Is anything meant to remain complex?

The first answer is "No". I mean, whatever you're writing about, the onus is on the writer to break his subject down to its simplest components, and then put them back together in front of the reader's eyes. If the writer fails to do that, then the blame can't be placed on the subject.

It so happens that the blame can be placed on the writer's choice of subject. Again, the fault is the writer's, but what do you when the subject is important and ought to be written about because some recent contribution to it makes up a piece of history? Sure, the essentials are the same: read up long and hard on it, talk to people who know it well and are able to break it down in some measure for you, and try and use infographics to augment the learning process.

But these methods, too, have their shortcomings. For one, if the subject has only a long-winded connection to phenomena that affect reality, then strong comparisons have to make way for weak metaphors. A consequence of this is that the reader is more misguided in the long-term than he is "learned" in the short-term. For another, these methods require that the writer know what he's doing, that what he's writing about makes sense to him before he attempts to make sense of it for his readers.

This is not always the case: given the grey depths that advanced mathematics and physics are plumbing these days, science journalism concerning these areas are written with a view to make the subject sound awesome, enigmatic, and, sometimes, hopefully consequential than they are in place to provide a full picture of on-goings.

Sometimes, we don't have a full picture because things are that complex.

The reader is entitled to know - that's the tenet of the sort of science writing that I pursue: informational journalism. I want to break the world around me down to small bits that remain eternally comprehensible. Somewhere, I know, I must be able to distinguish between my shortcomings and the subject's; when I realize I'm not able to do that effectively, I will have failed my audience.

In such a case, am I confined to highlighting the complexity of the subject I've chosen?

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The part of the post that makes some sense ends here. The part of the post that may make no sense starts here.
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The impact of this conclusion on science journalism worldwide is that there is a barrage of didactic pieces once something is completely understood and almost no literature during the finding's formative years despite public awareness that important, and legitimate, work was being done (This is the fine line that I'm treading).

I know this post sounds like a rant - it is a rant - against a whole bunch of things, not the least-important of which is that groping-in-the-dark is a fact of life. However, somehow, I still have a feeling that a lot of scientific research is locked up in silence, yet unworded, because we haven't received the final word on it. A safe course, of course: nobody wants to be that guy who announced something prematurely and the eventual result was just something else.

A short essay on a passion

This is a little something I wrote as part of an entrance test for my application to The New Indian Express. The section asked for a 500-word essay on something I'm passionate about, and I wrote about my fascination with astroparticle physics.

When I was eight years old, I peered through a telescope for the first time in my life. It was a small device, no more than two metres long, and yet it let me glimpse a brilliant view of Jupiter: it was the size of a marble, magnificently striated in hues of brown, red and orange. Then, when I was 13, I went to the Birla Planetarium in Hyderabad, where I revisited my five-year old fascination with Jupiter as I sat spellbound in the arena as a cosmic dance played out in the canvas stretched above my head: stars flew around, tumbling in and out of the horizon, the rings of Saturn floating serenely in space, moons rising and setting through a mélange of blues, yellows and greens.

It was a performance I haven’t forgotten to this day, remembering it as an eternally unfolding story, a few hundred pages in the epic saga of the universe. It could have been the charismatic voice of the narrator, it could have been the undisturbed loneliness on the night of my stargazing, it could even have been my mindless interest thereafter to find out more and more about the travellers in the heavens, but today, those memories are the seeds of my passion for astroparticle physics.

Many people – even science graduates – hear the name and think it’s a “big deal”. It is not. Astroparticle physics is the study of the stuff that stars are made of, and by extension, as Carl Sagan said, the stuff that we are made of. It is the search for and the understanding of the smallest particles that make up this universe one elegant phenomenon at a time. And just as my curiosity toward it was aroused one cloudless night in a small town in South India, so has it sustained: not within classrooms, not under the guidance of pedantic lecturers, but in my room, in the books I bought to teach myself more about it, in problems I solved, the simulations I ran and the experiments I conducted, in my mind where I could never rest without knowing how the universe worked.

In the last 15 years, I have learned where the stars come from that fascinate little children as little, bright spots in the sky, I have learned what the comets that streak Hollywood’s most romantic scenes really are, and I have learn all about our sun and the significance of human life. Most importantly, I have painted a glittering picture of the world for myself having met a wide range of people – young and old – simply by learning what I don’t know about and teaching what I do to anyone who is willing to listen. It is not a passion that I ever see fading because it has been an integral part of my growing years, a symbol of my parents’ support and my friends’ patience, and my own strengths, weaknesses and perseverance.

