S. Chandrasekhar and his attempts to get away from Astrophysics

I went back to Nobel Laureate S. Chandrasekhar’s biography a few months back after 17 years. Chandra written by Kameshwar Wali was a birthday gift I gave to my wife a few months after she joined me in Buffalo, New York after our wedding. If you have given books as gifts to folks at home, you must be aware of the hidden agenda. I don’t remember who started reading the book first, but I was definitely the first one to finish it. It was the first biography I read where the hero of the story co-operated with the author in a frank manner and the author has done a splendid job with the narration. Why did I go back the book now?

I had a specific objective – to re-read the story of “Chandrasekhar Limit” – the idea that languished for several decades before gaining acceptance by the scientific community eventually leading to a Nobel. It is a masala story with lots of twists and turns. It even has a villain, Prof. Eddington then doyan of Astrophysics, who launched a campaign to kill Chandra’s idea. But that would be a topic of a separate article. In this second reading of the book one of things that struck me was Chandra’s two serious attempts in getting away from Astrophysics. Why did Chandra try to do that? And what happened in each attempt? Let’s see briefly in this article.

Chandra’s career in Astrophysics was more of an accident. By the time Chandra landed in Cambridge he had already published a paper based on the work of Fowler, a Fellow of the Royal Society. Chandra had encountered Fowler’s paper while browsing the newly arrived journals in university library in Madras. In fact, Fowler helped him secure admission at Cambridge. So it was natural for him to start his PhD work under Fowler in Astrophysics.

1930s were hey days of theoretical Physics as a totally new foundation known as quantum mechanics was being built. Chandra soon realized that working in Astrophysics was more like being on the periphery. The real action was in pure Physics. In the meantime, Fowler left Cambridge on sabbatical and Dirac who had nothing to do with Astrophysics became Chandra’s official guide. Chandra consulted Dirac who advised him to visit Niels Bohr and co in Copenhagen. Folks at Copenhagen indeed turned out to friendlier and it is here Chandra made his first serious attempt at pure physics. He wrote a paper titled “On the statistics of Similar Particles” and sent it to Dirac in Cambridge. Bohr had already given his nod. But pretty soon Dirac found an error in his paper. “My paper sent to the Proceedings of the Royal Society is WRONG. That is all” Chandra wrote to his father in Nov 1932. Over four months of work was down the drain. Pressure started building up to submit a thesis. Chandra went back to Astrophysics.

Chandra’s second attempt at quitting Astrophysics happened just after he finished PhD in 1933 and was elected to trinity fellowship. Could this be the time to shift to pure Physics or pure Mathematics? The dilemma ended soon when he got an advice from a senior Fellow Harold Davenport, “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks. Why don’t you continue in astrophysics? You got the fellowship on that account. There is enough time to do mathematics later.”

Fortunately for Astrophysics, Chandra not only stayed with it but made a significant contribution in bringing Astrophysics part of main stream physics. Today 10% of the 12^th standard Physics syllabus my wife teaches is Astrophysics. Incidentally, we will be hearing a lot more of Chandra in the coming months as this year is Chandra’s birth centenary year. In fact, Kameshwar Wali will be giving a talk at a conference on Chandra at Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Koramangala, Bangalore in December. I hope to attend it.

My most favorite YouTube video and the marvels & the flaws of intuition

Chances are high your most favorite YouTube video is very different from mine in its form and content. Mine is neither a funny clip nor a music video although I enjoy watching both kinds of clips. But here is what is perhaps common between your favorite video and mine. Like you, I have watched it a dozen times so far. But more importantly I have listened to the audio extract of the video several dozen times by now. I listened to it in the gym a couple of days back and I listened to it before going to bed last night. It is titled “Explorations of the mind” and it is an hour-long lecture given at University of California, Berkley by the father of behavioral economics and Nobel Laureate Prof. Daniel Kahneman of Princeton. Who is Kahneman? And what is this video all about? And why do I like it so much? Let me briefly describe in this article.

Kahneman was born in 1934 (same age as my dad) to Jewish parents of Lithuanian origin and spent his childhood in France where his parents had migrated in 1920s. He says in his bio at the Nobel Prize site, “I had grown up intellectually precocious and physically inept”. His school PE teacher felt to pass him means to stretch his extreme tolerance. Kahneman made up for what he lacked in his physique by writing essays in a notebook like, “What I write of what I think”. Kahneman became a psychologist and together with Emos Tversky formulated a theory known as Prospect Theory. This theory turned upside-down a long standing belief among economists that human decision making is a rational process and eventually earned him a Nobel in 2002.

