Metastable

There’s a new book by Alan Lightman out, titled Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine. Irrespective of others’ appreciation of it, I expect to find the book preposterously dull if Michael Shermer’s review in the Times is anything to go by. “Does a scientific understanding of the world erase its emotional impact or spiritual power? Of course not.” ––thanks Mr Shermer, we were waiting for you on that.

For starters, I’d have thought we were way past casting the ‘science v. spirituality’ face-off as novel or, more misguidedly, as something to bait the casual reader with. In the latter case, the more well-read among us must brace for one of only two possible outcomes: a bird’s-eye review of the topic or a restatement of its essential animus in new words (a task for which Lightman is particularly suited). If it is a bird’s-eye review, then the book deserves to be judged as one of science, or science communication. But if it’s going to be old wine in new bottle – which a critic of Shermer’s standing should surely be able to sniff out – then the book must be judged solely for its quality of prose. His review is convincing on neither count, however.

Last: Musings on the subjectivity of science are always welcome; where I find the slip-up often happens is when people other than the authors claim the book is something it is not, and in this regard Shermer seems particularly suspicious. The giveaway is (always) simple to locate: what the reviewer claims to find interesting enough about a book to want to include it in the review or, better yet, cast the review such that it invokes the best parts of the book.

Given that there is a vague paragraph, something about “absolutes”, and another about science itself being like faith with a lazy allusion to some Einsteinian opinion, and some hilarious circumambulation of the captivating nuance these POVs have been known to offer, all ultimately glued together with quotes from Sagan and Feynman… isn’t this as monotonous, and as mainstream, as it can get?

Climate change is gradually turning the abundance of space into privilege, at least if it already wasn’t before.

In a warmer world, in which we will surely prize the efficient use of resources, physical isolation will be a luxury.

Not everyone will forswear all the land they have currently to occupy, but the more conscientious among us surely will, and the least privileged already have no choice.

You know Mukesh Ambani’s Antilla. How much land was cleared to build it? How much carbon is released into the atmosphere to power it? And how many people does it house?

The answers are not bound to be efficient, certainly not as much as they ought to be.

Our cities aren’t going to become more liveable – if indeed we’re able to get on that trajectory – by becoming bigger or less populated.

While these are the market’s aspirations, the state should counter-aspire to use its resources more efficiently and effectively.

For example, public transport is the way to go, not larger cars to transport one or two people at a time no matter how green they claim to be.

A more conscientious use of personal space is also the way to go, and Antilla is veritably anti-climatic for the four people it houses.

Notice that it all eventually comes down to our use of land. No matter the relatively infinite supply of solar or wind power, land is a finite resource. We live on it.

And being punctilious about land use, directly or indirectly, means consistently opting for the commons in all endeavours except those that protect our fundamental rights.

This, in final turn, means creating and maintaining a commons that we can all be proud of, and use without reservation or excuse.

How will these changes modify our art? How will human music, film, photography, etc. evolve in a world two degrees warmer?

Climate change may have creeped up on us but its realisation has certainly been marked by inflection: a short period in which the world decides to think and do differently.

In which ideas already known to be good and actions known to be desirable are reevaluated for their energy efficiency.

In which the more the seas rise, the more our endeavours will be penalised for being less efficient in their use of public resources.

Inflection always begets nostalgia. Perhaps our art, a few decades hence, will be shaped by the endurance of memories and marked by reminiscence.

Perhaps our literature will be consumed by the recreation of various togethernesses and our music by the reproduction of complete, and bygone, carelessness.

Perhaps the skeuomorphs our digital prophets retained to bridge the more functional technology of the 21st century with the intimacy of the 20th

will wind their way into our words, songs and images; finally into our memories

To preserve there the knowledge of mountains as beautiful, the seas as deep, the skies as blue, the rain as bliss – and quietly teach us to remember them so

While the world’s foundations crumble beneath us, under the weight of landslides, floods, drought, libertarianism, ignorance and disease.