The cause-effect paradigm

Some people find differential calculus very easy. Others find vector algebra very easy. However, given that our education system is firmly unidirectional for many justifiable reasons, the calculus-folk would have had to suffer vectors before they came across what they liked. This happens to most students. Unfortunately, the process is so rigorous that such students may be driven to lose focus or interest in the subject as a whole. There could be no other way to do it, but that doesn't mean there's no better way to teach such subjects inside classrooms.

From time to time, students and teachers alike need to be reminded that each topic in a subject is weak by itself, and only with the assistance of other topics is anything achieved. Instead of going from specifics to the larger picture, why not come from the larger picture to the specifics? After all, and this is just an (convenient) example, mathematics is a powerful but singular set of tools used to solve problems in the real world: every problem is application driven, including in string theory and loop quantum gravity, where, without the verification of their hypotheses by experiments, each remains just a strongly-defended opinion.

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="510" caption="The tools of multilateral thinking can be used within classrooms as well to improve efficiency and productivity."][/caption]

I must concede that some problems are better solved using some tools than others, but keeping in mind why the problem is being solved like that is important. Even if calculus provides a circuitous route to a solution, what's wrong with its being adopted by the calculus-lovers to get there? When they get there, the relationship between the problem and the solution becomes clearer: there is a better cause-effect relationship established than when a student struggles through vectors and is exhausted by the end, reluctant to take it up again.

As far as laying the groundwork is concerned, teaching students everything is the way to go: at some point later, then, they will be better equipped to make a choice - between what they think they ought to stick with and what they think they can afford to avoid. However, in this order of things, the problems solved using tool-set A and tool-set B, even if in different terms, could be the same, or related in some way so that even what seems difficult could be better understood in terms of what seems easy.

These are only musings concerned with the different ways through which students can convert information into knowledge. The point is: as long as we're here to solve problems, let's have fun doing it.

The learner as far-seer

I recall a trivial incident from December 13, 2011, which was the day when the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) announced a possible sighting of the Higgs boson particle. It was not so much an incident as something I'm observing now: when the announcement was being made by Fabiola Gianotti, who's in-charge of ATLAS, I had to pause the live-streamed video once every few seconds to look up what she was talking about. A 20-minute-long presentation took more an hour to be understood.

The reason I remember the experience is that, more often than not, one doesn't know when the learning phase of life ends - many, like me, don't even know what comes after it if it ends. However, earlier today, when I was reading a journal article on using laser-induced plasma and the technology's application in particle accelerators, I surprised myself by understanding the entire thing without stopping even once; I could get what the authors were saying even when they were speaking only via formulae.

It was strangely dejecting because one of the most likeable things about particle physics in my opinion is its tendency to throw up previously unknown information just when we least expect it. In fact, even the one thing we thought we knew about this universe - the highest speed possible - was defied last year by some 15,000 neutrinos. And in such a scenario, when the picture suddenly becomes clear, when I can see the jigsaw puzzle board and the different empty shapes here and there waiting to be filled, it's as if I'm ready to start answering the bigger questions and leave the smaller ones behind.

[caption id="attachment_21624" align="aligncenter" width="334" caption="Clinton Davisson (left) and Lester Germer conducted an experiment since named after them - as the Davisson-Germer experiment - in 1927. Six years earlier, Einstein had won the Nobel Prize in physics for his discovery that particles were discrete encapsulations of energy called quanta. In 1927, French physicist Louis de Broglie presented his thesis that all particles have a wave-like characteristic. In the Davisson-Germer experiment, the two Americans stumbled across an electron diffraction pattern where they were expecting an electron diffuse-reflection pattern while studying the surface of nickel.  This proved de Broglie's informed conjecture true."][/caption]

I feel like the depressed man whose psychiatrist suggests he witness a performance by a clown in town. The depressed man then admits he is that clown.

At this point, I see two outcomes. The first one hints that I only want to keep learning and I'm not as interested in "deploying" that knowledge usefully. That is only partly true because, hey, I don't have a particle collider in my backyard that introduces new particles into my life so I can piece the universal puzzle together better. The second outcome suggests that my knowing a lot of things - science-wise and not - is, for the most part, a product of this fear of what-will-or-won't-come-next.

The first outcome doesn't bother me much because I've discovered I like teaching. Even though I may not be using my knowledge of IC engines to fix vehicles on desolate highways, I try and ensure as many people as possible understand how such engines work and do what they want with that knowledge. The same applies for particle physics. However, in this case, the dimension of teaching acquires more weight because its capacity to be misunderstood is great: it's a developing field whose foundations are currently under fire, whose experiments are so complex that multiple governments are helping fund it, whose conclusions are so counter-intuitive that the layman and the physicist are today many perspectives apart.

