Bye, Bye, Ta, Ta

If you see a group of students, some of them girls, less than ten in number, hesitatingly trying to enter a teachers room, smiling sheepishly all the time then you can with near one probability say that they have come to invite their teacher to a fresher's welcome party or seniors' farewell party. Or may be Iftar party.

Bump Explained Again

Why again? Can't this thing die a natural death?

Relax. The new explanation is not so different from the earlier explanation if one thinks of squeezing the balloon analogy. So here is that other explanation from Cosmic Variance and here from Tommaso Dorigo. If you want to see squeezing the balloon in action then here is one place.

The present excitement has made several things very clear. Some old and some new. So, for example, memorize the following sentence:

Three sigma signals come and go.

 This statement has been made at several blog so no attribution is being given.

Now what is one, two three, four, five, ... sigma? Alright, we'll get to it at our sweet convenience. For the time being the sweet convenience of others is the one that is dictating the game. We, for the time being can not resist the temptation to tell that many of the bloggers took the pain of explaining the various backgrounds contributing to the observed event. That was really nice.

The Boy on Motorcycle

The south-west corner of Sir Syed Hall (South), the one closest to Old Boys' Lodge and Proctor Office is not a very busy spot. But curiously one can mostly find some destitute woman sitting their, different women at different times. A boy on motorcycle stops, brings out his purse, takes out a coin and gives it to the woman sitting their at that moment. Then he starts is motorcycle and leaves.

This boy has won, Lord willing, on the Day of Judgment.

Bump Explained

The bump that we have talked about in many posts was of course explained yesterday. Only one blogger is talking about it. The reason might be that the explanation is of Fly on the Moon type. The explanation says that the people analyzing the data has shifted their data by one bin from some energy onwards and hence you get a bump at another energy. It is like squeezing a balloon at one place gives you a bump at another place. The explanation is here, now in the beginning of that post. The blogger got his hint from a commenter. The basic observation is already there in the post here. To quote:

Note also that the W+jets background totally dominates. Note further that there is a mismodeling of the data in the region above 120 GeV: it seems like all data points are displaced by one bin toward the right with respect to background predictions.

He was just very close to the explanation. At least he had the right observation. There is a possibility that it might leave some red faces for the explanation is rather obvious.

Fly on the Moon

A local vernacular magazine carried a cartoon. A scientist is looking through his telescope at the moon. In the drawing there is a fly sitting on the objective lens of the telescope. Readers can see that. The rub is that the scientist is declaring that there is a fly on the moon.

Ha, ha. Or may be not. Students of Physics, high school onwards, will tell you that if a fly is sitting on the objective lens of a big telescope focused on the moon then you shall not see the fly at all. The only effect of the fly will be that the image of the moon will have less overall brightness.

But the cartoon is a rather effective one. If you can not be a scientist then you can at least make fun of them. Who is loosing here? Everybody, scientists and common people included.

Back to Bump

Particle Physics is a topic which many people would like to touch only with a barge pole.

But, then, science is by the people and for the people. Common people do have an interest in such exotic things. And in the era of consumer and civil rights many people have started taking it as their right to know as tax payers as to what is being done with their money. We kid you not.

So we had done a series of posts on a recent experimental observation at Tevatron. A group called CDF observed a bump in some of their data. This is an unexpected bump and thus it has created some excitement in Particle Physics and news circles. Our posts in that context are:
(1) How Much is 1 TeV of Energy? 
(2)  Why is it Called High Energy?
(3)  Higgs or No Higgs?
(4) The (Non-) Higgs Stampede

Since we missed some links their let us include them here.

 Famous Physics blog Quantum Diaries has a (belated) entry here.

The results were already present in a thesis publicly available. Here is that thesis.

There was already a paper that tried to explain the new findings. Paper was submitted on March 30, 2011. Here is that.

On the blogosphere physicist Gordon Watts perhaps had the earliest entry called Jumping the Gun on April 4, 2011. He and few other were very cautious that they should not divulge the results before an official public presentation. Understandable but funny because the thesis was already in public domain.

Not in Praise of UGC

What do the bureaucrats do?

Among other things they increase the bureaucratic hurdles. Text books tell us that bureaucracy is the steel frame of democracy. That is half truth. One can trace many problems of democracy to bureaucracy.

