Playing with electrons

Is our earth a cosmic aberration? It’s a no-brainer. The fantasy about extra-terrestrials – little green men- coming from faraway planets and befriending us or mostly attacking us, has been in vogue for quite a while now. The number of Hollywood movies including blockbusters and flops alike dealing with this topic has been increasing phenomenally in the last few years, may be decades. The use of computer graphics interface or CGI has been able to make a more appealing or ‘realistic’ portrayal of catastrophic damage inflicted by nefarious aliens on earth. To the common man on earth, this kind of existence of an advanced extra-terrestrial civilization on an unknown planet is something he is not worried about, and of course, for him, it is difficult to ponder over 'what it really means’. Its existence ends at the movie theater; it no longer exists beyond the realm of science-fiction. Some scientists – we can call them astronomers, or may be ‘atrobiologists’ – seriously th...

[ As is always in any blog, the opinions expressed here are the blogger's (my!) personal opinions, and need not be correct .] Renowned scientist CNR Rao once rightfully commented that 'India missed the semiconductor revolution'. What does it mean ? And why is it worth writing about at all ? Well, India - as of now- does near state-of-the-art research in several key areas of science and technology including biosciences/biochemistry, mechanical engineering, metallurgy, drug/pharmacy sciences, mathematics & physics and not to speak of computer sciences. To my knowledge, in these areas, India stands almost at par with top institutes in the world in terms of cutting-edge research. For example, places like NCBS and TIFR carry out seminal work in several key areas of biosciences; JNCASR has top-class computational experts in material sciences; the erstwhile grad students at IIT-Kanpur came out with the path-breaking AKS algorithm (computer sciences) which shook place...

[ The following has been translated from a small part of an original article written in Assamese language by Homen Borgohain with the same title. The content and it's meanings are the author's; I am merely the translator with no change in meaning from the original. ] "Do you actually believe that with death, everything is completely finished for a human being? A person who sings hymns of the Upanishadas , a person who writes the Hamlet , a person who composes the fifth symphony - do all these people get diffused in the dust after their death? All about the immortality of soul which religions speak of - is it completely a luxury of human imagination?"  - I asked him. "I shall try to answer your questions in a rather skewed manner instead of directly answering", he replied. "Actually, as a matter of fact, I shall tell you the answers which I have received having asked your questions to myself repeatedly. ..... 'Death' is the greates...

 "What is the most resilient parasite in the world ? A bacteria ? A virus ? ... An idea.. highly resilient, highly contagious..." True, it's Inception - the movie that baffled one's senses last year, a movie where the viewer has to participate in it's story building process to decide or wonder at its end if that rotating top would stop spinning. The most captivating concept in that movie, to me, was the concept involving a dream inside a dream inside a dream inside a dream. God ! Four layers of dream ! That's unbelievable in real life. I mean, I have never come across any real world person claiming to have had experienced four layers of dream while sleeping. A couple of movie's dialogues however, were very catchy, for example "when you dream, you do not know that it is dream. You think that's reality.", and another one: "Time's slower in dream than in reality.". Well, let me keep the movie aside, for that wasn't my ...

Snippets from the past – I An unusual night (or late evening) Winter in Guwahati is not as bad as I have experienced in some other places where I have had the fortune/misfortune of staying. Guwahati is the biggest city in and houses the capital of, my native state Assam, a state that belongs to ‘north-east’ India although technically it lies far east in the map of India.   It’s a pretty big city though not certainly as big as other metropolitans in India like Delhi or Mumbai. Encased by valleys and hills all around, it is, or rather was beautiful, the ‘was’ replacing ‘is’ due to increasing man-induced disorder and dirt in the city which is so poorly overlooked by the administration. Guwahati serves as the gateway to the entire region of north-east India which is so isolated from the mainstream India, both geographically and otherwise. So although connectivity in various other regions of north-east India has been bettered to some extent over the years, yet Guwahati still serves ...

Sunset  Every time I take a walk on the streets in the late evening close to sunset, I become more convinced that life is worth living. Sunset has been my favorite between sunrise and sunset, of course, because every day I wake up late enough to miss the freshness of sunrise. So invariably, I am left with one option – the sunset. Ever since my high school days, I have always enjoyed a walk at sunset, and almost every evening, I make a conscious effort to take even a five minute walk close to sunset. Else, a sub-conscious feeling of suffocation lingers about me for the rest of the night. However, being far away from sea-shore or even from any big river or vast plain land, I do not literally see the sun kissing the horizon in the literal sense. It is the evening colors which the setting sun weave in the sky that I refer to as my ‘sunset experience’. A work-burdened day of course restricts me from taking my favorite evening walk. Back in Golaghat (Assam, India) which is where my pa...

It was a very cold and snowy day. There was this tall Indian guy walking beside me. A colleague of mine that he was, I kept talking to him more of course, than to the other really short stranger who was also walking beside me. The snow was really very bad on that particular early February noon in 2010, in Columbus, Ohio, with nothing but an all-enveloping, thick white blanket engulfing our boot-covered feet as we tried to put our steps forward slowly. I was very hungry, and hence I was not so enthused to drag my feet indefinitely along with my Indian colleague in an effort to help find a single bedroom apartment for this rather reserved and short Italian stranger who had arrived in Columbus, to become another colleague in our research group. With heavy boots and thick jackets around our bodies, it was really a pain to walk even a mile which seemed like a light year. The dense whitish snowy ambience mocked cruelly at the sun trying desperately to throw a beam of extremely faint ray no...