we imbibe these limitations and accept the need to disengage or boycott when necessary, we will remain trapped in our ever-expanding but never-breaking circular arguments and argumentative circles.

In the present case, Teytelman tried to expose the NAS as a threat to public trust in climate science but failed, thanks in large part to the WSJ’s ill-founded decision to offer itself as a broadcast channel for Wood’s tantrum. Perhaps Teytelman has more fight left in him, perhaps others do too, but the time will come when the appeals to reason alone will have to cease, and more direct and pragmatic means, equipped especially to disrupt the theatre of fascistic behaviour – part of which is the conflation of ignorance and knowledge and often manifests in the press as ‘he said, she said’ – will have to assume centerstage. (I.e. The WSJ can’t solve the problem by next inviting Teytelman to write a one-sided piece.)

Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop is a more pertinent example. Goop trades in specious ‘alternatives’ to treat made-up diseases. But in spite of what one professor of law and public health acknowledged to be “immediate and widespread … backlash by health-care professionals and science-advocates”, and what many science journalists celebrated as inspirational examples of good communication, the company is set to launch its own Netflix show (more of an infomercial) on January 24. Note that as of December 2019, Netflix had 158 million paying subscribers.

It’s time to stop playing nice, and to stop playing this as individuals. Instead, science communicators – especially those committed to beating back the tentacular arms of pseudoscience and organised disempowerment (à la organised religion) – should respond as a community. While one group continues to participate in debates if only to pull some of the more undecided people away from ‘evil in the guise of good’, another must demand that the video-streaming platform cancel its deal with Goop.

(We could also organise a large-scale boycott of Goop’s products and services but none of the buyers and sellers here seem to want to change their minds.)

Responding this way is of course much harder than simply calling for violence, and quite painful to acknowledge the grossly disproportionate amount of effort we need to dedicate relative to the amount of time Paltrow probably spent coming up with Goop’s products. And in the end, we may still not succeed, not to mention invite similar protests from members of the opposite faction to our doorsteps – but I believe this is the only way we can ever succeed at all, against Goop, NAS and anything else.

But most of all, to continue to engage in debates alone at this time would be as responsible a thing to do as playing fiddle while the world burns.

A jumble of letters of the English alphabet visualised lying in a chaotic pattern under blue skies.

Google Docs: A New Hope

On By VMIn Analysis

I suspect the Google Docs grammar bot is the least useful bot there is. After hundreds of suggestions, I can think of only one instance in which it was right. Is its failure rate so high because it learns from how other people use English, instead of drawing from a basic ruleset?

I’m not saying my grammar is better than everyone else’s but if the bot is learning from how non-native users of the English language construct their sentences, I can see how it would make the suggestions it does, especially about the use of commas and singular/plural referents.

Then again, what I see as failure might be entirely invisible to someone not familiar with, or even interested in, punctuation pedantry. This is where Google Docs’s bot presents an interesting opportunity.

The rules of grammar and punctuation exist to assist the construction and inference of meaning, not to railroad them. However, this definition doesn’t say whether good grammar is simply what most people use and are familiar with or what is derived from a foundational set of rules and guidelines.

Thanks to colonialism, imperialism and industrialism, English has become the world’s official language, but thanks to their inherent political structures, English is also the language of the elite in postcolonial societies that exhibit significant economic inequality.

So those who wield English ‘properly’ – by deploying the rules of grammar and punctuation the way they’re ‘supposed’ to – are also those who have been able to afford a good education. Ergo, deferring to the fundamental ruleset is to flaunt one’s class privilege, and to expect others to do so could play out as a form of linguistic subjugation (think The New Yorker).

On the other hand, the problem with the populist ontology is that it encourages everyone to develop their own styles and patterns based on what they’ve read – after all, there is no one corpus of popular literature – that are very weakly guided by the same logic, if they’re guided by any logic at all. This could render individual pieces difficult to read (or edit).

Now, a question automatically arises: So what? What does each piece employing a different grammar and punctuation style matter as long as you understand what the author is saying? The answer, to me at least, depends on how the piece is going to find itself in the public domain and who is going to read it.

