The Greatest Movie ever made

The year: 1972. The scene: Afternoon tea in Fuld Hall at the Institute for Advanced Study. The camera pans around the Common Room, passing by several Princetonians in tweeds and corduroys, then zooms in on Hugh Montgomery, boyish Midwestern number theorist with sideburns. He has just been introduced to Freeman Dyson, dapper British physicist.

Dyson: So tell me, Montgomery, what have you been up to?

Montgomery: Well, lately I've been looking into the distribution of the zeros of the Riemann zeta function.

Dyson: Yes? And?

Montgomery: It seems the two-point correlations go as.... (turning to write on a nearby blackboard):

Dyson: Extraordinary! Do you realize that's the pair-correlation function for the eigenvalues of a random Hermitian matrix? It's also a model of the energy levels in a heavy nucleus—say U-238.

I present this anecdote in cinematic form because I expect to see it on the big screen someday, now that mathematicians outgun cowboys and secret agents at the box office. Besides, the screenplay genre gives me license to dramatize and embellish a little. By the time the movie opens at your local multiplex, the script doctors will have taken further liberties with the facts. For example, the equation for nuclear energy levels will have become the secret formula of the atomic bomb.

Random Matrix Theory Rules!

(Courtesy:American Scientist)

Some Reviews

It's 6:30 pm and I have nothing to do.
This isn't a normal holiday, and I find myself into my second week in Ahmedabad, interning in PRL. More on that later.
Just to keep the blog ball rolling, i'm reviewing two albums by two lesser known bands that have realy impressed me.
The first is Amorphis's Am Universum. While die-hard fans of the band's conventional Finnish Death Metal Style would disagree with me, I think this (and to a lesser extent, Tuonela, their previous album, from which this is like a step forward) is their best ever, simply because this stands out from all the other albums of the genre released by them. This is probably the closest metal has come to being psychedelic. The moody atmosphere created by the keyboards and the mellowed down guitars (but still heavy at the right places), and most importantly, the clean, soulful vocals and the occasional sax solo instantly went down well with me. Sadly, the band returned to a heavier, metal-oriented sound after this album. A semi-experimental album, it is a solid block of music and the listener can go from song to song without losing anything of the general mood of the album.
The second album is Pagan's Mind's Enigmatic Calling. This progressive metal band from Norway, with its science and fantasy themed music has often been called an old Dream Theater clone. While that is debatable, that shouldn't stop anyone from enjoying their music. Filled with catchy heavy riffs and attractive keyboard interludes, it is indeed worth enjoying. While the riffs are undoubtedly heavy, that word can't be used to characterise their music. Progressive would be the most apt, with a touch of studio-introduced processing and a clearly discernable scandinavian quality to it, that sets it apart from DT. The vocals, though raw at places, clearly has an epic quality to it, and the solos are just fantastic. Indeed, though the average song length might be around 7 to 8 minutes, their songs just don't drag on and on. And no over the top guitar antics that sometimes turns you off. All said and done, a great album to own
Enough said.
Sid \m/

Descent

I know i don't have a life...it's just that i can't prove it mathematically...yet.

Stay tuned for more updates as physics eats into my being...

Strange Frequencies - 2

[Wrote this in 10 mins while high...attempt #4 for CF...have actually stopped caring...
Another tribute to the twin gods of Asimov - Clarke]


What is the craziest you have done?
I'd say it was the time when i acheived the ultimate triumph over my fellow men.

I write this as the civilisation slowly dies and as men everywhere lose themselves to a force i have unleashed upon them.I was born totally tone deaf,lacking relative pitch, the ability to discriminate between musical notes, and i was always made conscious of this fact.My normal hearing is perfectly normal, but my inability to enjoy music really hurt, especially when i see others around me doing so.I always hated them for it.
Strangely i was always drawn to the branch of bio-acoustics, a new branch of science which studies the effects of sound waves on the human physiology, and of which i am now, unarguably the greatest scientist.
I closely studied why only a small fraction of songs become so popular among the masses and whether sounds of certain frequencies affect the brain differently.I studied the frequency profiles of most of the popular tunes and rhythms of the present day and probed them for patterns and other distinguishable features.
What i discovered was astounding.It seems that every song that was ever popular shared a characteristic pattern of a certain family of frequencies.This is something most of you would find ridiculously obvious, and some who would find it just ridiculous.But this is such a taken for granted assumption that precious little work was ever done on it.Before me, that is.
In a few months i had created what could be described as the greatest song ever.THE greatest ever.By putting together the most optimum mix of the frequencies of the family in the pattern i just mentioned, i created something that will ring in a man's brain for ever, a tune so good that it rings for ever in one's head, paralysing the brain into inactivity for good.
After that, it was just a simple of matter of getting a few microphones to transmit the song as a discrete digital signal to various broadcast receivers around the world, and now you probably know what i'm getting at.

The Future of Space Travel

This is one area which never fails to keep me thinking - how is mankind supposed to traverse the vast interstellar distances when it takes pathbreaking satellites like Voyager 2 many months to reach the outer planets of our own Solar System?