This video is titled “Explorations of the mind: Intuition: the marvels and the flaws”. The video can be divided into three parts. Part 1 is where the speaker is introduced (0-4:20). In part 2 Kahneman sets the context and defines the question he is planning to address for the rest of the talk (4:20-20:10). Part 3 (20:10-55:05) is where he presents a simple and useful model that addresses the question.

What is the question Kahneman addresses in this talk? It is as follows – On the one hand we encounter marvels of intuition when we see world class chess players, basketball players, fire fighters consistently making accurate decisions in a “blink” of an eye (check out Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink for stories on this). On the other hand, we have “experts” like the Chief Economists of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Olivier Blanchard who on September 2, 2008 said, “If the price of oil stabilizes, I believe we can weather the financial crisis at limited cost in terms of real activity”. Within two weeks some of the biggest financial companies in the world collapsed (check out Nassim Taleb’s Black Swan for stories of these kinds). Why is it that the human intuition works beautifully in certain areas like sports and doesn’t work in some other areas like long term forecasting?

Why do I find this question so interesting? I have a deep-rooted fascination for the learning process. And I believe this question is at the heart of this process. I encounter people all the time who have spent decades managing projects but have stopped learning a while ago. Surprisingly, they believe that with every passing year, they are learning more. But actually they are not. The talk sheds light on what happens when we learn or stop learning.

Vinay Deolalikars proof of P=NP and the power of "web-test"

There are several ways of making a million dollars. One way suggested by Warren Buffett is to start with a billion dollars and invest them in an airline company. Unfortunately, for most of us this is not a practical way. There is another way which surprisingly needs no investment. Well, it needs a pencil and a paper which you can borrow from your friend. And of course, it needs your time which you can steal from your employer like Einstein did at Swiss Patent Office. Or better still, like Srinivas Ramanujam, you can make your dreams work for you. But here is the catch – you should be able to solve one of the six open problems in mathematics called the “Millennium Problems” defined by the Clay Mathematics Institute. The original list contained seven problems but one was solved by Grigory Perelman of Moscow in 2002. Three weeks back, on August 8, an HP researcher Vinay Deolalikar put up a draft of a proof sketch for one of the six Millennium Problems called “P=NP” on the Internet. Will Vinay get his million dollars?

I am supposed to have studied ABC of complexity theory in my undergraduate and graduate schools. But I pretty much don’t remember anything except for what “P” and “NP” means. Class P contains problems like sorting and searching which have fast computer programs. The other class NP contains problems which don’t have fast programs yet but if someone gives us an answer, we can write a program that can check its correctness quickly. Nobody has been able to mathematically prove whether P is equal to NP or not equal to NP. The problem is around 40 years old and was proposed by Steven Cook in 1971.

For an abstract subject like complexity theory, Prof. Richard Lipton writes amazingly lucid blog titled Godel’s lost letter and P=NP. In the months of May, June and July Richard wrote 8 blogs every month and averaged 17, 20 and 33 comments respectively on each blog entry. That’s very high for an abstract mathematical topic like complexity theory. But something even more extraordinary happened earlier this month. From Sunday 8^th August till next Sunday 15^th August Richard wrote 6 blogs on topics related to Vinay Deolalikar’s proof. Here is the list of blogs and the number of comments on each blog:

8-Aug A proof that P is not equal to NP (188 comments)

9-Aug Issues in the proof that P not equal to NP (121 comments)

10-Aug Updates on Deolalikar’s proof that P not equal to NP (184 comments)

11-Aug Deolalikar responds to issues about his P not equal to NP proof (129 comments)

12-Aug Fatal flaws in Deolalikar’s proof? (311 comments)

15-Aug P=NP “Proof” is one week old (257 comments)

That’s an average of 198 comments, roughly 8 times his average over the past 3 months. Some of the comments came from students and amateurs. But many comments came from what Richard called “The group”: Timothy Gowers, Gil Kalai, Ken Regan, Terence Tao, and Suresh Venkatasubramanian a powerful collection of top experts in the field. The Group found out three major gaps in the proof which Vinay has worked on and sent a final version for publication to a journal. Only time will tell whether his proof can fill the gaps but at this point odds are stacked against him.

Following sample comment gives us an idea of what Richard’s blog meant to readers:

I also want to thank Dick Lipton for the monumental effort. I am very thankful not only for the things already said (things learned, putting N != NP in the spotlight, etc) but also for something else that many researchers here take for granted: this was a public showing of the rigorous peer-review process that many people, specially aspiring researchers, non graduate students and amateur scientists, are unfamiliar with. For somebody attending a good university in his/her country of origin but where top notch research is not conducted, this whole exercise provided a glimpse about what’s like doing cutting edge work. Hopefully that might be a motivation to pursue a career in math or science later on.