For example, I don’t think anyone would notice if I published such erratic pieces on my blog (although I don’t) – but people will if such pieces show up in a newspaper or a magazine, because newsrooms enforce certain grammatical styles for consistency. Such consistency ensures that:

  1. Insofar as grammar must assist inference, consistent patterns ensure a regular reader is familiar with the purpose the publication’s styleguide serves in the construction of sentences and paragraphs, which in turn renders the symbols more useful and invisible at the same time;
  2. The writers, while bringing to bear their own writing styles and voices, still use a ‘minimum common’ style unique to and associated with the publication (and which could ease decision-making for some writers); and
  3. The publication can reduce the amount of resources expended to train each new member of its copy-editing team

Indeed, I imagine grammatical consistency matters to any professional publication because of the implicit superiority of perfect evenness. But where it gets over the top and unbearable is when its purpose is forgotten, or when it is effected as a display of awareness of, or affiliation to, some elite colonial practice.

Now, while we can agree that the populist definition is less problematic on average, we must also be able to recognise that the use of a ‘minimum common’ remains a good idea if only to protect against the complete dilution of grammatical rules with time. For example, despite the frequency with which it is abused, the comma still serves at least one specific purpose: to demarcate clauses.

In this regard, the Google Docs bot could help streamline the chaos. According to the service’s support documentation, the bot learns its spelling instead of banking exclusively on a dictionary; it’s not hard to extrapolate this behaviour to grammar and syntactic rules as well.

Further, every time you reject the bot’s suggested change, the doc displays the following message: “Thanks for submitting feedback! The suggestion has been automatically ignored.” This isn’t sufficient evidence to conclude that the bot doesn’t learn. For one, the doc doesn’t display a similar message when a suggestion is accepted. For another, Google tracks the following parameters when you’re editing a doc:

customer-type, customer-id, customer-name, storageProvider, isOwner, editable, commentable, isAnonymousUser, offlineOptedIn, serviceWorkerControlled, zoomFactor, wasZoomed, docLocale, locale, docsErrorFatal, isIntegrated, companion-guest-Keep-status, companion-guest-Keep-buildLabel, companion-guest-Tasks-status, companion-guest-Tasks-buildLabel, companion-guest-Calendar-status, companion-guest-Calendar-buildLabel, companion-expanded, companion-overlaying-host-content, spellGrammar, spellGrammarDetails, spellGrammarGroup, spellGrammarFingerprint

Of them, spellGrammar is set to true and I assume spellGrammarFingerprint corresponds to a unique ID.

So assuming further that it learns through individual feedback, the bot must be assimilating a dataset in the background within whose rows and columns an ‘average modal pattern’ could be taking shape. As more and more users accept or reject its suggestions, the mode could become correspondingly more significant and form more of the basis for the bot’s future suggestions.

There are three problems, however.

First, if individual preferences have diverged to such an extent as to disfavour the formation of a single most significant modal style, the bot is unlikely to become useful in a reasonable amount of time or unless it combines user feedback with the preexisting rules of grammar and composition.

Second, Google could have designed each bot to personalise its suggestions according to each account-holder’s writing behaviour. This is quite possible because the more the bot is perceived to be helpful, the likelier its suggestions are to be accepted, and the likelier the user is to continue using Google Docs to compose their pieces.

However, I doubt the bot I encounter on my account is learning from my feedback alone, and it gives me… hope?

Third: if the bot learns only spelling but not grammar and punctuation use, it would be – as I first suspected – the least useful bot there is.

