Off to Oxford and pondering diffraction

The OxiMUN starts tomorrow and I'm hoping to have a bit of fun and meet some interesting people. Besides that, I have some interesting diffraction phenomena to investigate and explain. When linearly polarised light is incident on a reflective diffraction grating, it does not go onto all orders of diffraction in the same proportions as does unpolarised light. When the linear polarization incident upon the grating is rotated, one can visibly see some orders losing intensity and others gaining intensity. Generally, negative orders go one way (all increase or decrease to various extents) and the positive orders go the other way (again, variable). Its not immediately obvious to me why this should happen, and it'll be interesting to see if I can figure it out Buddha ishtyle. He would appreciate a challenge like this, I'm sure.

Meanwhile, I'm to debate a New Space Treaty at Oxford. I have the vaguest of ideas about what has gone before this, and strong opinions on the subject, which generally makes for an entertaining combination :D lets see how much I can bluff among the best in the country. Well, more or less the best, I think I must be the only person geeky enough to voluntarily opt for the Space Commission !

And I find that my mental abilities have degraded alarmingly in many respects ! I am not as agile as I used to be, and simple calculations and integrals etc which I would not have had to think about at all once upon a time now seem to vex me. This obviously cannot be allowed to continue and so I have already spent lots of money and no time (typical !) on a possible solution - The Art and Craft of Problem Solving by Paul Zeitz. I intend to work through the book and see if my brain can pick up the ropes and go the old Indian rope trick again :P lame.

And on top of all this, I'm supposed to be looking into control systems for a lunar lander and lunar bus even. (Go Frednet !) I have the books, I just need to spend some time and learn some stuff ! and that's what I mean when I say Ive lost the spark and the sheen a bit, the zest for a long tough problem solving and concept crunching session has more or less been evicted from my personality by the mind numbing influence of the Internet, and instead of doing the wonderful stuff I could be doing, I spend time refreshing the same 3-4 pages over and over again for hours.

My thesis is beginning to look up too, I have some nice mask design to do now, and then some modeling and fabrication side by side. The modeling is for some innovative new devices and the fabrication is for an old device I had tried over the summer but it dint really reach a full and satisfactory conclusion. Apart from that there is all the totally fascinating slow-light stuff which I just adoore, and I intend to get into that majorly. Plus there are the awesomely exotic essays I have to do for the Lab course and the "Experimental Quantum Physics at the Limits" course (dont you just love the "At the Limits" part of it ! thats what made me take the course :D )

So all in all, life looks good :)

Untitled Poem. 27-06-2005

Something I wrote a long time ago, as the date indicates. But I thought Id put it up here anyway.

The tides of time rock the isle of the mind.
The world mirrors that interminable sequence.
A welcoming door on an empty street,
The unconscious patter of well shod feet,
Its the most random thoughts that make most sense.

The air is heavy with the smell of rain.
The twilight softens the garish hues.
A cute girl with a smart lad,
The waitress with her note pad,
Its the obvious things that are most abstruse.

The cafe is mellow with the sound of voices.
The music lightens the sombre mood.
Blinking lashes and twinkling eyes,
Stunning truths and prosaic lies,
Its the highbrow things that are shallow and crude.

The curtains are billowing with the freewheeling winds.
The landlady brightens the room with her smile.
Hot coffee in a large mug,
Tired feet on a soft rug,
Its the forgotten heroes who were devoid of guile.

The dull grey skies are darkened by ominous clouds.
The flowers splash colour on old wooden tables.
A haggard face and a meditative sip,
A lovelorn gaze and a quivering lip,
Its the most honest men who are acting out fables.

The cobbled walks beyond the windows are wet.
The smell of fresh bread perfumes the air.
Faded paintings in bulky frames,
Old men playing quiet games,
Its only tired folk who want the world to be fair.

The raindrops carried by the swirling winds are cold.
The slight smile cannot hide the determined chin.
A broken nest by a fallen tree,
A lonely speck on an empty sea,
Its when the storm without is loudest that peace reigns within.

Run !

There was a time when I could run. I could run and not care, I could run and not feel my legs, not feel my body at all, I could run and imagine I was flying. I ran through the countryside simply to remind myself I was alive, I ran in races to feel my heart thumping within me, to taste victory and defeat, to run faster and harder and further, I woke up every morning when I did not need to and ran by myself, I missed parties and trips and movies just so that I did not miss out on running. It was purifying, elevating and liberating.

Years passed and I became careworn and tired, I had faced disappointment and become cynical, I had become unhealthy and unhappy. I worried about victory and was afraid of defeat, I no longer relished the race (any race, for I no longer ran) and its uncertainty and its drama. I was scared of life. I became indolent and fat and bald, I became unfeeling, unthinking and long winded. Gone was the direct and carefree demeanor, I was now timid and obscurantist, needing mindless sophistry and convoluted words to have an identity beyond the obvious lazy heap that I had become. I quizzed and I relished the power of knowing intricate trivia and pitting my wits against fellow obscurantists, I wrote and enjoyed exercising the imaginary power of impotent words. With time on my hands and a world to explore, I became more and more involved with vague fears and complexes and more dependent on verbosity and trivia for my self respect. I had long ago forgotten what freedom meant.