Peer review in scientific publishing is undergoing a shift. “web-test” is becoming a powerful alternative to traditional “it-may-take-a-year” kind of review. Will review of this kind happen also in literature & social sciences? I guess so. Shakespeare Quarterly a 60-year old prestigious humanities journal is going to open its review to the web. “web-test” is still in its infancy but holds a great promise.

I would like to thank my friend D. Sivakumar for sending me the link to Richard’s blog. It is because of Siva that I can claim – I have a friend who is an expert in complexity theory!

Entering the game-changer funnel: story of SAP Labs India

When Boria Majumdar, the cricket expert (he has a PhD on history of cricket from Oxford!) was invited to give a talk at SAP Labs Gurgaon, little did anyone know that it will catalyze the first idea from India Lab to enter the game-changer funnel. Game-changer is a new business incubation process at SAP Labs where only 3 ideas enter every year each having a potential of generating at least $20M of annual revenue. Last Wednesday V. R. Ferose, MD of SAP Labs India, narrated this story in Bangalore Innovation Forum at IIMB while speaking on how SAP Labs India is building an environment of innovation. What’s cricket got to do with software products? Let’s look at the story in brief and related questions that came up during the Q&A session.

When Ferose took over as MD at SAP Labs Gurgaon, he observed a fundamental issue with the environment. There were 500 smart employees with an average age of 26.5. However, they were surrounded by the same kind of people. Even outside the office they were mingling with their friends who were also from the same background i.e. IT. If one of the tenets of innovation is to “think different”, how can that happen when everybody thinks the same? Of course, one can’t control who one makes friends with. Then can we invite people with different background to the company and share their perspectives? That got a series of talks started where a non-IT person was invited every week for an hour. People who visited SAP Labs during this series are: Kiran Bedi, Dr. Abdul Kalam, Rahul Bose, Harsha Bhogle, Harish Hande etc. Boria Majumdar visited as part of this series.

Boria spoke about the problems with cricket administration. He mentioned how corrupt the whole administration is and how there is a huge need for bringing in efficiency in sports administration perhaps through a software. One of the employees picked it up as a potential opportunity. During the market survey it was clear that if we take into account the cash rich sports clubs like English Premier League (EPL) then there is indeed a huge opportunity. Perhaps IPL belongs to the same category. The idea was taken further – relevant patents were filed. And the idea got selected to enter the global business incubator i.e. game-changer process.

Q1: How did the idea author get rewarded in this case?

The idea author gets recognition in two forms. The first is that he becomes part of the incubation team not necessarily as a leader to the take the idea further. It took one and a half year for the idea to be incubated. The second form of recognition is an option given of going for a week to a design school either at Stanford or in Berlin for a course on design thinking.

Q2: Did $20 M goal act as a deterrent in submitting ideas?

We realized that technology people are not good at creating a business case. We have a value engineering group who help pre-sales in creating value propositions for prospective customers. We got the good ideas from technology people validated from the value engineering folks. This brought out the business potential of the ideas.

Q3: Have you come across an idea which started as incremental and then led to a disruptive innovation?

I don’t know all the innovations that came out from SAP Labs. However, from my experience I haven’t seen any incremental idea becoming disruptive.

Lessons from Einstein’s career progression at Swiss Patent Office

Imagine you have got a game-changing idea. You prototype it in your spare time and the demo get appreciated by a few people including a VP and a product manager. Then comes your performance appraisal and your boss rates you “above average”. He tells you the reason for the “above” part of the rating – it is because you got the Six Sigma certificate during the appraisal period. He doesn’t mention anything about your idea. Sounds surprising? Well, what happened here is similar to what happened to Einstein at Swiss Patent Office. The game-changing idea was that of “Special theory of relativity” and the certificate was the PhD degree from University of Zurich. Let’s see how the story unfolded during Einstein's six year tenure at the patent office.

In August 1900 Einstein was the only student among his friends to graduate and not get a job in spite of a respectable 4.91/6.00 average. He felt “I was suddenly abandoned by everyone standing at a loss on the threshold of life”. He had yet to publish any paper and had no credibility. After two short teaching stints in schools lasting a few months each, Einstein got called for an interview from Swiss Patent Office at Zurich in early 1902. In the interview “Albert was examined for two full hours. The director placed before him literature on new patents about which he was required to form immediate opinion. The examination unfortunately disclosed his obvious lack of technical training.” Einstein was offered a job in spite of the interview because of the good word put in by, his friend Marcel Grossman’s father Herr Grossman with the institute director Herr Friedrich Haller. The position offered, Technical Expert class III, was provisional and one level below what he was interviewed for i.e. Technical Expert class II and the salary was 3,500 francs a year. Einstein took up the job within a week of getting the formal letter sometime in the summer of 1902.

