Rewiring my brain: A musical offering

For the last six months or so I am having to rewire my brain. That's because I am taking formal classical piano lessons for the first time. The piano lessons are making my brain do things it has never done before, and it's taking even longer for the message to get from my brain to my hands. But it's been an enriching experience so far, and I am getting there.

I have been playing the piano and keyboard for more than 20 years. My school and college days were filled with music as documented before. But being congenitally lazy, I never took the effort to actually formally learn to read and write music. I also used to let my fingers run willy nilly over the keyboard, fingering be damned. My parents and others never got tired of telling me what a difference it would make if I actually learnt something formally, but like many other things I dismissed their wise advice with cheerful repudiation. To some extent I myself was to blame for this state of affairs. That's because I have a reasonably good memory for music and can remember the main parts of a musical piece after hearing it a couple of times, unless it is hideously complicated. Since my memory filled in for formal instruction I never felt the need to learn how to read and write.

While learning to play by ear served me very well for all these years, it also had some distinct drawbacks. Many notes in a musical piece are contrapuntal notes, sometimes playing in the background, gently cajoling louder notes, making the musical landscape richer. But these notes are usually very hard to decipher because of their transient nature and low amplitude. Many of the "contra melodies" both in eastern and western music fall into this category. Thus, while learning by ear is adequate for the general structure of a piece and entirely satisfactory for most Indian songs which did not have dominant contra-melodies, it fails to various extents for more involved pieces, and fails spectacularly for compositions by composers like Bach who was the unmatched master of counterpoint.

Thus my musical education has always been somewhat lacking. So it was with immense trepidation as well as anticipation that I looked forward to my first lessons. The first lesson was terrifying since my music teacher asked me to directly compose a piece of music and write it; I almost felt like running away. Fortunately I realised that I have found an extremely patient piano teacher who, when I confessed to her that I could be abysmally slow, dismissed my concerns by pointing out that she has even taught mentally challenged children with special needs. The piano lesson is at 9 PM which also makes things slightly challenging. But her enthusiasm and patience rub off, and even after a long day at work I find myself feeling energetic after a while.

The last six months have been quite an experience. Learning how to read and decipher music felt like being someone who has lived his life until now in a candlelit room and has just found the switch for the 100 watt lightbulb.

At first the going was tough and not much was possible; I was learning how to play the classical equivalent of nursery rhymes. In addition I have to say this; a lot of musical notation is not exactly meant to simplify things. For instance consider the 22 notes spread across the treble and bass clefs. Each line as well as each space corresponds to a note (A, B, C etc.). However, the fact that the line and space are of unequal width make this notion counterintuitive, and a beginner tends to regard only spaces as notes (more so because that's how the notes on a piano would look if turned by 90 degrees). However upon further contemplation it becomes clear that the particular notion employed is a considerable space saving device, since one can essentially represent the entire spectrum of the instrument in a short space.

But even that experience of playing the most elementary pieces was immensely valuable as I could truly develop my left hand for the first time, that left hand which until now had been engaged only in playing chords and no melody, acting more as a substitute for rhythm than as my right hand's equal.

It was only in the last three months that I have progressed to intermediate stage. If beginner stage is like riding a bicycle, intermediate stage is like driving a car. Landscapes that were previously inaccessible suddenly bloom exponentially in front of you. Relatively few pieces by leading composers are at the beginner stage but many more are at the intermediate stage. Once I got to this stage it was like opening the door to a garden full of exotic flowers. I could take full advantage of Pianostreet.com which has a lot of sheet music from various composers. Intermediate stage is when the turbo charging starts. I could branch out from what my teacher taught me and strike out on my own a bit.

I started with simple pieces like Bach's Minuet in G and Beethoven's Russian Folk Song, but even here the advantages of learning formal music were eminently clear. I would never have been able to disentangle the relatively complex intertwining of notes in these pieces by ear alone. I felt like a physicst who has previously performed experiments to watch balls rolling down inclined planes, but who knows no mathematics to understand what's happening in all its fine glory.

However, curiously, my musical memory which has served as an asset until now actually became a liability. That's because the moment I painfully deciphered one part, my brain would immediately commit it to memory, which meant that the next time I could play it without looking. Now that would be a good thing if I weren't actually trying to learn how to read! But learning how to read means getting enough practice at reading and re-reading the notes and symbols, just like learning a language. Memory opposes this process.

The most difficult thing has been to learn and stick to fingering. Previously, certain of my fingers have been used to playing certain notes. The interrelationship of the fingers to each other has also been hardwired because of years of using them that way. For instance, for certain patterns of notes, my index finger will invariably arch over my thumb, whereas traditionally it would not be done that way. Every time I am supposed to use specific fingering, my fingers strain to break free of the new rules that their upstart owner is trying to impose on them. They prance around and resist and have a life of their own, like Dr. Strangelove's gloved arm. They insist on obeying their own laws of motion. I have to constantly command my brain to rein them in. It is sometimes excruciatingly painful and yet I know that after some effort, order will be restored to this unruly landscape.

