My visit to NCBS

I spent a most amazing day yesterday at the nearby National Centre for Biological Sciences which is in the GKVK campus. It was the first time that I had really entered the institution for any length of time, although I had once been there on a social occasion over 2 years ago, and met other delegates at the conference whose social event I had been invited for, and once about 20 years ago, from the outside. It was established by the famous Obadi Siddiqi, about whom I had written in the context of his famous advisor Guido Pontecorvo, brother of the equally famous physicist Bruno, known for his mixing matrix of neutrinos and one who had defected to the Soviet Union after learning physics from Fermi, and the brother of the movie maker Gillo, the maker of the Battle of Algiers. I had also been to the conference centre in Pisa which earlier used to belong to their wealthy family as a factory for garments, if I am not mistaken. Among other highlights of my visit, was a 20 minute visit to the archives that store the papers of Siddiqi and many other important archival material, something so unusual that it merits an award for its own sake. I was invited by the Manager, Academic Collaborations and Events, a young person Vaishnavi Sridhar who make impeccable arrangements, and my host was Varadharajan Sundararaman, an expert on various diseases that he is trying to unravel at the level of cell-biology, and is himself an IISc alumnus. As someone who knows almost no biology it was a sobering experience listening to the expertise of the persons there. At lunch I was joined by my old friend Madan Rao who has been there for decades, indeed as I have been in IISc for decades and Shashi Thutupalli, a physicist who now does biology, and he was telling me about his astonishing interest in how life may have started on earth and his experiments and also his recollections on prior experiments in India and in the world. It was an astonishing set of interactions, and also crowned by a visit to the lab or Ranabir Das, who had been a student in my particle physics class in 2000, who did his Ph. D. in NMR and then learned biology during his post-doc years at the NIH and has just been promoted to professor. NCBS is a piece of heaven, and all this was before my own 70 minute talk on the Joy of Discovery as usual. Thanks to Varadha, I also now realize that Discovery of Joy is equally important. Thank you everyone. Thank you world. Thank you Universe for this.

And so a former Facebook friend, who has now graduated to being a real friend is Dr. Aritra Chatterjee. I met him in Hyderabad on Sunday, when he came down to meet me in Jubilee Hills at the residence of my late parents, and we then went to the Jubilee Hills International Centre to relax and talk in the lounge, over an Americano. Part of the agenda was related to a request from Aritra for a conversation and a meeting to discuss how to navigate his way through academia when we were conversing on FB messenger. So we seized the opportunity to meet and I noted down my precious words of advice, which I thought I should share with the rest of the world, because if there is a meteor strike and I vapourize, my gyaan would not be available to the world, unless Aritra would share it. Broadly speaking I noted down about 15+ points which I will now share with the world, which will be a changed place after this (avant et apres), but I digress. So hold your breath.

1. The importance of working hard cannot be understated (not the Importance of Being Earnest which is a play by Oscar Wilde, I guess but is not relevant, as in the stories of Stephen Leacock, where one begins with it was a cold and stormy night on the west coast of Ireland but it is not relevant since our story takes place on the east coast of Scotland, or something along those lines).

2. The importance of time management.

3. A famous, now retired eminent professor, would say that he would get up at 4 am to work. Not everyone can do that, but the advantage of that would be you get a couple of hours of freshness to yourself and to your work without distraction.

4. Develop good work habits.

5. Keep a diary and note down what you did every single day.

(An office mate in UD, Sean Oughton who used to be around on FB had exemplary word habits, and he would note down at the end of day what he did, and would file away every single paper he had photocopied and give it a tag and make an entry in a file so that when he wrote a paper in latex, he had a bibtex entry ready. An exemplar, but almost impossible to mimic).

6. Never play down your own ideas. No need to think that only others have good ideas and that you don't. And if you have good ideas, work them out to completion. A piece of advice given to me by my own thesis advisor Qaisar Shafi whose significant other Monika Shafi often reads my posts.

7. According to a late professor who talked to me over 30 years ago, when asked what research is, Michael Faraday is supposed to have said, work, finish, publish.