Perhaps our folktales will valorise the effeminate human, celebrate death, and find wisdom in Carson’s notes as much as Borlaug’s, in Vonnegut’s as much as Le Guin’s.

Perhaps our eschatology will transform into a less destructive fate for the sinful and deem the fallen worthy of salvage if they have communed with the wild.

Perhaps our language will recoup the names of forgotten birds, lose its adjectival distaste for rodents and speak of deserts and the pelagic alike in sylvan tones.

Whatever kind of world it will be, it will have to be a world aspiring for a stronger, more connected and more accessible commons.

But will its new grammar of togetherness forsake the romance of solitude?

Yesterday, I travelled first class in the Shatabdi Express, from Chennai to Bengaluru. I’d been looking forward to the journey because of the extra legspace in the offing, and the ability to sit in a train for five hours without having to manspread, curl up (to the extent possible), give up and pay for some ‘XL’ option or simply forswear your kneecaps. As it turned out, there was extra legspace, and the journey still sucked.

In its ‘common class’ coaches, the seats on the Shatabdi Express don’t have a headrest, but the first class seats do. However, it doesn’t protrude entirely from the top of the seat as much as begin from three-fourths of the way up in the form of a pronounced bevel (about an inch-and-half to either side).

As a result, I couldn’t sit up straight without being forced to stoop forward. The only other option was to recline such that, when I slid down the necessary amount, my head would rest on the bevel and my shoulders would be spared. Turns out for someone 6’4″ tall, such a configuration is not possible. So while the ‘common class’ coach penalises me for having a long bottom half, the ‘executive class’ coach penalises me for having a long top half. Second, if the Indian Railways has someone about 5’5″ in mind as the typical customer, doesn’t traveling in ‘common class’ already give them all the legspace they need?

Being tall is useless – and not seldom actively painful – in India.

xkcd does the best nerdy comic but oglaf is the comic I never knew I needed – and it’s probably the best ever. It’s wry humour + sex, often featuring erotic fungi and The Blind Gibberer, and even more oftenly situated in the sort of medieval setting that Dungeons & Dragons campaigns are. Most of it reads like those parts of a porno that have an actual story going on and as if they were directed by Taika Waititi. All together, the comics are sort of like bits and pieces of various D&D campaigns in all of history that never got played simply because they couldn’t muster the requisite gravitas, or pomposity. I sat down an hour ago to write this post but found oglaf instead and have been reading it since. So today’s post looks to be a flop, and I’m not even sorry.

*back to oglaf*

Laura Vanderkam writes in Fast Company about a three-minute habit that changed her life: keeping track of how she spends her time during her waking hours, with a spreadsheet. Much of her piece is directed towards mitigating parental guilt – that Vanderkam might not be spending too much time with her children, or when she is, that she’s not doing anything else with her life. In this case, keeping track of one’s time to remind oneself that one is still leading a productive life has worked out well. But although Vanderkam says it’s the best investment she’s ever made, she only just stops short of explicitly advocating that everyone else do the same. That’s where the problems would arise.

(A caveat before I proceed: “do more” is not the same as “don’t be lazy”, and I expect my readers to know the difference.)

The average adult attention span of the 21st century has (ironically) received much attention for being perceptibly lower than before. And we deserve all the tools at our disposal to remind ourselves beyond our goldfish-like memory that we’re not fucking up as much as we think we are. But that’s not all time-tracking is used for, and in the wrong hands it could be an instrument of capitalism. For one, the attention span goes hand in hand with another defining feature of our ‘accelerationist’ period: productivity, and the need to optimise for it in all walks of life.

Neither good work nor a good life should be the product of such optimisation because improving productivity ad infinitum can be deleterious to what it means to be human. For example, Vanderkam mentions a lot of numbers from her spreadsheet:

Working 40 hours a week, and sleeping about 52 (my rough average), leaves 76 hours for other things. I saw that I did have time to scale up my own personal interests. I joined a choir. I nudged up my running frequency from four times a week to seven.