So this is the first time that I am having to actively suppress my memory. Part of this effort has also meant that I deliberately ask my teacher to give me pieces which I haven't heard before, so that my memory does not help me play them at least during the first time. This is not very easy since I have listened to a substantial amount of classical music until now. But the treasure chest of classical music goes deeper than I think, and she always finds something. The latest effort is for a long transcription of Bach's famous Air on a G string. The measure is slightly tricky at times, and the piece should keep me occupied for some time.

Mostly I spend my time practicing these assigned pieces, but with my newfound ability I sometimes cannot resist the temptation to go beyond what she is teaching. In this spirit I have tried several pieces which I have heard before, which I could even play to some extent before, but which have acquired a whole new quality now that I can pry their notes apart. I tried "Fur Elise" of course, and I am trying out Schumann's beautiful "Traumerei" and Chopin's Mazurka in D which is a real challenge.

The most challenging of these right now in terms of coordination is Mozart's fast "Turkish March", the 3rd movement of his 11th Piano Sonata in A Major. Before I had spent literally months listening to this piece hundreds of times before I could get the right hand reasonably accurate. But the left hand's role was hidden in that sheet music, waiting all these years to be uncovered. And now that the left hand can dance over the landscape on equal terms with the right, life has acquired a golden hue.

The price of global warming science is eternal vigilance

John Tierney of the NYT weighs in on the hacked emails and accurately nails it

I’ve long thought that the biggest danger in climate research is the temptation for scientists to lose their skepticism and go along with the “consensus” about global warming. That’s partly because it’s easy for everyone to get caught up in “informational cascades”, and partly because there are so many psychic and financial rewards rewards for working on a problem that seems to be a crisis. We all like to think that our work is vitally useful in solving a major social problem — and the more major the problem seems, the more money society is liable to spend on it.

I’m not trying to suggest that climate change isn’t a real threat, or that scientists are deliberately hyping it. But when they look at evidence of the threat, they may be subject to the confirmation bias — seeing trends that accord with their preconceptions and desires. Given the huge stakes in this debate — the trillions of dollars that might be spent to reduce greenhouse emissions — it’s important to keep taking skeptical looks at the data. How open do you think climate scientists are to skeptical views, and to letting outsiders double-check their data and calculations?

We are all subject to the confirmation bias, and I can say from experience that we have to battle it in our research every single day as fallible human beings. But as Tierney says, when the stakes are so incredibly high, when governments and international budgets and debts and the fate of billions is going to be affected by what you say, you better fight the conformation bias ten times as much as usual.

Listen to Capt. Ramsey son:

"Mr. Hunter, we have rules that are not open to interpretation, personal intuition, gut feelings, hairs on the back of your neck, little devils or angels sitting on your shoulders..."

The damning global warming emails; when science becomes the casualty

By now everyone and his grandmother must have heard about the hacked emails of the prestigious University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU). The emails were sent by leading climate change scientists to each other and seem to express doubts and uncertainty. More importantly they also seem to display some troubling signs of rather dishonest discourse, with scientists trying to hold dangerously unfavorable opinions of journal editors who seem to be open to publishing papers that don't seem to agree with their views, and asking each other to delete emails which might signal doubt...

...Read the rest of the post on my Desipundit blog

A hermitian operator in self-imposed exile

Perfect Rigor: A Genius and the Mathematical Breakthrough of the Century
Masha Gessen (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009)

Pure mathematicians have the reputation of being otherworldly and divorced from practical matters. Grisha or Grigory Perelman, the Russian mathematician who at the turn of this century solved one of the great unsolved problems in mathematics, the Poincare Conjecture, is sadly or perhaps appropriately an almost perfect specimen of this belief. For Perelman, even the rudiments of any kind of monetary, professional or material rewards resulting from his theorem were not just unnecessary but downright abhorrent. He has turned down professorships at the best universities in the world, declined the Fields Medal, and will probably not accept the 1 million dollar prize awarded by the Clay Mathematics Institute for the solution of the some of the most daunting mathematical problems of all time. He has cut himself off from the world after seeing the publicity that his work received and has become a recluse, living with his mother in St. Petersburg. For Perelman, mathematics should purely and strictly be done for its own sake, and could never be tainted with any kind of worldly stigma. Perelman is truly a mathematical hermit, or what a professor of mine would call using mathematical jargon, a "hermitian operator".

In "Perfect Rigor", Masha Gessen tells us the story of this remarkable individual, but even more importantly tells us the story of the Russian mathematical system that produced this genius. The inside details of Russian mathematics were cut off from the world until the fall of the Soviet Union. Russian mathematics was nurtured by a small group of extraordinary mathematicians including Andrey Kolmogorov, the greatest Russian mathematician of the twentieth century. Kolmogorov and others who followed him believed in taking latent, outstanding talent in the form of young children and single-mindedly transforming them into great problem solvers and thinkers. Interestingly in the early Soviet Union under Stalin's brutal rule, mathematics flourished where other sciences languished partly because Stalin and others simply could not understand abstract mathematical concepts and thus did not think they posed any danger to communist ideology. Soviet mathematics also got a boost when its great value was recognized during the Great Patriotic War in building aircraft and later in work on the atomic bomb. Mathematicians and physicists thus became unusually valued assets to the Soviet system.

