Benoit Mandelbrot Dies

Benoit Mandelbrot (20 November 1924 – 14 October 2010)

Cesaro as quoted by Benoit Mandelbrot on limits in Koch Curves and fractals:

The will is infinite
and the execution confined
The desire is boundless
and the act a slave to limit.
—
From Mandelbrot’s seminal book on fractal geometry “The Fractal Geometry of Nature” (1982). This book has more digressions and quotations than any other book I think.

Mandelbrot was not like Feynman for me, not the kinds I could call a childhood hero, but the kind of person I liked more and more as I grew up. I was extremely saddened by the news of his demise today morning.

RIP!

As a tribute to Mandelbrot and his immense contribution. I would highly recommend this extremely wonderful PBS documentary.

[Click on the Image to Play]

If for some reason the above does not work – check the documentary out on googlevideo.

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Links:

New York Times Obituary

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A Logical Journey: From Gödel to Philosophy

I had an occasion to read this fantastic book over the last couple of months. This book is a compilation by Hao Wang, a confidante of Kurt Gödel. Compiled over ten years it contains Gödel’s views on a wide array of areas. Some of these insights are little known, some are very interesting and some just show that Gödel was just as human in making errors.

This is an unadulterated chronicle of a brilliant mind. I don’t know what else to say to suggest this book. It is a must read for anyone with a remote interest in Mathematical Logic, Philosophy and Kurt Godel.

A Logical Journey - From Godel to Philosophy

[Click on the image to buy this book or click here]

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Here is an introduction to the book and the author.

Hao Wang (1921-1995) was one of the few confidantes of the great mathematician and logician Kurt Gödel. A Logical Journey is a continuation of Wang’s Reflections on Kurt Gödel and also elaborates on discussions contained in From Mathematics to Philosophy. A decade in preparation, it contains some important and unfamiliar insights into Gödel’s views on a wide range of issues, from Platonism and the nature of logic, to minds and machines, the existence of god, and positivism and phenomenology.

The impact of Gödel’s theorem on twentieth century thought is on a par with that of Einstein’s theory of relativity, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle or Keynesian economics. These previously unpublished intimate and informal conversations, however, bring to light and amplify Gödel’s other major contributions to logic and philosophy. They reveal that there is much more in Gödel’s philosophy of mathematics than is commonly realized, and more in his philosophy than just a philosophy of mathematics.

Wang writes that “it is even possible that his quite informal and loosely structured conversations with me, which I am freely using in this book, will turn out to be the fullest existing expression of the diverse components of his inadequately articulated general philosophy”

I will leave you with some quotes from the book. Unless mentioned, they are by Kurt Gödel.

1. To develop the skill of correct thinking is in the first place to learn what you have to disregard. In order to go on, you have to know what to leave out: this is the essence  of effective thinking. (1972, from chapter 1 – Gödel’s life)

2. I would not say that one cannot polemicize against Nietzsche. But it should of course also be a writer [Dichter] or a person of the same type to do that. (17.2.48)

3. What you say about sadness is right : if there were a completely hopeless sadness, there would be nothing beautiful in it. But I believe there can rationally be no such thing. Since we understand neither why this world exists, nor why it is constituted exactly as it is, nor why we are in it, nor why we were born into exactly these and no other external relations: why then should we presume to know exactly this to be all  at there is no other world and that we shall never be in yet another one? (27.2.50)

4. One. cannot really say that complete ignorance is sufficient ground for hopelessness . If e.g. someone will land on an island completely unknown to him, it is just as likely that it is inhabited by harmless people as that it is by cannibals, and his ignorance gives no reason for hopelessness , but rather for hope. Your aversion against occult phenomena is of course well justified to the extent that we are here facing a hard-to-disentangle mixture of deception, credulousness and stupidity, with genuine phenomena. But the result (and the meaning) of the deception is, in my opinion, not to fake genuine phenomena but to conceal them. (3.4.50)

5. Is the book about Einstein really so hard to understand? I think that prejudice against and fear of every “abstraction” may also be involved here, and if you would attempt to read it like a novel (without wanting to understand right away everything at the 6rst reading), perhaps it would not seem so incomprehensible to you. (8.1.51)

6. As you know, I am indeed also thoroughly anti nationalistic, but one cannot, I believe, decide hastily against the possibility that people like Bismarck have the honorable intention to do something good. (7.11.56)

7. About the relation of art and kitsch we have, I believe, already discussed many times before. It is similar to that between light and heavy music. One could, however, hardly assert that all good music must be tragic? (23.3.57)

8. It is always enjoyable to see that there are still people who value a certain measure of idealism. (12.11.61)

9. Of all that we experience, there eventually of course remains only a memory, but just in this way all lasting things retain some of their actuality. (24.3.63)

10. She was not a beauty, but she was an extraordinarily intelligent person and had an extremely important role [in his life], because she was actually what one calls the life-line. She connected him to the earth. Without her, he could not exist at all.

A complicated marriage, but neither could exist without the other. And the idea that she should die before him was unthinkable for him. It is fortunate that he died before her. He was absolutely despondent when she was sick. He said, “Please come to visit my wife.”

She once told me, ‘I have to hold him like a baby.”  (1.4.2-3-4,  Alice Von Kahler on Adele and Kurt Godel)

Einstein and Godel at IAS, Princeton

11.The one man who was, during the last years, certainly by far Einstein‘s best friend, and in some ways strangely resembled him most was Kurt Godel,  the great logician. They were very different in almost every personal way- Einstein gregarious, happy, full of laughter and common sense, and Godel extremely solemn,very serious, quite solitary, and distrustful of common sense as a means of arriving at the truth. But they shared a fundamental quality: both went directly and wholeheartedly to the questions at the very center of things (in Holton and Elkena, Straus 1982:422).

