On the objectivity of Science

 When we talk about Science or Scientist , we often tend to overlook the fact that the word Scientist was coined by the British philosopher William Whewell in 1833. It follows that the scientific geniuses like Newton or Galileo were not known as ‘scientists’ during their lifetime. Although I am not sure by what names they were designated, we can always hazard a guess that they were perhaps called ‘natural philosopher’.

Nevertheless the scientific Revolution with all its ramifications have reconstructed our world views that largely started with the works of Copernicus( On the revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres,1543). With his heliocentric model of the solar system ,Copernicus dislodged Ptolemy’s geocentric model that dominated the science of astronomy for several centuries.

Equally important is the work of Andreas Vesalius( On the workings of the Human body,1543) that explained the human anatomy with considerable accuracy.  

A beginning was made that enabled human beings to understand his body as well as the universe and the inexorable march of science surged  ahead that received further momentum with the arrival of Galileo and Newton on the scene.New discoveries and inventions in Science began to play the most crucial role in furthering knowledge,driving economies and shaping cultures.  Bacon in his monumental work 'Novum Organum'(1620) went to the extend of branding printing,  gunpowder and compass as inventions that transformed literature, warfare and navigation.   Scientific study of every conceivable phenomena under the sky with its emphasis on instrumentalism, empiricism and above all falsifiable hypothesis came to acquire the status of an absolutely objective academic discipline. Everyone started to believe that science is objective and unlike humanities beyond personal whims and caprices.

This was the view about science for long. But is science really neutral?  Can science and scientific theory  ever be influenced by ideas of culture? Language? Or ideology?

I shall try to throw some  light on it in my next post.

The Power Of Fiction

WE all love to read fiction. And many of us have tried our hands at it. Some are phenomenally successful. Some are just hopeless storytellers .

Fiction is basically the art of telling lies. The fulcrum about which the story of a narrative  rotates does not (or hardly)exist. In fact Picasso once went to the extent of telling us that all art are false.

In his essay entitled ‘The sense of an Ending’, Frank Kermode defines fiction as ‘something we know does not exist but which help us to make sense of, and move in the world’. In other words the  fictionality of a given narrative is taken for granted and in fact many a time in our day to day discourse  we invent different fictions to help us out of problem and also to perpetuate the existence of our self-serving interests. This is also to mean that arguably we need to create  fiction for the promotion of a particular idea and also the person who remains behind that idea.

A case in point is the story of the apple involving  Sir Issac Newton. It is believed that Newton’s discovery of  gravitation was occasioned by the fall of an apple when he was sitting in a contemplative mood. But many have contested the story including the celebrated Science historian I.B.Cohen. Many argue that the story of the apple is merely an invention by historians with French writer Voltaire often cited as the chief suspect.  J.B.S. Haldane , an outstanding British Biological Scientist went to the extent of suggesting that ‘the story of the apple’ was a capitalist propaganda. Nevertheless it is a beautiful story and it has helped popularise the concept of gravitation and also  the man who is behind it. Many hold the view that such a beautiful story should not be destroyed by a ‘quest for historical accuracy’.

Even the history that we read as textbooks can border on fiction. History is basically a ‘personal construct’ as the past we ‘know’ is always contingent upon our own ‘present’.

Many doubt the existence of  medieval  Ahom general Lachit Borphukan and the narrative in which he murders his own maternal uncle for the dereliction of his duty. Often it is cited as an example of a story getting influenced by the killing of Kanch in Krishna narratives.

Nevertheless the ‘story’ has helped keep alive the Assamese nationalism –a ‘story’which is invoked in time of crisis. A ‘quest for historical accuracy’ may be ill-advised in this case.

There are many organisations in Assam whose survival litany is the story of the ‘step-motherly treatment’ meted out to the state by the centre.  But the level of corruption that the state is steeped in presently and also the astronomical grants( compare it with other states) that the centre has given to our state lead us to question this view. Besides should one go by the newspapers’ reports, one is more than consternated by the amount of money that has gone back unutilised. Nevertheless it is largely a convenient fiction that guarantees the survival of many organizations.

Leaky Gut Syndrome is not a recognised medical diagnosis. Yet lot of fictionalised accounts about the ailment are doing the rounds just for the sake of selling alternative medicine. Nevertheless this ‘fiction’ is useful and  has helped thrive a business.

Examples abound.

Fiction is a part of that power which eternally desires evil which eternally desires good.

Reference:
Hopes and Impediments by Chinua Achebe
The Universe  by J.P.Mcevoy
Re-thinking History by Keith Jenkin
The history of the siege of Lisbon by Jose Saramago 

Memory and Word

An octogenarian member of our family has been behaving in a manner that is symptomatic of  early Alzheimer disease. His anterograde  memory( he fails to create memory) seems to be failing whereas his retrograde memory( he can recall his past) is more or less intact.  His case offers a striking similarity with the protagonist of Umberto Eco’s celebrated novel ‘The mysterious Flame of Queen Loana’ in which the central character suffers a cerebral stroke that results in losing his anterograde memory. In other words  he could recall his distant past and particularly what he read as he  spent much of his time amid books by virtue of his being an antique book dealer .  He asks his wife what month it is and as his wife replies that it is April, he goes into a reverie and indulges in soliloquy:” April is the cruellest month breeding lilacs out of the dead land….’an oft-quoted line from Eliot’s The Waste Land. He recalls the lines from his past reading of the text whereas he is quite oblivious of what goes around his immediate present.