Kolmogorov and a select band of others took advantage of the state's appreciation of math and created small, elite schools for students to train them for the mathematical olympiads. Foremost among the teachers was a man named Sergei Rukshin who Gessen talks about at length. Rukshin believed in completely enveloping his students in his world. In his schools the students entered a different universe, forged by intense thought and mathematical camaraderie. They were largely shielded from outside influences and coddled. The exceptions were women and Jews. Gessen tells us about the rampant anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union which lasted until its end and prevented many bright Jewish students from showcasing their talents. Perelman was one of the very few Jews who made it, and only because he achieved a perfect score in the International Mathematical Olympiad.

Perelman's extreme qualities were partly a result of this system, which had kept him from knowing about politics and the vagaries of human existence and insulated him from a capricious world where compromise is necessary. For him, everything had to be logical and utterly honest. There was no room for things such as diplomacy, white lies, nationalism and manipulation to achieve one's personal ends. If a mathematical theorem was proven to be true, then any further acknowledgment of its existence in the form of monetary or practical benefits was almost vulgar. This was manifested in his peculiar behavior in the United States. For instance, when he visited the US in the 90s as a postdoctoral researcher he had already made a name for himself. Princeton offered the twenty nine year old an assistant professorship, a rare and privileged opportunity. However Perelman would settle for nothing less than a full professorship and was repulsed even by the request that he officially interview for the position (which would have been simply a formality) and submit his CV. Rudimentary formalities which would be normal for almost everyone were abhorrent for Perelman.

After being disillusioned with what he saw as an excessively materialistic academic food chain in the US, Perelman returned to Russia. For five years after that he virtually cut himself off from his colleagues. But it was then that he worked on the Poincare Conjecture and created his lasting achievement. Sadly, his time spent intensely working alone in Russia seemed to have made him even more sensitive to real and perceived slights. However, he did publicly put up his proofs on the internet in 2002 and then visited the US. For a brief period he even seemed to enjoy the reception he received in the country, with mathematicians everywhere vying to secure his services for their universities. He was unusually patient in giving several talks and patiently explaining his proof to mathematicians. Yet it was clear he was indulging in this exercise only for the sake of clarifying the mathematical concepts, and not to be socially acceptable.

However, after this brief period of normalcy, a series of events made Perelman reject the world of human beings and even that of his beloved mathematics. He was appalled by the publicity he received in newspapers like the New York Times which could not understand his work. He found the rat race to recruit him, with universities climbing over each other and making him fantastic offers of salary and opportunity, utterly repulsive. After rejecting all these offers and even accusing some of his colleagues of being traitors who gave him undue publicity, he withdrew to Russia and definitively severed himself from the world. The final straw may have been two events; the awarding of the Fields Medal which, since his work was still being verified, could not explicitly state that he had proven the Poincare conjecture, and the publication of a paper by Chinese mathematicians which in hindsight clearly seems to have been written for stealing the limelight and the honors from Perelman. For Perelman, all this (including the sharing of the Fields with three other mathematicians) was a grave insult and unbecoming of the pursuit of pure mathematics.

Since then Perelman has been almost completely inaccessible. He does not answer emails, letters and phone calls. In an unprecedented move, the president of the International Mathematical Congress which awards the Fields Medals personally went to St. Petersburg to talk him out of declining the prize. Perelman was polite, but the conversation was to no avail. Neither is there any indication that he would accept the 1 million dollar Clay prize. Gessen himself could never interview him, and because of this the essence of Perelman remains vague and we don't really get to know him in the book. Since Gessen is trying to somewhat psychoanalyze her subject and depends on second-hand information to draw her own conclusions, her narrative sometimes lacks coherence and meanders off. As some other reviewers have noted, the discussion of the actual math is sparse and disappointing, but this book is not really about the math but about the man and his social milieu. The content remains intriguing and novel.

Of course, Perelman's behavior is bizarre and impenetrable only to us mere mortals. For Perelman it forms a subset of what has in his mind always been a perfectly internally consistent and logical set of postulates and conclusions. Mathematics has to be done for its own sake. Academic appointments, prizes, publicity and professional rivalries should have no place in the acknowledgement of a beautiful mathematical proof. While things like applying for interviews and negotiating job offers may seem to us to be perfectly reasonable components of the real world and may even seem to be necessary evils, for Perelman they are simply evils interfering with a system of pure thought and should be completely rejected. He is the epitome of the Platonic ideal; where pure ideas are concerned, any human association could only be a deeply unsettling imposition.

