Passionately Curious

"I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious. "
-Albert Einstein


These days I am thinking a few things. And you know what? Today I've found that already some great men have thought about them!! So, here's a post with some quotations that will make it easy for me to express myself-


"Bear in mind that those who are finer and nobler are always alone — and necessarily so — and that because of this they can enjoy the purity of their own atmosphere.
I shake your hand in heartfelt comradeship, E."

He even spoke about 'paper whores'!
"Working on the final formulation of technological patents was a veritable blessing for me. It enforced many-sided thinking and also provided important stimuli to physical thought. [Academia] places a young person under a kind of compulsion to produce impressive quantities of scientific publications — a temptation to superficiality."

The most astonishing paragraph simply dumbfounded me. Because today after reading Newtons letter to the Royal Society I was thinking the exact same things!! Here it is,


"On the other hand, I maintain that the cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research. Only those who realize the immense efforts and, above all, the devotion without which pioneer work in theoretical science cannot be achieved are able to grasp the strength of the emotion out of which alone such work, remote as it is from the immediate realities of life, can issue. What a deep conviction of the rationality of the universe and what a yearning to understand, were it but a feeble reflection of the mind revealed in this world, Kepler and Newton must have had to enable them to spend years of solitary labor in disentangling the principles of celestial mechanics! Those whose acquaintance with scientific research is derived chiefly from its practical results easily develop a completely false notion of the mentality of the men who, surrounded by a skeptical world, have shown the way to kindred spirits scattered wide through the world and through the centuries. Only one who has devoted his life to similar ends can have a vivid realization of what has inspired these men and given them the strength to remain true to their purpose in spite of countless failures. It is cosmic religious feeling that gives a man such strength. A contemporary has said, not unjustly, that in this materialistic age of ours the serious scientific workers are the only profoundly religious people."

 And finally something that really touched me at this point of space-time ,

"Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."

Source Wikiquote

neuro-symbolic

This afternoon I was seating under a tree on a very nice bench facing the sea. From where I sit one can actually see the little black islands in the middle of the vast blue water and all the ships and boats shining in the dying sunlight. The sky was transforming into purple from greenish sky-blue. And I had this pleasant and very interesting reading material in my hand, titled- 'A neuro-symbolic hybrid intelligent architecture with applications'. Suddenly a cicada started to 'crick' at a very high pitch! I looked up and there was this cuckoo hiding in a branch...

And I was thinking, 'isn't it great that they are actually paying me for all these!'
This was 'the definition' of happiness in my mind!!

The steaming coffee mug with all its warmth actually asked me, 'aren't you happy?'
'Yes I am...'
:)

Play Hard...

There are birds that fly many hundred miles without a halt. Someone mentioned this to the cicada and the wren, who agreed that such a thing was impossible. 'You and I know very well', they said, 'that the farthest one can ever get even by the most tremendous effort is that elm-tree; and even this one cannot be sure of reaching every time. Often one finds oneself dragged back to earth long before one gets there. All these stories about flying hundreds of miles at a stretch are sheer nonsense.'

Now, that was a classic story. What we learn from it, will be an exercise problem. But here I have a different story to tell. At Singapore all these Chinese type(Mongoloid-Asian) people they really walk very fast. Most of them simply run! Sometimes, when I go for the bust stop I find someone just running to the stoppage. At first I used to wonder 'Why is this moron running so fast? The bus is not even there’. So, after slowly reaching there I find him still panting, give him a smirk and when the bus arrives just get on it together. I win! (Or, do I?)

But then comes the revelation! Every now and then I find that I am just 30 paces behind; there comes the bus, the running guy gets on it and says me sayonara. He wins! And the rate is alarmingly around 2 out of 10.

So, now I stop and reflect. You see, even if I go running still I might lose a bus by being just 30 paces behind. But at least I could say, ‘I couldn’t have made it anyway. No regrets!’ But when I go slow, and the Japanese/Chinese guy says me sayonara. I actually start to regret! I say, ‘I wish I had started faster a bit early.’

Observation, the china man didn’t know whether there will be a bus just when he reaches the stoppage. Still he is not slowing down. And managing to win 20% of the time! And when I win (!), I actually be just equal to him (we get on the bus together). Given all the unbelievable things human being has achieved, 0.2 is a huge winning chance which you cannot just give away.

Moral of the story: Play Hard!