Beyond assuaging personal concerns (esp. of the upper class), many of us would make the mistake of assuming these numbers mean anything. They don’t. Tracking time allows us to notice more clearly those hours in which we’re not doing anything, and we yearn to fill those hours up with something. In the process, we lose all sense of the importance of time that is free of this utilitarian calculus because it is being constantly deprecated and devalued.

The more we track time, the more we open it to being commoditised. It’s not healthy for our sense of goodness and contentment to arise from the acknowledgment that we’re not putting all available hours to good use. And when time becomes commoditised, we also leave the door open for others to define what forms this ‘good’ can and can’t take, and for self-determination to take the backseat.

Many of us, like Vanderkam, are prone to remembering the number of flights we’ve missed over the number of times we caught them just fine. But we shouldn’t remember the good times over the bad ones only because we think they were better spent. If we do, it’s inevitable that we’ll also start misguidedly accumulating regrets. As Vanderkam writes,

Indeed, knowing exactly where my hours go has helped me, in some moments, feel like I can slow time’s ceaseless ticking.

She’s not comfortable with the fact the time never takes a break – but why should it? We shouldn’t accuse time for not letting us do all the things we’d like to in 24 hours while we remain in denial of the purpose of our mechanical routines. We must ask ourselves: why do we have to do so many things in a day?

We’ve let gainful time encroach so far into our lives that having free time seems offensive. Gainful time is not just the time spent creating financial value, it’s also about spending time to accrue other forms of value – especially social. Tracking time to increase productivity guided by capitalist ideals engenders its own variety of shaming (time-shaming?). It’s become more fashionable to say you’re doing 1,000 things every day. (This also closely parallels the tendency to expect everyone to have an opinion on everything.) When you say you did nothing yesterday, you’re seen like – and you feel like – a failure. Your self-determination is non-existent.

Getting free time is particularly difficult for those for whom it’s not simply a matter of finding it, particularly wage labourers. Two examples from recent memory illustrate this area of concern well.

First: labour rights movements of the 20th century focused on being more paid for overtime thanks to the neoliberal view that working more = more money = better life. Workers were also entitled to ‘free time’ in that it was a time to perform unpaid labour, but in time, many of these tasks have also come to be recognised as lying outside of the demesne of ‘free time’. A common example is that of women who perform household activities. As a result, the fight for a ‘right to free time’ that further excludes “household labor, personal care, and caregiving” has been growing.

Miya Tokumitsu, a contributing editor at Jacobin, wrote an excellent article for the magazine in October 2017 on this theme. Excerpt:

Free time, as IG Metall argues, is essential for basic dignity; to care for ourselves and our communities, we need time away from generating profit for employers. Just as importantly, we need it to realize our human potential. Our ability to think independently, experience romance, nurture friendships, and pursue our own curiosities and passions requires time that is ours, time that belongs neither to the boss nor the market. At its core, the campaign for fewer working hours is about liberation, both individually and collectively.

… it would be a mistake to assume its battle is a particularly European one. Time and again, the American labor movement has taken up the struggle to reduce the workweek and expand workers’ freedom. It has recognized the potency of a demand that not only imagines a world where people have more control over their lives, but one that builds the bonds of solidarity by uniting the interests of workers and the unemployed, highly skilled and less skilled, foreign-born and native. (emphases mine)

Second, in 2015, a European court ruled that time spent commuting to work is to be counted as time spent at work if the workers in question don’t have a “habituated” location to call their workplace. If somebody drives from Gurgaon to Delhi to work and wouldn’t otherwise undertake this gruelling commute, this policy makes perfect sense, and should in fact be extended to workers who do have a fixed workplace. The ruling was in line with the EU’s ‘working time directive‘, which aims to keep workers from labouring for more than 48 hours a week on average. The court said in its ruling:

… the workers are at the employer’s disposal for the time of the journeys. During those journeys, the workers act on the instructions of the employer, who may change the order of the customers or cancel or add an appointment. During the necessary travelling time – which generally cannot be shortened – the workers are therefore not able to use their time freely and pursue their own interests. (emphasis mine)

So, by all means, convert free time into ‘useful’ time but be mindful of whom that usefulness is serving – you or something else. To make better use of time, we ought to examine the numerous demands made of us, many of which we assume as individual responsibilities without question, and shed those we find harmful. In tracking time, we must not lose sight of the context in which it serves a humane purpose because it is also tied to class politics.