A wrong kind of religion; Freeman Dyson, Superfreakonomics, and global warming

The greatest strength of science is that it tries to avoid dogma. Theories, explanations, hypotheses, everything is tentative, true only as long as the next piece of data does not invalidate it. This is how science progresses, by constantly checking and cross checking its own assumptions. The heart of this engine of scientific progress is constant skepticism and questioning. This skepticism and questioning can often be exasperating. You can enthusiastically propound your latest brainwave only to be met with hard-nosed opposition, deflating your long harbored fervor for your pet idea. Sometimes scientists can be vicious in seminars, questioning and cross questioning you as if you were a defendant in a court.

But you learn to live with this frustration. That’s because in science, skepticism always means erring on the safer side. As long as skepticism does not descend into outright irrational cynicism, it is far better to be skeptical than to buy into a new idea. This is science’s own way to ensure immunity to crackpot notions that can lead it astray. One of the important lessons you learn in graduate school is to make peace with your skeptics, to take them seriously, to be respectful to them in debate. This attitude keeps the flow of ideas open, giving everyone a chance to voice their opinion.

Yet the mainstay of science is also an readiness to test audacious new concepts. Sadly, whenever a paradigm of science reaches something like universal consensus, the opposite can happen. New ideas and criticism are met with so much skepticism that it borders on hostility. Bold conjectures are shot down mercilessly sometimes even without considering their possible merits. The universal consensus separates scientists into a majority who provide a vocal and even threatening wall of obduracy against new ideas. From what I have seen in recent times, this unfortunately seems to have happened to the science of global warming...

...Read the rest of the entry on my Desipundit blog...

A stunning achievement in 600 pages: The Storm of War

The contemporary Second World War historian faces a monumental task. He must sort through the enormous literature on the most devastating conflict in human history, both known and recently unearthed, and then pick out the gems. He must then string these gems together into a narrative that strikes the right balance between offering all important details and yet not miring the reader in a dense thicket of minutiae. The achievement of this objective is the mark of a true historian, and in his new, stunningly succinct and yet comprehensive history of the Second World War, Andrew Roberts more than accomplishes this objective and reveals himself as a historian of the first rank, in the words of The Economist, "Britain's finest military historian".

What distinguishes Roberts's book from other World War 2 histories is that it's simply the most stunning encapsulation of every single front in the conflict in a relatively slim 600 pages. In his drive to leave no stone unturned and his capacity to compose brief portraits of key people and events, Roberts surpasses even eminent historian John Keegan. Roberts's style is distinguished by terse, tightly knit chapters that deliver the goods in brief paragraphs and analyses. While generally chronological and covering each important front, the chapters also include separate ones on the Holocaust and on strategic bombing. A single, absolutely masterful chapter summarizes the conflict at the end. Bringing new information to bear on well-known events, Roberts provides striking new insights into the war and puts some long-harbored beliefs to rest.

The most important thread running through Robert's retelling of the War constitutes the singular mistakes that Adolf Hitler made and his underlying motivations while also highlighting his strengths. Hitler had an unusually prodigious knowledge of military equipment and detail and was a shrewd controller of men; a striking example was when, in the aftermath of his victory over France, he suddenly promoted twelve generals to Field Marshals, thus generally diluting the distinguished character of the rank and emphasizing his dominion over his officers. However, whatever his strengths were were far overshadowed by the stupendous mistakes he made. Admittedly the greatest was to decide to attack the Soviet Union. Hitler completely underestimated the sheer tenacity of the ordinary Russian soldier and citizen and on the other side of the continent, also underestimated the tenacity of that tiny island named England. His second greatest mistake was to foolishly declare war on the United States. Here Hitler made an even more elementary error in underestimating the enormous resources and production capacity of the United States which soon started bolstering the great Soviet war machine as well as the British. Most importantly, Hitler committed both mistakes fueled by his essential Nazism and thirst for Lebensraum (living space) in the East. And the fundamental underlying ideology driving this thinking which finally drove a stake into his grand plans was his racial theory about inferior Slavs and Jews. It was this rabid racial ideology which prevented him from shrewdly taking advantage for instance of Eastern Russians' contempt for Stalin's regime and turning them into allies; instead Hitler assigned the feared Einsatzgruppen to essentially wipe out Russian towns from the map. These SS units participated in the wholesale personalized murder of a million Russians in 1941 alone, killing on a scale whose sheer personal nature and horrifying brutality dwarfs even the later industrialized gassings of The Holocaust. Roberts does a superb job of highlighting how it was this basic racial and xenophobic mentality that drove almost all of Hitler's mistakes including most of his military ones.

Roberts also has revealing analyses of more tactical errors by Hitler. These include not ramping up U-boat production in time to possibly starve Britain and make her sue for peace, not focusing on fighter development without which his cherished bombers would not be effective, being almost blissfully indifferent to the Japanese whose help he could have considered in invading the Soviet Union, and of course his two cardinal tactical errors; letting the British get away at Dunkirk (Roberts demolishes the belief that Hitler did this because he was interested in peace negotiations with Britain) and even more importantly, halting the advance on Moscow in the summer of 1941, sudden driving his forces to the South. This miscalculation, combined with Stalingrad and the later great tank battle of Kursk, signaled the death knell for the Nazi regime.