 

Exercise:
1.    What do you learn from the story of cicada and wren? Does it help?
2.    Is ‘sayonara’ a Japanese or Chinese word?
3.    This is a mathematically intriguing problem about the bus story. So follow carefully- As I don’t know when the bus will arrive, it is always possible that just 30 paces before reaching the stop the bus arrives and leaves me. I mean, if the distribution of bus arrival is same, no matter how first I am walking I will have the same number of hit and miss scenario. Then at the beginning why should I walk fast to bus stoppage?
4.    What is the thing that qualifies this blog to be included in this scientific blog listing?

The price to be paid...

One of the most impressive discoveries was the origin of the energy of the stars that makes them continue to burn. One of the men who discovered this was out with his girl friend the night after he realized that nuclear reactions must be going on in the stars in order to make them shine. She said "Look at how pretty the stars shine!" He said "Yes, and right now I am the only man in the world who knows why they shine." She merely laughed at him. She was not impressed with being out with the only man who, at that moment, knew why stars shine. Well, it is sad to be alone, but that is the way it is in this world. -Feynman

Scientific endeavor is a lonesome process. If you are not satisfied with the excitement of the probability of finding new things (yes, you might not find anything new! But of course you can learn new things) maybe you are at the wrong end of the world. You simply need to disregard a lot of social things. Those who are close must accept your inner loneliness.

Exercise:
1. What is the type of reaction in stars?
2. Do you really find mathematics beautiful? What makes math/science interesting to you?
3. If you have the same reaction from your girlfriend about the reaction in the stars what would be your reaction? [place yourself in that poor scientists position]
4. Do you feel that ‘you would rather be lonely than be around some fools’? If 'yes', why it is not ‘arrogant’? If 'no', why fools are important?

Mind Building

“Of course, there's only a finite rate at which material can be absorbed by human mind, yet we disregard that phenomenon, and in spite of it we go too fast. So, I think I'll just go along slowly, and see how far we get.” –Feynman

Today I looked back and found that, the very few things I remember are exactly those things which I have used to solve some problem!

Sometimes we need to learn in a huge volume. What we do is we put a substantial amount of effort to understand those things but spare the exercise! And that’s where we lose.

Look at the legend of Knuth. He has written ‘The Art of Computer Programming’ it is kind of a voluminous literature survey. But actually it is far more than that. If you look carefully you will see that each chapter contains exercises! Those exercises are mostly created by Knuth himself. Solved, rated, organized and solutions were appended at the end of the book.

Now, do you see how much there is to be done before even to say to yourself that ‘yes, I have learned it’. Same observation works for any other ‘Legendary Genius’. Gauss believed, what you cannot use to solve problems is useless. We can always argue about this for long time but look at the attitude of these great men.

Learn Thoroughly, Solve some exercise, Make some problem for your own, Try to contribute them to that book, and then say, ‘I can do it’.

The equation is simple,
You haven’t solved any problem = You have learned nothing. [It always works]

I mean I have gone through this Kama Sutra thing a few times. Frankly speaking I don't remember a single position except the very obvious ones. Same story for all the mathematics I have learned.

Exercise:
1. In what situation we actually need to cover a huge material in a very short time?
2. Do you think trying to create some practice problem for yourself would require a lot of creativity?
3. Name a few Kama Sutra positions.
4. Write down the most complicated mathematical formula(at least describe it) that you have actually used to solve some problem.

Simply Everything I wanted to be!

From Wikipedia-
"Stephen Wolfram (born 29 August 1959 in London) is a British physicist, software developer, mathematician, computer programmer, author and businessman, known for his work in theoretical particle physics, cosmology, cellular automata, complexity theory, computer algebra and the Wolfram Alpha computational knowledge engine..."

Read More Here

Are you on the cutting-edge?

Think about the expert on analog computers who found his world was taken over by digital computers. Think about the electrical engineer with a PhD about vacuum tube technology at the verge of the invention of transistors! Yes, very soon the world will see another such change. Mark your position on it.

Confidence

Confidence must be earned daily, at a ‘hand to mouth’ basis. It doesn’t mean anything if served cold. So, if you are confident because you have done this-this and so-so a long time ago, throw it into the trash. It isn’t doing anything good to you, and it's smelling bad. Believe me, it’s smelling really very bad.

Earn some afresh.