Necessity and sufficiency

On By VMIn Science

With apologies for recalling horrible people early in the day: I chanced upon this article quoting Lawrence Krauss talking about his friend Jeffrey Epstein from April 2011, and updated in July 2019. Excerpt (emphasis added):

Renowned scientists whose research Epstein has generously funded through the years also stand by him. Professor Lawrence Krauss, a theoretical physicist …, has planned scientific conferences with Epstein in St. Thomas and remained close with him throughout his incarceration. “If anything, the unfortunate period he suffered has caused him to really think about what he wants to do with his money and his time, and support knowledge,” says Krauss. “Jeffrey has surrounded himself with beautiful women and young women but they’re not as young as the ones that were claimed. As a scientist I always judge things on empirical evidence and he always has women ages 19 to 23 around him, but I’ve never seen anything else, so as a scientist, my presumption is that whatever the problems were I would believe him over other people.” Though colleagues have criticized him over his relationship with Epstein, Krauss insists, “I don’t feel tarnished in any way by my relationship with Jeffrey; I feel raised by it.”

Well, of course he felt raised by his friendship with Epstein. But more importantly, the part in bold is just ridiculous, and I hope Krauss was suitably slammed for saying such a stupid thing at the time.a It’s a subtle form of scientism commonly found in conversations that straddle two aggressively differing points of view – such as the line between believing and disbelieving the acts of a convicted sex offender or between right- and left-wing groups in India.

Data is good, even crucial, as the numerical representation of experimental proof, and for this reason often immutable. But an insistence on data before anything else is foolish because it presupposes that the use of the scientific method – implied by the production and organisation of data – is a necessary as well as sufficient condition to ascertain an outcome. But in truth, science is often necessary but almost never sufficient.

Implying in turn that all good scientists should judge everything by empirical evidence isn’t doing science or scientists any favours. Instead, such assertions might abet the impression of a scientist as someone unmoved by sociological, spiritual or artistic experiences, and science as a clump of methods all of which together presume to make sense of everything you will ever encounter, experience or infer. However, it’s in fact a body of knowledge obtained by applying the scientific method to study natural phenomena.

Make what you will of science’s abilities and limitations based on this latter description, and not Krauss’s insular and stunted view that – in hindsight – may have been confident in its assertion if only because it afforded Krauss a way to excuse himself. And it is because of people like him (necessity), who defer to scientific principles even as they misappropriate and misuse these principles to enact their defensive ploys, together with the general tendency among political shills to use overreaching rhetoric and exaggerated claims of harm (sufficiency), that the scientific enterprise itself takes a hit in highly polarised debates word-wars.

a. If Krauss insists on sticking to his scientistic guns, it might be prudent to remind him of counterfactual definiteness.

The Resistance of the Time

On By VMIn Life notes

Let us visit the future – a suitable point of time located in one of the many tomorrows ahead of us, a tomorrow far enough to have left The Time behind. What do we see? We see, among other things, that many people spoke up. Many people did not. Many people who spoke up did not say what we wanted them to say. They said what others wanted them to say. A few even spoke words of their own.

What happens after a fascist regime ends? Will we want to remember who spoke up and who did not? Will we want to remember and punish those who did not say what we wanted them to say? Some of those who spoke up said all the wrong things, we say, and that was wrong because they were in power. They could have done something by doing the right thing.

Hmm.

One man comes to mind. K was a member of the government. He was a reasonable man and a smart man. He did not speak up at The Time. I imagine he did not want to upset his vengeful masters. I remember K as a good man because even though he did not speak up, he did a lot of good work when he was in the government. He advanced a variety of causes that people of my political persuasion would have appreciated if it weren’t for The Time being what it was.

Looking back from now, his name clearly belongs on the list of people who did not speak up.

But I know that if he had spoken up, he would have been removed from office and wouldn’t have been able to do all the other things that he did – things that continue to reap rewards to this day. These things probably did not make The Time end but then should they be discarded for this reason? To play the devil’s advocate: if K had spoken up against the government (assuming those were his views), the anti-fascist movement – such as it is – would have gained a prominent supporter, but his absence within government would have affected the prospects of those his department laboured for.

In fact, consider whether the policies he and his colleagues drew out to help whom they were paid to help in turn empowered those people to speak out with less risk to their jobs and lives.

We presume to know what caused The Time to end. There is no question that the widespread protests made up the bulk of the reason. It was a necessary condition – but was it sufficient also?

