End of Chapter 2

2013 is drawing to a close. The last few days though have been very hollow. I defended my dissertation in December but that did not bring the feeling of relief I thought it will. Productivity has been zilch and a sense of emptiness is creeping in. A need to start afresh. 

Lessons

Never show your cards, even if you are sure of winning ;)

Grumble grumble

If someone were to map the thoughts in my brain right now, it would resemble spaghetti in a chicken soup dipped in chocolate sauce topped with bacon and almonds mixed with strawberries and covered in pudina chutney with dumplings and taquitos with wasabi for sides. Though the last few days have been ok in everything, there’s a lot of thought sitting jumbled up like jalebis. Concentration span has been reduced to seconds and I am jumping from one thought to other like a kangaroo on hot coal.  Need a chat with an expert soon!

P.S. The national animal of Scotland is Unicorn. No Kidding.

Supertiny and Superbig

Is our perception bounded by the scale and lifetime of things we can measure? If the multiverse theory is correct and there is empirical evidence that it is correct, then our universe or any universe is the smallest building block in that collection of universes. According to one theory there are many times more universes than the number of atoms in our observable universe. Now think of us as observers in our universe and the scale and the life time of things we can measure, from galaxy clusters with super massive black holes to fermions and hadrons. We know these exist, because we can measure their scale in some way, either direct or indirect. This is what our universe is composed of or so we think. What lies beyond our power of measurement? Is there a universe which completely lies within the confines of the smallest subatomic particle? A universe with a lifetime so small it destroys itself even before it can be measured? It's more of a question of philosophy in science rather than pure science but then science and philosophy do meet very often. A similar question can be asked on the other end of the size spectrum. Is there a universe so huge and with a lifetime so vast that we can't measure it? Beyond our universe, multiverses where we are relatively small like a fermion? A universe so vast that it has remained practically unchanged in the last 13.8 billion years our universe has been alive? To an observer in that huge universe are we like a tiny universe which would disappear in a millionth of the time it takes to blink his eyelid?

Of this and that

Last one month has been busy but productive, a bag of joy and disappointment but generally good. It started with writing the comprehensive report for which I was already late and in the end only had 3 days to document almost 5 years of my work. Didn't do a particularly good job but at least I’ll have a second chance when I write the dissertation. Then there was the hastily arranged comprehensive exam which went OK  Relieved to say the least. In between all this, worked on the papers, submitted some re submitted and re re submitted. In between all this my phone decided not to cooperate and stopped working. Took it to a repair shop, which charged $44 for opening it and then the incompetent fellows returned it back. So repaired it myself and upgraded it to jelly bean. Hope to be more productive and get more work done this week.

Image: Mauna Kea, Hawaii  http://link2hawaii.groupsite.com

Random Post

I have this strong urge for renaming my blog to .. "Sorry I crushed your Nimbu Mirchi ..." ... fists clenched ...  counting from 100 to 1 .... lets see if the urge goes away.
Update: The urge is still there and I made a quick picture with free internet clip art

Welcome Back Windows

The experiment with Ubuntu seems to be over. Ubuntu desperately bum-kicked Windows on my laptop and sort of installed itself, while also formatting my hard disk and leaving no trace of all my data. I seem to remember it happened when the dinosaurs were still around, but it’s only been about 45 days. As they say, it was fun while it lasted. I taught myself a number of things, including the fact that nearly no half-decent video chatting software works on Linux. Except maybe a pre-Roman-Empire-era version of Skype. Nevertheless (yay I get to use it!) Ubuntu is useful if you actually want to do some work and be productive. But since I am a grad student and spend most part of my year writing beautiful text in Word like software and making beautiful presentations on powerpoint like software, Ubuntu seems as useful to me as the large hadron collider to a caveman. Last week I made a powerpoint presentation on a borrowed PC and accidentally opened the file in Ubuntu (Libre Office) and saved it in the source. Libre Office made sure my beautiful, animation laden presentation was successfully made unreadable and I had to redo it. So that was that, and in spite of Ubuntu not willing to allow Windows back in a gentlemanly manner (which is a whole different story), I installed Windows back.