Now, it is a supernova for Vishnu!

To add to his numerous other discoveries, here is a new Supernova to Vishnu’s credit!! This is a very bright one! .. 14.3 mag. This is roughly the brightness of Pluto(I mean the apparent brightness, as seen from earth) Such bright ones are pretty rare. Here is the page from Smithsonian which lists recent supernova discoveries.

“2006E” is the one that Vishnu shares with Puckett (a well known supernova hunter) and others.You can easily make out that there arent many in the mag 14** range. Here is an image of the supernova from Vishnu’s website.Many congratulations to Vishnu!

**In the magnitude scale a lesser ‘magnitude’ implies greater brightness.
Such a definition is for purely historical reasons. This is a logarithmic scale.

CMI Fest

The Chennai Mathematical Institute is moving to its new campus and they are having a “Math Mela” to commemorate this. Some eminent mathematicians from across the world are coming to Chennai and will be delivering lectures at CMI. Amongst the Mathematicians, some of the names that I could recognise were Robert Langlands , Manjul Bharghava, MS Narasimhan. There are a few talks by physicists too. (eg, Padmanabhan, Arvind) . Ofcourse, most of the talks are technical in nature. The talks by Physicists clash with my labs ..argh!
In a related note, Robert Langlands has been conferred with an honorary doctorate by the University of Madras.

Dilemma!

People would have gone through this..

Do I ditch blogger for wordpress?? I dont mean a dedicated hosting… I would happily switch to wordpress if I had a full-fledged hosting plan. It is a shift from http://neosagredo.blogspot.com to http://aswin.wordpress.com that I am contemplating. A much cleaner interface for blogging, great looks (of this particular template), categories,trackbacks etc are some of the advantages with wordpress. But, the flip side is that you get very little freedom to tamper with your template! It would be great if they could just allow me to change the css file, a little bit. Also, The default “blog stats” are extremely primitive and do not go beyond pageloads and referrals. Inspite of this, I have moved my content here. I am just playing around with the interface. I will continue to post stuff at my blogger site(and all comments go there). If I do change, it would be my second shift in less that 4 months! (the first time)

Who is this “Reader’s Editor”?

Today’s Hindu has a rather elaborate coverage of Alan Rusbridger’s (Editor,guardian)visit to India( Link 1 Link 2 Link 3). Appearing alongside these articles is the announcement by N.Ram that The Hindu will have a Reader’s Editor, pretty soon (from Jan13?). So.. who is this Reader’s Editor??.. what is his role ?? The details would be probably be out in a short while… but I thought looking at other examples would help in making a reasonable guess.

As explained by Ian Mayes( Reader’s Editor. Guardian) in this article,he is expected to

“[..]collect, consider, investigate, respond to, and where appropriate come to a conclusion about readers’ comments, concerns, and complaints in a prompt and timely manner, from a position of independence within the paper”.

That is the ‘principles’ part. How does all this work in practice?? To start with, A daily report of Corrections/Clarifications (compiled by the R-Editor) looks like an inevitable feature in such a setup. Here is a sample from the guardian. This is truly great! The usual Erratum/Corrigendum in some corner of the paper is an useless attempt. Also, Meyes has a weekly column for himself. Most of his articles are devoted to the job of debating the kind of coverage that The Guardian presented (Link 1 Link 2 Link 3)and clarifying on reader responses(Link 1, Link 2). In some of these articles, he ends up quoting various comments from the readers without passing any opinion on it. But occasionally, he does offer a complete apology. A recent heavy-duty row has been with Noam Chomsky! Chomsky had objected to a particular interview that was published in The Guardian. The Reader’s Editor looked into Chomsky’s complaints and finally conceded that The Guardian had indeed been faulty on three counts. The issue is not closed. The actual interview has been withdrawn from the website. Also, look at this curious case for yet another apology. Some of the other newspapers in UK have followed the Guardian Example and have Reader’s Editors in place.

As reg the US, NYT and WP do have such “Editors”. The current Internal- Ombudsman in the Washington Post has her own column and here is her description of the job. The New York Times Public Editor too has a separate column in the Opinion Section. The content of these columns is similar to the Guardian one. Amongst the NYT articles, I found this article on New Orleans particularly heartening.