Roberts also pays due attention to the Pacific theater of war including the incredibly bloody fighting at Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima and Okinawa. His discussion of this front includes a superb chapter on the Battle of Midway which was the turning point in the Pacific war, and most notably a detailed and riveting analysis of the more under-appreciated stage of the battle in Burma. The British response in Burma against a determined enemy in a sweltering thicket of tropical heat and rain forests was comparable to anything else in the War, and Roberts calls the defeat of the Japanese in Burma the "greatest gift that the British could have given India". He also has detailed and tactically accomplished accounts of the war in North Africa, (against Rommel's famed Afrika Corps), Normandy, Sicily and Italy and of the Ardennes offensive (The Battle of the Bulge) and the march towards Berlin. These accounts are interspersed with sharp portraits of men like FDR, Churchill, Eisenhower, Montgomery, Manstein, Rommel, Keitel and Goring.

Robert's chapter on the U-boat war is particularly skilled and he carefully documents the initial disasters that befell the British navy in the Atlantic. The U-boats sank millions of tons of shipping, and if Hitler had stepped up production earlier he could have starved off Britain much sooner in the war. However, in the end it was not the resilience of the Royal Navy nor Germany's increasingly dwindling war production capability that were decisive; it was a secret weapon that was developed by mathematician Alan Turing and his colleagues at Bletchley Park near London. It is difficult to overemphasize the absolutely crucial role that breaking the Enigma code of the Nazis played in the war. It is a silent undercurrent running through Roberts's narrative but its overwhelming importance is clear; it was code-breaking that won the critical Battle of Midway, and it was code-breaking that proved pivotal not just in the U-boat battle but in North Africa and in Normandy. It was not the atomic bomb, not even radar, but the obscure code-breaking work of brilliant scientists toiling away in the utmost secrecy that really won the war.

Further on Roberts has separate chapters on the Holocaust and on strategic bombing. His chapter on the Holocaust is painful to read and captures the key facts, including why FDR avoided bombing the train tracks to Auschwitz; there was genuine concern about killing prisoners (concern that in hindsight seems misguided) and such bombing was seen as a diversion of bombers from German cities. Roberts's analysis of strategic bombing is highly readable. Along with the atomic bombing of Japan, it's strategic bombing that is the most controversial part of the Allied campaign in the war. The destruction of Hamburg and Dresden are well known (the latter made famous by Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five"). Roberts wisely avoids passing any moral judgement and simply analyses whether the carpet bombing of German cities worked, and whether it was necessary. The answer to the first question is decidedly yes. There is a clear correlation between dwindling German war production and air power and the Allied bombing campaign; the bombing also kept German aircraft away from the Eastern front. The answer to the second question is more ambiguous, but in hindsight provided by the first answer it too appears favourable. Certainly the number of people killed in German cities by bombing, while quite high, was dwarfed by ground losses on both Western and Eastern fronts.

If I have a minor gripe with the book, it is that Roberts could have added about a hundred more pages and fleshed out the chapters on Stalingrad and the Holocaust in more detail. No matter how many books you read about the War, the Eastern Front and the Holocaust comprise a set of events which constantly beggar belief by their sheer magnitudes and leave one's mind shatteringly numbed. While 6 million Jews and others were murdered in an orgiastic frenzy of factory-like slaughter, 27 million Russians lost their lives in what can only be described as Dante's worst nightmare, a sea of blood whose volume is unmatched in human history. Just one statistic puts the staggering Russian losses in perspective; for every American soldier who died on the battlefield, 60 Russian soldiers lost their lives. About a million men died at Stalingrad alone compared to half a million or so American soldiers in the entire War. At the same time, the unimaginable ferocity on the Eastern Front was possibly matched only by Josef Stalin's own monstrous barbarity toward his own people; not even Hitler personally tortured and murdered hundreds of thousands of his own officers and generals for absolutely no reason. In the annals of twentieth century brutality nobody can match the excesses of Stalin, and these excesses manifested themselves dangerously in the complete lack of preparation the Soviet Union faced during the early Nazi onslaught. It was only the gargantuan resolve of ordinary Russian citizens and soldiers combined with the certain death at the hands of of their own officers that deserters would face (thanks to Stalin) that forced every Russian to fight for his life. The Nazi-Soviet conflict can only be seen through the lens of one of those mythical conflicts signaling the end of the world. While tomes have been published both on this conflict as well as the singular horror that was the Holocaust, Roberts has relatively brief (although highly well-informed) chapters on both topics and I thought that an addition of a hundred or so pages would have been a small sacrifice for some added narrative on these earth-shattering events.