12. Einstein has often told me that in the late years of his life he has continually sought Godel’s company in order to have discussions with him. Once he said to me that his own work no longer meant much, that he came to the Institute merely to have the privilege to walk home with Godel. [“The late years” probably began in 1951 , when Einstein stopped working on the unified theory. 1.6.2 Oskar Morgenstern]

13. The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways, the point, however , is to change it. (Karl Marx, Theses on Feverbach 1845, Chapter 3)

14. The place which philosophy has occupied in Chinese civilization has been comparable to that of religion in other civilizations. In the world of the future, man will have philosophy in the place of religion. This is consistent with the Chinese tradition. It is not necessary that man should be religious, but it is necessary that he should be philosophical. When he is philosophical he has the very best of the blessings of religion. (Fung1 948:1, 6).

15. Engaging in philosophy is salutary in any case, even when no positive results emerge from it (and I remain perplexed). It has the effect  [Wirkung] that “the color [is] brighter,” that is, that reality appears more clearly as such. This observation reveals that , according to Godel’s conception , the study of philosophy helps us to see reality more distinctly , even though it may happen that no (communicable ) positive results come out of it to help others.

16. In presenting these conversations, you should pay attention to three principles: (1) deal only with certain points; (2) separate out the important and the new; and (3) pay attention to connections. Godel, 5 February 1976

17. The notion of existence is one of the primitive concepts with which we must begin as given. It is the clearest concept we have. Even “all”, as studied in predicate logic, is less clear, since we don’t have an overview of the whole world. We are here thinking of the weakest and the broadest sense of existence. For example, things which act are different from things which don’t. They all have existence proper to them. (4.4.12)

18. Existence: we know all about it, there is nothing concealed. The concept of existence helps us to form a good picture of reality. It is important for supporting a strong philosophical view and for being open-minded in reaching it. (4.4.13)

19. Power is a quality that enables one to reach one’s goals. Generalities contain the laws which enable you to reach your goals. Yet a preoccupation with power distracts us from paying attention to what is at the foundation of the world, and it fights against the basis of rationality. (4.4.14)

20. The world tends to deteriorate: the principle of entropy. Good things appear from time to time in single persons and events. But the general development tends to be negative. New extraordinary characters emerge to prevent the downward movement. Christianity was best at the beginning. Saints slow down the downward movement. In science, you may say, it is different. But progress occurs not in the sense of understanding the world, only in the sense of dominating the world, for which the means remains, once it is there. Also general knowledge though not in the deeper sense of first principles, has moved upwards. Specifically, philosophy tends to go down. (4.4.15)

21. The view that existence is useful but not true is widely held; not only in mathematics but also in physics, where it takes the form of regarding only the directly observable [by sense perception] as what exists. This is a prejudice of the time. The psychology behind it is not the implicit association of existence with time, action, and so on. Rather the association is with the phenomenon that consistent but wrong assumptions are useful sometimes. Falsity is in itself something evil but often serves as a tool for finding truth. Unlike objectivism, however, the false assumptions are useful only temporarily and intermediately. (4.4.16)

22. Einstein’s religion is more abstract, like that of Spinoza and Indian philosophy. My own religion is more similar to the religion of the churches. Spinoza’s God is less than a person. Mine is more than a person, because God can’t be less than a person. He can play the role of a person. There are spirits which have no body but can communicate with and influence the world. They keep [themselves] in the background today and are not known. It was different in antiquity and in the Middle Ages, when there were miracles. Think about deja vu and thought transference. The nuclear processes, unlike the chemical , are irrelevant to the brain.

23. The possible worldviews [can be divided] into two groups [conceptions]: skepticism, materialism and positivism stand on one [the left] side; spiritualism, idealism and theology on the other [the right]. The truth lies in the middle,or consists in a combination of these two conceptions. (Chapter 5)

24. Some reductionism is right: reduce to concepts and truths, but not to sense perceptions. Really it should be the other way around: Platonic ideas [what Husserl calls “essences ” and Godel calls “concepts”] are what things are to be reduced to. Phenomenology makes them [the ideas] clear. (5.3.15)

25. Introspection is an important component of thinking; today it has a bad reputation. Introspective psychology is completely overlooked today. Epoche concerns how introspection should be used, for example, to detach oneself from influences of external stimuli (such as the fashions of the day). Even the scientists (fashions of the day). Even the scientists [sometimes] do not agree because they are not [detached true] subjects [ in this sense].

26. Positivists decline to acknowledge any apriori knowledge. They wish to reduce everything to sense perceptions. Generally they contradict themselves in that they deny introspection as experience, referring to higher mental phenomena as “judgments”. They use too narrow a notion of experience and introduce an arbitrary bound on what experience is, excluding phenomenological experience. Russell (in his 1940 (Inquiry into Meaning and Truth]) made a more drastic mistake in speaking as if sense experience were the only experience we can find by introspection.

27. For approaching the central part of philosophy, there is good reason to confine one’s attention to reflections on mathematics. Physics is perhaps less well suited for this purpose; Newtonian physics would be better. (Chapter 9)

28. The meaning of the world is the separation of wish and fact. (Chapter 9)

29. Whole and part– partly concrete parts and partly abstract parts- are at the bottom of everything. They are most fmtdamental in our conceptual system. Since there is similarity, there are generalities. Generalities are just a fundamental aspect of the world. It is a fundamental fact of reality that there are two kinds of reality: universals and particulars (or individuals).

30. Zhi zhi wei zhi zhi, bu zhi wei bu zhi, shi zhi ye. (To know that you know when you do know and know that you do not know when you do not know: that is knowledge .) Confucius, Analects, 2: 17. (Epilogue).

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Synthetic Life and Ethics

I am late with my echo statement on this.

Over the past few days, the internet is abuzz with news of Craig Venter and his team for creating the first fully functional cell, controlled by synthetic DNA and discussions on what might be the ethical consequences of future work in this area.

The fact that this has happened is not surprising at all. Dr Venter has been very open about his work and has been promoting it for some years now.  For instance, a couple of years ago there was a wonderful TED talk in which Venter talks about his team being close to creating synthetic life. The latest news is ofcourse not of synthetic life, but a step closer to that grand aim.

Another Instance : Two years there was a brainstorming session whose transcript was converted by EDGE into a book available for free download too.

