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Paradox of Energy

A recipient of the Sahitya Akademi Award, Chaturvedi Badrinath was one of the leading figures in Indian philosophy. His unique and accessible approach ranged across a variety of philosophical concerns. Originally published in the Times of India, the following is an extract from Chaturvedi Badrinath: Unity of Life and Other Essays, edited by his daughter Tulsi Badrinath, which presents the complex ideas of Indian philosophy in simple language.

That life is energy, is evident. What is equally evident is the truth that life-energy, or prana, flows in many channels: the energy of dance, of music, of thought, and of literature; and also the energy at the stock exchange. It assumes many forms: the energy in earth and in water, and the energy of the human mind and of the human heart. It takes many names: love is energy, and hatred is energy, too. What is not evident, though, although true, is the fact that there exists, at its very heart, a profound paradox. The highest form of energy arises from complete inner stillness. That is the paradox of energy. And it completes itself in the truth that inner stillness is the natural goal of all energy, even as it is its origin. When energy moves away both from its origin and its goal, it turns upon itself, as it always has, and destroys everything, the self and the other, in their individual and collective sense.

Nowhere has the nature of life-energy, and its manifold workings, been investigated in greater detail than in the Dharmic thought: and in the body of that thought, nowhere has the paradox of energy been discussed with greater thoroughness than in the  Mahabharata and in the Yoga-Vasishtha. Of these two, it is mostly in the Mahabharata that the inquiry proceeds through the complexity of concrete human relationships, in the very many diverse situations of life. Given the fact that life is energy, and that life is a complex system of relationships, it follows that it is in relationships that the workings of energy are most manifest; that is, in one’s relationship with one’s self and with the other. Indeed, it is in that light that the whole of Indian philosophy is to be studied, which it seldom is.

Let us see how very central, in the Indian enquiry into the human condition, the questions concerning life-energy, prana, are. What follows is not a summary of the philosophical literature on that subject but just an indication of the centrality of those questions.

For example, all the major Upanisads, revolve around the nature of prana. One of the six questions in the Prasna-upanisad, that was put to sage Pippalada by six other sages, all of them of great eminence, is asked by Asvalayana. He wants to know: if all forms of life are suffused with prana, or life-energy, then what is the origin of prana itself? How does it enter the human body? And how does it then divide itself into its varied expressions? How does it leave one’s body, so that, when it does, one is dead? How does life-energy hold the outside material world? and how does it hold the inner world of man’s mind? The two largest of the Upanisads, the Chhandogya and the Brihad-aranyaka, enquire into the intimate relation of the energy that flows in the elements of nature with the energy in the attributes of human personality. They enquire into the inter-relatedness of man’s various energies, physical and mental and emotional. They enquire into the inter-relatedeness of the material and the spiritual. And, through all these, they enquire into the nature of Self, the atman.

Samkhya, one of the oldest schools of Indian philosophy, certainly prior to the Mahabharata and to Buddhism and Jainism, speaks of the energy of intelligence, or sattva; energy of action, or rajas; and of the energy of dullness, or tamas, as being the three constituents of all that exists. Their varying proportions, which may keep changing with the passage of time, account for the diverse characters of individuals, and account also for the character of the relationships which they form. The Yoga expands upon it further. It shows that the energies of the body and of the mind are inseparable in a way that one determines the other. It suggests ways of disciplining them; so that they flow without being obstructed by the wrong attitudes and passions which we ourselves create. Yoga, properly understood, takes us, by disciplining our energies, towards simple human happiness, and towards beatitude.

The Mahabharata, undoubtedly the largest and the most systematic enquiry into the human condition, has the ordering of energy, individual and social, as its main concern. It takes up, but always in the contexts of concrete human relationships, the relation of the self with itself and with the other. It demonstrates how we misdirect, misuse, and abuse, our personal and collective energies, doing violence thereby to ourselves and to others. The Mahabharata then takes us, step by step, towards that greater freedom of energy that enhances human worth and does not degrade it; towards that freedom, of which every human person is a natural heir.

Vyasa, the author of the Mahabharata, regards all human relationships as determined by Time: the coming together; the parting; the loving; the hating; being indifferent; being gentle and tender; being nasty and brutal; going to war and reconciling in the attitude of peace. Bhishma, a dominant figure in the Mahabharata, rejects that view. He maintains that ‘Time is no force; it is only a mental construct to explain sequence. The real force, the primary human energy, lies in the human mind and in the human heart, from which arise all human acts, karma.’ The Yoga-Vasishtha goes many steps further. Its main thesis is that, like the material world, time is wholly a creation of the mind, and has no existence independent of the mind. Mind, or manas, is the moving energy. That is to say, perception is everything. These two radically opposed conceptions of energy, one of Vyasa, and the other of Bhishma and, many centuries later, of the Yoga-Vasishtha, have vastly different ethical implications as regards the question of responsibility.

The Buddha had rejected the idea of a permanent substance, called the atman, or the Self, which was believed to survive physical decay and death. He maintained, on the contrary, that there is no such abiding substance, and what we call `self’ is only a changing conglomerate of the physical, the mental, the feeling, the conscious attributes of man; all of them in a flux. But the main concern of the Buddha was with human suffering, duhkha, which arises from wrong perceptions of oneself and of the other. So, whether one believes, or one does not, in the Self, with a capital `S’, as a permanent entity, is of no consequence whatsoever for the human drama—the attraction; the repulsion; the feelings that are generated; the conflicts; the attitudes, and what one makes of oneself and of the other. Jainism likewise is concerned with these. And they assume that for all practical purposes there is a person, a self. What that means is that no final decision is at all required as to the validity of the metaphysical positions concerning the atman.

