New Definitions

Alcohol = Organic compound present in fermented beverages that has become a sex trigger   for people of many western nations due to prolonged usage over many centuries

Demoncracy = Corrupt democracy

Fate = Inability to explain


Intelligence = Information gained by stealth


UNO = Skyscraper in New York where diplomats of all countries assemble but those of a few authorize wars and impose sanctions to take away basic human rights from weak and helpless people

Audit Reports

Recently I was researching the financial status of some equipment manufacturers and banks in connection with a project. Apart from their technical and operational information I also collected summaries of their annual audited accounts.

As I surfed the web, I stumbled upon the websites of two of the world’s biggest and most influential financial institutions, The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. To my utter surprise I was unable to find any annual accounts, balance sheets or auditor’s reports on these websites, although there was a wealth of other data.

I really wonder as to whether these institutions are bound by any laws at all. If not, they must be the wellsprings of worldwide financial anarchy.

There were other things too that made me wonder. The World Bank’s slogan is “Working for a World free of poverty”. Does that mean they only look after the interests of those who are free of poverty at the expense of the poor? From their performance record it seems quite likely.

The IMF proudly states “Unlike the General Assembly of the United Nations, where each country has one vote, decision making at the IMF was designed to reflect the position of each member country in the global economy. Each IMF member country is assigned a quota that determines its financial commitment to the IMF, as well as its voting power.” Same story.

Dexter

In Latin the word dexter means on the right hand and sinister means the left hand. In English dexterity is skillfulness while sinister is evil. According to the Holy Qur’an on the day of Judgment those with the record of their deeds in the right hand will go to heaven while those with the record of their deeds in the left hand will go to hell. In the British parliament the ruling party sits on the right of the speaker while the opposition has to take the left seats. In political jargon a rightist is a conservative while a leftist believes in socialism or communism which is looked down upon by the rightists.

In this world majority of people are right handed, i.e. they prefer to work with their right hand and also write with it. There seems to be no biological explanation for it. But there can be a bio-mechanical one.

In most human bodies the heart is slightly to the left of the centerline of the torso and so is the stomach. Thus there is a slightly greater weight on the left side and the left foot. If the balancing system of the human body would not take care of it, most people would tend to lean to their left. Not surprisingly we have a tendency to extend our right hands when ever action is needed as it helps to balance the weight or more accurately the moment about the centre line.

The interesting question is, “why are our hearts and stomachs slightly to the left?” If we apply Darwin’s theory of evolution it would seem that initially equal numbers of people would have had their hearts and stomachs on the right or left or in the centre. May be in those days there were equal numbers of right-handed, left-handed and ambidextrous people. But those who favored the left side had a better chance of survival and outgrew the other types in population until the others became nearly extinct. It really boggles the mind as to what advantage having the heart and stomach on the left would give to a human being as opposed to having them on the right or in the centre.

Any suggestions?

OBL2?

There are people in this world who can swear that they attended the funeral of Osama bin Laden many years ago. And yet on 2nd May, 2011 US commandos raided a house in Abbottabad and shot a man they claimed to be OBL and announced that his DNA matched with some of his relatives. Next day as many as his three wives and some children were captured by the Pakistani military who verified that the man was named Osama bin Laden. How is that possible?

Simple enough! Osama might have had a namesake cousin who may have volunteered to act as his double or decoy when he was on the run. After the death of the famous OBL the innocent cousin might have decided to live out the rest of his life in anonymity in Abbottabad and although there was a multimillion dollar head money, those who knew about him decided to keep quiet until the CIA found out that someone by that name was alive and living there. The US leaders obviously thought that political mileage could be gained by having the poor man assassinated and the ugly operation was staged. It is not surprising that the face of the dead man was not shown to any outsider and the body was promptly disposed off out of anybody’s reach.

What a pity that some ten billion dollars that could have been spent on alleviating the misery of suffering humanity were wasted on hunting and killing a simple unsuspecting Beduin.

Just a guess, but it sounds plausible.