Entrepreneurs watching how they’re spending their time to singlehandedly get a startup off the ground might be doing the right thing but they are all also typically members of the upper class. For them, being less efficient has few, if any, long-term material and social and political consequences.

Rolling Stones has published a fabulous profile of Johnny Depp, written by Stephen Rodrick. It’s about 15 minutes’ worth of reading long and I highly recommend you read it right now. The profile’s power comes from excellent writing and a narrative that makes you come really close to feeling sad for Depp but never truly letting you get there, like an asymptotic sympathy held in check only but significantly by the fact that the actor, now in his 50s, is craving for a pity you realise he doesn’t deserve.

I harboured a soft spot for him towards the end for being a man who believes so much in a goodness of the world and its people that just doesn’t exist. But aside from being what seems like one of the “broken people” – Depp’s coinage – Depp comes across as being inebriatedly oblivious to the consequences of his ludicrous actions despite multiple attempts from his friends and family to ‘save’ him. He still thinks he’s funny, that he’s doing right by his family and friends, and that he was screwed over by TMG, the company he hired to manage his finances, when he wasn’t looking. But why wasn’t he looking?

As Kayleigh Donaldson sums up nicely on Pajiba, Depp just seems to be stuck in a time-capsule and convinced that his karma will do him right.

Depp is in his 50s now. [His] attempt at swagger is just depressing. Usually, this is the kind of stuff you’d think Rolling Stone would be all over: The rock & roll life to the max, no apologies and no holds barred. But it’s 2018 now, and Rolling Stone has evolved. Its coverage is different, the people it covers has varied far beyond the world of rock. Besides, even the actual Rolling Stones themselves don’t do this shit anymore. Depp comes across as stuck on his own planet, drunk and alone except for the one yes man who thinks it can all be solved with a few good words.

Rodrick’s profile takes down yet another lone genius not worth celebrating as much as he is, at least outside of his films. Depp’s thinking is shallow, his interests restricted to his immediate vicinity, his ostensibly philanthropic concerns brandished about as if they mean anything. To extrapolate what Donaldson says, the West of the 1960s could’ve protected him the way it did someone like Kerouac or Thompson but in 2018, Depp is just being a fool. He needs to catch up quick but until he does, he will remain obtuse.

I’m sorry, my dear followers, to have to disappoint you (or, quite possibly, induce a sigh of relief) but today’s blog post will have to be just these lines. My laptop died yesterday, I got a cold, lots of anxiety, a mild fever and a migraine, and I’ve got a hectic weekend coming up. I’ve been sleeping/lying down all day today and haven’t had the headspace to think of new things to write about, let alone bring myself to write. I’ll hopefully be back on top of the game tomorrow. Perhaps the idea encapsulated in today’s post is that I’m just showing up so I can say I’ve been maintaining a habit, sometimes just for its own sake. Good night!

My laptop, a 2015 MacBook Pro that survived being drowned during the Chennai floods that year, went into the ICU today. A service person said the RAM was fried, along with some other adjacent components. When a friend asked if I was going to get a new machine, I said I wasn’t. His question brought to mind a conversation I’d had many years ago with Anuj Srivas, The Wire’s business editor and one of the best tech journos around. Our conversation had been centred on a question posed by either Ben Evans or Ben Thompson – whether most of the world’s information was being produced on mobile phones. At the time, we’d been able to agree that most information was being consumed on phones but couldn’t possibly be created on phones. The example I’d harboured in mind was programming: surely programmers weren’t producing most of their code on mobile devices?