Would it be unreasonable to expect resistance to work like we expect fundamental science to work: like trees, like the movement of continents, slowly but surely leading up to something great, which does not signal its value in flashing green lights as much as invites us take as much as we possibly can from it, in as many forms as we can imagine, in as much time as we need?

Another man comes to mind. H was not a politician but he did have a seat at one of the highest tables in the land. He was not a very outspoken person at all; when he did speak, especially to the press, he stuck to the sport he had always been associated with. One day, as protests raged around the country against the CAA, H tweeted a banal comment about the way he liked to eat a snack, almost as if he was utterly oblivious of the fires burning elsewhere.

To the people caught in those blazes, H‘s tweet – fuelled by his privileged indifference, they said, when in fact he appeared to be responding to a friend’s comment – might have hurt just as much. No one knew what he was doing by way of resistance, if he was resisting at all, but the moment he published his words, the enemies of The Time tossed him in the figurative trash. The wavefunction had been forced to collapse irrespective of its own secret plans.

§

In Hannah Arendt’s telling, Adolf Eichmann personified the banality of evil – a label that in one moment captured the microscopic structure of human cruelty, and in the next, launched itself into the public imagination through the pokerfaced visage of Eichmann at the Jerusalem trial, as portrayed in countless films and documentaries. Her words were both accurate and sensational, so much so that uttering them as if they were one’s own was to plagiarise Arendt as much as to acknowledge her observation anew. There was no other way to put it.

But where the smallest pieces of evil are banal, the smallest bits of good are presumptuous. Goodness is often a self-contained and narcissistic moral force that refuses to make sense of anything but itself, and even itself it does not make sense of very well.

For example, we think we knew the ways in which people were and were not protesting. Of course, fascism was a hydra-like threat and dropping whatever you were doing to shout against the CAA on the street would not have been excessive. But what if you were not? What if, instead of expressing solidarity with my compatriots – whether they supported the CAA or opposed it – I had chosen to direct my vector of defiance against other foes?

Say, instead of marching from Valluvar Kottam or Jantar Mantar or August Kranti Maidan, that I had spent my time admonishing people for feeding stray dogs outside my house, soliloquising on my blog against the notion that science communicators are experts at nothing, and leaving the waiter a large tip when my father isn’t looking. What would you have said to me, or of me?

What is protest? What does it mean to resist? If in the post-fascist society we expect to rediscover the roots of a functional democracy, we must also expect to find here peaceable people – people able to trust one-another, who aren’t just keen to rationalise how X or Y resisted without joining a protest – arguably a basal instinct – but who can recognise demons they themselves may not have faced, and tip their hats to the silent fight to resist their temptations. If fascism is such a chimerical threat, would it not incubate more than one kind of monster as well?

Here, a third man comes to mind. L was a journalist with an organisation that was uninhibitedly angered by The Time and its attendant perversions. For this reason, L was automatically accorded a measure of respect and admiration in certain circles, especially those populated by people equally angered by The Time. L had heard some even say they would have liked to work with him in his organisation. Very flattering.

However, such flattery only complicated matters for L because he was almost constantly depressed. Where one might have taken a break from the news by diving into their work, L paid his bills by keeping his faced pressed tightly against the grindstone. He found it nearly impossible to disengage even as the sparks of cynicism and pessimism flying forth singed his psyche.

But he resisted. Every morning, he woke up, walked to the mirror and spent ten minutes muttering words of encouragement. Every time the Delhi police thrashed university students without provocation, he fought back tears and found ways to help his colleagues with their reports. Every time the voice in his head screamed at him for being so utterly incapable of moving the needle, L willed himself to step away from the darkness and go for a walk. Every time he wanted to leave, he found ways to stay.

The impetus for the resistance of L was to remain a productive and thinking citizen, to do what one could (the adjectives ‘big’ and ‘little’ rendered completely meaningless), to push the paddle against the current and journey upstream at whatever pace one could muster, until one day, he reached the shore to walk among his compatriots, to join them in pleasant conversation.