But why talk of bureaucracy in the academic context?

Well the academic structure of the country is supervised by UGC. On the face of it this is an institution, the UGC, run and overseen by academicians. In reality many times the people at the helm of the affairs are those who have reached their, not because of their academic aptitude but their aptness in managing the bureaucracy. In name these people are academicians, they have the degrees and the required years of teaching and research but in reality they have managed these qualifications by, well, managerial means.

Now these people do one thing. They take decisions.

The next question to ask is whether their decisions can be of academic value? Can their decisions be useful for academics? Will these people fortify the academic structure of the country.

No. These people are singularly incapable of any such thing. If they had any knack of academics then they would have been doing that. They had the knack of climbing the ladder and climb they did. And then you have the knife in monkey's hand.

Two specific examples come to mind regarding their helpful decisions. One is the introduction of Refresher Courses for university teachers and the other is the recently introduced Course Work for Ph.D. students. Why are both of these ideas bad is something that we shall take up later on.

The (Non-) Higgs Stampede

Half a day is an eon in the world of High Energy Physics, that is, Particle Physics.

Around twelve hours ago we had reported in the post called Higgs or No Higgs, about a bump seen the the CDF collaboration of Tevatron, Fermi Lab, Chicago, USA. In that post we had two or three links related to this possible finding. By now there are nearly twenty links relevant to this news, every one saying his or her bit. One might get the feeling that alright just give me a summary. Well nearly everybody starts his post by giving a summary. Let us try our luck.

(1) Peter W. Higgs is from University of Edinburg. (Wikipedia, His Home Page)
(2) He proposed a mechanism that gives mass to some elementary particles called gauge bosons. It is called Higgs mechanism.
(3) For this mechanism one requires a new particle that has been named the Higgs particle.
(4) Similar mechanism gives mass to other particles also. Thus people say that Higgs is the source of all mass.
(5) There are many people who had the same or similar ideas at around the same time. And they wrote papers also. Because of this the same mechanism is also called Brout–Englert–Higgs mechanism or Englert-Brout-Higgs-Guralnik-Hagen-Kibble mechanism, or Anderson–Higgs mechanism.
(6) Predicting the mass of a particle is big thing in High Energy Physics. If you can do that most people will start saying that you deserve a Nobel Prize. (This is paraphrasing late Professor KVL Sarma of TIFR, Mumbai.)
(7) Higgs discovery has the same status. It is amongst the last piece of the beautiful edifice of High Energy Physics called the Standard Model. It should fetch Peter Higgs the Nobel Prize.
(8) Hence the excitement in the cosmos (we mean the universe, that is, the world) about a bump  found at Tevatron.
(9) We got the hint that there might be something new at Tevatron as found by the research group CDF from this post at UH/LHC Blogs.
(10) And the rest, as they say, is the history.
(11) This was the paper, still a preprint, that started it all.
(12) We like the discussion at the Collider Blog so here is the relevant link.
(13) If you are fond of getting your dose of news from Google then here it is. Courtesy Lubos Motl.
(14) Here is the take by the last mentioned. Nobody ignores his opinion though he is not a paper publishing physicist for some time.
(15) What is our (Alig's) stake in the excitement? We already told you.
(16) Tommaso Dorigo is a blogger whom every body approaches for the insider news.
(17)  Sean Carroll gives his perspective at that powerful blog.
(18) A person with a pseudonym Jestor usually gives very entertaining and perceptive summary of the most relevant things. He obliges here.
(19) We already have mentioned the blog Not Even Wrong. It has a perspective (not technical ) summary here.
(20) The first paper explaining the results came after 21 minutes of the release of data.
(21) It turns out that the excitement in fact was about a new particle called Z-prime, not Higgs. The latest is that it is not so. In other words there is no signal for a new particle.
(22) So there is no show, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you. Come back later.

Return of Don Quixote

Q: Who is Don Quixote?
A: The main character in a novel of the same name by Spanish author Cervantes. According to Wikipedia:

As a founding work of modern Western literature, and one of the earliest canonical novels, it regularly appears high on lists of the greatest works of fiction ever published.

Q: What is a quixotic task?