I’m not so sure today. Following my friend’s question, I thought my next machine would likely be a Chromebook, followed by another thought that I should probably get a powerful tablet instead, like the iPad Pro. All I do can be done in the browser. Recently, I had deployed a few Nodejs apps on DO and Linode VPSs, and had taken to managing them using a Terminal app on my iPhone. My entire digital footprint is mediated by this app and Chrome. I realised that all I needed was at least 4 GB of RAM and a good Bluetooth keyboard, and I could get to work. Suddenly, it seems quite plausible that most information is produced on mobile devices.

However, I don’t think Anuj or I were wrong at the time we had our doubts. Many things have happened since to enable coders and content creators to build on mobile devices to a preferential extent. Foremost is computing power and capacity, followed by the increasing popularity of APIs, and finally an expanding suite of apps to cash in on these advancements. I haven’t checked if DO has an app but on its mobile site, I can tap two or three buttons, spin up a virtual server, login to an HTML console (or through an SSH app), and start building. Powerful text editors like Atom even come with preset code templates that automate numerous tasks. And just like that, I have an app or website up and running within minutes, and I’m already switching to Twitter to brag about it. 😉

Scientists have combined one atom of sodium (Na) and one of caesium (Cs) to form one molecule of NaCs, achieving the most precisely controlled chemical reaction in history. They were able to achieve this using a fascinating bit of technology called a magneto-optical trap. While the trap itself has a sophisticated design, its essential modus operandus is founded on a deceptively simple technique called Doppler cooling.

If a laser is shined on an atom that is moving towards the source of light, then the atom will absorb a photon (due to the Doppler effect). Because of the conservation of momentum, the atom ‘acquires’ the photon’s momentum as well, and its own momentum drops. The laser is tuned such that its frequency imparts the atom with a photon that kicks one electron to a higher energy state. When the electron drops back down to its original state, it emits the photon, and the atom spits it out.

The emitted photon’s recoil gives the atom another momentum ‘kick’ (a la Newton’s third law), but because it happens in a random direction, the atom has been effectively slowed in the direction it was originally moving in. By repeating this process over and over, an atom can be slowed down considerably (from hundreds of metres per second to a few centimetres per second), dragging its kinetic energy down as well in the process.

Since the kinetic energy of a set of atoms defines the temperature of the group, this Doppler cooling can effectively cool atoms down. The technique is most suited for atoms that have a simple electronic structure – where, for example, the electrons don’t have more than two possible states to be in: ground state and one excited state. However, most atoms do exhibit such hyperfine structure, limiting the applications of Doppler cooling. Additionally, there is also a Doppler cooling limit when the technique is applied because the atom’s kinetic energy can’t be lowered below the recoil temperature imparted by the departing photon.

One alternative is called Sisyphus cooling. Instead of constantly removing the kinetic energy of an atom, Sisyphus cooling uses a combination of lasers to create a jagged potential gradient such that an atom in motion is forced to from a region of lower potential to one that is higher.

Imagine this ‘jag’ as a series of mountains. The atom moves up the first mountain, in the process of which its kinetic energy is converted to potential energy. At the summit, an optical pump – a technique similar to Doppler cooling – removes this potential energy, dropping the atom to a state with lower energy than it had before climbing the mountain. And because the atom is still in motion, it begins to climb the second mountain, after which it is left with even lower energy.

Once the atom has crossed a series of mountains, successive conversions of kinetic to potential energy, and successive pump-outs of this potential energy, leave it with very little energy to call its own. In short, it has been cooled to a sub-Doppler temperature. The title of ‘Sisyphus’ is self-explanatory at this point: like the Greek king cursed to roll a boulder uphill only for it to roll back down as he neared the peak, the atom is also forced to climb uphill only for the optical pump to send it back down each time.