What is of greater importance is what all philosophical systems put together say to us as regards the ordering of our physical and mental and emotional energies.

Featured image: Mekanagadde, Karnataka, India. Photo by Adarsh Kummur. CC0 via Unsplash.

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Adding a new dimension to the early chemistry of the solar system

What was our solar system composed of at the beginning of its formation? Using sophisticated computer simulations, researchers from France and Australia have obtained new insights into the chemical composition of the dust grains that formed in the early solar system which went on to form the building blocks of the terrestrial planets.

The formation of our solar system started from the collapse of a self-gravitating and slowly rotating cloud of gas and dust. As the radius of the cloud decreased, the rotational velocity increased to preserve angular momentum. The increasing rotational speed created large centrifugal forces, and the material which was not already accreted into the new born protostar formed a large thin disk. Meteorites, comets, and all planets in our solar system, including the Earth, formed from rocky material that condensed out from this thin disc, called the solar nebula, which surrounded our young, newly formed sun 4.5 billion years ago.

As regulated by the laws of thermodynamics, the local temperature and pressure in the solar nebula determined the chemical composition of the dust grains that condensed out of the cooling disc. This dust then accreted to form bigger objects like meteorites, asteroids, and planets. Intuitively, we would expect to find hot, high pressure environments closer to the young sun and cold, rarefied environments far from the sun. This is at basis of the one-dimensional thermodynamic condensation sequence for a thin disc, which shows that high temperature materials called refractories (such as ceramic-like dust and silicates) should be located close to the sun while volatile materials (such as ices and sulfur compounds) should form far from the Sun where temperatures are cooler.

However, meteorites, in particular carbonaceous chondrites, one of the oldest objects of our solar system (about 4.5 billion years ago), contain a mix of both refractory and volatile material. Mercury, the closest planet to the sun, also shows mix of both refractories and, surprisingly, volatiles which should not be present according to the traditional one-dimensional condensation sequence.

These new 2D calculations provide a clearer view of the pristine chemistry of our solar system soon after its formation.

In order to investigate the problem, Francesco Pignatale from the Centre de Recherche Astrophysique de Lyon, in France and co-authors Sarah Maddison, Kurt Liffman, and Geoff Brooks from Swinburne University of Technology in Australia, computed two-dimensional maps of the distribution of condensates using a 2D model of the solar nebula available, which accounts not only for the distance from the sun but also for the thickness of the disc.

The resulting maps have revealed a complex chemical distribution of the dust, with refractory materials present at large distances from the sun on the surface of the disc, and volatile materials present in the inner disc close to the young sun.

Comparison between the temperature distribution in the 1D disk model (top) and 2D disk model (bottom) with the temperature distribution from D’Alessio et al., 1998 and 1999 and rendering from Pignatale et al., 2016. R is the distance from the forming star in AU (astronomical unit, the average distance between the Earth and the Sun, ~149*106 Km), Z is the altitude from the midplane of the disc and T is the temperature in Kelvin).

The reason of this counter-intuitive behaviour is due to the complex temperature and pressure distribution of disc. According to the 1D disk model, regions close to the sun are characterized by hot temperatures while regions far from the star experience very cold environments.

On the other hand, in the 2D disk model, it is possible to find high temperature regions on the disc surface and at relatively high distances from the forming sun, which are directly heated by the sun. Very cold regions close to the sun in the inner disc are also present. Here, the high concentration of dust prevents the stellar radiation from efficiently going through the disc, thus failing to heat the gas and dust.

These new 2D calculations provide a clearer view of the pristine chemistry of our solar system soon after its formation.

Featured image credit: Artist’s concept of a protoplanetary disk, where particles of dust and grit collide and accrete forming planets or asteroids by NASA. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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A guide to Southern California for classical art enthusiasts [interactive map]

Every year, millions of people visit California in search of beaches, hiking, celebrity sightings, and more. In the map below, Peter J. Holliday shows us his version of California, focusing on the rich history of classically inspired art and architecture in Southern California.  Enjoy the stories of grand landmarks such as Hearst Castle, Pasadena City Hall, and the Getty Villa. Holliday writes about the initial criticism of the Getty Villa:

“The initial reception of the Getty Villa is notorious. The Villa represented the past as if it were new, without any of the sense of passage of time separating out the visitor from antiquity. This staging elicited all manner of hand-wringing over issues of authenticity. It’s pristine condition discomfited critics; its sense that the imagined brought forth the many comparisons, both positive and negative, with Disneyland”

Peter J. Holliday will also be giving tours of Pasadena during the 2016 Society of Architectural Historians Annual International Conference on April 9th.

Featured image credit: Neptune Pool by Urban~commonswiki CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia.