Dimitar Sasselov, Max Brockman, Seth Lloyd, George Church, J. Craig Venter, Freeman Dyson, Image Courtesy - EDGE

The BOOK can be downloaded from here.

So from such updates, it did not surprise me much when Venter made the announcement.

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Ethics : There have been frenzied debates on what this might lead us to on the internet, on television and elsewhere. These discussions on ethics appear to me to be inevitable and I find it most appropriate to quote the legendary Freeman Dyson on it.

“Two Hundred years ago, William Blake engraved The Gates of Paradise, a little book of drawings and verses. One of the drawings, with the title “Aged Ignorance”, shows an old man wearing professional eyeglasses and holding a large pair of scissors. In front of him, a winged child running naked in the light from a rising sun. The old man sits with his back to the sun. With a self satisfied smile he opens his scissors and chips the child’s wings. With the picture goes a little poem :

“In Time’s Ocean falled drown’d,
In aged ignorance profound,
Holy and cold, I clip’d the Wings
Of all Sublunary Things.”

This picture is an image of the human condition in the era that is now beginning. The rising sun is biological science, throwing light of every increasing intensity onto the processes by which we live and feel and think. The winged child is human life, becoming for the first time aware of itself and its potentialities in the light of science. The old man is our existing human society, shaped by ages of past ignorance. Our laws, our loyalities, our fears and hatreds, our economic and social injustices, all grew slowly and are deeply rooted in the past. Inevitably the advance of biological knowledge will bring clashes between the old institutions and new desires for human improvement. Old institutions will clip the wings of human desire. Up to a point, caution is justified and social constraints are necessary. The new technologies will be dangerous as well as liberating. But in the long run, social constraints must bend to new realities. Humanity can not live forever with clipped wings. The vision of self-improvement which William Blake and Samuel Gompers in their different ways proclaimed, will not vanish from the Earth.”

(The above is an excerpt from a lecture given by Freeman Dyson at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1995. The lecture was pulished by the New York Review of Books in 1997 and later as a chapter in Scientist as Rebel. )

Artificial Life Beyond the Wet Medium :

Life is a process which can be abstracted away from any particular medium – John Von Neumann

Wet Artificial-Life is what is basically synthetic life (in synthetic life you don’t really abstract the life process into another medium, but you digitize it and recreate it instead as per your requirement).

I do believe abstracting and digitizing life from a “wet chemical medium” to a computer is not very far off either i.e. a software that not only would imitate “life” but also synthesize it. And coupled with something like Koza’s Genetic Programming scheme embedded in it, develop something that possesses some intelligence other than producing more useful programs.

Coded Messages :

This is the fun part from the news about Venter and his team’s groundbreaking work. The synthetic DNA of the bacteria has a few messages coded into it.

1. “To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to create life out of life.” – from James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

James Joyce is one of my favourite writers*, so I was glad that this was encoded too. But I find it funny that what this quote says can also be the undoing of synthetic life or rather a difficult problem to solve. The biggest enemy of synthetic life is evolution (creating life out of life :), evolution would ensure that control of the synthetic bacteria is lost soon enough. I believe that countering this would be the single biggest challenge in synthetic biology.

*When I tried reading Ulysses, I kept giving up. But had this compulsive need to finish it anyway. I had to join an Orkut community called “Who is afraid of James Joyce” and after some motivation could read it! ;-)

2. What I can not build, I can not understand – Richard P. Feynman

This is what Dr Venter announced, isn’t “What I can not create, I do not understand” the correct version?

Feynman's Blackboard at the time of his death: Copyright - Caltech

3. “See things not as they are, but as they might be” – J. Robert Oppenheimer from American Prometheus

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Recommendations :

1. What is Life – Erwin Schrodinger (PDF)

2. Life – What A Concept! – EDGE (PDF)

3. A Life Decoded : My Genome, My Life – C. J. Venter (Google Books)

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N is a Number : A Portrait of Paul Erdős

N is a Number : A Portrait of Paul Erdős is one of the most delightful, endearing and probably one of the best documentaries I have seen on an individual. I have always regarded Paul  Erdős as one of my personal heroes and hence It seems weird that I had not seen this rather old documentary earlier. Especially given it’s extremely high quality, appeal and not to mention the character it is based on.  However, it is never late to discover something so good.

There is an extremely good wikipedia entry on Paul Erdős. However I would still write a few words on him before linking to the videos.

A Mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems.

— An extremely famous quote attributed to Alfréd Rényi. It was originally intended for Hungarian mathematicians and the mathematical-circles culture that flourished there giving the world so many mathematical giants.

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Erdős was an extremely prolific and famously eccentric mathematician, producing more papers and collaborating with more people than anybody in history. His eccentricity made him an extremely lovable character, and he made a fair share in contributing to human comedy.

He had no home and no full time job, he traveled around the world for half a century. Surviving on living with collaborators, fees from lectures and other appearances. His dis-interest in anything carnal or materialistic was almost Zen like I would dare say. Just having two pairs of half empty suitcases as his only belongings as he moved along from one location onto another.

It is often said (and quite correctly) that if you finish all bees in the world, the world would not survive for long. We could use that as an allegory for the sciences /mathematics as well. Erdős was essentially a bee. Brilliant in many areas of mathematics, he traveled from place to place using one idea from one area into another, cross-pollinating them, generating interest with his lovable anecdotes and enriching Mathematics as a consequence. A welcome departure from the so called purists.

His mathematical output was so prolific that a tribute is the famous Erdős number that gives the collaborative distance of a mathematician with him. The reason for such astounding output was not just his love for only mathematics but a brilliant memory. Colleagues have remarked that he could remember problems discussed years ago and exactly what the details that were talked about. If a mathematical problem was left half way, he could still remember where was the point they stopped, even if revisited after years. Not just that, he had this knack of knowing the mind of other mathematicians in where their interests lay. So he knew who would like to work on what kind of problems.

Though Mathematics was his only love, his knowledge was extremely wide and he could talk with most people about most things they might be interested in. Almost educated in the classical European style, with interests spreading across other basic sciences, politics, history. literature etc.