Now, I do not know of how the readers have reacted to the these editors. But, from the content of their articles, my guess is that any such feature in India would be a huge step towards newspapers gaining more respect amongst their readers. In the Hindu’s case, this will greatly enhance the quality of this wonderful newspaper. I hope the other major publications in India follow suit and establish such self-correcting mechanisms.

ps: Ofcourse, the first case for the Hindu’s R-Editor is ready,courtesy bloggers!

pdate : The R-Editor has been appointed. It is Mr. Narayanan, an old hand at The Hindu.
Samanth and Nina have their doubts about the new appointment.

Current Science Special on Einstein

There are quite a few interesting articles on Einstein’s work in the Current Science Special on Einstein.
I noticed this thanks to Woit. Contributors include David Gross(Nobel ‘04),Atiyah(Fields ‘66 ,Abel ‘03),Ashoke Sen,Ashtekar,Narlikar amongst others.
T Jayaraman of IMSc has an article on Einstein’s Political Thoughts! .
I havent read any of these articles in detail..So, no comments as of now.

Noether’s theorem

I had earlier made a post about  Clifford’s post on the “Greatest Physics Paper”.
It is always fun to talk about history of physics and this thread certainly served that purpose. I also thought that Clifford had intended to have a debate and then run away…
But, surprisingly, he has come back to the post and it is time to Vote!!
AND Emmy Noether’s Symmetries Paper (my suggestion) is amongst the final five!
As expected, The Principia is currently leading the way…

Update : Noether’s paper is not doing very badly…it is ahead of both the Einstein Papers )

One year of Quantum Diaries.

The Physics year is now a thing of the past. And quantum diaries , a project where numerous physicists from around the world blog about their daily lives and physics, has also reached its target lifetime of one year. A review of the past one year’s experience (by the Editor,QD) can be found in the latest Symmetry Magazine. ‘Symmetry’ is a wonderful magazine brought out by Fermilab. I have never seen this in the print form , but it looks pretty similiar to the Cern Courier.

Getting back to Quantum Diaries.. there were a few blogs which were updated regularly and has some nice posts. But, quite a few bloggers were pretty irregular! For ex, John Ellis had a blog at QD and his last post was in July’05! Prof.Ellis is a very well-known physicist and I am sure that his blog would have raked up a large amount of traffic. Anyway, some of the bloggers there hope to continue their blogging.

24 asteroids and counting…

Amateur Astronomers are a rare breed in India. This might be due to a variety of reasons. The primary reason is probably the reasonable financial commitment involved in this hobby. Ofcourse, small pockets of enthusiastic amateurs exist. But when compared with countries like the US, the numbers here are much lesser. There aren’t many telescope makers either.

Given this, the first Indian amateur astronomer to discover an Asteroid must be quite a special guy! Vishnu Vardhan Reddy is the one who accomplished this feat and he now has 24 asteroid discoveries to him name! I first met Vishnu on a mailing list. Since then, I had been paining him to give a lecture at our Astro Club. Finally, he was in India for a month and gave a lecture at our Astro Club on Jan 3rd.

Vishnu’s path to these discoveries is pretty fascinating. After getting his masters in Communcations, he worked as a Science journalist for the Asian Age (based in Delhi). He was into amateur astronomy since his school days, thanks to Prof.Devdas in Chennai. Infact, most amateurs in Chennai owe their initiation to this dedicated man who is now 80+ and is still making telescopes! Do read Vishnu’s recollections about his childhood. After learning from Prof.Tom Gehrals that even amateur astronomers could make significant contributions to asteroid hunting, Vishnu took serious interest in finding asteroids. An asteroid is detected by observing its motion wrt background stars. One needs to take periodic photographs of the sky to make out an asteroid. Ofcourse, the larger a telescope you have at your disposal, the better equipped you are. Quality photography equipment is also necessary. Vishnu got a 12″ Meade scope thanks to an unexpected loan from a friend whom he had never met!!

Gregg quickly asked me if I could come up with the money later. I said I don’t have anyone but I can try for sure. He took out his Credit Card and ordered the telescope right away. I was shocked at first. Here was a guy who spent $3,000 on a telescope without even seeing my face!

Mind you, these are atrociously costly toys. Today, the cost of this Meade scope would be ~2 lakhs . But, to his dismay, Vishnu found that a 12″ Meade is not sufficient to make asteroid discoveries on a regular basis! The very purpose of collecting $3000 from various sources seemed lost. However, things fell into place during a visit to the US. He met experienced asteroid hunters and finally found his first asteroid! Do read his rather elaborate account of this discovery.