Well, the answer is here, albeit in a highly theoretical, neglected branch of physics, something most people take for granted (this is by no means new stuff - work on developing this began way back in the '60's)
The concept of an 'inertialess drive' - i.e. a propulsion system that acts on every atom of a body so that no strains are produced when it accelerates - was probably invented by the master of the 'Space Opera', E.E. Smith, in the 1930s. It is not as improbable as it sounds - because a gravitational field acts in precisely this manner.
If you fall freely near the Earth (neglecting the effects of air resistance) you will increase speed by just under ten metres per second, every second. Yet you will feel weightless - there will be no sense of acceleration, even though your velocity is increasing by one kilometre a second, every minute and a half!
And this would still be true if you were falling in Jupiter's gravity (just over two-and-a-half times Earth's) or even the enormously more powerful field of a white dwarf or neutron star (millions or billions of times greater). You would feel nothing, even if you had approached the velocity of light from a standing start in a matter of minutes. However, if you were foolish enough to get within a few radii of the attracting object, its field would no longer be uniform over
the whole length of your body, and tidal forces would soon tear you to pieces.
An 'inertialess drive', which would act exactly like a controllable gravity field, had never been discussed seriously outside the pages of science fiction until very recently. But in 1994 three American physicists did exactly this, developing some ideas of the great Russian physicist Andrei Sakharov.
'Inertia as a Zero-Point Field Lorentz Force' by B. Haisch, A. Rueda & H. F. Puthoff (Physics Review A, February 1994) may one day be regarded as a landmarkpaper. It addresses a problem so fundamental that it is normally taken for granted, with a that's-just-the way-the-universe-is-made shrug of the shoulders.
Their provisional answer depends on the astonishing - and outside the physicists' ivory towers - little-known fact that so-called 'empty' space is actually a cauldron of seething energies - the Zero-Point Field. HR&P suggest that both inertia and gravitation are electromagnetic phenomena, resulting from interaction with this field. There have been countless attempts, going all the way back to Faraday, to link gravity and magnetism, and although many experimenters have claimed success, none of their results has ever been verified. However, if HR&P's theory can be proved, it opens up the prospect - however remote - of anti-gravity, 'space drives' and the even more fantastic possibility of controlling inertia.
This could lead to some interesting situations: if you gave someone the gentlest touch, they would promptly disappear at thousands of kilometres an hour, until they bounced off the other side of the room a fraction of a millisecond later.
The good news is that traffic accidents would be virtually impossible; automobiles - and passengers - could collide harmlessly at any speed. The 'weightlessness' which we now take for granted in space missions - and which millions of tourists will be enjoying in the next century - would have seemed like magic to our grandparents. But the abolition - or merely the reduction - of inertia is quite another matter, and may be completely impossible.* But it's a nice thought, for it could provide the equivalent of 'teleportation': you could travel anywhere (at least on Earth) almost instantaneously. Frankly, I don't know how Interstellar Space travel could manage without it...

Also, soon to be written - a science fiction story (by me, of course) featuring this landmark new theory...keep checking this blog for it.

Cheers
Sid

The monster list of Metal Links \m/

My first post this semester...dedicated to metalheads everywhere!
If you are one who has exhausted his collection of music and wants to increase it or just wants to read up some interesting stuff about new bands, this is the right place, for, i present to you a list of links that will be of infinite help in this regard. Each of these are authentic, working links, and i have visited them all...that answers the question about what i do with all my time i suppose....
A good internet connection is advised for most of the sites...so stay up late in your hostel rooms if you intend to download off 'em...
Here they are:
(Credit to a certain Yashwant K for collecting them...)

Blog pages dedicated to metal:
http://asabay.blogspot.com/
http://alejandrojeldres.blogspot.com/
http://blackmetalwarez.blogspot.com/
http://brutalblogmp3.blogspot.com/
http://deathmetalinvasion.blogspot.com/
http://www.doom-or-be-doomed.blogspot.com/
http://download-full-metal-albums.blogspot.com/
http://grimdepot.blogspot.com/
http://loadown.blogspot.com/
http://www.maurocksinamorata.blogspot.com/
http://metal-tomb.blogspot.com/
http://metal--head.blogspot.com/
http://metaldlz.blogspot.com/
http://metalmusicforever.blogspot.com/
http://mp34all.blogspot.com/
http://smetal.blogspot.com/
http://takemurarock.blogspot.com/
http://the-well-of-souls.blogspot.com/
http://themetalarchive.blogspot.com/
http://theultimatemetal.blogspot.com/
http://undead666.blogspot.com/
http://classicdeathmetal.blogspot.com/
http://www.whiplash-full-metal-albums.blogspot.com/
http://rockshot.blogspot.com/2006_03_01_rockshot_archive.html
http://empeethreeindex.blogspot.com/