His work was not rich just in quantity. He displayed an extremely good taste in choosing and posing problems. The solutions to some of which have resulted in entirely new areas of Mathematics. Paul Erdős had been a towering figure even while he was alive, but as more time passes by, he only grows taller.

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N is a Number : A Portrait of Paul Erdős – Videos

Total Runtime : 57 Minutes

[View Here]

– Based on the book “The man who only loves numbers” by Paul Hoffman.

– Made by George Paul Csicsery 1993

– Narrated by James Locker

– Music by Mark Adler (I have to mention the music as I thought it was pretty beautiful, especially towards the end)

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Hat Tip : To Dr Vitorino Ramos’ ever thoughtful blog

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Ray Solomonoff is No More

For the past couple of years, I have had a couple of questions about machine learning research that I have wanted to ask some experts, but never got the chance to do so. I did not even know if my questions made sense at all. I would probably write about them on a blog post soon enough.

It is however ironical that I came to know my questions were valid and well discussed (I never knew what to search for them, I used expressions not used by researchers) only by the death of Ray Solomonoff (he was one researcher who worked on it, and an obituary on him highlighted his work on it, something I missed). Solomonoff was one of the founding fathers of Artificial Intelligence as a field and Machine Learning as a discipline within it. It must be noted that he was one of the few attendees at the 1956 Dartmouth Conference, basically an extended brain storming session that started AI formally as a field. The other attendees were : Marvin Minsky, John McCarthy, Allen Newell, Herbert Simon, Arthur Samuel,  Oliver Selfridge, Claude Shannon, Nathaniel Rochester and Trenchand Moore. His 1950-52 papers on networks are regarded as the first statistical analysis of the same.  Solomonoff was thus a towering figure in AI and Machine Learning.

[Ray Solomonoff  : (25 July 1926- 7 December 2009)]

Solomonoff is widely considered as the father of Machine Learning for circulating the first report on the same in 1956. His particular focus was on the use of probability and its relation to learning. He founded the idea of Algorithmic Probability (ALP)  in a 1960 paper at Caltech, an idea that gives rise to Kolmogorov Complexity as a side product. A. N. Kolmogorov independently discovered similar results and came to know of and acknowledged Solomonoff’s earlier work on Algorithmic Information Theory. His work however was relatively unknown in the west than in the soviet union, which is why Algorithmic Information Theory is mostly referred to as Kolmogorov complexity rather than “Solomonoff Complexity”. Kolmogorov and Solomonoff approached the same framework from different directions. While Kolmogorov was concerned with randomness and Information Theory, Solomonoff was concerned with inductive reasoning. And in doing so he discovered ALP and Kolomogorov Complexity years before anyone did. I would write below on only one aspect of his work that I have studied to some degree in the past year.

Solomonoff With G.J Chaitin, another pioneer in Algorithmic Information Theory

[Image Source]

The Universal Distribution:

His 1956 paper, “An inductive inference machine” was one of the seminal papers that used probability in Machine Learning. He outlined two main problems which he thought (correctly) were linked.

The Problem of Learning in Humans : How do you use all the information that you gather in life in making decisions?

The Problem of Probability : Given you have some data and some a-priori information, how can you make the best possible predictions for the future?

The problem of learning is more general and related to the problem of probability. Solomonoff noted that the Machine learning was simply the process of approximating ideal probabilistic predictions for practical use.

Building on his 1956 paper, he discovered probabilistic languages for induction at a time when it was considered out of fashion. And discovered the Universal Distribution.

All induction problems could be basically reduced to this form : Given a sequence of binary symbols how do you extrapolate it? The answer being that we could assign a probability to a sequence and then use Bayes Theorem to make a prediction on which particular continuation of a string was how likely. That gives rise to an even more difficult question that was the basic question for a lot of Solomonoff’s work and on Algorithmic Probability/Algorithmic Information Theory. This question is : How do you assign probabilities to strings?

Solomonoff approached this problem using the idea of a Universal Turing Machine. Suppose this Turing Machine has three types of tapes, an unidirectional input tape, an unidirectional output tape and a bidirectional working tape. Suppose this machine will take some binary string as input and it may give a binary string as output.

It could do any of the following :

1. Print out a string after a while and then come to a stop.

2. It could print an infinite output string.

3. It could go in an infinite loop for computing the string and not output anything at all (Halting Problem).

For a string , the ALP would be as follows :

If we feed some bits at random to our Turing Machine, there will always be some probability that the output would start with a string . This probability is the algorithmic or universal probability of the string .

The ALP would be given as :

Where would be the universal probability of string with respect to the universal turing machine . To understand the placement of in the above expression, let’s discuss it a little.

There could be many random strings that after being processed by the Turing Machine give an output string that begins with string . And is the such string. Each such string carries a description of . And since we want to consider all cases, we take the summation. In the expression above gives the length of a string and the probability that the random input would output a string starting with .

This definition of ALP has the following properties that have been stated and proved by Solomonoff in the 60s and the 70s.

1. It assigns higher probabilities to strings with shorter descriptions. This is the reverse of something like Huffman Coding.

2. The value for ALP would be independent of the type of the universal machine used.

3. ALP is incomputible. This is the case because of the halting problem. Infact it is this reason that it has not received much attention. Why get interested in a model that is incomputible? However Solomonoff insisted that approximations to the ALP would be much better than existing systems and that getting the exact ALP is not even needed.

4. is a complete description for . That means any pattern in the data could be found by using . This means that the universal distribution is the only inductive principle that is complete. And approximations to it would be much desirable.

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Solomonoff also worked on Grammar discovery and was very interested in Koza’s Genetic Programming system, which he believed could lead to efficient and much better machine learning methods. He published papers till the ripe old age of 83 and is definitely inspiring for the love of his work.  Paul Vitanyi notes that :

It is unusual to find a productive major scientist that is not regularly employed at all. But from all the elder people (not only scientists) I know, Ray Solomonoff was the happiest, the most inquisitive, and the most satisfied. He continued publishing papers right up to his death at 83.

