Woody Allen Quotes

“I was thrown out of college for cheating on the metaphysics exam; I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me.”~Woody Allen.



“To you I'm an atheist; to God, I'm the Loyal Opposition".~ Woody Allen

My Institute

The opulence and Grace of Mughal Dynasty

In the beginning there was darkness and then BANG! giving birth to an endless expanding existence of time, space and matter. Now we can see further than we have ever imagined, beyond the limits of our existence in a place we call the Universe.Our universe is brimming with its strange violent and potentially life transporting phenomenon. Its like imagining cosmic puddles where objects could disappear being injected or escaped to some other place in space or time.These cosmic puddles are like tickets to oblivion for the most part. Because either you get shredded in a black hole or get torn apart in a gravastar. The first discussion about this cosmic puddle like phenomenon appeared in 1783, when former Cambridge don John Michel presented the following argument that if one fires a cannonball vertically upwards, its ascent will be solved by gravity and eventually the particle will stop moving upward and will fall back. But if we fire this cannonball with initial velocity greater than a critical value called escape velocity, the cannonball will get rid of the gravitational force applied and will get out of the area of its effect. The escape velocity for earth is about 12km\s and about 618km\s for the sun. Michel further argued that there could be stars that are much more massive than sun and have escape velocities greater than the speed of light. We would not be able to see these stars, because any light they sent would be dragged back by the gravity of these stars. Thus they would be what Michel called dark stars and we now call black holesThe idea of black hole dates back to the First World War, when German Astronomer Karl Schwarzschild solved equations of Einstein's newborn Theory of gravity while serving in Russian Front.From his achievements he showed that space-time around any massive star would be curved. It can be explained as if we squeeze a massive star like sun to have it concentrated into a one solar mass (MΘ) black hole with radius of only two miles. Like this the gravity of a star would be infinite and curvature of space time around it would spiral out of control. This implies that not only black hole is unique in being its mass concentrated into a tiny space but also unique in the way its gravity works, So as that not even photons can escape its grasp.The Black hole property of Schwarzschild's solution was recognized slowly as progress in understanding black holes was slow----people were unwilling to accept that physical objects would ever collapse to such an extreme state. Another stumbling block rested on a mathematical misunderstanding springing from the obvious fact that in usually adopted Schwarzschild Coordinate the metric becomes singular at the event horizon r = rs = 2GM/C2 (where M is the mass of black hole and 'rs' represents Schwarzschild's radius) Also a further cause for the delay in the understanding came from the fact that people did not seem to pay much attention to this discoveries reported by other people.One discovery which was found to be a rather incredulous was Chandreshakhar's alarming result of 1931, that because of relativistic degeneracy of electrons, a cold body could not prevent having mass more than 1.44~MΘ( Where MΘ denotes the mass of sun) from collapsing indefinitely. When later the alarm caused by the discovery subsided, Chandrasekhar was awarded a Noble Prize in 1983. It was at least in part for his early work on the limiting mass of cold stars.However, Chandrasekhar's work caused conspiracy among renowned scientists of that time like Sir Arthur Eddington and Einstein himself. They did not believe like most other scientists that laws of Physics would ever allow the singularity of condensed matter at such an extreme state.Despite these hindrances of getting science community to believe that black hole is not just a mathematical fantasy but is a real fact based on real laws of physics and nature. And for that observational research had to wait longer, untill the development of radio astronomy (from 1940's onwards) and X-ray astronomy (from 1960's onwards).One way of looking for a black hole was therefore to look for matter that was orbiting what seemed to be an unseen object . And taking this understanding into account the modern epoch of understanding black holes commenced in 1950's . Partly from the introduction of the idea idea that in coordinate systems metric is regular everywhere except at the origin (of which the Kruskal metric is best known) and partly from John Wheeler who coined the term black hole for the collapsed state of matter in 1969 and then conjectured that black holes have no hair; which meant that the collapsed state of any non-rotating massive star could in fact be described by Schwarschild's solution. Other highlights were Kerr's discovery of an exact solution for rotating black holes, and Israel's uniqueness theorem for non-rotating black holes soon to be extended by Carter and others to the rotating case. Another spectacular result was work that Roger Penrose did between 1965 and 1970, showing that according to general relativity there must be a singularity of infinite density within the black hole. It was rather like the big bang at the beginning of time only it would be end of time for collapsing body. At that singularity, our ability to predict the future breaks down. However any observer who remained, would not be affected by this failure of predictability because neither light nor any other signal can reach them from the singularity which can be concisely called the Penrose's singularity theorem. This result was soon extended by the Hawking and by Geroch.With hindsight, we can say that once it was understood what the appropriate level of mathematical sophistication is to adopt for great complex research on Black holes. As young physicists and mathematicians started to take interest in this field, taking the fact into account that work had to be done on had started to become prolific ------consequently great discoveries were made in 1950’s and 1960’s. Nevertheless there was still a chock to come, when Stephen Hawking presented his achievements named as Hawking radiation. This work explained that there are rays emitting out of black holes when quantum effects are taken into consideration and which permits a black hole thermodynamics to set up.So where do we stand on the question of whether black holes as described by the mathematical solutions discussed above actually exist in nature?What are the circumstances in which astrophysical black holes are thought likely to be formed? The mean density ‘ρ’ of black hole (its mass M divided by 4/3 πrs3) is proportional to 1/M2.For 1MΘ black hole, ρ ~ 1016 g/cm3, forty times nuclear matter density. Whereas for a black hole of 108 MΘ, ρ ~ 1g/cm3 the density of matter. Except this, it is crucial to note that conditions required for matter to form a small black hole are much more extreme than for a large one. There are three main regimes of black holes.(i) Stellar mass black holes formed after the death of some normal star.(ii) Supermassive black holes (~106-1016MΘ) formed in the centre of galaxies as a result of the processes of galactic dynamics.(iii) Black holes formed as a result of fluctuations or phase transitions in the early universe where conditions were so extreme that black holes of all masses would have been produced.However, scientists are concentrating more on stellar mass black holes based on their observational evidences found in the systems like Cygnus X-1, Scorpio X-1 and so many others.The discovery of the system Cygnus X-1 gave evidence of black hole emitting X-rays (By the end of 1960’s) . While the discovery of system Scorpio X-1 in 1966 gave proof of existence of an observed star and neutron star.Astronomers have also found convincing existence for a supermassive black hole in the centre of the giant elliptical galaxy M87, as well as in other galaxies. The discovery is based on velocity measurements of a whirlpool of hot gases orbiting the black hole. In 1994, Hubble Telescope data produced an unprecedented measurement of the mass of an unseen object at the centre of M87. Based on the kinetic energy of the material whirling about the centre, the object is about 3 billion times the mass of our sun and appears to be concentrated into a space smaller than our solar system.However, few scientists have questioned the existence of black holes and suggested in their place, the existence of an exotic bubble of superdense matter, an object they call a gravastar. Gravastars are cold, dense shells supported by a springy, weird space inside. These black holes critics suggest they are like black holes, lit only by the material raining down onto them from outside. In fact, they seem to fit all the observational evidence for the existence of Black holes.But the problem with idea of gravastar (appeared most recently in 2002) have some confused as well as mathematical problems under the carpet and needs much more explicit explanation. While black holes on the other hand not only have refuted the critics of Karl Schwarzschild and Chandreshaker but also have proved to be useful in predicting the future under the newly grasped idea of P-Branes and also for the establishment of theory of everything.