HEAT IS ON

Ever since I was taught Newton’s Law of Gravitation at school, “Every particle in the universe attracts every other particle…….,” I had been wondering how the particles know of each other’s existence. The first prerequisite for attracting or being attracted is awareness of the other’s presence. So there must be something being exchanged among all particles of matter in the universe. Some scientists have suggested the existence of a force field around everything that exists; others have proposed the existence of gravitons. But as usual, they all missed the obvious.

Way back in the early 1960s I learnt about thermal radiation and heat transfer and came across the Stefan-Boltzmann Law of Blackbody radiation discovered in late nineteenth century. A black body is a hypothetic body that completely absorbs all wavelengths of thermal radiation incident on it. Such bodies do not reflect light, and therefore appear black if their temperatures are low enough so as not to be self-luminous. All blackbodies heated to a given temperature emit thermal radiation given by:

q = σ T4 A (1)

where

q = heat transfer per unit time (W)

σ = 5.6703 10-8 (W/m2K4) - The Stefan-Boltzmann Constant

T = absolute temperature Kelvin (K)

A = surface area of the emitting body (m2)

It was later modified for grey and colored bodies that were not black and for temperature of the environment or other bodies interacting with it. The final simplified equation of net heat transferred from one body to another is of the form:

q = ε σ Fh,c (Th4 - Tc4) Ac

where ε is the emissivity, F the form factor and h and c denote the hotter and colder temperatures.

I had found the answer to my long unresolved conundrum. Every object in the universe makes its presence felt by emitting thermal radiation, the intensity of which is proportional to the fourth power of its absolute temperature, and every object reacts to change in temperature of every other object in its sight.

Obama Gets Osama

Finally we have a story of how the purpose of the existence of US administration and military was fulfilled when in the darkness of night a squadron of US marines in 3 helicopters (symbolizing trinity?) raided an awkward looking building in Abbottabad (named after a British colonialist), shed a lot of blood and captured and shot dead an unarmed man named Osama Bin Laden and dumped his body in the sea a thousand miles away. There is no way of knowing the truth. It might even be a hoax to glorify or discredit someone in the context of USA’s internal politics

Irrespective of the noble purpose of its formation as claimed by its sympathizers, Al-Qaida, the international revolutionary brotherhood headed by OBL had in recent years turned into a demented cult that relished the sight of bloodshed, destruction and misery as much as a super power military organization. It claimed affiliation with Islam but trampled every Islamic virtue. If the assassination of OBL helps to disintegrate that cult, then it certainly is good riddance.

Yesterday a CNN reporter was able to find a lady who had lost her husband in the 9/11 tragedy and tried his best to coax her into making an anti-Islamic or anti-Pakistan statement, but the decent lady stuck to her observation that all this had not brought her husband back. Interestingly enough, on the day when Khalid Sheikh also an Al-Qaida stalwart was put to death by court order, a gentleman who had probably lost his father in that act of violence commented before CNN that it was as sad a day as when his father was killed. That shows the moral and spiritual gap between the American people and the ruling establishment in which the CIA has a lion’s share. Anyone who has lost a loved one in a violent incident shares the grief of the loved ones of another no matter how evil that individual might be.

Justice would have been done if Osama bin Laden had been kept alive and tried in a court of law and the allegations of his involvement in various terrorist acts proven in a fair manner. Assassination by presidential order is by no mean justice.

As far as I am concerned, my private war on terror is going to continue with efforts to make terrorist leaders, generals and presidents renounce their lust for death and destruction.

Some More Definitions

Address = Location in space

Point = Address without content

Line = String of addresses without content

Motion = Change in address

Absolute motion = Change in address relative to a fixed address

Relative motion = Difference of absolute motions of two bodies

Straightening the Space

The algebraic function y = 1/x is unique and had fascinated scientists and mathematician of the 19th century. The graph of the function is called a hyperbola which is a perfect example of an asymptote. It is shown below:

For those who are not familiar with mathematical jargon it can be explained in terms of numbers. The values of y for various values of x are as in the table below:

It is clear that as the value of x decreases the value of y increases, so much so that when the value of x becomes zero, the value of y becomes infinity. However it is interesting that if you proceed from x=1 toward x=0 the value of y increases to plus infinity, while if you approach from x=-1 towards x=0, the value of y decreases (or increases in the negative direction) until it becomes minus infinity. Thus at x=0, y exists simultaneously at plus and minus infinity. From the common concept of infinity it is mind boggling. How can something exist at both extremes of the universe at the same time? Such a thing could only happen if the space was a curved continuum. To put it simply, if two persons started walking in opposite directions an d continued to do so without deviating one day they would meet face to face on the other side of the earth. Hence came the idea of the curved space and the donut shaped universe.