Solomonoff’s ideas are still not exploited to their full potential and in my opinion would be necessary to explore to build the Machine Learning dream of never-ending learners and incremental + synergistic Machine Learning. I would write about this in a later post pretty soon. It was a life of great distinction and a life well lived. I also wish strength and peace to his wife Grace and his nephew Alex.

The five surviving (in 2006) founders of AI who met in 2006 to commemorate 50 years of the Dartmouth Conference. From left : Trenchand Moore, John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Oliver Selfridge and Ray Solomonoff

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Refernces and Links:

1. Ray Solomonoff’s publications.

2. Obituary: Ray Solomonoff – The founding father of Algorithmic Information Theory by Paul Vitanyi

3. The Universal Distribution and Machine Learning (PDF).

4. Universal Artificial Intelligence by Marcus Hutter (videolectures.net)

5. Minimum Description Length by Peter Grünwald (videolecures.net)

6. Universal Learning Algorithms and Optimal Search (Neural Information Processing Systems 2002 workshop)

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Richard Feynman and The Quest for Tannu Tuva

A week ago I observed that there was a wonderful new documentary on you-tube, put-up by none other than author and documentary film-maker Christopher Sykes. This post is about this documentary and some thoughts related to it. Before I talk again about the documentary, I’ll digress for a moment and come back to it in a while.

With the exception of the Feynman Lectures in Physics Volume III, Six not so easy pieces (both of which I don’t intend to read in the conceivable future) there is no book with which Feynman was involved (he never wrote himself) that I have not had the opportunity to read. The last that I read was “Don’t You Have Time to Think“, a collection of delightful letters by Feynman written over the years (Note that “Don’t you have time to think” is the same as “Perfectly Reasonable Deviations”).

A number of people including many of Feynman’s close friends were surprised to learn that Feynman wrote letters and so many of them. He didn’t seem to be the kinds who would write the kind of letters that he did.  These give a very different picture of the man than a conventional biography would. Usually, collections of letters tend to be boring and drab, but I think these are an exception.  They reveal him to be a genius with a human touch. I have written about Feynman before, like I have covered points in an earlier post which now seems to me to be overtly enthusiastic. ;-)

Sean Caroll aptly writes that Feynman worship is often overdone, I think he is right. Let me make my own opinion on the matter.

I don’t consider Feynman god or anywhere close to that (but definitely one of my idols and one man I admire greatly), I actually consider him to be very human and some one who was unashamed of admitting to his weaknesses and who had a certain love for life that’s rare. I only am attracted to Feynman for one reason : People like Feynman are a breath of fresh air in the bunch of supercilious pseudo-intellectual snobs that are abound in academia and industry. A breath of fresh air especially for the lesser mortals like me. That’s why I like that man. Why is he so famous? I have tried writing on it before. And I won’t do so anymore.

I’d like to cite two quotes that would give my point of view on the celebrity-fication of scientists, in this case Feynman. Dave Brooks writes in the Telegraph in an article titled “Physicist still leaves some all shook up” February 5, 2003:

Feynman is the person every geek would want to be: very smart, honored  by the establishment even as he won’t play by his rules, admired by people of both sexes, arrogant without being envied and humble without being pitied. In other words, he’s young Elvis, with the Earth  shaking talent transferred from larynx to brain cells and enough sense to have avoided the fat Las Vegas phase. Is such celebrity-fication of scientists good? I think so, even if people do have a tendency to go overboard. Anything that gets us thinking about science is something to be admired, whether it comes in the form of an algorithm or an anecdote.

I remember reading an essay by the legendary Freeman Dyson that said:

Science too needs its share of super heroes to bring in new talent.

These rest my case I suppose.

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The only other book of Feynman that I have not read and that I have wanted to read for a LONG time is Tuva or Bust! Richard Feyman’s Last Journey. Unfortunately I have never been able to find it.

There was a BBC Horizon documentary on the same. And thankfully Christopher J. Sykes has uploaded that documentary on you-tube.

This is a rare documentary and was the last in which Feynman appeared. It was infact shot just some days before his death. This documents the obsession of Richard Feynman and his friend Ralph Leighton with visiting an obscure place in central Asia called Tannu Tuva. During a discussion on geography and in a teasing mood Feynman was reminded of a long forgotten memory and quipped at Leighton, “Whatever happened to Tannu Tuva”. Leighton thought it was a joke and confidently said that there was no such country at all. After some searching they found out that Tannu Tuva was once a country and now a soviet satellite. It’s capital was “Kyzyl”, the name was so interesting to Feynman that he though he just had to go to this place. The book and the documentary covers Feynman’s and Leighton’s adventure of scheming of getting to go to Tannu Tuva and to get around Soviet bureaucracy. It is an extremely entertaining film to say the least. The end for it is a little sad though. Feynman passed away three days before he got a letter from the Soviets about permission to visit Tannu Tuva and Leighton appears to be on the verge of tears.

The introduction to the documentary reads as:

The story of physicist Richard Feynman’s fascination with the remote Asian country of Tannu Tuva, and his efforts to go there with his great friend and drumming partner Ralph Leighton (co-author of the classic ‘Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman’). Feynman was dying of cancer when this was filmed, and died a few weeks after the filming. Originally shown in the BBC TV science series ‘Horizon’ in 1987, and also shown in the USA on PBS ‘Nova’ under the title ‘Last Journey of a Genius’

Find the five parts to the documentary below:

“I’m an explorer okay? I get curious about everything and I want to investigate all kinds of stuff”

Part 1

Click on the above image to watch

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Part 2

Click on the above image to watch

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Part 3

Click on the above image to watch

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Part 4

Click on the above image to watch

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Part 5

Click on the above image to watch

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After I got done with the documentary did I realize that the PBS version of the above documentary was available on google video for quite some time.

Find the video here.

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Michelle Feynman

As an aside :  though Feynman could not manage to go to Tuva in his lifetime. His daughter Michelle did visit Tuva last month!

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One of the things that has me in awe after the documentary over the last week is Tuvan throat singing. It is one of the most remarkable things that I have seen in the past month or two. I am strongly attracted to Tibetan chants too, but these are very different and fascinating. The remarkable thing about them being that the singer can produce two pitches as if being sung by two separate singers. Have a look!