But these are minor issues. In the purview of his analyses, the crisp and riveting style of his narrative and the comprehensive detailing of every single important front, battle and fact of this great conflict, Roberts is second to none. While Roberts's basic thrust is to highlight Hitler's tactical mistakes, his overweening racial ideology and his conflict with his generals, in retrospect of course such analysis is relatively easily enunciated. Just think of how we would have written history differently had the Nazis, God forbid, won the war. We would possibly be talking about French casualties by Allied bombing instead of British casualties in the Blitz (the former actually exceeded the latter), and General Mark Clark letting the Nazi tenth army get away in Italy instead of Hitler letting the British get away at Dunkirk. Given the capacity of Hitler's armies, the experience and fighting capability of the German solider (probably the most well trained of any in the conflict), the superiority of German weaponry and the brilliance of his generals (of whom some like Manstein, Rommel and Guderin were regarded as the finest strategic minds on any side), it was by no means obvious that the Nazis would lose. But as Roberts's overall message in the book indicates, in the end Adolf Hitler lost the war because of the same reason that he almost won it; because he was a Nazi.

I cannot recommend The Storm of War enough. The Second World War was a transformative event in human history that should be remembered until the end of time. It deserves the constant and passionate attention of the finest historians of their generations, and Andrew Roberts proves himself as one of the best of this class.

Note: The Storm of War is not available in the United States until 2011. It is available in Britain and can be ordered through the British Amazon.

A rollicking romp through quantum connections

Very few physicists have emphasized the human side of physics as well as Jeremy Bernstein. A veteran physicist and writer who has known many famous physicists of the twentieth century, Bernstein has penned highly readable portraits of Oppenheimer, Bethe and Einstein among others and has written books about nuclear weapons, quants on Wall Street, Bell Laboratories and the German atomic bomb project. In this book he explores the several ramifications of the strange proliferation of concepts from quantum mechanics into popular culture, theater, art, philosophy and cinema. Perhaps this proliferation is not surprising considering the bizarre implications of the actual meaning of quantum theory, but as Bernstein indicates, non-physicists have extended the reach of quantum concepts far beyond what the scientific creators of the theory would have intended.

Bernstein takes us through a diverse variety of topics and characters. He describes the Dalai Lama's writings in which he draws parallels between Buddhism and quantum theory, and this gives him an opportunity to talk about two central characters in the book, physicists John Bell and David Bohm who the Dalai Lama knew and who played crucial roles in the development of the interpretative parts of the discipline. Bernstein describes the famous conflict between Einstein and Bohr about the meaning of quantum theory and explains Bell's groundbreaking contributions that argued against Einstein's belief that quantum mechanics might be governed by some kind of "hidden variables" which we have to discover; Bell showed that any such hidden variable theory would have to involve superluminal communication and would be at odds with the theory of relativity. Later many remarkably precise experiments verified Bell's ideas, and Bell would almost certainly have received a Nobel Prize had he not died untimely of a stroke.

Bernstein also discusses the extension of quantum theory into non-scientific realms and describes the plays of the playwright Tom Stoppard (writer of "Hapgood" and "Arcadia"), who seems to have incorporated some concepts into his writing. Along the way Bernstein discusses the famous double slit experiment of quantum theory (best discussed in the Feynman Lectures on Physics) which inspired Stoppard and other writers including Princeton philosopher Rebecca Goldstein (author of "Incompleteness", a fascinating book about Kurt Godel) whose work Bernstein also describes. Bernstein also uses these narrative threads to talk about his own background at Harvard and Princeton where he came in contact with many of the key figures in the development of quantum physics. He has a clear and readable discussion of Bell's theorem and its background.

The last chapters in Bernstein's book talk about New Age-type expositions of quantum theory discussed by writers like Gary Zhukov and Fritjof Capra (author of "The Tao of Physics") who seemingly find many parallels between the philosophical parts of the discipline and Eastern philosophy and mysticism. Bernstein is admittedly not very impressed with these interpretations as many of them sound rather fuzzy and devoid of concrete meaning. Perhaps Bernstein should have also taken a well-deserved jab at the New Age guru Deepak Chopra, whose use of quantum concepts seems to have been divined from thin air.

Readers might be forgiven for Bernstein's digressions which usually constitute a common part of his writings. For instance his first chapter is about his encounter with poet W H Auden and the philosopher Reinhold Niebuhr which seems to have little bearing on the rest of the book. A chapter on Niels Bohr's protege, the physicist Leon Rosenfeld, suddenly digresses into how quantum mechanics came in conflict with Soviet Marxism and dialectical materialism, and how Soviet physicists struggled to reconcile physics with their political ideology. A lot of this has to do with Bernstein's own background and it usually makes for interesting reading, but as in some of his other books, one cannot help shake off the feeling that Bernstein is trying to pack too much into the book and jumping from one topic to another with alacrity. However, I personally enjoy such digressions, and while some others may not, there is still enough interesting material in this slim book to keep most readers with a variety of interests hooked.

At the Bryn Mawr eCheminfo Conference

From Monday through Wednesday I will be at the eCheminfo "Applications of Cheminformatics & Chemical Modelling to Drug Discovery" meeting at Bryn Mawr College, PA. The speakers and topics as seen in the schedule are interesting and varied. As usual, if anyone wants to crib about the finger food I will be around. I have heard the campus is quite scenic.