8. IMHO publishing is important because it gives you discipline and forces you to organize your thoughts and your work and also is a `deliverable' and is a good insurance policy against detractors. Of course you run the risk of being called a paper churner, but you have to live with that.

9. Obviously teaching is important. Keep meticulous notes and publish them, because you never know who might find them useful. Also it is something you will find useful if you have to teach the same course again and again.

10. Try to find a good publisher for your books. My friend Swati Meherishi across at Springer told me once that Indian students like books by Indian authors. Never quite understood why, but a publisher knows better than I do.

11. If you are an experimentalist, get your lab going asap, and generate data and organize it and work very hard to get it going.

12. Obviously getting funds for your research is very important. Leave no stone unturned.

13. In whichever city you are in, try and find others in the field and try to discuss and collaborate. Do not become isolated.

14. Organize small workshops and seminars at 0 cost. It has immeasurable value.

15. Involve students in your own teaching and research. Of course they are young, but they will enrich you.

I must also add that very few of these pieces of advice are those that I have applied to myself, because I am not very organized. But that is life. I would also advocate the pommodoro method for good work habits, if you are keen on it.

A very useful resource is You and Your Research by Richard Hamming. I found it very influential when it came to myself. I should not say which part, but it has many parts and different people may find different parts useful.

I guess I should relish my senior citizen status since people come to me for such gyaan and advice. It should be borne in mind that I am not a particularly distinguished nor is my career really exemplary. But I do admit it could have been worse.

`Veena's dreams'

Veena had never seen a krait but she had seen a young cobra, a fully grown Russell viper and plenty of rat snakes. And rats! The city produces plenty of garbage to keep the cycle of life going. She was hurrying `home' a hole in the wall in that City of Dreams, that some called Maximal City. She had seen snakes too, when she was a child. Growing up between emerald fields of paddy, and gently swaying coconut trees of faraway Tamil Nadu. She remembered the days when her father took her on his cycle to `school' in a uniform. She remembered the carefree days or hiding between those trees and playing with her friends. Her grandmother bent over with the weight of life. Mother struggling to keep the family going. They told her you will do well. Get an education. You will go to the great city. A city that has neighbourhoods with names like Versova and Ghatkopar and Saki-Naka, and Mahalakshmi! That was a surprise for her. The name that she liked most was Andheri, which was close to the work `andhera' that she would learn later, which meant darkness, which would envelop her and take her to momentary relief from the cares of the world. It had to happen because there were no jobs for youth in her `native' place and all the young men would set off to the `Gelf' or to Bombay or to Delhi or Hyderabad or Bangalore. Her parents found her this fine young man in Bombay, and they said it will be a match made in heaven. She could not even remember when it was. Here in Bombay she soon learned to use the local trains. Across in far-away Malabar Hill she found a job. Her services as a clean and reliable cook were considered priceless. Her honesty made it particularly useful for her employers who could entrust the house keys to her while they set off on their busy schedules. Today she would catch the local at 7 pm from Churchgate Station, after hurrying past all the vendors and hawkers, past the banyan trees that cast their branches and their dangling roots on the footpaths and the pavements, past Flora Fountain. She looked into the window pane of one of the glitzy shops that had jewellery. And yet she could see her own reflection. She too was pretty once. Her hair too was black once. On her brow were etched fine lines, one for each worry in life, like a finger-print which a divine palmist would have been able to read. The heat and humidity had left their mark. As she hurried along, one of the straps of her `hawai' chappal broke, but have no fear. She found a shoe-repair store and in the 5 minutes he took to replace them, she got a moment to relax. She looked out and said to herself I have worked very hard today. Maybe, just maybe, today I will indulge myself. Do I deserve a treat? Will it be a needless luxury? Can I be so selfish. She broke down and did it! She got herself a coconut water for twenty rupees. It would weigh on her conscience, but she was willing to take the risk. She had great plans for the little ones. The older one finally got a break. He was off to the `Gelf' like so many others. He would be a driver there. He would send back some money. Veena was looking forward to it. She would use some of it to go back home. It would be an amazing train ride. When she would get over 36 hours to do nothing except to sit, and day dream and look at the countryside pass by. And she would look for the snakes from her childhood. But no garbage though. She was done with garbage for this lifetime.