But the scientists who must have been euphoric at the brilliant idea which must have been dubbed a great discovery seem to have missed out on the relationship between algebra and geometry. y=1/x can be written as x*y=1 which is the equation of a rectangle of unit area. As x decreases, y increases and the shape changes from square to oblong and gradually a thinner and longer rectangle until x approaches zero and y approaches infinity. But when x becomes equal to zero, the rectangle ceases to exist. It becomes a straight line. There is what one might call a geometrical phase change. Just like gas laws can not be applied after the gas has condensed into a liquid, the equation of a rectangle can not be applied to a straight line. X=0 is a straight line which extends from minus to plus infinity along the y axis. Is anything wrong with that?

So it seems that the notions of space being a curved continuum and the universe being donut shaped are mere illusions and any mathematical deductions based on these notions would produce more profound illusions.

If I live long enough or get an opportunity to devote full time to the subject, I would certainly like to remove as many illusions as possible.

Star Flirt

It was a pleasant summer night. The full moon was constantly smiling as usual. The stars were showing off their radiation and the planets were dancing in their orbits with ecstatic abandon. It was party night for nature. The Earth was looking great in its shades of blue and green.
One of the stars winked at Earth and whispered, “Your green leafy wig looks wonderful.”
“Aha!” Chuckled Earth and splashed a big wave in the Atlantic. “Do you know what’s inside?”
“No,” said the star,” Can you tell me what resides in there?”
“Oops,” shrieked the earth and a streak of lightning flashed.
“What was that?” asked the startle star.
“Naughty lice!” the earth tried to regain its composure.
“What do you mean?” wondered the star.
“There are many of them under my beautiful green leafy wig and each more troublesome than the other, especially the two legged ones. They live to give me pain. Sometimes they bury powerful explosives under my skin and ignite them. It is really painful.”
“So why don’t you get rid of them?” asked the star with a touch of sympathy.
“How can I?” replied Earth, “They are my life and I must live with them.”
And the party continued.

6. DISTANT WORLDS

So far, we have discussed the development of those parts of the science of Physics which relate to the understanding of the universe around us. Theorization from a mass of data collected from observation and experimentation, or theoretical analysis resulting in the prediction of what would be discovered later, are the two main modes by which Science grows. However, there is no dearth of anomalies in Science, some of which have been occasionally highlighted in the preceding text.

One of the topics which has not been discussed at any considerable length in spite of being significant to the aims and objects of this work is Cosmology which combines astronomy with the more recently developed techniques of radiotelescopy and spectroscopy. With these techniques, it is now established that the Sun, like other stars, is a dense mass of plasma with a core temperature of about thirteen million degrees Centigrade consisting mainly of hydrogen and small amounts of heavier elements formed by nuclear fusion which constantly releases heat energy producing the blinding illumination. It is also believed that planets have formed due to the separation of small quantities of spinning gaseous clouds containing heavier elements which gradually cooled and condensed into bodies such as the Earth.

However, it is curious that while ninety two elements and hundreds of isotopes are formed in the complex process of nuclear fusion, transmutation and, probably fission in stars, the dozen elements of the man-made trans-Uranic series are not formed naturally.

Even more curious is the fact that the steady state theory of the formation of the universe assumes that stars were formed by the gravitational collapse of very large clouds of hydrogen gas which created such high temperatures and pressures that nuclear fusion reactions took place in them without any external detonation. But regular hydrogen found abundantly in the water of our oceans and whose nucleus has only one proton does not take part in nuclear fusion no matter what you do with it. Only isotopes of hydrogen such as deuterium whose nucleus has both a proton and neutron and tritium whose nucleus has one proton and two neutrons take part in nuclear fusion. So it seems that the original gas clouds would have had predominantly deuterium and tritium and so would be the case with our Sun. And since our Earth is believed to have originated from the Sun, the waters in our oceans should have been mostly heavy water in the beginning which may have transformed into normal or light water over billions of years. But then the same would have happened in the stars including our Sun and the fuel for the fusion reactions should have ended ages ago.