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Project Tuva : Character of Physical Law Lectures

On the same day I came across 7 lectures which were given by Feynman at Cornell in 1964 and were put into a book later by the name “The Character of Physical Law”.  These have been made freely available by Microsoft Research. Though some of these lectures have already been on youtube for a while, the ones that were not needless to say were a joy to watch. I had linked to the lectures on Gravitation and Arrow of Time previously.

Click on the above image to be directed to the lectures

I came to know of these lectures on Prof Terence Tao’s page, who I find very inspiring too!

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Quick Links:

1. Christopher J. Sykes’ Youtube channel.

2. Tuva or Bust

3. Project Tuva at Microsoft Research

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The Trials of J. Robert Oppenheimer

Not very long ago, I wrote two rather long posts centered around the charismatic nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer:

>> Peace (Part three of this post – The Gita of J. Robert Oppenheimer)
>> American Prometheus

Since I have already written considerable amounts on Oppenheimer, I wouldn’t write more, though  I could write more. I would request readers to have a look at the above two posts.

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[J. Robert Oppenheimer]

Click to Enlarge

Just today my friend Rod informed me of a movie on Oppenheimer. Rod’s pretty much a hawk on the Internet. I suspect he either defies causality or has a number of top-secret contacts  as he comes to know of stuff before it is posted on the web. ;-)

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Robert Oppenheimer, once an inspiring character and a charismatic figure was a broken man after the security hearings of 1954, he was never the same person again. The Trials of J. Robert Oppenheimer is a very good BBC horizon like documentary on his life with a focus on the security hearings provided by PBS. It explores why Oppenheimer had to go through all the humiliation after doing such a great service to his country. It can be watched for free, even the transcripts are available here.

Click on the above image to watch the movie

The introduction to the movie goes like this:

J. Robert Oppenheimer was brilliant, arrogant, proud, charismatic — and a national hero. Under his leadership during World War II, the United States succeeded in becoming the first nation to harness the power of nuclear energy to create the ultimate weapon of mass destruction — the atomic bomb. But after the bomb brought the war to an end, in spite of his renown and his enormous achievement, America turned on him, humiliated him, and cast him aside. The question this film asks is, “Why?”

“The country asked him to do something and he did it brilliantly, and they repaid him for the tremendous job he did by breaking him.”
— Marvin L. Goldberger, Los Alamos scientist and former director, The Institute for Advanced Studies

AMERICAN EXPERIENCE presents The Trials of J. Robert Oppenheimer, featuring Academy Award-nominated actor David Strathairn (Good Night and Good Luck, The Bourne Ultimatum) as Robert Oppenheimer. From multiple Emmy Award-winning producer David Grubin (RFK, LBJ, Abraham and Mary Lincoln: A House Divided), The Trials of J. Robert Oppenheimer features interviews with the scientist’s former colleagues and eminent scholars to present a complex and revealing portrait of one of the most important and controversial scientists of the twentieth century. The two-hour film traces the course of Oppenheimer’s life: his rarefied childhood, his troubled adolescence, his emergence as one of America’s leading nuclear physicists, his leadership of the Los Alamos laboratory, and his tragic humiliation

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As is my experience, there would be some people around who would think that Oppenheimer was a moral monster as he was instrumental in getting the bomb made and that his preachings on peace were just hypocrisy. I would not debate on that as I am spent on the matter. For knowing what I have to say on the matter I would direct the reader to this post by me – Peace (Please have a look at the third part of that post). Also Oppenheimer is not just about the bomb, he did some high quality work in theoretical physics as well.

[JRO Smoking, Oppenheimer was a chain smoker all of his life. It turned out to be his un-doing. He died of throat cancer]

Coming back, I liked the movie quite a bit in spite of the fact that most of what is in the movie I already read about in American Prometheus (that’s obvious isn’t it?). Oppenheimer is played by David Straithairn and this 110 minute movie has been directed by David Grubin. Just like American Prometheus, the “dialogs” in the movie are from the actual transcripts of the security hearings of 1954. The movie has some rare video sequences that I have always wanted to see, like for instance Oppenheimer’s short speech after getting the Fermi Prize.

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I would have loved to write more on Oppenheimer and his life and what I get to learn from it, but I don’t think it would be a bright idea to put some very personal observations and lessons on a public platform. I might choose to do that sometime later maybe.

I’d direct you all to have a look at the movie, it has lessons for all of us in difficult times. Not just on an individual level but on a national level too. We have a lot to learn from the past.

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Related Posts:

1. American Prometheus

2. Peace. (The Gita of J. Robert Oppenheimer)

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Personal and Historical Prespectives of Hans Bethe

I recently discovered a series of three lectures by the legendary physicist Hans Bethe given in 1999. Bethe was a professor at  Cornell University almost all his life and these lectures given at age 93 had been made public by the University quite a while ago.

[Hans Bethe at the blackboard at Cornell in 1967: Image Source and Copyright – Cornell University ]

These lectures are on the Quantum theory for expert and the non- expert alike. Due to some engagements I am yet to view them, however I am still posting them as I am sure these as given by Bethe himself would be great.

From the Cornell University Webpage for these lectures:

IN 1999, legendary theoretical physicist Hans Bethe delivered three lectures on quantum theory to his neighbors at the Kendal of Ithaca retirement community (near Cornell University). Given by Professor Bethe at age 93, the lectures are presented here as QuickTime videos synchronized with slides of his talking points and archival material.

Intended for an audience of Professor Bethe’s neighbors at Kendal, the lectures hold appeal for experts and non-experts alike. The presentation makes use of limited mathematics while focusing on the personal and historical perspectives of one of the principal architects of quantum theory whose career in physics spans 75 years.

A video introduction and appreciation are provided by Professor Silvan S. Schweber, the physicist and science historian who is Professor Bethe’s biographer, and Edwin E. Salpeter, the J. G. White Distinguished Professor of Physical Science Emeritus at Cornell, who was a post-doctoral student of Professor Bethe.