After two years, in September 1904, Einstein’s salary was revised from 3500 to 3900 francs when Haller wrote to Federal Council, Einstein had “proved himself very useful.” He should, however, remain class III rather than promoted to class II since, “he is not yet fully accustomed to matters of mechanical engineering”. The next revision happened in 1906 when his salary was increased by another 600 francs. Haller then wrote, “Einstein had continued to familiarize himself with the work, so that he handles very difficult patent applications with the greatest success and is one of the most valued experts in the office. He has acquired the title of Dr. Phil. from the University of Zurich this winter and the loss of this ma, who is still young, would be much regretted by the administration of the office.”

It is interesting to note that in the 1906 appraisal, the director did not even mention the three papers the young employee had published in the single issue of Annalen der Physik in 1905, his annus mirabilis – one important enough to take him to the history books (on Brownian motion), one which brought him the Noble prize sixteen years later (on photoelectric effect) and the third containing the outline of Special Theory of Relativity.

Moral of the story? If you have a game-changing idea, don’t expect to get “excellent” rating from your boss, at least not in the next appraisal cycle. Even by the turn of the decade (1910) there were only a handful of people in the world who had understood the impact of relativity. Einstein had to be extremely lucky to have a boss to be one of them.

What did the patent office job mean to Einstein? Three things: One – “Besides eight hours of work … eight hours of idleness plus a whole Sunday”, second, "He (Haller) taught me to express myself correctly", and third, what Einstein mentioned on his seventieth birthday, “It gave me the opportunity to think abut Physics. Moreover, a practical profession is a salvation for a man of my type; an academic career compels a young man to scientific production, and only strong characters can resist the temptation of superficial analysis”.

Source: Einstein: The life and times by Ronald Clark

Acharya Jagadis Chandra Bose: The father of systematic experimentation in India

Thanks to the gift we got from Prof. Dipan Ghosh during our visit at IIT Bombay (alma mater of me & my wife) I got an opportunity to see the special issue of Physics News published in October 2009 on the 150^th anniversary of Sir. J. C. Bose. It was fascinating to read about the man who, as The New Cambridge History of India says,” invented national science for India as laboratory science.”

In 1895 JCB gave his first public demonstration in Calcutta of electromagnetic waves, using them to ring a bell remotely and to explode some gunpowder. In 1896 the Daily Chronicle of England reported: “The inventor (JCB) has transmitted signals to a distance of nearly a mile and herein lies the first and obvious and exceedingly valuable application of this new theoretical marvel”. It would be two more years (1897) before the first successful demonstration of Marconi in Salsbury Plain in England. JCB had used semi-conducting crystal as a detector for radio waves. Sir Neville Mott, Nobel Laureate in 1977 for his own contribution to solid-state electronics remarked that, “J.C. Bose was at least 60 years ahead of his time” and “In fact, he had anticipated the existence of P-type and N-type semiconductors.” What do I find unique in JCB story? Let me articulate 3 things:

1. Fighting spirit: When JCB returned to Calcutta after completing BA from Cambridge in 1885, he had a recommendation letter from Viceroy Lord Ripon. Principal of Presidency College didn’t like this and JCB was given a position but at a salary one third the salary of sahib teacher. JCB continued to teach and yet didn’t accept any salary for three years until the Principal relented. JCB received all his arrear salary as a teacher in the senior grade with retrospective effect from the date of his joining the college.

2. Pursuing one’s passion: On his thirty sixth birthday in 1894, JCB took the now famous vow of devoting his life in the pursuit of scientific research. He converted a small enclosure adjoining a bathroom in the college into a laboratory. His productivity as a researcher zoomed during the following year. In May 1895 he read a paper before the Asiatic Society of Bengal; by October 1895 he was able to dispatch to the Royal Society another paper, while three short articles would appear in The Electrician in December 1895. Impressed by his work Royal Society offered him a special Parliamentary grant for his research. JCB would later say, “That day the closed gate opened and for five years this progress was uninterrupted”.

3. Role of instruments and laboratory: JCB developed extremely sophisticated instruments in his lab like resonant recorder, high magnification crescograph, photosynthetic recoder etc. The resonant recorder could automatically record velocity of excitatory impulse with an interval down to 1/1000^th of a second.