The advances in the techniques of radio transmission and reception during the first half of the twentieth century, and the invention of radar and eventually radio telescopes resulted, during the 1960's, in the discovery of some unique phenomena called Quasars, Pulsars and Black Holes. The quasars are very large stars, though much smaller than galaxies, at great distances beyond the limits of our own galaxy (The Milky Way which is known to be so large that light takes a hundred thousand years to travel across it; and containing roughly a hundred thousand million stars) which are not only visible with optical telescopes but also emit radio waves and ultraviolet radiation. Scientists are unable to explain how such relatively small objects can generate such inconceivably large amounts of energy that they appear bright at such huge distances. Pulsars are celestial bodies, again at very great distances, but estimated to have planet (Earth) size dimensions characterized by the emission of regular pulses of radio waves every second or fraction thereof.

Our knowledge about the Earth, the Solar system and the Universe as a whole has been considerably augmented by the data obtained from satellites equipped with sophisticated electronic gadgetry sent into outer space, earth orbit and orbit around the Sun with the help of powerful rockets developed initially for military purposes. The paths of these satellites have, however, remained within the range of the orbital planes of the planets of our Solar system.

To explain the complex cosmological phenomena, a new science of astrophysics has come into existence which correlates the known facts of other disciplines particularly physics with astronomical observations. For instance, several mathematical models of the universe's evolution and lives of stars have been based on Einstein's general relativity. The equations represent such fundamental canons of physics as preservation of the sum total of mass and energy in the universe, the conservation of momentum, the balance of forces etc., and are solved starting with the initial condition that all matter and energy was concentrated at a point in a boundless vacuum where it suddenly exploded, expanded and eventually diluted into what we see as the universe around us, which is still believed to be expanding.

Thus although the void of the universe is assumed to be infinite, the expanded material part must always have a dynamic boundary within which all our observations are limited, enveloped by a larger expanding sphere of radiation energy which must have escaped in all directions at the speed of light; a sort of universe within universe within universe, the radius of the radiation envelop being about twenty thousand million light years if the current estimate of the age of the universe is correct.

As for what came out of the big bang initially, it is obvious that the vital fundamental particles were formed which then combined in their own ways to form subatomic particles and so on.

Oddly enough, all the estimated matter and energy in the universe fails to account for all the gravitational forces that are supposed to be acting in it; and hence the existence of large quantities of some sort of speculative dark matter beyond perception is suspected, perhaps similar to the apparitions of some religious beliefs. However, there is a spectrum of solutions to the equations of general relativity that range from a continuous and indefinite expansion at the present rate to an eventual slowing and subsequent contraction to a dense state. Identical analyses can be carried out for either the entire universe or a single star or galactic system. The pulsars, thought to be the remnants of such collapsed stars are also called neutron stars and are believed to consist largely of tightly packed neutrons with a density that is a few billion times that of earth such that a cubic centimeter of their matter would weigh a few million tons on earth.

Many astrophysicists believe on theoretical grounds that the gravitational collapse of a star could create a high density object whose gravitational field would be too strong to allow anything -- including light waves -- ever to leave the body. Such hypothetical objects are called "black holes", because light and other signals being unable to emerge from them, their matter has literally disappeared from view, although they continue to influence the motion of other stars in their vicinity. Based on irregularities in star movements and the emission of very short wavelength radiation, a number of black-hole locations have been conjectured by astrophysicists. What is more interesting is that scientists believe that the normal laws of physics would not be applicable in the vicinity of black holes which are said to be capable of "devouring" any matter that approaches them and loses its physical structure.

We thus find that an extension of our knowledge of Physics and Astronomy brings us to a point where we must start looking for a new set of physical laws which could naturally bifurcate into two sets of physical laws, one governing the events in our galaxy, and the other in the vicinity of the black holes. For those who believe that the laws of physics are universal and everlasting, this must be a minor shock. On the lighter side, blackholism seems to have existed among people for some considerable time in the form of persons who are always ready to grab but never willing to give away anything, and somehow they seem impervious to all norms and laws.