Scientific Revolutions

Scientific Revolutions, almost by definition, defy common sense. The purpose of science is to peel back the layer of the appearance of objects to reveal their underlying nature. In fact, if appearance and essence were the same thing there would be no need for science.

-- Michio Kaku

Roman Holiday

Its the first black and white english movie i ever watched, with my eyes swolling out because of lack of sleep at 4 in the morning. I was waiting for our president to declare the restoration of judiciary on 16th of March 2008 with my sister in the TV-lounge and watched this movie on laptop in front of TV just for past time activity but it turned out to be a rather pleasant time as movie was nice, bringing few smiles to my face which one should always care about.The issue which was depicted in this movie was about 1950's movement of feminism in western culture , and it was delineated splendidly.Above all after watching this movie i had the feeling that black and white movies are also worth-watching and can become one of my favourite ones too :)

Large Hadron Collider

Large hadron collider is the best model of intelligence of man regarding science. It is the biggest and most complicated machine ever made in the history. This has the basic function of locomotion of protons, near to the speed of light. Observing the results and consequences, we’ll have under the collision of these protons. This machine has been built by a European institute, named CERM with the help of many other countries, universities and thousands of scientists.
CERN, whose complete name is European Organization for Nuclear Research, was inaugurated by some European scientists at the end of Second World War in 1954. Its goal is to understand the universe at the very basic level, including the questions about the reasoning of formation & interaction of fundamental particles. CERN which started as a small laboratory in 1954, is now the biggest particle physics laboratory of world. It is situated on the border of Geneva, Switzerland, and France. Its buildings are on the both sides of the border. It has 20 European countries as its members.
As a laboratory of particle physics, the function of CERN is to understand fundamental particles, from which electrons, protons and neutrons are generated. Further to which better comprehension and justification of laws of nature is also included. For this, CERN requires particle accelerators which help protons, electrons etc. to move with relativistic speed. These highly accelerated particles are collided, consequently basic particles are formed from which electrons & protons are produced. These basic particles are Quarks and Leptons, as these particles are really small in size, and therefore special digital detectors are used for the detection and observation of them.
Large hadron collider is the most modern particle accelerator, which has been built at the cost of 8 to 10 billion dollars to find out the answers of most important questions in physics. The suggestion for this project was given in 1980’s and was approved in 1994 by CERN council. This great model of science and technology completed its construction in 2008. It was formally initiated at 10th September 2008 with locomotion of one beam of protons being done inside it successfully. This is an underground circular tunnel, which has circumference of 27km. it has been dug 100m inside of the earth on both sides of the border of France and Switzerland.
There are 9300 superconducting magnets being used inside of it, which provided the protons with the energy of moving within 99.9% of speed of light. On this speed, a proton will complete its one cycle around the tunnel of 27 km in 90 microseconds. Likewise protons will complete its 1100 cycles in one second. Protons will have 6 million collisions among them in one second altogether. The temperature has been cooled down to -271 celsius for these superconducting magnets to work. To make this temperature possible 60 tons of liquid helium and 10,080 tons of liquid nitrogen is being used. Accordingly the temperature here will only be 2 degrees above Absolute Zero, making LHC the coldest place not only on earth but in the whole universe.
In LHC two beams of protons will be circulated in opposite directions and every beam will have the energy of 7 Tere Electron Volt. Then these beams coming from the opposite directions will be collided and the energy of this collision will be 14 TeV. Consequently so much temperature will be generated that this temperature will be greater than the inner temperature of sun. It will be the hottest place of our galaxy but this temperature will be concentrated in a very tiny space, like the size of a proton having very small magnitude. Here the main goal is to produce those circumstances which were there in the one thousandth of a second right after the Big Bang. By artificially providing these circumstances of that time, we’ll be able to find out the qualities and properties of particles, which were present immediately after the big bang.