A: It is foolishly impractical pursuit of ideals, typically marked with rash and lofty romantic ideals, according to
Merriam-Webster.

Q: Why is it being used here?
A: Because we have suggested a quixotic idea earlier, see here and  here, and we are suggesting similar things in this post. Now have a look at the paragraph below from here:

Today more than 30,000 particle accelerators are at work in hospitals, factories, shipping ports and laboratories around the world. Historically, breakthroughs in accelerator science come from basic science, leading to applications for diagnosing and treating disease, cleaning up polluted air and water and greener industrial processes. Next-generation technology like the EMMA accelerator will help pave the path for even more applications. STFC issued this press release about EMMA on April 1:

So let us explore the possibility of replicating those stories here at AMU.

We intend to return to the uses of accelerators in later posts.

Higgs or No Higgs?

Is seems that we are not done with the subject matter of the post before the previous one. Among the chief aims of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland is to find the missing particle of Standard Model of particle physics called the Higgs. The Aligarh group participating at LHC is not part of that experiment. They are part of another experiment that shall explore the formation of something called Quark-Gluon Plasma or QGP. This post is not about that. It is about Higgs. The Tevatron machine at Fermi-Lab in USA is among the last colliders to have tried its hands on this particle. The latest result mentioned two posts ago is Tevatron's take on the question of Higgs. We'll soon know whether Tevatron got a hint of Higgs or not, after the paper analysed by Filip Tanedo gets more scrutiny.

Why are we belabouring the point? Well AMU has a stake their also. Dr Syed Afsar Abbas, Visiting Professor at the Physics Department of AMU say that Higgs will not be seen. Here is the paper. And here is some discussion on it at a controversial blog Not Even Wrong.

Why is it Called High Energy?

In the post immediately before the present one we have talked about a TeV of energy. This is the unit of energy used in particle physics whose another name is High Energy Physics. 1 TeV of energy is roughly the energy of a flying mosquito. A common person may now ask as to why the energy of a flying mosquito is termed high. Any guesses?

How Much is 1 TeV of Energy?

TeV stands for terra electron volt. We have encountered these type of names earlier. Like a calorie TeV is also a unit of energy useful in modern particle physics. So how much is a TeV of energy? Filip Tanedo says:

A TeV is roughly the kinetic energy of a flying mosquito.

He quotes this page. Now since these energies are relevant for the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, Geneva and the Physics Department of AMU has a group participating in LHC experiments therefore it is nice place to get linked with what is happening in that exotic field. Tanedo has tried the impossible-to explain the title, and the content, of a oven hot paper from Tevatron at another particle physics laboratory called the Fermilab in USA.

Coming Out of Cocoon

For far too long Muslims have abstained from speaking for themselves. Longer still for Islam. But the things are changing now. Slowly but surely. A decade ago no mainstream journalist, jurist or a civil servant will utter the phrase reservation for Muslims. Last year M.J.Akbar did precisely did that, that is, advocate reservation for Muslims. He did that in Kennedy Auditorium-during Sir Syed Memorial Lecture. Some time before that Justics A.M.Ahmadi had done the same in public function-as reported in Urdu Roznama Rashtriya Sahara. Now even politicians, tribe of statesmen belongs to the class of dodo and dinosaur, are opening their lips. But there still is a class that is unable to see the writing on the wall. May be in immediate past they rationalized their silence too strongly. A journalist has given the name Muslibs, acronym for Muslim Liberals, to these people. Coming back to those who have put their finger on the real crux, it is heart warming to see the pieces by Muhammad Tariq Ghazi. We have used one here and another one is there.

Out of Syllabus

Somethings you shall never get in your syllabus. For example how was Urdu compromised-beginning with the British. The Alig groups are reading following article in this context: Anjuman Taraqqi-i-Urdu

For Anniversaries

In case you have missed it the earlier post Ice Cream Sundae was against anniversaries. The present one is for Anniversaries. And there is no dichotomy. We are forbidden to add new things to Religion (deen). In science there is a room for that. In fact that is the game.