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Underground in the city

Most people living in large towns and cities probably give little thought to soil. Why should they? At a first glance, much of the ground in towns and cities is sealed with concrete, asphalt and bricks, and most city-dwellers have little reason to have contact with soil. To most, soil in cities is simply dirt. But soil is actually in abundance in cities: it lays beneath the many small gardens, flower beds, road and railway verges, parks, sports grounds, school playing fields, and allotments of the city, where it plays many under appreciated roles. In fact, almost a quarter of the land in English cities is covered by gardens, and in the United States, lawns cover three times as much area as does corn. Cities are surprisingly green and beneath this green is soil, and it is dawning on city planners that soils of the city actually play a crucial role.

The most obvious role for urban soil, and the place where people have the most intimate contact with soil, is in the many gardens, parks, and allotments that scatter the city. Here, soil supports the plants that adorn our gardens and city parks, and garden lawns, and it provides nutrients and water for the vegetables that city dwellers grow. In fact, millions of people worldwide grow their own food in one way or another in cities, often by necessity, and during the Second World War allotments in British and American towns and cities were a mainstay for food production for civilians threatened by shortages of food. It might be a surprise, but soils of city allotments are often more fertile, and support higher yields, than those of farmland, largely because allotment owners often add substantial amounts of compost to their soil, made up household wastes, which boosts organic matter content of soil.

Soil also helps cities in less obvious ways, such as by soaking up heat, keeping in check the urban heat island, absorbing excess water after intense rainfall, thereby reducing pressure on sewerage systems, and it forms the base of a perfect sports pitch for football, tennis, cricket and golf; for all these sports, the meticulous management of turf and its underlying soil is key to sporting success.

Image credit: Demand for allotments, such as these close to the Old Trafford Football Ground, Manchester, is booming, as city people turn to the soil to grow their own food. Photo by Richard Bardgett, do not reuse without permission.

Despite its many roles, soil of the city is under threat. The most obvious threat is the sealing of soil with impermeable materials such as asphalt, bricks, and concrete. Worldwide, cities are growing fast, and as they grow they consume massive areas of fertile farmland and its underlying soil. The scale of urban expansion is enormous. Across Europe, for example, upward of 500 square kilometers of land are sealed by asphalt, bricks, and concrete each year. To put this into perspective, this is an area roughly half the size of the city of Berlin. And in Germany alone, around 27 hectares of land are sealed every day, which is roundly the size of 30 football pitches. The consequences of this sealing for soil are dramatic: it prevents plants from being able to grow and abruptly ends the many functions that soils perform, such as the recycling and storage of water or nutrients, and the exchange of gases between the land and atmosphere. Soil sealing effectively suffocates the soil.

Another big problem for city soils is contamination with pollutants from a long history of industrial activity. These pollutants, which can include a cocktail heavy metals, organic pollutants, and even asbestos, can pose a significant health risk, especially in the vast areas of derelict land where industry once flourished. These areas, often termed brownfield land, can be considerable; in England, there is some 65,000 hectares of brownfield land in our towns and cities, which is roughly the size of 100,000 football pitches, and in Germany this figure is almost double. Cleaning up this land for housing and new businesses is a major priority for city planners, but it is not an insignificant task. But much can be done. The 2012 London Olympics, which took place on what was derelict industrial land contaminated with heavy metals, solvents, organic toxins, and rubble, is an excellent example what can be done. Restoring this land required an enormous soil cleaning operation, involving ‘soil hospitals’ and several soil washing plants to test, treat and recycle contaminated soil. And now, a once derelict industrial wasteland is a vibrant and sustainably landscaped area of London supported by clean and healthy soil.

Worldwide, cities are expanding rapidly. And with this come the sealing of considerable areas of fertile soil and increasing pressure on unsealed soil as the urban populations grows. City planners are beginning to realise that this is, and will, have severe consequences for the urban environment given the many important functions that healthy soil plays in urban life. I have mentioned a few, such as in helping excess water drain away after storms, in storing carbon and nutrients, and in providing a foundation to grow vegetables and flowers, and play sports. But more needs to be done: urban expansion needs to be more soil friendly. This might be through restricting sealing to poor quality soils, or unsealing and restoring health to sealed soils that are no longer in use. Or it might be through bringing back life to soils of derelict land and encouraging city-dwellers to nurture their soils to grow food, as done so effectively during the Second World War. Education is also important, to inform gardeners how best to build the fertility of soil, and how to reduce the health risks of contaminants that potentially lurk in urban soils.

Next time you walk through a city, don’t just look at the buildings, pavements and roads that cover much of the land. Look also to the ground and the abundance of soil that supports the many gardens, flowerbeds, parks, sports grounds, and allotments of the city. This green space, and many aspect of urban life, depends on healthy soil.

Featured image credit: Southeastern Penang Island Bird Eye view by Marufish. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

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Exposures from the dark side

Julian Assange is an unusual figure in the world of hacktivism. He embraced his notoriety as leader of Wikileaks, and on 4 February 2016, he appeared on the balcony of the Ecuadorian embassy holding a copy of a UN panel report that declared that he has been “arbitrarily detained” while avoiding extradition to Sweden for alleged rape for almost six years (British and Swedish prosecutors still seek to detain him).

There was more than a hint of a double standard in Assange’s demands that the UK should defer legally to the UN panel. Hacktivism often seems to disregard legal constraints in force in the offline world. It is typically anonymous, making it hard to hold people to account when things go wrong. It is not always open or democratic — even when it is practised in jurisdictions with strong democratic traditions.