Written transcript of talk given to Class X students at St. Paul's High School, 28th November, 2022

Good morning. I would like to begin by thanking Mazher Ali Ahmed saab and Brother Sudhakar Reddy for giving me this opportunity to be here, a good 44 years after I left the corridors and grounds of this great school. I never thought I would ever be here to thank the school and the teachers for having made me what I am today. While this is a great honor, it is also a great responsibility and I wonder what I will say this morning that will make a mark on young minds. I must first and foremost say that I am still the child that I was in those formative years as a child. As Picasso said, as a child I used to paint as a grown-up, and as an adult I have tried all my life to paint like a child. It is a child that is imbued with curiosity about the world, and is filled with a wonder and an urge to know what is what. Every color, every sound, every smell is new and wondrous. To a child every adult is a repository of knowledge, or experience and of learning. In the field in which I work, it turns out that every stage one relives the experience of the child. To me this is the greatest aspect of being in the field of research and science about which I have been charged with the responsibility to speak to you about. In the era of YouTube (the CEO of which Susan Wojicki by the way is the daughter of a particle physicist Stanley) and of TedX talks, what is one more talk? Why one more? Why here? Mazher Ahmed saab asked me if I would need some projection facilities and declined. I learnt from Patrick Winston a professor from MIT who gave several talks on how to give talks has emphasized, and ever since I first heard him, it became obvious that we have only one language processor. If you are seeing and reading something, you do not hear the speaker, and vice versa. That is why today I decided that if I am to make a mark on you, it is only through the auditory channel. Of course you will watch me and my every gesture and every nuance, and I hope that you will take something away, indeed as I did of my famous teachers in the school and I should name Rasool Sir, Krishnamurthy Sir, Irene teacher, Sakina teacher to name a few. My visual impressions are the strongest, and I can even see my mother talking to Brother Stanislaus about 50 years ago.

A friend of mine who works in the publishing industry in Delhi told me that Indian students like to read even technical books written by Indian authors. This struck me as something unusual, or something that I had not thought of. I think she meant that the way in which the turn of phrase takes place, or the way and example is brought out is also culture dependent. I know for a fact that our students like to have many steps worked out, and also like explicit demonstration. Every culture has its own style. For instance American books have a lot of diagrams and drawings, and different sub-topics in boxes. If this is the case for something that is inanimate like a book, then what about a talk? A motivational speech? It is of course an untested hypothesis, but I would imagine that looking at me and hearing me would be qualitatively different from watching a lecture by a famous American or European scientist talking about his or her experiences about a life in science. A lot is said about role models. In the context of role models for women, it is said that you can only be what you can see. Surely this must also be true for regional, national, cultural categories. It is often the case that role models that are presented or held up are remarkable persons, indeed some extraordinarily singular persons like, e.g., Srinivasa Ramanujan, or C V Raman or Satyendra Nath Bose, who are persons from another era, and another time. Others include great institution builders like Homi Bhabha or Vikram Sarabhai, but that was from an era when India was a young country. An individual at the cross-roads of history would make a huge difference. That is also the case for legendary persons such as Richard Feynman or Robert Oppenheimer, who were charismatic and also had their destinies tied up with that of the world itself, having been tempered in the crucible of history. What about the normal and the ordinary? My mission therefore is to offer a few words in this direction as to what a career in science and research and teaching, both of which are inextricably tied up together.

I do not need to offer a definition of science here. We all know what science is. Is the human effort to come to terms with the world around us. To find out the relationship between cause and effect, with rigor and reproducibility at the core and heart of it. It is to find a precise language independent of the era or the place, which is universal. Modern science as we know it probably came into being in the last few centuries. Empirical science is as old as civilization itself, the latter founded on the taming of nature, to find out the pattern to the cycles of nature, to put natural forces to the service of human beings. From the rise and fall of the tides to the prediction of rains or to the annual flooding of the Nile, to the making of Wootz steel and Chola Bronzes, art and civilization have gone hand in hand with science. It is on the one hand a great co-operative effort of civilizations themselves, and that of the individual striving on the other. While there is a dance between the needs and impulses and urges of individuals and the harmonizing of the needs of the general vs. that of the individual, history has marched on.