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This does mean giving someone the benefit of your doubts, and yes, doing so is a precarious thing in a fascist regime, when even the slightest inclination towards granting an offender a second chance could spell doom. But fascism is a great corrupter as well, rivalling Morgoth Bauglir himself, and if the simple tokens and rituals with which we once forged trustful relationships between ourselves no longer work, whose fault is it: those about whom we know little or those whom we know for sure to be fascists, their faces the faces of The Time itself?

In the words of Joseph Brodsky, 1984 (source):

No matter how daring or cautious you may choose to be, in the course of your life you are bound to come into direct physical contact with what’s known as Evil. I mean here not a property of the gothic novel but, to say the least, a palpable social reality that you in no way can control. No amount of good nature or cunning calculations will prevent this encounter. In fact, the more calculating, the more cautious you are, the greater is the likelihood of this rendezvous, the harder its impact. Such is the structure of life that what we regard as Evil is capable of a fairly ubiquitous presence if only because it tends to appear in the guise of good. You never see it crossing your threshold announcing itself: “Hi, I’m Evil!” That, of course, indicates its secondary nature, but the comfort one may derive from this observation gets dulled by its frequency.

A prudent thing to do, therefore, would be to subject your notions of good to the closest possible scrutiny, to go, so to speak, through your entire wardrobe checking which of your clothes may fit a stranger. That, of course, may turn into a full-time occupation, and well it should. You’ll be surprised how many things you considered your own and good can easily fit, without much adjustment, your enemy. You may even start to wonder whether he is not your mirror image, for the most interesting thing about Evil is that it is wholly human. To put it mildly, nothing can be turned and worn inside out with greater ease than one’s notion of social justice, public conscience, a better future, etc. One of the surest signs of danger here is the number of those who share your views, not so much because unanimity has a knack of degenerating into uniformity as because of the probability—implicit in great numbers—that noble sentiment is being faked.

By the same token, the surest defense against Evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even—if you will—eccentricity. That is, something that can’t be feigned, faked, imitated; something even a seasoned impostor couldn’t be happy with. Something, in other words, that can’t be shared, like your own skin—not even by a minority. Evil is a sucker for solidity. It always goes for big numbers, for confident granite, for ideological purity, for drilled armies and balanced sheets. Its proclivity for such things has to do presumably with its innate insecurity, but this realization, again, is of small comfort when Evil triumphs.

One segment of a new tabletop accelerator. The grey structures are nanometer-sized features carved in to silicon that focus bursts of laser light (yellow and purple) on a stream of electrons. As the electrons move from left to right, the light focused in the channel is carefully synchronised to move them forward faster and faster.

The pocket-sized accelerator

On By VMIn Scicomm

The world’s largest machine is called the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). It’s in the shape of a ring with a circumference of 26 km, and cost $3.4 billion (Rs 24,262 crore) and 12 years to build. Using millions of electrical and mechanical components, it accelerates protons to extreme energies and smashes them against each other.

For the last few years, a team of researchers at Stanford University, led by Robert L. Byer, a professor in the department of applied physics, has been building a machine that also accelerates subatomic particles — but it’s so big, it could fit entirely on your fingertip.

That’s right.

This microscopic device belongs to a class of machines called tabletop accelerators that scientists are interested in for lower energy applications.

The LHC was designed to aid particle physics research, which typically requires particles to be accelerated to more than 1 GeV; the LHC itself can accelerate protons to 8,000 GeV. (A proton at rest has 938 MeV of energy, and an electron is 1,836-times lighter.) On the other hand, medical imaging devices typically use particles, especially electrons, of a lot less than 1 GeV. So the cheaper and smaller tabletop accelerators offer the tantalising prospect of more accessible and affordable diagnostics, plus other industrial applications.

A smaller accelerator could also democratise high-energy physics research: more labs around the world, especially in middle and lower income countries, can then use these devices to conduct their studies instead of having to use data produced by richer countries according to the latter’s own research goals.

“We want to miniaturise accelerator technology in a way that makes it a more accessible research tool,” Jelena Vuckovic, an electrical engineer at Stanford whose lab led the work on a new project, said in a statement.

