Month: January 2021

Remembering Hawking

| Cosmoshivani

The series “In to the Universe with Stephen Hawking”, when first premiered world wide in 2010 really kindled my interest in him. He introduced me to Black holes, and made me aware of my existence in this universe.

I have read (or at least tried reading) most of his books. Especially “A brief history of time” really made me realize why I was studying anything in the first place; to understand the universe we live in. The George book series he wrote with her daughter Lucy was also interesting; perhaps my first ever sci-fi series (if we exclude “The little Prince” which I read in Hindi). George’s parents were basically environmentalists and used to eat most of the things grown in their garden. But George was not very supportive of that fact. The drawings were also really beautiful and made the story more alive. The first time George accidentally goes to Eric’s house, trying to find Freddy, his pig; there he meets Annie and her parents Susan & Eric. On his very first interaction with Eric, they talk about how a charged scale attracts water towards it. He also gets to see Eric’s magical computer, Cosmos. It has this feature of opening a portal to any part of the universe. And later, Annie and George secretly go on many adventures. Like their rather reckless trip to Saturn’s moon Enceladus; they even rescue Eric when he falls into a Black hole. In another book of the series, Annie, George and Eric sit back and witness the creation of whole universe unfolding through the portal created by world’s smartest computer, Cosmos.

I was very excited when I read the explanation of Hawking radiation in brief history but sadly it’s flawed. The discovery certainly is really interesting. There is a somewhat nice and detailed description by Ethan Siegel but unfortunately, we can never fully comprehend or appreciate the concept until we read and understand quantum field theory and general theory of relativity in detail.

I was also really fascinated by the nautilus shown in “The Grand Design”. The way these books described things was so different from any text book I had ever read before. Mainly the things about origin and fate of the universe, like why do we exist and where do we come from struck me so deeply at that time and still do.

Blogroll: 2020

| Cosmoshivani

Why most Hacktoberfest PRs are from India : The author of this post has tried to show all of his frustration throughout this article. Its rather long, but very well written. I’m glad that someone took the trouble to type it all out. I don’t really want to add anything but would like to say that I agree with the views of the author.

https://pulkitsharma07.github.io

The Butterfly Life Cycle : I came to know a very rare aspect of Adonis Blue butterfly through this post. Usually, the caterpillars form a chrysalis attached to the plant (to make it look like a leaf), but the caterpillars of Adonis Blue take very different route. Their caterpillars are adopted by ants! Ants take them to their nest because they smell and sound like the ant larvae. But sadly, when these caterpillars are there, they eat ant’s larvae too. There are similar ant-butterfly interactions found in nature all over the world.

Math reading challenge 2020

| Cosmoshivani

So, I found this article by Evelyn lamb in her blog Roots of Unity at the end of 2019. It had some prompts to help you find math related books. I wasn’t able to complete all of them but I did try some.

I read three books for the prompt, “A work of fiction in which a main character is a mathematician“. The very first book I read was, “The devotion of suspect X“. It was beautiful. Set in Japan, it’s about a mathematician Ishigami, who is a High school teacher. One day, when he was trying to take his life, someone rings the doorbell. His new neighbors, Yasuko and her daughter Misato. Without knowing, they save his life. And from that point, he does everything to protect this family next door. It’s mysterious, and very emotional at times. Next was, “The Housekeeper and the Professor“. Due to a terrible accident in 1970, a mathematician is now only able to remember last 80 minutes of his life. Like a hard disk which has only 80 minutes of memory limit; anything new is recorded on top of that. So whenever he wakes up in morning, he doesn’t remember a single thing that happened yesterday. Many housekeepers are assigned to take care of him but no one lasts. But it’s about to change. The tenth housekeeper, who is the youngest in the company takes the job and then starts a story of friendship between the housekeeper, her son and the professor. They go on many trips and he tells them interesting things like the importance of square root, amicable numbers, perfect numbers, triangle numbers etc. But the good days come to an end. His 80 minute memory tape is also broken and he cannot retain even a minute of new memories. Sadly, in the end, he is transferred to a new care facility. Then I read “Uncle Petros and Goldbach’s Conjecture“. Its story revolves around a mathematician who is obsessed with the Goldbach’s conjecture (Every even number greater than 2 can be written as a sum of prime numbers). And how he puts in so much effort to discourage his nephew from pursuing higher mathematics, because he doesn’t want him to get mad and obsessed like himself. It also has a very tragic ending.

For the next prompt, “A graphic novel about math or mathematicians“, I read “Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth“. It had really awesome script and beautiful drawings. I read about Russel’s paradox for the first time in it, which is introduced by Bertie Russell himself. It goes something like this, if a set consists of all the sets that do not contain themselves, then does that set contain itself as an element? If it does then it does not follow the property that it should not contain itself; If it doesn’t contain itself then it does follow the property and thus it belongs to the set but then again if it does it shouldn’t and if it doesn’t then it should.

For the most part, the story follows the life of Bertrand Russell. There are many events of his life from childhood to a university student; how he started questioning everything that others took for granted. It also contains many dialogues and fictional meetings between famous mathematicians, which makes it even more interesting.

logicomix
Logicomix

So basically, all I read was mathematical fiction. But I did learn some concepts in number theory and logic here and there.