Knowledge Liquidity and Inertial Guidance System

You might be wondering, how does these two even relate? Actually there is a story (or should we say history). Once upon a time I was reading this article on general relativity in some scientific magazine. It was about how Einstein could come up with this idea. And it had the description of some of his thought experiments. As a student from Bangladesh, where most of the experiment actually we do with this single apparatus called ‘mind’, I am very much in a habit of these sort of thought experiments. So, I said to myself, “Here is a thought experiment! We should have more of these Einstein guys here, because this is what we specialize in! It must be fun.” And there it goes-

A guy is standing on top of the North Pole with a gyroscope in his hand. Another fellow is standing somewhere on equator with a gyroscope in the right hand and another gyroscope in the left hand. Once the first guy puts lifts his gyroscope over his head and the next time the second guy is doing some wired maneuver with his two gyroscopes and so and so…

I said,”wait wait! What the hell is the ‘Gyroscope’! I have never seen it; even our physics book didn’t mention it ever!” To cut the long story short. There and then I felt the peril of being in a poor country. Yes, all the credit goes to the poverty, but now I am not going into that.

And after that, every now and then I hear about this gyro-thing. In ‘Wings of Fire’ by A.P.J Abdul Kalam, in some article about the navigation system of rocket and submarines, in helicopters, aircrafts, even in some auto image-stabilizing cameras, there is gyroscope!

So, just three years ago I had this hard time with gyroscopes. Even the Wikipedia article was of at most 15 lines! But now, another ‘thought experimenter’ can simply see gyroscope in action on YouTube, read all the theory on Wikipedia or any other site. And simply know that, it’s all about the conservation of angular momentum. The liquidity of knowledge increased indeed!

Now, here is an interesting note about angular momentum. At the level of quantum mechanics it is quantized! I mean an electron cannot just have any momentum. The momentum has to be some integral multiple of h over 2 pi. For the illustration purpose, say you are a spin baller (cricket). Now if the ball was a quantum scale object, which it is not, you would not spin it at any arbitrary rotation. It would have to be some integral multiple of some constant! Now, we are familiar with the concept of resolution. I mean of course you cannot even make a ball of arbitrary size. It has to be some integral multiple of atoms/molecules. In that sense the momentum also cannot be just any value!

As if, Mother Nature is doing this simulation with our existence on a digital computer with a finite precision. I mean, if you had to represent the momentum of cricket ball in a computer register your precision would be limited by the number of bits of that machine! Surprisingly, nature also has this limitation of finite resolution. So, the tag line is, ‘even if you have a very big cricket ball, you cannot just spin it with ‘any’ momentum. There is this natural limit of the ‘resolution’. As a result it is kind of easy for computer science guys to feel the essence of the discrete nature of quantum mechanics (or, we should say ‘the discrete nature of nature itself’). Much of the advancement of the ‘theory of computation’ was due to the struggle of scientists for understanding this sort of ‘quantization’ (which is ’digitization’ on the ‘nature machine’).


*I hope to write a sort of technical review of this quantum nature for ‘non technical persons’ very soon. And there is this other topic about Reversible Computing and Energy of computation. Oh, I wish I had more time…. :(

Me and My Research (part 1)

Once upon a time when I was a child I read this book named “Mathematics the art of reasoning” by William P. Berlinghoff. (I am not sure about the author’s name though!) It was a very slim book; hard covered; didn’t take much time to finish. It dealt with the axiomatic approach of reasoning. There I learned this fascinating truth about mathematics;

“You can create your own mathematical system!”

Like there is Euclidian geometry and there is Non-Euclidian geometry, Abelian groups and non-Abelian groups… so, like Euclid and Abel you can also create a mathematical system and play with it. (Of course, it might not be as useful as those by Euclid or Abel, or who knows it might be better!) The trick is to fix up some axioms. Like Euclid’s geometry had 5 axioms and Abel’s groups had this additional axiom of Commutativity.

You create as many axioms as you want, there’s no limit, and then you just do this consistency check to ensure that one of you axiom don’t contradict another! And there you go. You have your own tool for reasoning. Any new reasoning about your system must comply with these initial set of axioms.

And we all know that one have to be very careful about what he teaches to a child, because the psychological effect of that teaching is not 'undoable'. So, here I am; a person who has this huge ‘thing’ for mathematical reasoning! I mean for a reasonable conversation with anyone, before going to any ‘reasoning step’, I have to make sure what the axioms are. I mean first I have to check the consistency of the things taken ‘granted’. No matter how crazy it is, if it doesn’t contradict itself, it’s mathematical! And we can have a fun time working with (maybe, talking about) it.

Actually, by talking about all these things I am trying to create the axiomatic basis of my future discussions. I think we have had enough digression. Let’s start out talk on research:

Richard Hamming one of the greatest minds of our time has given this lecture about 'research'. It actually centered on the idea of what sort or problems to attack, how to know I am doing something important. And he actually described how he himself could end up doing something important! And in the process he pointed out “the difference between those who do and those who might have done.” You should check it out if you missed it up to this point in space-time!