Most accelerators function on the same principle: generate lots of electromagnetic energy, then transfer it to charged particles using an intense electric field.

The Stanford group accomplishes this with a narrow channel, about 200-times less wide than a single strand of hair, etched in a slice of glass. A rapidly pulsing infrared laser is shined over the channel, its wavelength precisely twice as long as the channel’s height, and then electrons are shot through. The whole setup is maintained in a vacuum.

As the waves of the radiation pass over the channel, they alternatively push forward and slow down the electrons. Byer’s team etched tiny ridges – little mountains and valleys – on the base of the channel such that when electrons passed over a ‘mountain’, they would be pushed forward more than they would be slowed down when they passed through a ‘valley’.

This way, they reported achieving an acceleration gradient of 300 MV/m: for every meter of this arrangement an electron would traverse, it would gain 300 MeV of energy – a sizeable improvement over that of the European XFEL, the world’s longest linear accelerator (2.1 km). Byer et al also claimed in their paper that the apparatus consumed only 10 mW of power.

However, their device couldn’t sustain its impressive gradient over more than a few centimetres and only worked with pre-accelerated electrons.

In a new paper published on January 3, the same group, led by graduate student Neil Sapra, has reported some changes to their device to make it more robust and scalable, with a view to achieving higher energies in future iterations for important medical and industrial applications.

The principal difference lies with the use of a free-space laser in the 2013 design, where radiation emerges from a source and passes through free space before striking the electrons, so to speak. The new design uses “on-chip coupling through a grating coupler to accomplish a waveguide-integrated dielectric laser accelerator,” Sapra told The Wire.

That is, the laser light is first inserted into a slab waveguide, which is a component consisting of one material sandwiched between two others such that light passed into the middle layer is trapped there by total internal reflection. The waveguide is then coupled with the glass channel, improving the coordination between the laser light and force exerted on the electrons. The better this coupling is, the lesser power will have to be expended for acceleration.

The team also used a new technique, dubbed ‘inverse design’, to fashion the device. Inverse design is a software framework that allows researchers to optimise the photonic circuit together with the physical parameters of the apparatus to improve different aspects of the device, such as acceleration efficiency, with a lower computing cost.

But the device isn’t exactly ready to ship. Its pros include the low laser power required (around 3 mW), the robust architecture that allows it to be integrated more easily into larger machines and, of course, the small size – a few dozen micrometers wide, somewhat larger if the laser source and focusing equipment are included. However, the device still needs pre-accelerated electrons to work – in this case of energy 83.4 keV – and the pre-accelerators aren’t very small.

Second, the new device energised electrons by 0.9 keV over 30 micrometers, which implies an acceleration gradient of 30.5 MV/m. This is 10-times lower than what the previous design achieved.

One way to increase the amount of energisation is to line up multiple small accelerators to make a big one. Physicists from California tried this in 2016 using a laser plasma accelerator, which is another type of tabletop accelerator. They found that to push electrons to 1 GeV, the assembled device plus modifications would have to be a few hundred meters long.

These dimensions are still competitive if the goal is physics research. However, hundreds of metres is infeasible for medical imaging and other non-laboratory applications.

Sapra indicated a similar direction for his dielectric laser accelerator, saying that the current study demonstrated acceleration over a single stage, and that in future, he plans to augment this design using a waveguide that will split and “branch off into multiple stages, similar to what I showed on a single-stage level in this work”.

An accelerator composed of a thousand such stages is expected to be about an inch wide, effectively rendered as an ‘accelerator-on-a-chip’. Sapra expects the chip could potentially accelerate electrons up to 1 MeV – perfect for medical and industrial applications, including (according to one report) materials processing, sterilisation, cargo screening, biofuels production, and water and flue-gas treatment.

The Wire
January 4, 2020

Featured image: One segment of a new tabletop accelerator. The grey structures are nanometer-sized features carved in to silicon that focus bursts of laser light (yellow and purple) on a stream of electrons. As the electrons move from left to right, the light focused in the channel is carefully synchronised to move them forward faster and faster. Credit: Neil Sapra.