So what are the current important anniversaries?
(1) Discovery of Superconductivity (100th Anniversary)
(2) Expanding Universe (30th Anniversary)
(3) Beginning of Unification, Maxwell's Equation (150th Anniversary)

(Source : P&P)
But the main purpose was to point out a failed anniversary. In 2008 it was thought that it was the hundredth anniversary of the Physics Department and should be celebrated. Miyan (Late Dr Syed Muhammed Ahmed, former Assistant PRO of AMU and on whom many posts have appeared at AAA) was contacted. He did not confirm it. Consequence? No anniversary. Chemistry department has been more enterprising. They celebrated their 100th anniversary. One can hazard that by the same argument even Physics Department can celebrate its anniversary. But the sad thing is that we are not expert in keeping our archives in order and as a result one can not make the preferred fourth entry in above list.;)

Decidedly Wrong Track

One of the atrocities of the modern so called liberated intelligentsia is  they they have tried and succeeded to a very large extent to put man and woman in, not a co-operative, but competitive mode. When most of the world is fed up with the bad consequences of materialism there are still some people who are just discovering it and falling into the ditch head long. Look at this piece in Hindu. To quote:

With the burden of domestic work on their shoulders, women spend more time doing unpaid work than men around the world…

 So remember when your mommy was breast feeding you she was doing unpaid work. When your dad brought you candies did you pay him buster? Gosh! You subjected your father to unpaid work.

Let us try to get cooled a bit. Take an Aligarian example. The graduate student was running high fever. The paper was two days later. Course was delayed and thus the notes of quantum mechanics were not complete. Teacher came to know of the situation. He got down to brass tacks. In a day and the subsequent  night the missing notes were completed and delivered to the student. Of course this will happen for a good student only. Not for any T, D or H. Now was this teacher doing unpaid work or not? Let us muster all the nice people against this student who exploited his teacher and take out a procession, dharna, memorendum, hum se jo takrayega ....

The teacher was Professor Muhammed Zillur Rehman Khan Sahab who had already served as the Head (not the Chairman) of Physics Department, Dean Faculty of Science and later the Officiating Vice Chancellor. He also had the honour of refusing the Vice Chancellorship. He is the one who made the memorable statement in the context of this refusal:

The best honour a physicist can have is to be a professor of physics and I had that, I do not want to be a Vice Chancellor.

 The quotation is verbal. People with a flair for verbatim records have to find their fodder some where else.

When will we get out of the western web of deception?

Revolutions

Transition from one paradigm to another via revolution is the usual developmental pattern of mature science. This is the profound observation of Thomas Kuhn, whom we passingly mentioned earlier. The observation that made him famous, if not his raison d'être.

He is not the presiding deity in the philosophy of science, accept for a minority. But people still use the terminology of revolution in the context of science. As we have mentioned that when one talks of science then physics is taken as the prototype. Last century saw the most exhilarating roller coaster ride of developments in physics. This contained at least two revolutions. One is special relativity and another is quantum mechanics. General relativity is no less a revolution but if we include that then we have to include a few more names.

The main point of the post is that both of above revolutions took place firmly in twentieth century. The century in which Aligarh Movement was in its full swing including the Aligarh College, later AMU. Some of the significant developments, even if only a small part, should have come in our share. It was not to be the case.

To be fare some consideration can be made for the fact that European and American explosion of twentieth century science benefited from earlier continuous developments of two hundred and fifty years. That is the time when our ancestors were slowly succumbing to and were,  later on, firmly under the grip of colonialism.

What did come in our share? We can only think of this article on The Theory of Valency : Developments and Problems. It is by Rudolf Samuel. That it is from a borrowed intellectual is not the only rub. Valency is an extremely important concept, particularly in chemistry, but it is not among those concepts that can be counted among the revolutions of science. Samuel was a man of spectroscopy and he did what he could do best. One can hazard that if he had turned his attention inward, towards the nucleus or in a marginally different direction, the condensed matter physics then may be more significant things could have come in our share. But this is rather unfair to him. This is not the job of a man of spectroscopy. And one should not ignore his contributions to that field.

The story of India at large is not much different from ours. But we shall leave that out to more competent and more interested people.

Of Kings and Queens

Why is there no talk of Kings and Queens at An Alig's Armchair?

Let us talk about a King.