[To be continued]
* I am taking this tea break to read the Hamming lecture again for myself.

Man From Yesterday

I am a man from the previous century. And here I am at the new point of space-time feeling uninvited. I have already lived the better half of my youth, and yet I don’t have a single contribution to this world. Yes, this new world is created by fellow men from our century but I was not among them.

Not a single thing I see around me is my contribution. I never even planted a tree. I do things that have not enlightened a single virgin soul. I did not find anything new about the nature, about reasoning, about anything. I didn’t contribute to the ‘Collective Intelligence’ of our kind. I cannot point to anything and say, “here is a thing, I understand better than most of you.” My knowledge is inappropriate, useless and incomplete… And I don’t even work honestly for betterment

I wish I could be an honest person. I wish…

Context sensitive cognitive process and Strong Form of Mathematical Induction

The very core of our perception is context sensitive. And we the believer of physical model of ‘the human’ and of course the believer of mathematics, can ask a question about this. [Before asking the question let me clarify one thing. That is the ‘belief’ part of mathematics. Yes, we have to believe in it! I mean if you say you are an advocate of mathematical reasoning and you don’t believe the Dedekind–Peano axioms, then ask your self: “actually, who are you bullshitting?” Ok, I understand here ‘believe’ is not like that religious beliefs. It’s fare more ‘cleaner’ and so-so…]

Now if you want a very interesting insight about the context sensitiveness of our cognitive process and its relation to perception you might like to watch this TED Lecture. here.

Ok, back to the point. We see that what we perceive, very much depends on the contexts of our observation and on the history of our perception about those contexts. So, previously when those ‘contexts’ were the subject of our observation, we had to learn it using our previous experience with some ancestral contexts. This way up to the very beginning of our existence we can build an ancestry of contexts!

And here comes the Strong Form of Mathematical Induction. And we ask, “Where is the base case?” Without a base case we can always prove “All horses are of the same color!” But in reality there are horses of many color and most of all, ‘we exist’! So, in the very beginning there must be some pre-installed ‘perception’, standing on which we start ‘perceiving and understanding’ everything.

Now, I give you the homework. Ask the question.:)

Lost Moments of Glory!

Does it happen to you too?
I have this habit of learning various seemingly irrelevant things. And the funny part is, whenever I learn a new thing there comes a chance to use it! It started long time ago. But I noticed it after studying Group Theory. The day I finished the book, there came this mail about finding the modulus for an interesting hash function. And 'tat-ta' here comes group theory!

Now, the sad part of the story lies elsewhere. Sometime, without any earthly reason I pick up some book (If you don't count 'fun' as an earthly reason), start reading it, and then just stop reading! Again for no reason. And inevitably there comes this situation where it is almost essential to know what that book said!

These days I am encountering the second situation frequently. I have this book on DFT for one month now and I have just gone through the introductory chapter where they say all the good thing you can do with DFTs but I just didn't go thrugh it. Now here came a chance to use som2 DFT, but I am not ready!

Again, and again....
I wish I could kick myself.

So here's a new vow:
 "I will not put down another book that I pick up for fun, unless I reach the end flap"

A love affair with Quantum Mechanics!

Yes, I fell in love with quantum mechanics. Surprisingly, I fell because I didn't understand it! As Feynman says: "... And, like falling in love with a woman, it is only possible if you do not know much about her, so you cannot see her faults. The faults will become apparent later, but after the love is strong enough to hold you to her. So, I was held to this theory, in spite of all difficulties, by my youthful enthusiasm."

Quantum Mechanical Computers

The previous lecture ended with the line, "...So, in 2050, or before, we may have computers that we can't even see! I will return to these strange bests in the next chapter."

So, here I am at the next lecture, Quantum Mechanical Computers. The last lecture about thermodynamics of information and reversible computers was quite a delight. Dick Feynman, this man teaches not science rather he teaches how to live a life.

For a long long time I am hearing a lot of things about these, as Feynman puts it, 'strange beasts'. Lets see what the guru has to say about it.

I have got a nice can of Jasmine Tea!
And again, what can be a better company for a delightful journey into the world of quantum computers with Dick Feynman?

Preface and ...

Oath: Every now and then I'll have an entry here.

For a long long time I have been thinking about this blog. Just to organize my thought about some interesting things. Very interesting things.

I will change the preface later.
Now, I don't have time.
So,
Sayonara!