Here is how JCB described his own method of research: “The first condition is imaginative faculty, for the true laboratory is one’s own mind where every experiment has first to be visualized in all details and where behind all illusions one catches glimpses of truth. Aimless experimentation without clear vision is futile… The researcher has next to compare his thoughts with facts to be discovered by following surer paths of demonstration. Unrestrained imagination inevitably leads to widest speculation which is subversive of intellectual sanity. Thus, methods of introspection and experimentation must equally balance, one supplementing the other. Two other conditions for successful prosecution of research are the facilities of a well equipped laboratory and the invention and construction of new equipments of extreme delicacy and precision.”

Source: Physics News, Bulletin of Indian Physics Association, Sir J. C. Bose 150^th Anniversary issue, October 2009,

The work of Jagadis Chandra Bose: 100 years of mm-wave research by D. T. Emerson (1998)

1930: The year when Benjamin Graham re-discovered “Margin of safety”

1930 was the year when the Great Depression was in its infancy and Warren Buffett was born. It was also the year when Warren’s guru Benjamin Graham was at his career’s mid-point and he would re-discover the principle of “Margin of safety (MoS)”. MoS would become one of the core principles of Graham’s investment style known as value-investing. It would be published in the book Security Analysis in 1934. MoS, I believe, is also one of the core principles of systematic innovation. Question is – How did Graham forget the principle in the first place? And how did he re-discover it? Let’s see it in brief in this article.

By 1930 Graham was 36 years old and had been in Wall Street for 16 years. He had experienced what it means to lose big-time twice. The first loss was in 1903 when Graham lost his father. Graham was 8 years old and his father 35. For the next several years Graham saw practically all the assets including furniture and jewelry disappearing from home, some of it to the pawn shops. The second loss was during the market panic of 1907 when his mother’s margin account was wiped out and her bank closed down. Things began to change slowly for Graham when he entered Columbia on an Alumni scholarship.

During the great bull market of 1920s Graham saw considerable reversal of fortunes. In the middle of 1929, Graham’s fund was sitting on a two and a half million dollars capital – put in long terms investments and short term hedging & arbitrage operations. By the end of 1929, in spite of the September crash of Dow Jones, Graham’s fund had lost only 20 percent compared to a much larger loss of Dow Jones. In a few circles, Graham was being referred to as “financial genius”.

In January of 1930 Graham visited Sr. Petersburg, Florida for holidays along with his family. He met a man named Mr. John Dix who was ninety three years old. Mr. Dix’s father had founded the John Dix Uniform Company of Long Branch, New Jersey. Dix asked Graham all about his business, how many clients he had, how much money I owed to banks and brokers and innumerable other questions. Graham answered them politely but with smug self-confidence. Suddenly Dix said with greatest earnestness, “Mr. Graham, I want you to do something of the greatest importance to yourself. Get on the train to New York tomorrow; go to your office, sell out your securities; pay off your debts, and return their capital to your partners. I wouldn’t be able to sleep one moment at night if I were in your position in these times, and you shouldn’t be able to sleep either. I am much older than you, with lots of more experience, you’d better take my advice”. Graham felt the old man couldn’t possibly understand his business and thought Dix’s ideas were preposterous. Of course, Dix was 100 percent right, Graham 100 percent wrong.

Graham would remember Dix in June when the Dow Jones would reach the abysmally low level of 42 from the April level of 279. Graham’s loss in 1930 was 50 percent, in 1931 it was 16 percent and in 1932 only 3 percent. Graham suffered but perhaps far lesser than others. Surprising part is - Graham doesn’t blame himself for the failure to protect himself against the disaster. What is it that Graham regrets?

In 1928 Grahams had moved into a duplex apartment with terrace on the 18^th and 19^th floor of a thirty storied building at the heart of New York City. It had ten rooms and a rent of $11,000 per year and the lease was to run ten years. Considering Graham’s gains of $600,000 before taxes for the closing year, the expenditure appeared modest even by highly conservative methods. He was proved wrong and pretty soon Grahams moved out of the apartment. What was Graham’s learning?

The true key to material happiness lay in a modest standard of living which could be achieved with little difficulty under almost all economic conditions. Graham would remember Mr. Dix and the New York apartment experience for the rest of his life.

Source: Benjamin Graham: The memoirs of the Dean of Wall Street, McGraw-Hill, 1996

Related articles:

Margin of safety: My most favorite insight of 2009

Edison’s folly and understanding the exposure to negative Black Swan