Wikileaks allegedly exposes the wrongdoing of governments and other powerful global actors, based on inside information given to it by leakers or hackers. Yet the transparency it demands of others does not apply to itself. It collects its leaks through electronic drop boxes that it has helped to design to protect the anonymity of its sources. Wikileaks claims to support human rights and to engage in processes of democratic accountability, but its own failure to disclose much information about itself denudes its credibility and contributes to an objectionable kind of impunity.

Consider the difference between Wikileaks and two of the media organizations with which it cooperated: The Guardian and The New York Times. Both newspapers have a long tradition of investigative journalism and have engaged in big journalistic exposures, sometimes based on leaks. Their journalists fact check articles, edit them in ways to make large amounts of information digestible by their audiences (not to mislead), and sign their names. Their (publicly known) headquarters are located in countries with strict libel laws and laws prohibiting hacking, even in the service of bona fide investigative journalism. When they make mistakes, they issue retractions and often apologize or pay damages. They are also open when they or their journalists are guilty of fraud or of some other kind of criminal activity.

Wikileaks is systematically different. Although it says quite a lot about its convictions on its website, it displays no masthead identifying its editors, and, apart from Julian Assange, few people connected with the organization in general or its news gathering in particular have ever been named. This might make sense if those running Wikileaks were based in human rights-violating jurisdictions, but it is known that much Wikileaks technology is based in Scandinavia, where there is no tradition of censorship or government interference in the media. Since Wikileaks does not necessarily go in for disclosures that are more far-reaching than those of its mainstream collaborators, it is unclear why it is so shadowy. On the contrary, its secrecy about itself detracts from both the credibility of its news and the credibility of its adherence to human rights. Though Wikileaks claims to check all its information before publishing, it does not back up this claim with an indication of numbers of people working for it, or their competence, or the methods by which information is tested for accuracy and authenticity. This would be bad enough in a media organization with a relatively local coverage, but Wikileaks publishes leaks about the powerful in a wide array of countries. Again, it has not been quick to report allegations of wrongdoing by its own employees. On the contrary, it has avoided doing so. For example, it did not publicize charges of sexual assault against Assange in Sweden. Finally, its dumps of documents with identifying details of individuals have sometimes put people in danger.

Wikileaks illustrates some of the difficulties of human rights-supporting journalism conducted anonymously and from the legal no-man’s land of cyberspace.

Featured image credit: The Subtle Roar of Online Whistle-blowing: Julian Assange by New Media Days / Peter Erichsen. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Flickr.

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10 surprising facts about spiders

Arachnophobia, an irrational fear of spiders, affects millions of people around the world. This is not helped by popular culture portraying them as scary, deadly creatures who could creep up on you, and bite you, when you least expect it. Admittedly, they also look pretty creepy…

The outcome being that spiders often get a bad reputation, with people running away from them, or killing them, when they usually pose no danger to anyone. In fact, spiders play a very important part in balancing nature, controlling the population of insects. You do need to be careful of the hundred or so species that are classed as dangerous, but this is only one hundred out of over thirty-five thousand species of spider. So the odds are in our favor.

Are you scared of spiders? Marie Curie once said “Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood”. Why not celebrate Save a Spider Day and take a leap into the web of knowledge with us? We’ve found the following ten facts about these misunderstood creatures:

‘Ant mimic jumping spider’ by Shyamal. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.


Spiders have been around much longer than we have, appearing over 400 million years ago during what is known as the Devonian period, so it’s not really fair that we sometimes treat them so poorly. We should be respecting our elders!
They live on every continent. The only place where spiders have not been found is the ice cap of Antarctica.
Surprisingly, not all spiders build webs. Some will hunt their prey rather than build a trap, but all of them produce and use silk for a variety of purposes.
The largest spider is the Goliath tarantula, found in South America – it has a leg span of 26cm, which is the same size as a Chihuahua. The smallest spider is the male Patu digua, whose body length is only 0.37 mm – 3 of these spiders would fit on the head of a pin.
Some spiders can mimic other creatures, pretending to be ants, distasteful bugs, and even bird droppings on a leaf, either to defend against predation or as a form of attack.
Many spiders will eat a variety of creatures, whilst some have very specific diets. For example, the tropical bolas spider will only eat the male of a single species of moth – it lures its prey by pretending to be the female moth.
Most spiders can’t see very well, mainly because they are nocturnal and “listen” to the world around them using vibrations felt through the air, ground, their webs, or the surface of water.
Spiders often use their chelicerae as weapons for attack and defence, however fishing spiders also use them to hold their egg cocoons whilst they run along the surface of water.
All but one family of spiders (the Uloboridae) are venomous, but the majority can’t harm humans – there are less than 100 species that are considered to be a serious danger to humans.
The famous black widow spider goes by many different names across the world: malmignette (southern Europe), Button spider (South Africa), Redback (Australia), and katipo (New Zealand).

There are even more facts to be discovered, so check out the article on spiders from The New Encyclopedia of Insects and their Allies, available on Oxford Reference, to discover more.

Featured image credit: Spider web, by avtar. CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay.

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How to polish your résumé

I’ve read a lot of résumés over the years. I’ve read 35-page résumés from senior academics documenting every Rotary talk, guest lecture, and letter to the editor. I’ve read not-quite-one-page résumés from high school students giving their neighbors as references. In the process, I’ve come to think of résumé reading as an acquired literary taste, like flarf or fanfiction. And I’ve come to think of résumé writing as a unique genre with its own rhetorical nuances and conventions.