"I was warned about this"

Bill O'Reilly is a little tamer than usual but also denser than usual in his latest argument with Dawkins. The same old canard is trotted out, and at one point Dawkins dons the garb of the English headmaster and asks O'Reilly to stop shouting and adds that he was warned about O'Reilly's amazing knack for equating loudness with truth

Coyne vs Dawkins

This year being Darwin's 200th birth anniversary, we have seen a flurry of books on evolution. Out of these two stand out for the authority of their writers and the core focus on the actual evidence for evolution that they provide; Jerry Coyne's "Why Evolution is True" and Richard Dawkins's "The Greatest Show on Earth". I have read Coyne's book and it's definitely an excellent introduction to evolution. Yet I am about 300 pages into Dawkins and one cannot help but be sucked again into his trademark clarity and explanatory elegance. I will have detailed reviews of the two books later but for now here are the main differences I can think of:

1. Dawkins talks about more evidence than simply that from biology. He also has evidence from history, geology and astronomy.

2. Dawkins's clarity of exposition is of course highly commendable. You would not necessarily find the literary sophistication of the late Stephen Jay Gould here but for straight and simple clarity this is marvelous.

3. A minor but noteworthy difference is the inclusion of dozens of absorbing color plates in the Dawkins book which are missing in Coyne's.

4. Most importantly, Dawkins's examples for evolution on the whole are definitely more fascinating and diverse than Coyne's, although Coyne's are pretty good too. For instance Coyne dwells more on the remarkable evolution of the whale from land-dwelling animals (with the hippo being a close ancestral cousin). Also, Coyne's chapter on sexual selection and speciation are among the best such discussions I have come across.

Dawkins on the other hand has a fascinating account of Michigan State University bacteriologist Richard Lenski's amazing experiments with E. coli that have been running for over twenty years. They have provided a remarkable window into evolution in real time like nothing else. Also marvelously engaging are his descriptions of the immensely interesting history of the domestication of the dog. Probably the most striking example of evolution in real time from his book is his clear account of University of Exter biologist John Endler's fabulous experiments with guppies in which the fish evolved drastically before our very eyes in relatively few generations because of carefully regulated and modified selection pressure.

Overall then, Coyne's book does a great job of describing evolution but Dawkins does an even better job of explaining it. As usual Dawkins is also uniquely lyrical and poetic in parts with his sparkling command of the English language.

Thus I would think that Dawkins and Coyne (along with probably Carl Zimmer's "The Tangled Bank" due to be published on October 15) would provide the most comprehensive introduction to evolution you can get.

As Darwin said, "There is grandeur in this view of life". Both Coyne and Dawkins serve as ideal messengers to convey this grandeur to us and to illustrate the stunning diversity of life around us. Both are eminently readable.

The official slide into absurdity

There's been so much said about Obama prematurely winning the Nobel Peace Prize that I cannot possibly add to it. This was one of the very few times when both his detractors and his supporters were united in their recognition of this absurdity. I bet the news has given a headache to Obama and undoubtedly introduced another lofty expectation and complication in his life.

Suffice it to say that it's at times like this that I feel gratified to be working in the sciences. Sure, Nobel Prizes in the sciences have also been controversial, but nowhere as controversial as the literature, peace and economics prizes. The peace prize has officially turned into a joke and the economics prize is close to being one. But the ribosome, DNA structure, symmetry breaking in weak interactions and high-temperature ceramic superconductors have a ring of certainty and permanence that no achievement in finance or peace can have, although an achievement in literature might come close to being this way. Uncle Alby's words speak again; "Politics is ephemeral but an equation is forever"...

More on V. Ramakrishnan and a book that started it all

You could start with the telephone interview on the Nobel website. What's interesting is that Ramakrishnan did his PhD. from a not particularly distinguished university; his rather peripatetic career really seems to have taken off only several years after graduate school. I think this is a good illustration of what you can achieve even later in life if you put your mind to it. In the interview he says that in fact he was not very interested in his PhD. research project. He used to subscribe to Scientific American at the time and it was through the magazine that he realized that the most exciting developments were happening in biology (I was about to switch my subscription from Scientific American to Discover; maybe I should stick to Scientific American now). He was also inspired by the example of famous physicists like Francis Crick and Walter Gilbert who switched to molecular biology and made pathbreaking contributions.

It is worth remembering that one of the key influences that propelled physicists into molecular biology after the War was a little book by Erwin Schrödinger named "What is Life"? which laid out the basic questions- but tantalizingly, not the answers- necessary for addressing the questions of life and heredity at a molecular level. It makes for very interesting reading even today. The book was based on lectures that Schrödinger gave in neutral Ireland in 1943, one of the very few places not torn by the conflict. Schrödinger was also woefully ignorant of chemistry and therefore did not focus on metabolism (proteins), only on heredity. Now we know that metabolism might have evolved separately from genetics and is at least as important as genetics.