Great sites to download off!
(Most of these are underground russian or european sites...so they may not be in English!)
http://kot.spb.ru/mp3/2774/
http://metalmp3.zip.net/
http://www.geocities.com/greenplasticgrass/full.html#crip01
http://www.angelfire.com/music6/www.evonetwork.com/
http://www.mp3passion.net
http://www.mp3real.ru
http://www.51mpc.com/share.htm
http://xpeh.harddays.net/
http://www.mediaportal.ru/category/mp3/
http://www.angernet.org/
http://www.kohit.net/
http://www.files.lt/
http://www.phazemp3.com/
http://www.free.of.pl/s/sidis/full_allbums.htm
http://musica.mustdie.ru/
http://www.zonaunderground.com/

Some places to download our own Indian rock from:
http://split-magazine.com/downloads/
http://www.blackstratblues.com/

(phew)
That's all folks!

A bright and shiny future

Another CF story that didn't make it. Looks like Science fiction does not sell anymore.
Written at the start of the sem, I didn't think it was good enough to be posted here...but what the heck...here it is anyway.

The earth was past it's prime.
Located in the outer edge of the galaxy, it's intelligent inhabitants didn't develop contacts with other intelligences which

were concentrated around the galactic center and hence didnt benefit from the sharing of technology and trade that occurred between these worlds.
Within the first millennium of the technological revolution, all the resources on earth were used up.The desperate adoption of nuclear power by the ruling business companies (the nation had become obselete in a globalised world)of the planet had streched the inevitable total energy crunch by only a few centuries before all the fissionable material had been used up.An ever increasing population had driven the beings to dwell in underground cities, and adopt yeast and plankton and similar microbe-derived products as staple foods.Soon all the worlds population was concentrated in 200-odd cities and the open spaces were kept aside for growing and harvesting.But the planet was doomed to a bleak future and no amount or research and development of new technology could change the future.

A few thousand years later, a lone scout ship of the galactic confederation(GC) was searching in the neighborhood for harvestable resources like iridium and other fissionable heavy metals.The GC was a loose agency that was responsible for governing the various planets and colonies of the 50 odd intelligences of the central galaxy region.it was composed of the heads of the various intelligences, each in charge of a stellar cluster and so on.Each intelligence controlled many star clusters and the planets in them, until the race for planets among them had ended and boundaries were drawn up.

This scout detected the signs of intelligence in this part of the galaxy (concentrated in a single solar system, to be more precise) and reported it to the GC.The Gc soon sent a peace-cum-reconnaissance there.It consisted of two members,one each of the dominant races of the galaxy.
One was a Gly being (named after its home planet)and was a highly dexterous being,having 7 independently movable appendages on its body(2 were artificial,i.e. not originally characteristic of the species but due to genetic engineering, all Glys born had these 2 extra limbs to be put to use).Its physical abilities were offset by its lack of intelligence, though (the Glys were the last of the races to reach the level of technological advancement that all races now had).
Another was a Gaian matrix organism.It was a slow moving but highly complex and intelligent organism.Ever since all Gaians had,after a century of planetwide debate some three thousand years ago decide to merge all their individual consciousnesses into a single, mother unit, all Gaians were part of this giant organism.After this, the Gaians had become the most advanced race of the galaxy.
The GC ship navigated the solar system in a few minutes, studying the extent of intelligent prescence there.It soon zeroed in on the home planet, which was the third from the star.The beings, they found, had established remote bases on the moon orbiting the planet and on the planets before and after itself from the sun, but no major settlements on either.
After some preliminary study, they landed on the planet, surprised at not being stopped or intercepted.The planet was barren and brown to look at under the acidic clouds that thickly enveloped it.On the whole, they decided, it was an uninteresting planet to look at.They landed their ship on a random sandy place on the northern hemisphere. Again surprised at not encountering any moving life forms on disembarking, they carefully proceeded in a northerly direction.The Gly creature had a breathing apparatus supplying it the thick greenish gas that it breathed.The Gaian had no use of any such appratus as it was only a remote outpost of the overall intelligence that was it's race, and did not need to breathe to sustain itself.
Soon they discovered a largish city of brown buildings randomly oriented and distributed with respect to each other.Detecting no organism more intelligent than some clusters of anaerobic bacteria here and there, they proceeded faster.Unlike most settlements of that planet, it seemed to be mostly overground.During the detailed exploration of the city thay found many large laboratories where chemicals were manipulated,labs where lifeless electronic robots had been created and tested and facilities for nuclear research, and facilities for a large number of other scientific studies.In addition they found many empty rooms(buildings and buildings of them....living quarters, they assumed), rooms with many semi decomposed books with leaves of a carbon-based compound that broke away under their touch and filled with words in a script they didn't know.

They worked out that the planet had been sans intelligent life for at least four thousand years.They also worked out the age of the age of the civilization that created the city to be eight thousand years.

They also spent a sorry, pitiful minute thinking of the fate of the beings who created the city...

On the way back to their ship, they unearthed a metal structure inscribed with large letters of the script alien to them....they decided to take it back and study it. The words were - WELCOME TO BITS PILANI.