All of us will need to update a résumé periodically, whether for job-hunting, promotions in an organization, free-lance work, or service on a board of something-or-other. So we should be paying attention to those nuances.

Let’s start with audience, which is usually a hiring committee. Hiring committees read résumés in the context of a particular job and often have a scoring grid or rubric prepared by human resources. The rubric asks two questions. Do you meet the minimum qualifications in terms of degrees, types and length of experience, and skills and abilities related to the job? How do you measure up on the preferred qualifications?

However, each person on a hiring committee brings their own professional lens and experience to the process. Some look for conciseness, some for typos, some for gaps, some for exaggerations, some for fonts and graphic design; some analyze references, some focus on job titles and duties, some worry about longevity in a job, and some think about transferable skills. That’s why there are committees.

Does one résumé fit all situations? In the context of a particular job, hiring committees read résumés as a match for that job description. But résumés also tell a general story. Is the person primarily a writer, a designer, a manager, an editor, a researcher, et cetera? You will probably want to have different versions of your résumé that emphasize different skills, and you may want your résumé to be organized around those skills rather than as a simple chronology of past positions.

Should you start your résumé by listing your career objective? If you are applying for a specific position, you don’t need to sacrifice important space by announcing that your objective is “a challenging position in professional writing that enables you to use your skills as a communicator” or some such thing. The people doing the hiring can infer your objective from the job description and the fact that you applied. You usually do want to list an objective if you are sending a résumé to a professional contact who might circulate it to people in a company or a large organization that might save résumés and search them electronically when openings arise.

Image credit: Climbing Up to Business Success for Young Owners by Calita Kabir. CC-BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

In fact, you might even want to have a separate version of your résumé for employers that rank applicants using software. Human readers prefer active verbs like manage and produce and write, but computers are often coded with key words from position descriptions, so a résumé may need to be tweaked to include nouns like management and production and documentation. There is no single list of magic words, of course, so you will want to develop your own set of key words based on an analysis of job postings in your field. Search engine optimization is not just for Google.

People read résumés differently than computers do, so you can also optimize your résumé for human readers. Find a focus group of people who can give you honest opinions and ask them “What is the first thing you notice about the résumé?” “What would you want to ask about if the person was in the room right now?” “What would the applicant be like as a colleague or employee?” “What are five personality characteristics that stand out about this person?” (If you get really ambitious, you can do this exercise with a list of key words but free style is okay too). Writing a résumé is part self-presentation and part self-analysis, so it’s useful to develop some strategies for analyzing your presentation of self.

One last thing. Should you call it a résumé, or resume, or resumé? Oxford Dictionaries gives résumé, with the acute accent over both of the e’s. So does Bryan Garner and the New York Times Style guide. That makes sense to me, since you want to distinguish résumé the noun from the (etymologically-related) verb resume. And of course, if you are going to put in one acute e, why not go all the way? Who knows what effect that might have.

Featured Image credit: keyboard button entering by niekverlaan. Public domain via Pixabay.

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What black hole collisions reveal about the universe

The remarkable detection of gravitational waves by the LIGO collaboration recently has drawn much attention to the fundamental and intriguing workings of gravity in our universe. Finding these gravitational waves, inferred to be produced by merger of two stellar mass black holes, has been like listening to the very distant sound of the universe. The natural question that arises is: What do such phenomena tell us about the cosmos, and what new information can they bring on the amazing nature and structure of the universe?

The key point to note here is, gravity is the supreme force ruling such happenings which are on cosmic scales and also at hugely faraway distances. The dynamical process that governs such phenomena, especially the formation of stellar mass black holes, is gravitational collapse of massive stars, that is, shrinking and contracting of the big stars in the universe under the force of their own gravity. Also, galaxy formation and in general, structure formation in the universe, are largely governed by such collapse processes.

We know, from the time of Newton, that any two bodies will be attracted to each other by their own gravity with a force that is proportional to their masses, and the farther they are the less force. But we now know that while such a simple law would hold in approximation, this Newtonian gravity picture assumes the force of gravitation to move at an infinite speed, inconsistent with the special relativity theory which is experimentally well tested.

This is why Einstein developed the general theory of relativity, which is the best available theory of gravity today. For weak gravity fields such as those on earth or in planetary systems, we do not see much observable differences from Newtonian theory. However, when gravity fields are strong, as would be the case when massive stars contract and collapse under their own gravity at the end point of their stellar evolution, we then need to use the Einstein theory of gravity to probe their dynamics. It is Einstein’s gravity that rules the universe of stars and galaxies, their evolution and dynamics, and tells us about the amazing phenomena in the universe such as the black holes and space-time singularities, including the Big Bang singularity as the origin of universe.

Photograph of Albert Einstein in his office at the University of Berlin, published in the USA in 1920. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

The sun, and other massive stars many times the sun, give out light and heat by burning their internal nuclear fuel such as hydrogen. When this fuel is exhausted finally, the star reaches the end point of its evolution and the nuclear reactions within subside. There are no pressures present within now which can resist the ever present force of gravity of the star. The massive body then starts contracting and shrinking onto itself, which is the gravitational collapse of the star. For stars which are about seven to eight times the mass of the sun, this collapse can still be halted due to a newly generated quantum pressure within which builds up as the star contracts, due to rapid motion of neutrons inside. Then the contracting stellar core gives birth to a neutron star, of the order of ten kilometers in radius, whereas the outer layers of the star are blasted off in a supernova explosion.

