Santoshi Ma rescues Gandhi’s grand-daughter !

The following was first written as a comment on this blog. A particular piece dealt with an interview of Mahatma Gandhi’s grand-daughter, Ms. Usha Gokani. Ms. Gokani happened to be dining at the Trident/Oberoi Hotel in Mumbai, a scene of the terror attacks, on 26 November 2008. Ms. Gokani managed to escape unhurt. She had the following to say in an interview with an Indian daily:

The fact that I chose to dine at the India Jones restaurant at the Oberoi Hotel that fateful night of 26/11, and the manner in which I escaped death by a whisker, reinforces my belief that there is a driving force that governs the entire universe. While the staff at Oberoi’s ushered us into safety through the service entrance, I kept praying to Santoshi ma. It is her grace that I could make it out alive that night.

My comments (slightly modified) appeared as follows:

Your post reminds me of two anecdotes:

The first deals with George Orwell. In 1937, while fighting for the Republicans against Franco’s fascists in the Spanish Civil War, Orwell was shot in the neck and nearly died. The episode is described vividly in “Wounded by a Fascist Sniper” and also in Homage to Catalonia. Later friends would often tell him how “lucky” he was to have stayed alive. Orwell wrote that he found this a a rather curious definition of good luck. Rightly so, it would have been far nicer to not have been shot in the first place !!

The whole Santoshi ma (SM) rubbish is just the same! Either Ms. Gokani hasn’t been paying ALL her dues to SM, or SM has just been a bit sloppy at work lately. Either way, its clear that the expectations for good luck are pathetically low! (alas! only to the benefit of SM)

It also seems from the whole episode that in this case the apple hasn’t fallen too far from the tree. In 1934, Mahatma Gandhi wrote that the Bihar earthquake of that year was providential retribution for India’s failure to eradicate untouchability. This ridiculous remark led to a spirited rebuttal from Rabindranath Tagore (well chronicled in the book, “Mahatma and the Poet”; a review can be found here), who argued that an earthquake was caused only by physical forces. Gandhi, however, remained unconvinced. As great as the Mahatma truly was, in this matter he was certainly out of his mind ! (Surely, by his own logic, Britain deserved a few earthquakes of her own!)

To attribute a divine provenance to overwhelmingly good fortune (or tragedy) remains an enduring symbol of our credulity and stupidity; even the greatest seemed to have erred on this count.

Has the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) destroyed the earth yet ?

For a comprehensive, unequivocal and succinct answer, click here

Requiescat In Pace

This has been a somewhat sad week for science, physics in particular. John Archibald Wheeler passed away on April 13, and a few days later on April 16, Edward Lorenz died.

I first came across Wheeler’s name as a first year undergraduate student while reading James Gleick’s biography of Richard Feynman, entitled Genius. All I remembered about him from that book (and what most non-physicists might care to remember about him) was that a) he coined the term “black hole” and b) he was Richard Feynman’s Ph.D. advisor.

A wonderful personal tribute to the man can be found here. On that blog, someone kindly posted a link to a series of video interviews about his life and times. Its a wonderful repository of information for anyone curious or just fascinated by the golden age of physics. Other interviews include those of Dyson, Gell-Mann, and Teller.

Edward Lorenz was a name I encountered less than a week ago ! A colleague in Lab, drew my attention to a book, “Nonlinear systems and Chaos” by Steven Strogtaz. I have only managed to go through the first two chapters of the book, in what is my first serious attempt to understand nonlinearity and chaos. Although I had heard of the butterfly effect, I hadn’t connected it to the name Edward Lorenz. During the course of this past week, this oversight has indeed been emended ; by virtue of the book, as well as the sad demise of Edward Lorenz.

There are plenty of videos out there that illustrate nonlinear phenomena, but for me personally, the following was most pedagogically efficacious (and brief):

h-index for Chemists

A discussion came up at lunch today about h-index for chemists. I hadn’t thought about the h-index for some of the leading chemists of our times, or even what the magnitude of the h-index might be. Henry “Frtiz” Schaefer III, of the University of Georgia has compiled a list, ranking the h-index of living chemists. When the list was first published online by Chemistry World in 2007, the Harvard organic chemist E. J. Corey came out tops with an h-index of 133 (which means Corey has published at least 133 papers, each of which have been cited at least 133 times) . A recent update ( March 2008 ) finds fellow Harvard faculty, G. M. Whitesides, has pipped Corey with an h-index of 140 !

A few chemists who work in the general area of electrochemistry and/or electron-transfer reactions, are listed below:

Name, h-index, (Rank):

Allen J. Bard, 106, (11)

Harry B. Gray, 97, (16)

Thomas J. Meyer, 91, (34)

Royce W. Murray, 87, (44)

Rudolph A. Marcus, 84, (51)

Jean-Michel Savéant, 81, (57)

R. Mark Wightman, 71, (119)

Fred C. Anson, 68, (152)

Christian Amatore, 54, (389)

Andrew G. Ewing, 51, (463)

The full list can be found here. The highest ranked Indian chemist is C.N.R Rao (74) with an h-index of 76.

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