The second outcome is something I learnt while writing this post. The impetus that holds my two-decade-long learning spree up is nothing but fear, a fear of the unknown. Not learning something on a given day, with me, seems like forgoing a chance to imagine something we might not physically live. It's like the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics - a.k.a. Schrodinger's cat: for as long as I don't open the box, the cat is both dead and alive, the experience is both there and not there.

Saying "I learn not because I want to" is too bland: I learn because I want to look into the darkest corners of the universe and not see something that I can't understand or gauge in some way.

The popularly perceived notion of beauty comes with inexplicability: the capacity of an entity to defy definition and/or predictability, to defy structure and exhibit a will of its own in form and function. However, the silent reminder we are everyday given that, no matter how far out into the universe we venture or how deep we probe into the atom, the laws of physics are the same is the soul of beauty. And the inexplicability I seek to defy by learning is simply understanding how the same thing that gave us the dung beetle also gave us the Carina Nebula, that the same thing that gave us the Monarch butterfly also have us black holes.

[caption id="attachment_21625" align="aligncenter" width="335" caption="This image of the Carina Nebula is composed of multiple shots taken from the Atacama Desert in South America."][/caption]

I think that's a fear I've enjoyed and enjoy having.

A Shade Of Solecism

In the process of understanding this wide world, a strange inner transformation comes to fruition. Just like Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, the expenditure of energy in observing something changes the observation. The world we learn about is only the world that includes us, and the world there is is made up of people who change it continuously. What we can learn is what it is, but the mistake would be in trying to teach ourselves what it could have been instead of understanding it for what it was.

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="240" caption="Rites of passage"][/caption]

I learnt of the world outside my window by writing. When I write things and hit "Save", an exuberance sweeps over me that signifies that something has been said and set in stone, that something cannot be changed and for every moment that comes after it, it is embellished deeper and deeper in the murk of history. For that reason, I can't let anything be wrong. I want my footprints on history's pages to be picture-perfect. It's not something I'm pretending to be - it's only something I know I can be and am trying my best to be so. In order to make correctness a habit, I read, I discover, I interpret. Reading and discovering can happen over and over again, without interpretation they will remain useless as time passes. Our mark does not lie in understanding that darkness is darkness and the light is the light; it lies in being able to light a candle without regard to whatever winds may be blowing then.

However, as the writer writes more and more, there is more and more about the world that is new, that is there in the now but wasn't in the then. If this moment has been prepared for, then disillusionment can be spared in favour of understanding, as has been noted that to attempt to learn is futile if understanding is absent. The prevalence of a loss of context forces a delineation on the matter of "understanding": to say that one understands is to not have integrated the ability to recognize, disintegrate and recreate, but to have only remembered the meaning encapsulated therein.

As much as contributions are expedited, so much is the world changed, and the world of the minute before understands its retirement just so. I, who have learnt much in this process of writing and self-discovery, am now a different man than of the minute before and have cast over my understanding of the world then a shade of solecism. The greatest lesson, therefore, does not concern the contents of our learning but the methodology itself: not what we learn, but how we learn. By integrating the idea that the spinning top spins so because tops spin so, we do not graduate from being fools. We must learn why it spins so. A top spinning the moment past will grind to a clumsy halt, but in setting another in motion is our learning vindicated.

A Fatidical Caliginosity

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="130" caption="Here, there, everywhere!"][/caption]

As I sat absterging the world wide web for methods to model vortex streets, I came across one particularly agrestic site featuring, inadvertently, a vaticinating article on the caducity of some olidly spelt and nitidly pronounced words of the English language. A malison seemed to descend on the article that had included them, archetypically having been done so as roborants.

Those are only few of the fubsy words facing extinction from a language that continues to evolve with no mansuetude, constantly borrowing words to appease its speakers and exuviating words as and when the same speakers are done using them. A smart language, in other words, and over the course of the 20th century, it has come a long way in restructuring itself to be spoken more easily and, consequently, become more accessible and less embrangled in the eyes of those for whom it is a second language. As words changed, portmonteaus took shape and sentences became shorter, those encapsulations of meaning that were too specific to salvage any versatility - so very important these days - were sidelined with often methodical oppugnance. I don't think it's surprising at all that a language that is mutated on a daily basis begins to show Darwinian characteristics of evolution over the course of two centuries.