A sympathetic science

On By VMIn Culture, Op-eds, Science

If you feel the need to respond, please first make sure you have read the post in full.

I posted the following tweet a short while ago:

With reference to this:

Which in turn was with reference to this:

But a few seconds after publishing it, I deleted the tweet because I realised I didn’t agree with its message.

That quote by Isaac Asimov is a favourite if only because it contains in those words a bigger idea that expands voraciously the moment it comes in contact with the human mind. Yes, there is a problem with understanding ignorance and knowledge as two edges of the same blade, but somewhere in this mixup, a half-formed aspiration to rational living lurks in silence.

The author of another popular tweet commenting on the same topic did not say anything more than reproduce Kiran Bedi’s comment, issued after she shared her controversial ‘om’ tweet on January 4 (details here), that the chant is “worth listening to even if it’s fake”; the mocking laughter was implied, reaffirmed by invoking the name of the political party Bedi is affiliated to (the BJP – which certainly deserves the mockery).

However, I feel the criticism from thousands of people around the country does not address the part of Bedi’s WhatsApp message that reaches beyond facts and towards sympathy. Granted, it is stupid to claim that that is what the Sun sounds like, just as Indians’ obsession with NASA is both inexplicable and misguided. That Bedi is a senior government official, a member of the national ruling party and has 12 million followers on Twitter doesn’t help.

But what of Bedi suggesting that the controversy surrounding the provenance of the message doesn’t have to stand in the way of enjoying the message itself? Why doesn’t the criticism address that?

Perhaps it is because people think it is irrelevant, that it is simply the elucidation of a subjective experience that either cannot be disputed or, more worryingly, is not worth engaging over. If it is the latter, then I fear the critics harbour an idea that what science – as the umbrella term for the body of knowledge obtained by the application of a certain method and allied practices – is not concerned with is not worth being concerned about. Even if all of the critics in this particular episode do not harbour this sentiment, I know from personal experience that there are even more out there who do.

After publishing my tweet, I realised that Bedi’s statement that “it is worth listening to even if it’s fake” is not at odds with physicist Dibyendu Nandi’s words: that chanting the word ‘om’ is soothing and that its aesthetic benefits (if not anything greater) don’t need embellishment, certainly not in terms of pseudoscience and fake news. In fact, Bedi has admitted it is fake, and as a reasonable, secular and public-spirited observer, I believe that is all I can ask for – rather, that is all I can ask for from her in the aftermath of her regrettable action.

If I had known what was going to happen earlier, my expectation would still have been limited – in a worst case scenario in which she insists on sharing the chant – to ask her to qualify the NASA claim as being false. Twelve million followers is nothing to be laughed at.

But what I can ask of others (including myself) is this: mocking Bedi is fine, but what’s the harm in chanting the ‘om’ even if the claims surrounding it are false? What’s the harm in asserting that?

If the reply is, “There is no harm” – okay.

If the reply is, “There is no harm plus that is not in dispute” or that “There is harm because the assertion is rooted in a false, and falsifiable, premise” – I would say, “Maybe the assertion should be part of the conversation, such that the canonical response can be changed from <mockery of getting facts wrong>[1] to <mockery of getting facts wrong> + <discussing the claimed benefits of chanting ‘om’ and/or commenting on the ways in which adherence to factual knowledge can contribute to wellbeing>.”

The discourse of rational aspiration currently lacks any concern for the human condition, and while scientificity, or scientificness, has been becoming a higher virtue by the day, it does not appear to admit that far from having the best interests of the people at heart, it presumes that whatever sprouts from its cold seeds should be nutrition enough.[2]

[1] The tone of the response is beyond the scope of this post.

[2] a. If you believe this is neither science’s purpose nor responsibility, then you must agree it must not be wielded sans the clarification either that it represents an apathetic knowledge system or that the adjudication of factitude does not preclude the rest of Bedi’s message. b. Irrespective of questions about science’s purpose, could this be considered to be part of the purpose of science communication? (This is not a rhetorical question.)