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Introduction

View Introduction (Quick Time Required)

The introduction has been given by Edwin E. Salpeter and Silvan S. Schweber.

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Lecture 1

View Lecture 1 (Quick Time Required)

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Lecture 2

View Lecture 2 (Quick Time Required)

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Lecture 3

View Lecture 3 (Quick Time Required)

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Appreciation

View Appreciation (Quick Time Required)

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Note: All the images above and also the text giving an introduction to the lectures are a copyright of Cornell. Please comply with the terms of use associated with them.

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Links:

1. Download Apple Quick Time

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American Prometheus

I wrote rather passionately about J. Robert Oppenheimer in one part of a previous post marking an anniversary of the first nuclear bombings. Those interested in Oppenheimer’s life might be interested in reading that part.

I read American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Buy it) by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin between 14-29 October. And it is amongst the best biographies I have read. It is a very different book, it is not inspiring like some biographies on great men are. It is not philosophical or based on some mad pursuit. I have never seen such a well researched biography before. Sometimes I found the details about Oppenheimer’s personal life nauseating, but that just indicates the amount of surveillance he was under.

This book is not inspiring, it is haunting*.

[American Prometheus- Kai Bird, Martin Sherwin. Image Source ]

A Pulitzer prize winner (2006), this book chronicles the life of physicist, administrator, poet, American patriot and the father of the atomic bomb from his very early days to his last. The authors delve into every aspect of Oppenheimer’s life from his birth, to his time in England and Germany as a student. His leftist days at Berkeley, his love interests, his role in the Manhattan project, his public humiliation in the security hearings of 1954 at the height of the red scare and his quiet life after that, till his death. Twenty five years of research by the authors culminated into a devastatingly sad biography of one of the most famous men of all time.

The prologue in the book quotes George Kennan (1904-2005) the famous American diplomat now known as the father of the containment policy during the red scare as saying the following about him:

“In the dark day of the early fifties, when troubles crowded in upon him from many sides and when he found himself harassed by his position at the center of controversy, I drew his attention to the fact that he would be welcomed in a hundred academic centers abroad and asked him whether he had not thought of taking academic residence outside this country. His answer, given to me with tears in his eyes: ‘Damn it, I happen to love this country’“

The book is divided into 5 parts and 40 chapters, each part covering a stage in his life. I would request all who get the opportunity to read this book, even those who have personal enmity with science and scientists but read once in a while about general things.

Some sections of the book are striking and stunning and represent major turning points in the book and just stand out.

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While reading I observed that the authors place very clearly facts about the “Apple Incident” in which I was interested ever since I read about it, where in a state of depression and enormous emotional distress in his troubled student days at Cambridge, England in the autumn of 1925 Oppenheimer placed a “poisoned” apple on the desk of his head tutor, Patrick Blackett (few people know that Blackett was an adviser to Jawaharlal Nehru). The authorities learned of the incident and after some talking with his parents he was allowed to stay at Cambridge subject to the condition that he visit the psychiatrist as per a mandated chart. Oppenheimer gradually recovered and thrived in his golden intellectual days at Gottingen, Germany shortly afterwards when he produced some fundamental research and became known as one of the best quantum physicists of the time. The time bracket from this period at gottingen to his days as the Director of the Manhattan Project were his best days. By the end of 1945 Oppenheimer was one of the most famous physicists of the time.

[The above photo of Oppenheimer’s porkpie hat was the cover of Physics Today in May 1948, exemplifying the high regard and respect Oppenheimer commanded at that time. Image Soure]

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Taking a brief digression, I’d cite two of my favorite quotes from the book:

After the emotional turmoil of his student days in England, Oppenheimer was always trying to be above that. His guiding principles were discipline and work. Quoting him from a letter to his brother.

Discipline is good for the soul is more fundamental than any of the grounds given for its goodness. I believe that through discipline, though not through discipline alone, we can achieve serenity, and a certain small but precious measure of freedom from the accidents of incarnation…I believe that through discipline we learn to preserve what is essential to our happiness in more and more adverse circumstances, and to abandon with simplicity what would else have seemed to us indispensable.

There is another fantastic quote attributed to P.A.M Dirac, the legendary physicist who was known to be eccentrically single minded to his dedication of science. Once Oppenheimer gave him several books as a gift. Dirac politely refused and remarked:

Reading books interfered with thought.

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The Beast In the Jungle: I mentioned just a paragraph earlier that there were some very strong parts in the book that represented a watershed in his life. Some of them were just stunning. Like this part named “The Beast In the Jungle“. Until this section of the book Oppenheimer had been doing fine even though the number of his enemies were increasing. It was after this chapter that his decline began or rather accelerated.

The authors mention that Oppenheimer had harbored a vague sort of a premonition that something dark was in store for him in the future for a while. In the late 40s he read a novella by Henry James written in 1903 titled “The Beast in the Jungle“. James’ story was one of obsession, tormented egotism and as the authors put it, of existential foreboding. The story is very short, I have placed a link below to read the book from, for those interested. I could finish it under a couple of hours only. The basic plot of this story is as (from wikipedia):

John Marcher, the protagonist, is reacquainted with May Bartram, a woman he knew ten years earlier, who remembers his odd secret: Marcher is seized with the belief that his life is to be defined by some catastrophic or spectacular event, lying in wait for him like a “beast in the jungle.” May decides to buy a house in London with the money she got from her Great-Aunt who passed away, and to spend her days with Marcher curiously awaiting what fate has in store for him. Marcher is a hopeless egoist, who believes that he is precluded from marrying so that he does not subject his wife to his “spectacular fate”.

He takes May to the theatre and invites her to an occasional dinner, but does not allow her to get close to him. As he sits idly by and allows the best years of his life to pass, he takes May down as well, until the denouement where he learns that the great misfortune of his life was to throw it away, and to ignore the love of a good woman, based upon his preposterous sense of foreboding.

Oppenheimer was struck by the charge of the story and asked his friend Herb Marks to read it. After the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as the authors write citing evidence Oppenheimer lived with a similar feelings that someday he would be struck by his “beast in the jungle” which would alter his whole life. Oppenheimer knew he was kept track of and that people in the Govt and the intelligence were looking for evidence to destroy him. As it turned out, his beast in the jungle was Lewis Strauss, who destroyed him.