Today, science is an international enterprise. Large science projects from the human genome project to alpha-fold, or the Large Hadron Collider or the LIGO have teams of hundreds if not thousands of scientists. And yet we do know that ideas from individual trailblazers cannot be under emphasized. How is a young person to prepare and train herself or himself for this noble endeavor? It also has to be kept in mind that science is probably like a marathon to be run like a sprint or sprinting a marathon. There are innumerable pressures of competition and rat-race which is a feature of advanced capitalist society. There is little substitute for hard work and concentration, and persistence and perseverance. The rewards are the joy of discovery, that Eureka moment for which one may have to wait a lifetime. The process of scientific work requires a great deal of knowledge, assimilation, analysis and synthesis. Henri Poincare is said to have spoken of his Eureka moment, and so has Albert Einstein. Psychology of creativity has rested on 4 important milestones of preparation, incubation, illumination and verification, which clearly have nothing to do with a given individual, culture, era or national or any other kind of category.

My purpose in being here is to talk a little about what makes a voyage possible for someone from India and what are the life-experiences. While it is impossible to be anything but anecdotal, it seems to me that the life-forces that shape us are our birth-families and the cultures of the cities and towns in which we are born, about whether or not there is exposure to a culture of science and knowledge, in addition to abilities of individuals, at e.g., problem solving, and whether or not there is access to life-influences like peer groups, the educational institutions to which go, the kinds of teachers we have, the availability of books and libraries. I cannot understate the importance that these have had on my life. In my being here I offer myself as an example of someone who has had a life in science, albeit of a rather esoteric and technical type, where there is little I can share with a non-specialist except to say that my work has used mathematics, field theory, and physical models to try to improve our basic understanding of sub-nuclear phenomena, from the determination of the analog of the electric charge of the strong interactions, the lifetime of certain unstable particles, the search for patterns among the masses of elementary particles, deploying of tools to improve the knowledge of scattering processes, and finally to solve problems of evaluation of integrals that arise in general settings, but also make an appearance in physical problems. Each day that I work in this field I feel that I have learnt a little bit more. Whereas the human experience is often a little frustrating, it can also be elevating. Like it is in every sphere of human life.

What I can say is that even today, I feel like a child in the sense that I feel I still don't know anything and like after every class in school I felt I knew a bit more, I feel that way after every little I effort. Of course, the cycle must go on. We educate others, the way we were educated in this great temple of learning and it is once again an honor for me to be here. I hope that every one of you will take away a little bit and I hope that this half-hour will make a difference to your life. I thank every one of you.