With $200 in pocket, I took a 3-day bus journey from Michigan to Arizona in the last week of June. The bus went through 7 states arriving in Tucson 10 hours late!

Phew!

Curious, I asked what they were and he replied, “Dude, you have found 2 asteroids.” Not sure if that’s true, I went and checked the MPchecker again so that they got the numbers right. Yes, they were new and I found them.At last after 3 years of chasing all kinds of things, I finally got not one but 2 asteroids. Too tired to enjoy the new discoveries, I crashed on the bed at 5.30 pm.

The whole thing must have been quite an ordeal!

After this, he switched fields and is now into Professional Astronomy. But, he still tweaks around with amateur scopes, sets up remote observatories and makes quite a lot of asteroid discoveries with them. His latest one was a binary asteroid near the Earth. He told me that this is the first such discovery using amateur equipment. Congrats and BOL to Vishnu for future discoveries!

Happy New Year

I hope U have a great 2006!
As a New Year Gift, here is a link to a wonderful short story (“Fire Stones”) that appeared in the Hindu’s magazine. It is taken from the collection published under the name “Higher Ground“. All stories are based on the devastating Tsunami that hit the Indian Ocean in Dec’04. I read another story (“Spirit of Uncle Vijay”) from the same collection in Outlook’s annual speacial.

Remembering Prof.Raychaudhuri

Prof. AK Raychoudhri, one of the doyens of the Indian Physics Community, passed away in June 2005. He is probably one of the most under-recognised scientists of his time. Frankly, I had not heard about him till I learnt some Gen.Relativity. The famous “Raychoudhry Equation” is a crucial tool to understanding GR and played an important part in the famous work of Hawking and Penrose on Singularity Theorems. It is these theorems and the interest on compact objects that re-ignited GR research in the 70s. For those who are familiar with some GR, I would suggest that you read Prof.Dadich’s paper on the Raychoudhry equation: gr-qc/0511123

The Telegraph carried an excellant tribute to this great man. The sad part is that there was very little media attention devoted to his passing away. Here are a few abstracts from that piece :

[..]For the first time, singularities seemed inevitable in GTR, and could no longer be argued away as being artifacts of special properties of specific solutions of the Einstein equation. Again, not a result the master would have rejoiced over[..]

Here, the master is Einstein.

The central theme of the singularity theorems is how a singularity is an inevitable feature of solutions to Einstein’s GR. Raychoudhri’s equation gave hints to this property of Einstein’s equations. But the complete theorems had to wait till Hawking and Penrose.

[..]Why did Raychaudhuri himself not arrive at the singularity theorems when he possessed the key tool more than a decade in advance? The answer: he was pursuing a different programme — that of finding a spacetime free of singularities. That programme did not succeed, but careful perusal of his efforts once again bears testimony to his original approach and commitment to the subject[..]

[..]He submitted a thesis based on his work on the Raychaudhuri equation for a DSc in physics, and in 1959 was awarded the degree on the glowing recommendation of none other than John Archibald Wheeler*. Despite this, an application for a promotion to a higher position at the IACS was turned down by the authorities on some flimsy pretext[..]

After this, he joined the Presidency College, Kolkatta. He taught there for a long time. The most remarkable thing about AKR is that he taught undergrad students at Presidency. I do not know of many top-class Indian Physicists teaching at the Indian Universities. I have personally heard many of his students (now physics profs) talking about how inspiring his classes were. Prof.Dadich also lists some of AKR’s former students: Ashoke Sen, S.Bhattacharya (current TIFR Director),CV Vishveshwara,JV Narlikar and Probir Roy .

The last few lines from the Telegraph probably sums up his life in the best fashion :

[..] he was a total academic, a rarity these days. To paraphrase Einstein’s well-known remark about Mahatma Gandhi, future generations of Calcuttans will scarcely believe that such a physicist lived among us, sharing his best with so many.

This post would have served its purpose if it made ARK and his work known to a much larger audience.

*For those who didnt know, Wheeler is a highly acclaimed Theo.Physicist. He is also a well known Gen. Relativist. Feynman and some great relativists like Misner,Thorne,Wald were his PhD students.