On Solitude

I have had unparalleled opportunity to be alone with myself and meditate, both upon my life and upon my subjects, and (I regret to say) after making a very promising start 3 months ago I rather tired of my quiet isolation and yearned for the company of old friends and the comfort of old haunts, the warmth of home and the careless lethargy of an unambitious life. The splendid solitude of the earnest savant that I so relished at the outset of this journey became a burden and slowly I wandered from the path of learning, maintaining enough of a hold to keep track but not enough to delight in it. As I have so many times before, I saw the light and somehow, I forgot. I have been competent all this semester, but there was the opportunity to be exceptional, to be inspired, and I squandered it in my indolence, my mind clouded by false concerns and intellectual diversions just engaging enough to hide the damage being done.

Just this afternoon while I mused upon life, I identified "a willingness to be alone" as the factor that separates the definitively ordinary from the potentially great. I then realized that in this semester, that was exactly where I was found wanting. I could, after a point, no longer sustain the mental focus that forms the basis of productive meditative solitude, and it became all too easy to find ways to be entertained and thus not have to think. Being alone induces a state of honesty and introspection that many people find abhorrent, and I - having conquered the daemons of self deceit - threw away for no reason the purity of mind earned over weeks of silent work and thought. I reached the very edge of genius and turned back, unable to maintain order and peace when they were most important.

Genius is a state of mind, and it is earned through sustained meditative work. If I dont get there in the next year or two, I will never get there. There is a definite window of opportunity, I know the path, I have but to walk it, my mind at peace and my voices silent.

I Sea.

The Giant Squid (genus Architeuthis) has been photographed alive in the wild only once (2004) and taken on video alive only once (2006), on both occasions by a Japanese expedition. Giant Squid are the stuff of countless maritime legends, but their existence has been scientifically confirmed only for a couple of centuries (in 1888 to be precise), and attempts to study them have been severely limited by their propensity to die as soon as they are captured. Most of the specimen studied are those that wash up on beaches and are thus in very bad shape. It was once thought that giant squid were primarily delicate drifters which just ate whatever happened to pass by. However, the photographs taken by the Japanese team (with the help of a baited hook) show much more robust and belligerent predatory behaviour.

To me, this raises some interesting issues. In any ecosystem predators tend to be more intelligent and capable of adaption than other animals. Surely, the fact that the Giant Squid is a predator (of a fairly aggressive sort too) means it might have a brain capacity greater than once thought. My speculation is of course, fueled by the fact that they have large and (even in death) disconcertingly conscious looking eyes, and their bodies look very much like the elongated shapes of super intelligent aliens one so often sees in charming sci-fi magazines (which seem to primarily come out of America. A population that has supported science fiction for 70 years cant be all bad !) and thus the whole effect begs the question, what sort of intelligence do Giant Squid possess ?

And it turns out that the brain of the squid is very large and complex and it has a very highly developed nervous system. But what really intrigues me, is that they might posses that faculty to which might be attributed all of human progress - curiosity. Again and again through history sailors have reported squid checking their ships out, even attacking them, far outside their zone of comfort which is deep cold waters. In fact, coming to the surface leaves them very vulnerable to attack by sperm whales (who the squid can only beat by preventing them from coming to the surface to breathe). But squid, more than any other deep sea creature (save the sharks perhaps, who will attack anything that moves) seem to have a fascination for human craft. The encounters of giant squid and human vessels have been well documented in recent years, and even if one discounts the legends (though they were right about the existence of the giant squid after all) there is surely a case to investigate further the cognitive capabilities of the giant squid. Furthermore, if we can be offended by the killing of whales (and everyone here in europe seems to be absolutely outraged by japan killing whales) then surely surely, we ought to extend the same concern to a creature who is certainly a worthy adversary to the whale, and might be just as intelligent. I would love to know the results of any tests that might be conducted on Giant squid in the wild in the future, and their response to various stimuli.

Something in their eyes tells me they're smarter than we think :-) Wikipedia, Youtube and Google yeild some interesting results on them Squid. and the Giant Squid is not the end..apparently there is something called "Colossal Squid" ! :-) I love the deep seas almost as much as space and they are so much more accessible and plausible too !

Surely one of the most fascinating things to explore in the deep sea are the extremophilic lifeforms that live there (and they have been caught on film in a visually stunning but otherwise mediocre documentary. What a waste ! the possibilities for that documentary were immense), under incredible pressures and near hydrothermal vents with superboiled water that cant evaporate due to the pressure. They prove that complex life forms can arise even in areas devoid of sunlight, drawing their energy from deep sea vents that spew sulphur and other compounds that are harvested by sulphur eating bacteria (which are also fairly common near volcanic vents) as well as other larger lifeforms and they fuel a food chain based on sulphur instead of oxygen. A whole new biology which has evolved independently of the rest of the world. And the volcanic vents are many times widely seperated making biological exchange between them impossible, so there might be (and probably are) many independently evolving ecosystems (planets for all practical purposes) under the sea ! When a vent shuts down (as must happen every once in a while) so does one entire ecosystem around it. The sea floor must be littered with them. Arthur C. Clarke envisioned this kind of life on Europa (I dont know if he was the first one) and speculated as to the evolution of intelligence in such circumstances. Why not ? It is a challenging and constantly evolving environment. But of course, any given vent might not last long enough for intelligence to evolve (but then again, who is to give Nature a time limit ?) and it has been speculated that Sulphur based metabolism is not efficient enough to sustain intelligent brains (but maybe our brains are energy inefficient, spoilt by the abundance of oxygen). It is certainly possible.