Open Letter to Amy Wax

Dear Prof. Dr. Amy Wax,

I bring your greetings from a shit-hole country. You seem to have had a run-in with some Indian doctors, especially women and brahmin women to boot, who could not live up to their potential in the shit-hole country of their origin. And as a result they are frustrated and come to your country and complain about it. Your frustration at their behaviour is understandable, especially because you are proud of a country with over-sized achievements. More precisely it is not the country per se, but that of white people who founded the country, because your narrative seems to suggest that others who are also citizens of your country such as blacks and Asians, according to you are jealous of the oversized achievements of whites only, and not that of the country. This is also understandable, since your oversized achievements include a lot of activities such as nuclear weapons, of which two were tried out on civilian populations in Japan, and during the war Americans of Japanese origin were interned. Other oversized achievements clearly include your 101st Airborne and the 7th Fleet and the USS George Bush and thousands of war-heads and thousands of non-nuclear warheads such as daisy cutters and other less potent ones such as tomahawks and hundreds of thousands of mines that can be used in maritime warfare. More recently the outsized achievements also include thousands of drones and hundreds of F-16 fighter-craft with which you maintain Pax Americana, except that it is not Pax but more like micro- and medium-sized wars all over the world. Oversized cities like New York used the labour of indigenous Indians who apparently were not afraid of heights. Other shit-hole residents who were rotting in Africa were brought to your land to work on your plantations and your cities. The legend is that they had to be brought in chains. That is not true. It is those who could not be brought on ships who had to be chained in their countries because they were trying to scramble on to the ships that were leaving Dakar for the Americas. Your anguish is understandable. After all your parents or forefathers and members of your community were harassed, persecuted and many of them were exterminated, and it is only America that gave your refuge, and hence your loyalty to its institutions is natural. Your oversized achievements could include investments in eradication of disease and poverty, and in actually bringing genuine peace to the world and create a more humane order. I believe you live in Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, named after William Penn and has a certain wonderful natural air to the name, evoking images of forests and springs and rivers and streams. On the very day you described my country as a shit-hole, a disgruntled gentleman attacked harmless passengers in a subway in the Big Apple, aka New York city with canisters of smoke and high powered assault weapons, and it is a wonder that no one died, although half a dozen were critically injured. In a superior culture and country like yours, with oversized achievements (sorry I should emphasize that these are achievements of white people, because you also said that blacks are jealous and bitter about .their not being able to participate in the bountiful oversized table), it is only natural that people should carry oversized arms with oversized ammunition, which are normally tried out on people of inferior cultures such as in Iraq, Afghanistan, including depleted uranium shells and daisy cutters in the Tora Bora caves, but sometimes these things happen. I understand that this time the person of interest, was a black man, although for reasons unknown most shooters happen to be white. This should represent a paradox for your theory because white people are not bitter and jealous. But I should not question too much. Oversized weapons and smoke canisters are good for business. The NRA has often said guns do not kill people, but people kill people. I agree. I am pleased that an Ivy League University of yore has people such as yourselves on their distinguished faculty. It must fill students of colour and of other ethnicities with great confidence because for the first time they have been told in no unclear terms how lucky they are to have been able to flee from their countries of (shit-hole) origin. It seems that this phrase was already used for African countries by one of your former Presidents. I am glad that my country is now included in this. Together, we from India and they from Africa will now unite and together we will deal with our shittiness. I thank you for educating us and we did not even have to pay for it. And before I stop, I would like to suggest for your bed-time reading an article by late President Fidel Castro entitled `the Brain Drain' which is carried on voltairnet.org . It tells you how your oversized achievements have been underwritten by the sweat and blood of tax-payers from shit-hole countries. The best thing I like about Castro was that he when he retired, his brother Raoul took over as President. This meant that crossword clues "Cuban President" did not have to be changed. But I digress. I wish you well and take care and have a nice Easter break.

Regards, A s-h country resident.

Regarding the Meera Memorial Medal

Part of a letter I wrote to a student who was awarded the Kum. L. A. Meera Medal awarded to the best I. Ph. D. student at IISc, based on the grades in their first few semesters. It was instituted in IISc, where Meera had attended a summer school or two, by the Kum. L. A. Meera Meera Memorial Trust in Palghat, founded by late Shri L. K. Ananthakrishnan, the father of Meera.

``Meera was my friend. Couple of years senior to me. She did a Masters in Computer Science in IITM when I was in B. Tech. After my B. Tech I joined IMSc in Jan. or Feb. 1985 for Ph. D. programme. She also was selected. By June I had decided my background was not good enough to go straight for a Ph. D. and so I accepted the offer from U. Delaware. In the meantime, Meera had an offer from U. Pennsylvania. It turned out that Newark, DE was only about 50 or 60 miles away and I met her in Philadelphia once or twice. She even made a meal for me in her Graduate Towers. After the Thanksgiving break in November I got a call from the police saying that there had been a break-in and that she had been killed in a random crime. They called me because my number was in the telephone bill, and wanted to know who the nearest of kin were. A couple of years later I was called to testify in a lawyer's chamber about the events. Her father had an out of court settlement with U Penn and then with the funds set up a Memorial Trust. Much later I was inducted to the Board of Trustees. I worked for the trust for many years, organizing lectures, schools, etc. But after I became Chair, I could not do it any longer. I imagine their charitable work continues.''