Mufti Taqi Usmani Sahab (DB) has narrated the story of the demise of a Shaikh. The Shaikh left a will that his Funeral Prayer can be lead by only that person who has maintained the sequence. It means that a person who never missed a Prayer ever since he became an adult. At the time of Funeral Prayer this announcement was made at it was requested that Man of Sequence (Sahib-e-Tarteeb) should come to lead the Prayer. Nobody came forward after two announcements. After the third announcement the King himself came forward. It was Tipu Sultan, later to achieve martyrdom. Allah knows better.

There is a similar story of passing away of Khwaja Bakhtiaruddin Kaki (RA) whose Funeral Prayer was ultimately lead by King Altmash (RA).

 So we'll talk of Kings and Queens if these are Sayyidina Dawood (AS) or Sayyidina Sulaiman (AS) or Hazrat Ibraheem bin Adham Quddisallahu Sirrahu.

Then there are the governors, ambassadors, kings and queens who got their fifteen minutes of fame. Them we shall have little to talk about.

AMU is not International Islamic Caliphate of Islam. It is an academic institution and it is the main manifestation of Aligarh Movement. So the focus at An Alig's Armchair will be academics with a bias towards science.

And that is why we do not talk much of Kings and Queens.

Ice Cream Sundae

Google has, for sometime, been celebrating various occasions by designing suitable modifications of its standard logo. Sometimes these new logos are global but many times they are for local audiences. Here is the official collection of these logos. To give some colour to the blog we flick first twenty of them. Since not all of them are global you might be seeing many of them for the first time.

(1) Mar 31 2011 200th Birthday of Robert Bunsen - (Global)

 (2) Mar 25, 2011, 400th Birthday of Evliya Çelebi - (Turkey)

(3) Mar 24, 2011, 137th Birthday of Harry Houdini - (Global)

 (4) Mar 21, 2011, Persian New Year - (Selected Countries)

 (5) Mar 20, 2011, Holi Festival - (India)

 (6) Mar 17, 2011, Sayed Darwish's Birthday - (Egypt)

 (7) Mar 17, 2011, 150th Anniversary of the Italian Unification - (Italy)

 (8) Mar 17, 2011, St. Patrick's Day - (Selected Countries)

 (9) Mar 15, 2011, Hungarian National Day - (Hungary)

 (10) Mar 14, 2011, Alam Ara's 80th Anniversary - (India)

 (11) Mar 13, 2011, National Thai Elephant Day - (Thailand) 

(12) Mar 12, 2011, Chinese Arbor Day - (China)

 (13) Mar 09, 2011, Doodle 4 Google: Ireland Winner - (Ireland)

 (14) Mar 08, 2011, Women's Day - (Selected Countries)

 (15) Mar 08, 2011, Carnival - (Brazil)

 (16) Mar 07, 2011, Sendung mit der Maus 40th Anniversary - (Germany)

 (17) Mar 06, 2011, Will Eisner's 94th Birthday - (US, Selected Countries)

 (18) Mar 06, 2011, Ghana's Independence Day - (Ghana)

 (19) Mar 03, 2011, Girl's Day - (Japan)

 (20) Mar 01, 2011, Martisor (Spring Day) - (Romania, Moldova, Bulgaria)

 

And to top all, err bottom it all, here is today's logo:

It is the celebration of 119th anniversary of first recorded ice cream sundae. Two decorated scoops of ice cream serving as the double o of Google.

Now the purpose of life is to prepare for the hereafter. In this scheme the place of many of the anniversaries is not there. An additional observation can be made about today's choice. Most of the economics courses begin with the statement that as time passes man achieves higher and higher levels of satisfaction. Now this is not true but nearly most of us believe it to be true. Isn't it coming from the western economists who know better?

As a result of these compounded fallacies man has been thrown into indulgence with this world. 120 years ago man was less satisfied but more satisfied 119 years ago because ice cream sundae had arrived. And you shall be even more satisfied if you discover more things to cater to your palate.

In case it looks like a betrayal of a well begun theme then rest assured that you can still eat your ice cream sundae provided you take it as a blessing of your Lord and thank Him for that.

Who Should Call the Shots?

In an authentic tradition beloved Prophet (PBUH) said that if your affairs are run by your women then it is better for you to be below the ground. Clearly if you leave your affairs to your children then the Prophetic (PBUH) injunction may not be very different.