One does not even need to go deep into the sea to find extremophiles and species evolving seperately from our ecosystem. They can be found in caves, and the way troglobites have evolved, very obviously from terrestrial creatures that went into the caves and stayed there, and how different they now are, is surely a brilliant and dramatically clear illustration of evolution at work ! and america has some of the most remarkable caves. Take the evangelicals to the caves I say, and maybe they will see the light. And their world view is as backward as cavemen anyway. (okay okay, sorry, but I could not resist that) In the deep caves too one sees sulphur eating bacteria and a food chain that has them at its base, though its not as dramatic as the sea based ones. Here too, one sees different species in every cave ! thats evolution.

All this of course, goes some way to reassuring us of the tenacity of the phenomenon we call life, and increases our hopes of finding it somewhere nearby. And if some signs of tool making and intelligence - however rudimentary - were to be found somewhere deep in the sea, it would change the way we look at ourselves, and remind us of our transience. We will be lucky if someone finds the shells of what we once considered our achievements and wonders if they are signs of intelligence.

Let there be Light

I dont know how else to put it - I have been taken over by science. Physics and mathematics are all I seem to be able to talk about, my thoughts revolve around questions as arcane and arbit to most other people as they are delightful to me - questions about everyday life, and the world around us.....a common one, "How is a rainbow made ?" the answer to that is surprisingly intricate and pretty and hides some nice complexities in a particularly beautiful phenomenon. (wikipedia is quite good on this check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow) Another one, seen as almost trivial by many people is "why is the sky blue ?" that deals with rayleigh scattering, which is the simplest type of scattering and if you want to look deeper into scattering you quickly get into Raman scattering and Brillouin scattering and nonlinear optics (which is my bane this semester).....and then there is the small (and some would say pressing) matter of increasing the efficiency of solar cells and that question takes you to quantum dots, Excitons, and a maze of quantum mechanical equations and greek letters one will despair of ever figuring out (if you have the heart to read them at all).....if you study the subject of light (as I happen to do), you will come across many wonderful phenomena, photonic crystals, mirrors that dont invert left to right, amplifiers that are based on light diffracting off a diffraction grating made by light ! or sound !!!

It is an interesting thing, to stay in "middle europe" - a prosperous and gray city, a class filled to the brim with geniuses as well as arbit characters, a foreign land with a different language and to study light. There is something about light. Not only to man and his mind which pines for it but also in nature. It has been the key to EVERY major theory advanced in the last two hundred years, from maxwell's electromagnetism (which first gave us a clue as to what light "actually was" (if there is such a thing as "actually being") ) through relativity (the postulate about the speed of light being constant along with the postulate of relativity of motion yeilds the whole theory ! ) (and I have always wondered, "why light ? whats so special about the speed of light ? why that number ? does it follow from somewhere else ? why cant gravitational waves, (which (at least so far, as far as I know) are not connected to light) have a speed greater or less than the speed of light ?" and the refinements in understanding make it even less comprehensible, apparently, phase fronts can and very commonly do travel faster than light, but 'information' or 'wave groups' cant ! why ? what is information exactly ? what is the relationship between information and "order" (because surely they are related, I have studied information theory at college and dealt with the concept of 'entropy' but I do not know enough thermodynamics to relate the information theoretical concept of entropy with the thermodynamic one) and what has any of that to do with fundamental limits to speed ? questions questions questions ! but they convince me that light is central to our understanding of the universe and will continue to be so for some time.) and then of course there is quantum mechanics and its connection to light is so well documented that I wont put it down. As a matter of fact, it is convoluted and complicated and dare I say it, "messy" and at the same time is wildly accurate. The universe is strange and and beautiful and unfathomable. It constantly challenges our limited brains (to be fair to them, they evolved to maximize procreation and food intake in a world where everything that mattered was macroscopic and moved slowly so its a little unfair to expect them to be naturals at relativistic and quantum mechanical phenomena, as it is, they dont do too bad - after years of frustration and training :D ) and fills our pitiful imaginations and puny hearts with awe.

Reality is the most wonderful thing we have, and we are given a staggeringly short time to contemplate it, and it pains me to think that the majority of people waste this time being scared of it and forcing themselves and their children to believe crude, simplistic, stupid and harmful stories written by the worst kind of people living in sick societies thousands of years ago. They are arrogant enough to claim that they can explain not just the origin and the present state of the universe, but also its 'purpose'. I am so stunned by the sheer arrogance of it, that I cannot think of a good enough repartee. Anyone who has studied science knows.

I am still a lazy man, and dont study as much as I should, but then there is the universe to think about ! and I miss India and its teeming millions. Europe is a very beautiful place to be lonely in. Very gray in winter, and somewhat similar to that Island mountain in another dimension in "Grimus" by Rushdie.....you can only survive if you are passionate or obsessed about something. Unfortunately in my case, being passionate about something does not imply I work terribly hard for it :D