If the star is, however, much more massive, of tens of solar masses, then there is no halting of its collapse under gravity, resulting in a continual gravitational collapse. Then, the general theory of relativity predicts that a space-time singularity must be the final fate of such a collapsing star. The singularity is an epoch where all physical quantities such as the mass-energy density, the curvatures of space-time, and such others blow up and diverge arbitrarily high.

In the past few decades, researchers have now analysed extensively many gravitational collapse models within the framework of Einstein’s gravity. The key point here is, as the collapse of a massive star evolves to form the singularity, at times an event horizon of gravity develops before the singularity happens. Then we have a “black hole” forming as the collapse end-state. This is because the event horizon is a “one-way membrane” which allows entry for material particles and light, but they can never escape the black hole region. On the other hand, if the event horizon fails to form or is delayed during collapse, then we have a singularity not hidden inside the horizon, visible to faraway observers in the universe, sometimes called a “naked singularity.” Whether the collapse produces a black hole or a naked singularity depends on the internal structure of the star and how its dynamical evolution proceeds.

Einstein’s theory treats the universe as a “space-time continuum,” or “fabric,” wherein matter and its motion curves the space-time. It is like putting a marble on a rubber sheet curving the same. The formation of a black hole or singularity from the collapse of a massive star creates strong ripples in the space-time geometry. Merger events of black holes or singularities create such ripples or vibrations, propagating at the speed of light. These perturbations in the space-time geometry are what we call gravitational waves.

The two black holes that collided to produce the gravitational waves that LIGO detected recently were stellar mass black holes of 36 and 29 solar masses, which were produced by such gravitational collapse. This involved very intricate measurements of contraction in space through laser beams.

This is of course one way to begin scratching the surface of the ultimate reality that the universe is. While gravitational waves provide a strong confirmation of general relativity, there are major advances to be made theoretically and experimentally and challenges to be resolved. What is important and crucial here is we have now started probing into ultra-strong gravity regimes in the universe as never done before, and where the gravitation and quantum forces may unite to produce hitherto unknown and unseen unique physical effects. The future may therefore herald many surprises in our understanding of the universe and is certainly exciting!

Featured image credit: Artist’s illustration of galaxy with jets from a supermassive black hole by ESA/Hubble. CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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Shaping Israel’s military nuclear doctrine

Notwithstanding the July 2015 P5+1 Vienna diplomatic agreement with Iran, Israel will soon need to forge a more comprehensive and conspicuous strategic nuclear doctrine, one wherein rapt attention is directed toward all still-plausible nuclear enemies. Irrespective of precisely which national and/or sub-national nuclear adversaries Jerusalem may sometime have to face, this indispensable doctrine will need to satisfy at least two intersecting criteria. In principle, therefore, it will need (a) to identify and consider all available strategic options (deterrence, preemption, active defense, strategic targeting, nuclear war fighting); and (b) to correctly correlate all of these overlapping alternatives with imperative survival goals.

“Everything is very simple in war,” says Carl von Clausewitz, in his 19th-century classic, On War, “but the simplest thing is still difficult.” By “difficulty,” Clausewitz means (among other things) complexity. In this connection, Israel’s now systematically-configured doctrine will need to take close account of: (c) certain possible interactions between assorted strategic options; and (d) certain determinable synergies that could possibly obtain between enemy attacks. By focusing on synergies, or on what military planners more typically call “force multipliers,” Israeli strategists could acknowledge that in certain crucial matters of war and peace, the adversarial “whole” could become much more dangerous than the simple sum of its “parts.”

Significantly, calculating these particular interactions and synergies will present Israel with a computational task on the highest order of intellectual difficulty. It follows, going forward, that the progressive refinement of Israel’s nuclear deterrent must always be viewed as a primarily intellectual requirement, and not as a merely operational task or narrowly political expectation.

To begin its pertinent calculations, Jerusalem must first identify the basic goals of any Israeli nuclear deterrence posture, here with special reference to required enemy perceptions of  both ability and willingness. Before a rational adversary of Israel could be suitably deterred by any Israeli nuclear deterrent, that enemy would first need to believe that Israel had both the capacity to launch appropriate nuclear reprisals for certain forms of aggression, and the will to undertake such a launch. In matters involving a prospectively irrational nuclear enemy of Israel, successful deterrence would then need to be based upon certain threats to enemy values other than national survival, and/or would need to be complemented or supplanted altogether by strategies of preemption.

In law, when they are permissible, such strategies are usually known as expressions of “anticipatory self-defense.” In some circumstances, it could conceivably help Israel to feign irrationality itself (earlier, then Minister of Defense Moshe Dayan had stated: “Israel must be seen as a mad dog, too dangerous to bother.“), but any actual Israeli resort to pretended irrationality could turn out to be a double-edged sword. Here, the principal danger posed would be a nuclear enemy that responds to Israel’s apparent irrationality with its own “defensive” first strike. In such cases, the logic behind the “rationality of pretended irrationality” strategy would backfire upon Israel, perhaps even incentivizing an enemy to “preempt” an otherwise expected Israeli preemption. Once again, everything here might seem “simple,” but could, in fact, be exceedingly “difficult.”