The life and scientific work of Steven Weinberg (a proposed op-ed)

STEVEN WEINBERG (1933-2021) NOBEL LAUREATE (1979) AND PHYSICIST EXTRAORDINAIRE

Nobel Prize winning physicist and one of the most influential theoretical physicists of the twentieth century Steven Weinberg passed in July 23, 2021 in Austin, Texas, where he had been professor of physics and founder of the theoretical physics department at the University of Texas, Austin. Weinberg shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in physics with Sheldon Glashow and Abdus Salam for their construction of the unified electro-weak theory of the weak and electromagnetic interactions. Their work was associated with the correct identification of the mathematical structure of the underlying symmetries governing these interactions, and the incorporation of the Higgs mechanism into their model that would make the force carriers massive, and the mixing between them, which is characterised by the `Weinberg angle’.

Weinberg was born on May 3, 1933 in New York City and studied at the Bronx High School of Science, a school that produced a large number of gifted student of science. Glashow and Weinberg were from the same graduating class. Weinberg obtained his undergraduate degree at Cornell University and spent a year at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark after which he returned to the USA to pursue his Ph. D. at Princeton University under the supervision of Sam Trieman. He worked at Columbia University, MIT, and Harvard University before moving to the University of Texas. Over the course of his career Weinberg was considered a great teacher of physics, expositor, and also a supervisor for several Ph. D. students.

Weinberg worked in virtually all the important topics in the field of elementary particle physics, namely the phenomenology of the (electro-)weak and strong interactions and quantum field theory, where he has innumerable results which are named after him. In 1967 he wrote a short paper `A Model of Leptons’ which was his Noble Prize winning paper, which is one of the highest cited papers in the field in history. Weinberg was initiated the programme of `phenomenological lagrangians’ which was a framework that required one to use partial knowledge of elementary particles and their interactions at lowenergies even if a full theory that would reveal itself only at higher energies. He pursued the programme of renormalisation vigorously, studied CP violation, implications of phase transitions in the early universe, supersymmetric models to name some examples. After the Veneziano model was proposed, the precursor to string theory, Weinberg co-authored a paper with Gabriel Veneziano to improve its properties. Weinberg actively encouraged the study of string theory by appointing several persons to his group in Texas, thereby illustrating his genuine commitment to the growth of theoretical physics in every possible manner. Weinberg was intimately aware of experimental data and its implications to theory. He was also interested in physical cosmology and followed the subject.

Weinberg is also known for his monumental books on many technical fields, on field theory and particle physics, as well as on gravitation and cosmology. He also wrote popular books, The First Three Minutes, the story of the big bang and its aftermath being a huge best-seller. In his later years, he put forward his views on the evolution of western science.

Not a stranger to controversy, Weinberg was an avowed rationalist and atheist, and a defender of reductionism in science, which made him a proponent of the Superconducting Super Collider, a high energy collider in the US which eventually was cancelled due to the expense. He pioneered the debates around such topics and participated in them, especially regarding collective effects in physics, such as in the phenomenon of superconductivity. A key notion of `spontaneous symmetry breaking’ was proved by him with Jeffrey Goldstone and Salam in relativistic field theory, supporting the hypothesis of Yoichiro Nambu (Nobel Prize 2008), which is a manifestation of collective effects. These debates continue to this day.

Weinberg also did not shy away from his duties as a scientist and citizen. He advised his country’s government whenever called upon, including as a member of Jason, an elite group of scientists. He was a vocal supporter of Zionism by his own admission and protested against what he considered an unfair targeting of Israel for international sanctions.

The life and work of Steven Weinberg stand as a sacrament to all those who are committed to knowledge and science and its application. In the present era, where collaboration and team work is more the order of the day, one can learn the importance of understanding a subject from a very fundamental point of view, which was the hallmark of his style and approach (many of his papers are single-authored and have few references). The legacy of Weinberg will be one which brought simplicity and order to the world of elementary particle physics.

B. Ananthanarayan is Professor and former Chair of the Centre for High Energy Physics, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. A B. Tech. in Chemical Engineering from IIT Madras (1985) he obtained his Masters (1988) and Ph. D. (1991) from the University of Delaware in physics. He is an author of over a 100 refereed publications in international journals in elementary particle physics and field theory, and held the MSIL Chair of the Div. of Physical and Mathematical Physics, IISc (2015-18) and serves on the board of Springer Publications and was Associate Editor of Current Science. He is also a keen populariser of science and is active on Social Media.