Then - due to what little honesty and steel remained in me - I got a scholarship and came to Europe, I did well, very well. I clenched my teeth and dived into the deep end. I wasted time, I buried myself in TV shows and movies and Causes, but I did enough to do well and hence Im still afloat. I scrambled to keep myself above the dark and corrosive waters of fear and weakness that I have let accumulate around me. I was still enslaved and worse, I was beginning to think this was life. And then St. Andrews with its broad playing fields and open spaces, the vast beach and the North Sea reminded me of freedom.

I must Run and be free. Run despite the wind and the rain and the fear, I must run to tear from my mind the suffocating cobwebs of vague mistrust and cynicism that have enveloped and weakened and stunted it ! I must remember what it was like to walk erect, stride confidently and think boldly, and for that I must run with freedom in my heart and wings on my heels ! :)

To hell with News !

Because this is the sort of news that is dished out even by the BBC - the best of a sickeningly bad lot. What have we come to ? is this really the sort of thing that the public care about or want to read ? Why does making money have to mean that only the most stupid crass, gross and sickening things get printed ? Im through with this. Im done with mass media and conventional ideas of culture and entertainment. It makes me angry and sad. how did things come to this ? bombs, death, fun, murder, sex, lust, consumption consumption and god. I hate the whole lot.

The Opportunity for a New Rennaissance

Image Source BBC

A Soyuz rocket leaves the Bainkour Cosmodrome to take a new crew to the ISS, representing the greatest achievement of our species and all that is good in it. It is symptomatic of a remnant of the pioneering spirit that has led us to the domination of our biosphere and made us the most successful species (in terms of complexity and versatility) that our planet has ever seen. It is no mean achievement, and many times in our past we might have become extinct had it not been for some fortuitous circumstances coupled with our own ingenuity. What has distinguished us from all other species goes beyond what we label "intelligence". It is not merely the capacity to process information and manipulate the environment with our opposable-thumb-equipped appendages, but the desire and the drive to learn and explore and stick our neck out, that has set us apart.

In the past the great expansions of our species and the great migrations (including recent ones like the American conquest of the wild west and the Russian conquest of Siberia and the far east) have been driven by economic factors - a thirst for resources and food, driven by the people at the bottom of the pyramid, who had the least to lose and most to gain from taking risk and braving the dangers of the unknown. The rich might finance the discoveries and administer the empires, but it is always the poor who actually make the land their own and make it productive, and provide the expendable numbers who die and reproduce to push ever further the boundaries of the domain of mankind.

We already dominate the land masses of our planet, and we are fast stripping them bare and the unsustainable nature of our civilization is making itself obvious to even the most obtuse among us. Millions of our fellow men go hungry because we just cant be bothered about feeding them, our civilization has insulated most of us from human suffering and has insidiously sucked us into a vortex of shallow entertainment to the point where we are perpetually bored. This is a result of the complete lack of opportunity for worthy exploration and meaningful risk in our societies today. The only risks we take - in mountains and rivers and jungles - are for our entertainment and pleasure. Perhaps today, even when so many of us have so much leisure and vast resources and knowledge bases at our command, the number of explorers and pioneers as a percentage of the population is at an all time low. And so our kids do drugs and play video games and preach jihad when they should be picking up the skills that will stand by them on some worthy task.

The reasons for this web of interrelated problems lie in the fact that our species is at a crucial point in its history, we are at the base of a great leap, one that we cannot break up into manageable hops and cannot hope to take in the natural course of events - because, the next phase in the expansion of our species must play out in the vastness of space and the depths of the ocean. It is not possible for individuals or small groups to participate in this,without heavy investment from the defining institutions - nation states - of our era. The very nature of the challenges we face is such that they require us to act together as a species rather than as a collection of random individuals, and so far, we have shown ourselves to be quite incapable of doing anything of the sort. We have been vacillating for decades if not centuries, bickering and butchering, we have become soft and feeble minded. The lives of men - and any meaning that might be found in them - are determined by the quality of the ideals and utopias they choose to pursue, and we have spent too much of recent history in the bloody and perfidious pursuit of narrow, contradictory and stunted ideas. Men need worthy challenges and dangers to bring out what is best in them, men need impossible odds and mighty causes to bind them together and it is up to our leaders, who are in the privileged position of being able to allocate the truly vast resources brought together by our civilization to give mankind the chance to galvanize itself, to sally forth into the unknown and conquer and toil and set up new worlds.

The conquest of the oceans and of the solar system will provide inspiration to a disillusioned race, it will revitalize the population, it will provide chances for the risk takers to seek fortune and the the frustrated to redeem themselves, it will be the most splendid stage men will have ever had to cover themselves with glory. It will distract the devout among us from the rantings of priests and save the skeptical from the blatherings of politicians, it will force the greedy to be brave and the offer the bored a chance to be audacious, Men will see vistas and wonders hitherto unimaginable, and that is why we live is it not - to go further, venture deeper, learn more than ever before ! What can be more pointless than stagnation and the pursuit of money and riches without tying it into exploration and knowledge ? what can be more boring than living exactly like our forefathers, seeing only what they have seen (now polluted, and on a computer screen), what can be more sad than young men looking for adventure in computer generated illusions !

It is time mankind dared to live and dream again. It is time we realized, as our faraway ancestors did, that our species and the pursuit of knowledge and the exploration of the unknown are things glorious and magnificent enough to die for. The physical and psychological challenges of space and the deep ocean await us, we must accept them, we must live again !

St. Andrews

The Playing fields of the University

The landscaping along West Sands (beach)

A view of the beach.

Tri-colour :) I am rather fond of this one :)