Interestingly, Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, the French physicist who devised Sisyphus cooling and won a piece of the physics Nobel Prize in 1997 for it, published a paper in Current Science on the subject in 1994. This issue of Current Science was dedicated to the work of Shivaramakrishnan Pancharatnam, a physicist noted for his work in optics. The foreword, penned by George William Series, with whom Pancharatnam worked from 1964 at St Catherine’s College, Oxford, until he died in 1969, states,

[He] made some outstanding contributions to optics, first, in the fifties, in the area of polarisation and coherence phenomena in the classical regime, and then, in the sixties, in the study of atoms simultaneously interacting with resonant radiation and low frequency magnetic fields. His work in the latter area drew international attention before it was cut short by his early death at the age of thirty-five. … But it is fair to say that his work received renewed attention and acclaim only after the recognition, in the eighties, that he had derived and used the concept of geometric phases in his studies of the interference of polarised light.

Cohen-Tannoudji acknowledges Pancharatnam’s research as part of the foundation on which more advanced cooling/trapping techniques, like the Sisyphus, rest. From his paper,

All Pancharathnam’s works were done at a time where the only light sources available for optical pumping experiments were spectral lamps, excited by DC or microwave discharges and emitting a light with a broad spectral width and a weak intensity. The spectacular development of unable laser sources, which started in the early seventies, stimulated several experimental and theoretical studies. … A new research field, called laser cooling and trapping of atoms, has appeared and is expanding very rapidly. … In this special issue dedicated to the memory of S. Pancharathnam, I would like to briefly describe two examples of recent developments which, I am sure, would have pleased him, because they use concepts which were quite familiar to him.

Pancharatnam’s doctoral adviser was C.V. Raman, at the Raman Research Institute. He is most well known for independently discovering the geometric phase in the study of waves in 1956.

All waves can be described by their phase and amplitude. When the values of both parameters are changed at the same time and in slow-motion, one can observe the wave evolving through different states. In some cases, when the phase and amplitude are cycled through a series of values and brought back to their original, the wave looks different from what it did at the start. The effective shift in phase is calling the geometric phase.

The British physicist Michael Berry was able to provide a generalised description of the geometric phase in 1986, and it has since been commonly known as the Berry phase. He, too, had published an article in that issue of Current Science, in which he acknowledges that he couldn’t properly appreciate the relevance of Pancharatnam’s paper on the geometric phase until he visited Sivaraj Ramaseshan in Bangalore in 1987. Berry’s article concludes thus:

Now, as we remember Pancharatnam’s untimely death in his creative prime, and celebrate his youthful achievements, it is time to look again through all his work. Who knows what further delicious physics this will reveal?

Delicious indeed. Modern science – such as one that can guide two atoms, manoeuvred one by one, step by step, to strike a chemical bond under the watchful gaze of physicists trying to build better quantum computers – stands on the shoulders of many giants. One of them was Pancharatnam.

Today’s post is just a very interesting tidbit I found when conducting research for a piece for #GRIT – about how, in the 19th century, the White House had a sewer gas problem so severe that Chester A. Arthur, the 21st US president, refused to move in there until it had been cleared up. According to Thomas Reeves’ biography, he stayed in the house of Senator John P. Jones, cofounder of the town of Santa Monica, California, until then. I found this detail in a review article by James Whorton, a medical historian at the University of Washington, published in the Western Journal of Medicine in 2001.

When President James Garfield was shot in 1881 and taken to the White House to be treated, his steady decline over the following weeks at last came to be blamed not on the assassin’s bullet still lodged in his back, but to the executive mansion’s obsolete plumbing system. A “well-known plumber” told a New York newspaper that “the real trouble” in Garfield’s case “is sewer gas,” while the Sanitary Committee of the Master Plumbers of New York offered to outfit the White House with sewer traps at no charge. Instead, the president was moved from Washington, DC, to his summer home in New Jersey, despite physicians’ fears that he could not survive the journey; he died in New Jersey less than two weeks later.

His successor, Chester Arthur, refused to move into the White House, having been made nervous by authoritative statements that, until its plumbing was reconstructed to eliminate sewer gas, “the White House will be behind our better class of tenement-houses.” Arthur even went so far as to lobby Congress to tear down the White House and erect a sewer gas-proof replica in its stead, but though the Senate approved $300,000 for the project, the House of Representatives would not concur, and the new President had to settle for a plumbing overhaul of the old building.