All things considered, Israeli planners would do best to remain focused on maintaining more recognizably secure and penetration capable nuclear retaliatory forces, and also on deploying appropriately layered or multi-tiered systems of active defense.

In meeting the perceived ability criterion of successful nuclear deterrence, Israel will first need to demonstrate, inter alia, the substantial invulnerability of its own nuclear retaliatory forces to enemy first strikes. Like the United States, Jerusalem is increasingly likely to depend upon some form or other of strategic triad deployments. Already, it is very likely that Israel has begun to embark upon serious sea-basing of a portion of the country’s still-undeclared nuclear forces.

Looking ahead, it is plain that it will be in Israel’s long-term survival interests to more fully commit to certain submarine-basing nuclear options.  Israel is a tiny country, and its land-based strategic forces could sometime present to enemies as too-vulnerable. In part, whether or not Israel should proceed to more explicit submarine-basing of its presumed nuclear retaliatory forces, it could still acquire meaningful deterrence benefits from a nuanced and incremental end to “deliberate nuclear ambiguity,” or the “bomb in the basement.” Although somewhat counter-intuitive, Israel will soon have to clarify that at least certain specific sectors of its presumptive nuclear retaliatory forces are not only survivable, but also “usable.” Ironically, this could mean forces that would not appear, prima facie, as “too destructive” for operational military use.

From the early days of first Prime Minister David  Ben-Gurion, Israel has understood the overriding need to rely upon a “great equalizer,” that is, on nuclear weapons and corresponding strategy. There are, of course, a great many circumstances in which any nuclear option would be unsuited – most obviously, in any plausible forms of regional counter-terrorism – but, in the end, there can be no viable substitute for such a residual option. Doctrinally, Israel has already rejected any notions of theatre nuclear deterrence, and/or nuclear war-fighting; nonetheless, there are still some identifiable circumstances wherein a nuclear exchange might simply not be preventable.

On this point, Pakistan, in another prominent theatre of assorted military nuclear risks, last year accepted a strategy of theatre or tactical nuclear deterrence. Among other things, this explicit acceptance signaled a dramatic shift away from classic Cold War patterns of “mutual assured destruction” (MAD) toward what Kennedy-era Americans used to call “flexible response” or (more recently) “nuclear utilization theory.” Speaking of Cold War, it is clear that we are now entering into a “Cold War II,” and that Israel’s military nuclear doctrine should already begin to factor this re-emerging polarity into its wider security-policy decisions.

In the end, some forms of nuclear war-fighting between Israel and particular enemies might not be avoidable. Such failure could take place so long as: (1) enemy state first-strikes launched against Israel would not destroy Israel’s second-strike nuclear capability; (2) enemy state retaliations for an Israeli conventional preemption would not destroy Israel’s nuclear counter-retaliatory capability; (3) conventional Israeli preemptive strikes would not destroy enemy state second-strike nuclear capability; and (4) Israeli retaliations for enemy state conventional first strikes would not destroy enemy state nuclear counter-retaliatory capability.

What this means, for Israeli security, is that Jerusalem must take appropriate steps to ensure the plausibility of (1) and (2), above, and, simultaneously, the implausibility of (3) and (4).

Submarine deployments could prove helpful or even indispensable to Israel’s nuclear deterrence posture. Submarines, after all, still represent the ultimate stealth weapon, and a submarine force could essentially guarantee the ability to unleash a catastrophic retaliatory strike.

Because of Israel’s irremediable lack of strategic depth, the small country’s developing submarine force represents an “ace in the hole” element of strategic deterrence. Already, Israel is upgrading its Dolphin I submarines purchases from Germany with additional Dolphin II submarines. These boats are diesel powered, and unlike the US nuclear submarine capability, are more or less limited by the length of time they can remain submerged. The INS Rahav, Israel’s newest submarine from Germany, arrived in Haifa on December 17, 2015, and joined the INS Tanin, Tekuma, Leviathan, and Dolphin. A sixth submarine has been ordered from Germany.

Israel’s submarines have been designed and built to meet very specific Israeli requirements, and are larger than the original German boats. The Rahav is over 220 feet (67 meters) long, and weighs more than 2,000 tons. One must assume that this larger size is intended primarily to accommodate nuclear tipped missiles. In essence, a complex sea-basing capability will be critical to maintaining Israel’s nuclear deterrent.

In the seventeenth century, English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, in  his literary (not nautical) Leviathan, soberly intoned that “Covenants without the sword are but words.” Today, there is nothing about the 2015 Vienna Agreement that will in any way meaningfully curtail Iran’s steady policy of military nuclearization. On the contrary, it may already be prompting the reciprocal nuclearization of certain Sunni Arab rivals in the region, most evidently Egypt and/or Saudi Arabia.

Looking ahead, Israel will need to rely increasingly on a multi-faceted doctrine of nuclear deterrence; moreover, certain elements of this “simple but difficult” doctrine will soon need to be rendered less “ambiguous.” This will imply, in turn, an even more determinedly “synergistic” Israeli focus on prospectively rational and irrational enemies, including both national and sub-national foes.

