This is the last blip before Scienceblogs.com/thescian fades into the background. I am no more a blogger. The past few years has been a memorable journey and your company was wonderful. A big thank you to you, the readers, and to Scienceblogs who made this a great experience for me.
Please visit TheScian.com to relive those old times. I am publishing, as text and audio, the best posts of this blog since 2006 along with reader comments. The articles and audio will go online every friday starting today. You can subscribe to it via iTunes and other apps.
I am in the process of revamping TheScian.com as a childrens website. You should subscribe for the Newsletter at TheScian.com if you would like to receive updates on this.
So, wife asked me what's with connectedness of the stuff in this world, synchronicity and such. Well, there is much to say. Let's take this, for instance: Place the picture of a BZ reaction snapshot and a CMB picture side by side. One is a chemical reaction in a small dish, the other is a seven year long snap of the universe. Why do they look similar. Such strangeness, like galactic superclusters are waves of matter... (just a wee bit bigger than our lab reactions).
I find myself scrubbing (my own person, that is, please read on) vigorously without being aware only to realize later that I am listening to a fast-paced music while bathing. Most of you would have experienced the connection between music and pace of physical action. Amateur observations made while listening to music during bathing, driving and writing software have naturally led me to wonder about the kinds of resonance between brain's biochemical processes (a.k.a rhythms) and music. The new year's edition of New Scientist supplied a word for this that I had not known before: Entrainment.
The logical extension of this musical synchronization, it appears to me, is captured in the fascinating demonstration of synchronicity by Steven Strogatz that showed how matter in our world is connected in some remarkably fundamental ways.
That's Narayanan Krishnan, who has dedicated his life to feeding the poor in Madurai. You can vote for him at CNN Heroes 2010. He could use the prize money.
Here's a question: How close can we physically get to it while still keeping most of the atoms in our body intact? We seem to be OK at 3000 light years. Would we be fine at 10 light years, 1 light year, 5000 miles? I suppose if we figure out a few things, we are ready to head straight to the nearest neutron star.
Year 3000, package tour to PSR J1614-2230, spins at 317 a second, come come and have a go yourself! Things the tour company has to sort out: the enormous gravitational attraction and the fact that this is a rapidly rotating field that would tear you apart into a gazillion pieces, radiation that would blow the stuff we are composed of.
How long will you need to find your truest, most productive niche? This I cannot predict, for, sadly, access to a podium confers no gift of prophecy. But I can say that however long it takes, it will be time well spent. I am reminded of a friend from the early 1970s, Edward Witten. I liked Ed, but felt sorry for him, too, because, for all his potential, he lacked focus. He had been a history major in college, and a linguistics minor. On graduating, though, he concluded that, as rewarding as these fields had been, he was not really cut out to make a living at them. He decided that what he was really meant to do was study economics. And so, he applied to graduate school, and was accepted at the University of Wisconsin. And, after only a semester, he dropped out of the program. Not for him. So, history was out; linguistics, out; economics, out. What to do? This was a time of widespread political activism, and Ed became an aide to Senator George McGovern, then running for the presidency on an anti-war platform. He also wrote articles for political journals like the Nation and the New Republic. After some months, Ed realized that politics was not for him, because, in his words, it demanded qualities he did not have, foremost among them common sense. All right, then: history, linguistics, economics, politics, were all out as career choices. What to do? Ed suddenly realized that he was really suited to study mathematics. So he applied to graduate school, and was accepted at Princeton. I met him midway through his first year there--just after he had dropped out of the mathematics department. He realized, he said, that what he was really meant to do was study physics; he applied to the physics department, and was accepted.
I was happy for him. But I lamented all the false starts he had made, and how his career opportunities appeared to be passing him by. Many years later, in 1987, I was reading the New York Times magazine and saw a full-page picture akin to a mug shot, of a thin man with a large head staring out of thick glasses. It was Ed Witten! I was stunned. What was he doing in the Times magazine? Well, he was being profiled as the Einstein of his age, a pioneer of a revolution in physics called "String Theory." Colleagues at Harvard and Princeton, who marvelled at his use of bizarre mathematics to solve physics problems, claimed that his ideas, popularly called a "theory of everything," might at last explain the origins and nature of the cosmos. Ed said modestly of his theories that it was really much easier to solve problems when you analyzed them in at least ten dimensions. Perhaps. Much clearer to me was an observation Ed made that appeared near the end of this article: every one of us has talent; the great challenge in life is finding an outlet to express it. I thought, he has truly earned the right to say that. And I realized that, for all my earlier concerns that he had squandered his time, in fact his entire career path--the ventures in history, linguistics, economics, politics, math, as well as physics--had been rewarding: a time of hard work, self-discovery, and new insight into his potential based on growing experience.-source
I am working on some very smart things to say here. Really. Meanwhile, there's 