Ultrahigh vacuum is produced in the accelerator for the prevention of collision of protons with gas molecules which will be like the interstellar space. There are detectors specially designed to work efficiently with highly accelerated particles at very little periods of time and space. Then for the observation and analysis of this recorded data and information, a distributed network of computers will be used.
But what will be the benefit of constructing a machine this bigger in size and complex in functions? What will be the result of consistent hard work and adversities of two decades? How many satisfied answers will we get from the questions arisen in the process of this series of experiments? These are the natural questions, which emerge in the mind of a reader. The hopes of scientists associated with LHC can be divided into five vast constituents, which are about the five theories of physics.
First of all we’ll study the expected outcomes of big bang theory. According to this theory our universe is increasing in its size with passage of time. So if we look in the past, we’ll find the universe much smaller. Likewise if we go back 14 billion years ago, then we’ll observe that our universe was almost of the size of a dot. At that time matter did not exist as it exists today, in the shape of protons, electrons, neutrons, atoms and molecules. At that time universe started to expand with an explosion. Temperature was also too much then, which started to cool down very slowly, converting the matter into present state with having too much different properties than at the time of being generated. In LHC, scientists will try to understand the process of formation of electron, proton and neutron by producing the conditions present at a few milliseconds after big bang. In addition to which they’ll try to understand why the mass of protons and neutrons is more than Quarks and Lepton combined, from which these particles are made.
Another important theory named String Theory will be tested here through different experiments. If its results will be in accordance with this theory’s predictions, then these experimental proofs will be very important for this theory. According to this theory, the fundamental particles of nature are made from very tiny strings. This theory says that there are 11 dimensions. In which three are of space, one is of time and seven others are additional. These dimensions are very small and curved but very tiny particles can go into them. If some particles or energy will disappear because of collision of protons, as string theory predicts it to move to the extra dimensions then this will be the proof of existence of additional dimensions.
Third important theory is the standard model of physics which explains clearly the properties of particles discovered yet and it also explains the causes of interaction between them. But this is not a complete theory. It does not explain the relation between gravitational force and other natural forces. For this scientists are waiting for such demonstrations which will provide them a key to understand further than the current progress in unification of natural forces. Further adding to this, existence of particle named Higg’s Boson or God’s particle is very important. This particle hasn’t been discovered yet, a big number of scientists are quite hopeful that LHC will be triumphant in the discovery of this particle. This particle is very important for understanding those reasons because of which other particles supposedly gain mass.
Fourth theory is about Dark matter (non-luminous material postulated to exist in space). In agreement with Astrophysics 96% of universe is made up of dark matter and dark energy. Its significant property is that electromagnetic force does not affect it. But it interacts with common matter through gravitational force. LHC also aims to find out the fundamental particles of dark matter but many scientists do not have many expectations for that.
Fifth important theory, on which experiments of LHC will shed some light, is Multiverse Theory. It says that there are infinite universes rather than just one. But presently scientists have low expectations to find a proof for such a theory.
Some scientists have shown concern that the experiment may create miniature black holes which would shallow the earth. But most scientists are dismissing this intimidate as nonsense. The fact is that to create a black hole which will be able to destroy the earth, a minimum critical mass of 30% of mass of sun that contains 99% mass of the whole solar system is required. Only one percent is distributed to all planets, naturally the share of earth is very low. Therefore, it’s impossible to create as much energy on earth as is required to create a black hole.
On September 20th, LHC encountered a technical fault and it had to be shut down for some time. Reportedly, the huge magnets of the world’s largest ‘atom smasher’ over heated 10 days after the start of LHC. Scientists are currently trying to fix the problem and planning to restart the experiment within a few weeks. Though the experiment has been suspended for some time, it’s not over yet. Let us hope to find the answers to the great questions discussed above in near future.