More links; profile of Ramakrishnan in TOI featuring interviews with his father. It's always amusing when, the moment someone wins a Nobel Prize, the fact that he or she does not own a car and bicycles to work every day suddenly becomes the title of a news piece! In this particular case, given that Ramakrishnan works in bicycle-friendly Cambridge, it's probably not surprising that he rides to work. He would probably not have done this had he worked in San Diego or at Yale.

Ramakrishnan is astonishingly the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology's 13th Nobel Laureate. The laboratory has been to molecular and structural biology what Rutherford's Cavendish Laboratory was to physics in the first half of the twentieth century. It was set up by Nobel Laureates and has served as a magnet for biostructural research for half a century.

More: A video interview with Ramakrishnan about his ribosome work, recorded at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (another molecular biology pioneer). It's worth noting how, in addition to being extremely perseverant and creative, Ramakrishnan was definitely also in the right place at the right time. For instance after his PhD. he ended up working with Peter Moore at Yale, a scientist who was then one of the very few people working on the ribosome. In addition, most modern high resolution structure determinations need access to a synchrotron which provides a very high intensity beam of x-rays. Ramakrishnan ended up at one of the world's premier sources of synchrotrons, Brookhaven National Laboratory.

Ramakrishnan also spares few words in castigating both the press and the general public for taking cognizance of important work only after it wins prizes. He says,

I think it’s a mistake to define good work by awards. This is a typical mistake that the public or even the press make. None of you called me about my work even two days ago… right?”

The first Indian to win a Nobel Prize for chemistry

Venki Ramakrishnan has done it. He, Ada Yonath and Tom Seitz have won the Nobel Prize for chemistry for 2009 for their pioneering studies on the structure of the ribosome. The prize was predicted by many for many years and I myself have listed these names in my lists for a couple of years now; in fact I remember talking with a friend about Yonath and Ramakrishnan getting it as early as 2002. Ramakrishnan thus joins the ranks of Raman, Khorana and Chandrasekhar as the latest Indian science Nobel Laureate. Will his achievement inspire more students in India to study science? I sure hope so...


...Read the rest of the entry on Desipundit

The 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics: Kao, Boyle and Smith

Seems nobody saw this coming but the importance of optical fibers and CCDs is obvious. It's also interesting that Indian physicist Narinder Kapany's name is not on the list. I am not completely familiar with the history but from what I know Kapany was one of the early pioneers in fiber optics.

It's no small irony that the CCD research was done in 1969 at Bell Labs. With this Bell Labs may well be the most productive basic industrial research organization in history, and yet today it is less than a mere shadow of itself. The CCD research was done 40 years back and the time in which it was done seems disconnected from the present not just temporally, but more fundamentally. The research lab that once housed six Nobel Prize winners on its staff can now count a total of four scientists in its basic physics division.

The 80s and indeed most of the postwar decades before then seem to be part of a different universe now. The Great American Industrial Research Laboratory seems like a relic of the past. Merck, IBM, Bell Labs...what on earth happened to all that research productivity?

The 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Source: Nobelprize.org

The 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to Elizabeth Blackburn (UCSF), Carol Greider (Johns Hopkins) and Jack Szostak (Harvard) for their discovery of the enzyme telomerase and its role in human health and disease.

This prize was highly predictable because the trio’s discovery is of obvious and fundamental importance to an understanding of living systems...

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First potential AIDS vaccine

This just came off the press:

A new AIDS vaccine tested on more than 16,000 volunteers in Thailand has protected a significant minority against infection, the first time any vaccine against the disease has even partly succeeded in a clinical trial...Col. Jerome H. Kim, a physician who is manager of the army’s H.I.V. vaccine program, said half the 16,402 volunteers were given six doses of two vaccines in 2006 and half were given placebos. They then got regular tests for the AIDS virus for three years. Of those who got placebos, 74 became infected, while only 51 of those who got the vaccines did. Results of the trial of the vaccine, known as RV 144, were released at 2 a.m. Eastern time Thursday in Thailand by the partners that ran the trial, by far the largest of an AIDS vaccine: the United States Army, the Thai Ministry of Public Health, Dr. Fauci’s institute, and the patent-holders in the two parts of the vaccine, Sanofi-Pasteur and Global Solutions for Infectious Diseases.

However this also came off the same press:

Scientists said they were delighted but puzzled by the result. The vaccine — a combination of two genetically engineered vaccines, neither of which had worked before in humans — protected too few people to be declared an unqualified success. And the researchers do not know why it worked...The most confusing aspect of the trial, Dr. Kim said, was that everyone who did become infected developed roughly the same amount of virus in their blood whether they got the vaccine or a placebo. Normally, any vaccine that gives only partial protection — a mismatched flu shot, for example — at least lowers the viral load.

Nevertheless, after a decade of failures, at least it's a definite starting point scientifically.

One day left before the singularity

Stay tuned for it at 9:30 PM on CBS