Let it finally be known. Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan bears a direct intellectual connection to Israel’s submarine of the same name. Diplomatic agreements can never save Israel.

Israel’s nuclear forces and associated doctrine can offer Israel relevant existential assurances, but only through a corollary policy of intelligent and calculated “non-use.” In this apparently paradoxical relationship, Jerusalem can find counsel in the ancient strategic wisdom of Sun-Tzu. Says the oft-quoted Chinese strategist in The Art of War:  “Subjugating the enemy’s army without fighting is the true pinnacle of excellence.”

This timeless advice on “deterrence” is even more compelling in today’s nuclear world, more compelling than even Sun-Tzu himself could ever have imagined.

Image: Protest by Bruce Emmerling, Public Domain via Pixabay.

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Shakespeare and India

The most striking aspect of Shakespeare in India today is that it seems to have at last got over its colonial hangover. It is well known that Shakespeare was first introduced to Indians under the aegis of colonialism: first as an entertainer for the expatriates, then soon incorporated into the civilizing mission of the empire. This resulted in Indians being awed by Shakespeare, taking him too respectfully, especially in academia. Although the productions of the Parsi theatre in late nineteenth and early twentieth century treated the bard in a cavalier fashion, mixing and mashing up his plays into hybrid and melodramatic versions, they were considered populist travesties and an embarrassment by Indian academics. After this there was a period of faithful translation and performance, followed by one of creative adaptation and assimilation in indigenous theatre forms, to the current moment when an irreverent attitude is to be found, which feels free to bounce its own concerns off his works and ‘play’ around with them.

Globalisation and the increasing accessibility of the Internet is a strong contributory factor in creating a new post-colonial confidence, particularly in the young, for doing it their way. An arts foundation in Chennai holds an annual festival called ‘Hamara (our) Shakespeare’ seemingly eliding the past and asserting a new affinity with the poet. ‘Scenes from Shakespeare’, an annual short play competition held by the Shakespeare Society of India in Delhi, is going from strength to strength: it had so many entries last year that the performances had to be staggered over two days. Even as I write, a ‘Re-imagining Shakespeare’ Festival is scheduled at another university: adaptation, translation, pastiche and parody all seem to gel with the words of Shakespeare. The most telling example of this freedom of approach towards Shakespeare was seen in the ‘Great Indian Shakespeare Festival’ organized by students of an Engineering and Technological University in August last year where I was the plenary speaker. They performed a version of Julius Caesar set in the cut-throat board rooms of the corporate world which lead to some surprises – like Caesar being deposed as CEO but spared the knife. When asked ‘Why Shakespeare?’ The group leader, a mechanical engineer, said he that he wanted to ‘dig deep into the words and metaphors coined by Shakespeare.’

Shooting ‘Khoon ka Khoon’ (‘Blood for Blood’) 1935. Dir: Sohrab Modi. Studio: Minerva Movietone, Stage Film. National Film Archive of India. CC BY 2.0 via Shruti Swamy Flickr.

The transnational success of Vishal Bharadwaj’s trilogy of Hindi films, Maqbool (Macbeth, 2003), Omkara (Othello, 2006), and Haider (Hamlet, 2014) has also given fillip to the acculturative impulse. All three films have kept quite close to the original text while relocating it in contemporary India. More and more, the local seems to be able to converse with Shakespeare. What is more, Shakespeare’s stories and words help articulate what would remain submerged. Bharadwaj’s films embed current political flashpoints in their narrative of Shakespeare: the gangs of Mumbai and rural North India which were a law unto themselves, and the unresolved question of Kashmir.

Stage productions too are not lagging behind. Rajat Kapoor has produced two unconventional versions: Hamlet the Clown Prince in which a group of clowns discuss and then enact, in their own inimitable manner, the challenge of performing the greatest tragedy in the world, Hamlet; and Lear, in which an aging actor recounts his life in an effort to make amends with his daughter. A Merchant of Venice performed in English, directed by Vikram Kapadia, was set among contemporary Mumbai stock brokers. The most distinctive has been Piya Behrupiya (Beloved as Trickster), an adaptation of Twelfth Night directed by Atul Kumar, which was commissioned for the Globe to Globe festival of 2012. Taking a cue from its most famous line ‘if music be the food of love…’ it reconceived the play as a musical (not many known operatic versions) playing up the comic confusions of identity and love. It deployed a range of indigenous music genres to elucidate and enhance mood and character. Olivia’s part, sung by an actress with a husky voice in semi-classical notes, easily overshadowed the energetic and folksy Viola. And Malvolio was spared further punishment after he appeared in sheer yellow tights to woo Olivia. Further, the production took a cheeky post-colonial stand: it dared to critique Shakespeare when the actor playing Sebastian stepped out of the charmed circle of performance and, addressing the audience directly, complained about the limited lines given to Sebastian, lines which are invariably further cut in productions. However, he had to wryly acknowledge that the audience had come to see the famed ‘Shakespeare’ and not the play that he had been laboring to translate.

The levels and types of engagement with Shakespeare in India are diverse and increasing. Purists may be appalled at the post-modernist piecemeal encounters, but they need not be seen as desecrations of a literary icon. Rather, they reveal a truth which has to be universally acknowledged that Shakespeare is now a world author, and in the Indian context, detached from the colonial baggage, he continues to speak in strange and wondrous forms to newer generations.

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