Einstein and Oppenheimer: The parts on Einstein in the book were interesting.

[Einstein and Oppenheimer at IAS: Image source]

The book mentions Einstein in numerous instances throughout. However the ones related to Oppenheimer are the ones that I intend to touch upon.

Einstein could not understand why Oppenheimer was so keen on maintaining access to Washington and the echelons of the government. Einstein by instinct disliked politicians, and figures of authority. I quoted him in one previous post on this:

To punish me for my contempt of authority, fate made me an authority myself.

Einstein was always uncomfortable with attention is a well known fact to all those who admire him. There was this unforgettable quote in the book by him. On Einstein’s 71st birthday, Oppenheimer was walking him to his residence and Einstein said:

You know, when it’s once been given to a man to do something sensible, afterward life is a little strange.

Einstein suggested to Oppenheimer that he resign just taking into account the sheer outrageousness of the attacks on him. Einstein had left Germany when the Nazi nationalist frenzy swept the country and never set his foot on Germany again. He believed that the rise of McCarthyism in America was alarming, and he thought that Oppenheimer would end up humiliating himself.

As the authors note that Einstein’s instincts were right. He confided to a friend:

Oppenheimer is not a gypsy like me, I was born with the skin of an Elephant; there is no one who can hurt me.

and he thought that Oppenheimer was the reverse.

I would once again suggest the book to everyone who can set his/her hands on it. I would also congratulate the authors for the extremely gripping and compelling biography, it is amazing to think that the authors could piece together research spread over 25 years in such a wonderful way and I am already not able to get myself to complete a 60 page report on a project based on Support Vector Machines, in which I don’t even have to “piece together” things.

* This line is in no way borrowed from, or inspired by the newsweek review on this book.

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Links:

1. American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer – Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin

2. The Beast in the Jungle – Henry James (Download it from Project Gutenberg)

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The Emerging Mind

About two months back I came across a series of Reith lectures given by professor Vilayanur Ramachandran, Dr Ramachandran holds a MD from Stanley Medical College and a PhD from Trinity College, Cambridge University and is presently the director of the center for Brain and cognition at the University of California at San Diego and an adjunct professor of biology at the Salk Institute. Dr Ramachandran is known for his work on behavioral neurology, which promises to greatly enhance our understanding of the human brain, which could be the key in my opinion in making “truly intelligent” machines.

[Dr VS Ramachandran: Image Source- TED]

I heard these lectures two three times and really enjoyed them and was intrigued by the cases he presents. Though these are old lectures (they were given in 2003), they are new to me and I think they are worth sharing anyway.

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For those who are not aware, the Reith lectures were started by the British Broadcasting Corporation radio in 1948. Each year a person of high distinction gives these lectures. The first were given by mathematician Bertrand Russell. They were named so in the honor of the first director general of the BBC- Lord Reith. Like most other BBC presentations on science, politics and philosophy they are fantastic. Dr Ramachandran became the first from the medical profession to speak at Reith.

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The 2003 series named The Emerging Mind has five lectures, each being roughly about 28-30 minutes. Each are a trademark of Dr Ramachandran with funny anecdote, witty arguments, very intersting clinical cases, the best pronunciation of “billions” since Carl Sagan, and let me not mention the way he rolls the RRRRRRRs while talking. Below I don’t intend to write what the lectures are about, I think they should be allowed to talk for themselves.

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Lecture 1: Phantoms in the Brain

Listen to Lecture 1 | View Lecture Text

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Lecture 2: Synapses and the Self

Listen to Lecture 2 | View Lecture Text

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Lecture 3: The Artful Brain

Listen to Lecture 3 | View Lecture Text

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Lecture 4: Purple Numbers and Sharp Cheese

Listen to Lecture 4 | View Lecture Text

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Lecture 5: Neuroscience the new Philosophy

Listen to Lecture 5 | View Lecture Text

[Images above courtesy of the BBC]

Note: Real Player required to play the above.

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As a bonus to the above I would also advice to those who have not seen this to have a look at the following TED talk.

In a wide-ranging talk, Vilayanur Ramachandran explores how brain damage can reveal the connection between the internal structures of the brain and the corresponding functions of the mind. He talks about phantom limb pain, synesthesia (when people hear color or smell sounds), and the Capgras delusion, when brain-damaged people believe their closest friends and family have been replaced with imposters.

Again he talks about curious disorders. One that he talks about in the above video, the Capgras Delusion is only one among the many he talks about in the Reith lectures. Other things that he talks about here is the origin of language and synesthesia.

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Now look at the picture below and answer the following question: Which of the two figures is Kiki and which one is Bouba?

If you thought that the one with the jagged shape was Kiki and the one with the rounded one was Bouba then you belong to the majority. The exceptions need not worry.

These experiments were first conducted by the German gestalt psychologist Wolfgang Kohler and were repeated with the names “Kiki” and “Bouba” given to these shapes by VS Ramachandran and Edward Hubbard. In their experiments, they found a very strong inclination in their subjects to name the jagged shape Kiki and the rounded one Bouba. This happened with about 95-98 percent of the subjects. The experiments were repeated in Tamil speakers and then in babies of about 3 years of age. (who could not write) The results were similar. The only exceptions being in people having autistic disorders where the percentage reduced to only 60.

Dr Ramachandran and Dr Hubbard went on to suggest that this could have implications in our understanding of how language evolved as it suggests that naming of objects is not a random process as held by a number of views but depends on the appearance of the object under consideration. The strong “K” in Kiki had a direct correlation with the jagged shape of that object, thus suggesting a non-arbitrary mapping of objects with the sounds associated with them.

In the above talk and also the lectures, he talks about Synesthesia, a condition wherein the subject associates a color on seeing black and white numbers and letters with each.

His method of studying rare disorders to understand what in the brain does what is very interesting and is giving insights much needed to understand the organ that drives innovation and well, almost everything.

I highly recommend all the above lectures and the video above.

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