The more I get closer or more I talk to this amnesiac member of our family, the more I get a sense of immediacy and involvement. Besides I feel increasingly aware of  how memory gives us a sense of continuity. I am Nayan J.Kakoty (aka NJK)-past, present and future because I have a memory. It is my memory that helps me construct the narrative of my life. I cannot go back physically to my past as the’arrow of time’ moves only toward future. But it is  through my memory I am able to go back to my past and relive those days. Remember Wordsworth’s Daffodils: ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud  that floats on high over vales and hills/when all at once I saw a crowd/a host of golden Daffodils beside the lake…’

Wordsworth saw the Daffodils long back in past and now he is just reminiscing . In other words it is with  the help of his memory Wordsworth is getting an accesses to one of his edifying experiences that happened in his past. We all carry our past in memory as Wordsworth says again in Solitary Reaper;” the music in my heart I bore ,/long after it was heard no more’.

What Happens when there is a suppression of links in the chain of our memory? Remember what happens when the king forgets about the ring in Shakuntala? Or just mark the situation Amir Khan finds himself in Ghajni.

The octogenarian member of our family has a novel way of filling up the gaps in his highly fractured memory. He often confabulates. He often invents stories that fill up the gap when his memory goes blank. And most interesting fact  is that those inventions are from his own past experiences.

Memory! What a wonderful piece of work!

Memory is life.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Why does a word exist? Does it exist for its usages? Or it exists for its existence  in dictionary?

There are many words in our( Assamese) language that are not to be  found in any dictionary. For example in my day to day life I have often overheard people saying’ Moi khai keni or moi khai pini golu( I went after I had eaten my food). The words like keni or pini (in the context of this use) are not in any Assamese dictionary. I do not know if the words are just the babbling of a dialect of Assamese. At least in standard Assamese these words are not found. Neither can they be used in the context as above.

Recently AASU demanded a Sarbic(Comprehensive)reform of SEBA(Board Of Secondary Education). But surprisingly the word Sarbic was not in ChandraKanta abhidhan. Not in Saraighat Abhidhaan either. A friend of mine told me that the word could be a derivative of Sarba(entire). I looked up and  even there too the word could not be found.

In that case it is worth-examining how the word has forged a path into AASU’s rhetoric.

These words pose the conundrum as mentioned above. Besides it also underpins the debate if  a dictionary should be prescriptive. Or whether a dictionary should be  left alone to describe the language as it is.

( After reading Lynda Mugglestone’s ‘Dictionaries: A very short introduction published by Oxford University Press)

Ill-starred event

This blog post might give the impression of a déjà vu as I wrote on the subject before also.

Never did I realise that a lecture on Disaster Management can be so interesting and rewarding. When a friend of mine asked me to join him in the lecture at Academic Staff College, Gauhati University, which was to be delivered by an Assam Civil Service officer from NDMA Mrs Nandita Hazarika, willy-nilly I agreed to come as I was expecting a slide show of facts and statistics from a somnolent civil servant. But to my utter surprise , it turned out to be a lecture that enriched my perception
manifold about the subject. Besides the lecture was organised at the most opportune time as India’s biggest natural disaster has badly mangled our collective unconscious. The lecture was basically about how we can mitigate the impact of a disaster (both natural and man-made)with preparedness and planning . Here was an officer with considerable oomph and zeal who knows what job is cut out for her.

The lecture set my mind in motion as nature and environment are two important issues that occupy a sizable portion of my mindscape. I searched for the etymological root of the word ‘disaster’ and found that it is a word of Italian origin of 16th century. From Italian ‘disastro’-ill-starred event,from’dis’(expressing negation)+’astro’ meaning ‘star’(From Latin ‘astrum’.) ( Oxford Dictioary of English,Second Edition,Revised)

Being an ill-starred event, no nation can avoid natural disaster. But is there no element of human intervention in natural disaster?

To my mind all the natural disasters are nothing but an extension of age-old man versus nature conflict. Western literary productions have constructed a concept of nature which was subsequently put into practice in material culture. For instance the ideas of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke suggest that nature was valueless and should be treated as man’s private property. For them the ‘state of nature’ was a primitive one. Rousseau was an exception who believed that nature was ‘purest’.
During Industrial Revolution which was considered to be the beginning of ‘modernism’, Man’s relation with nature became more exploitative as progress and development came to be regarded as man’s control over nature and environment. With that man’s attempt to subjugate nature received momentum. It may be recalled that Francis Bacon who presided over the trials of witches used the same language( that he used in the trials) when it came to subjugating nature. ‘Hound her’, ‘bind her’…these were the exact words that he used with regard to nature. Since then man’s attempt to dominate nature with complete conquest has been continuing unabated.

But this is a litany as even school children are also being told that we are living in a world that is being lost to pollution, environmental degradation and so on and therefore Time magazine can start off an article stating ‘how everyone knows the planet is in bad shape’.( The Skeptical Environmentalist by Bjorn Lomborg).
There has hardly been any attempt –which is life-affirming-to effect a reconciliation between the human and non-human world. The relation has always been exploitative. As a result nature, at times ,hits back at us with all the fury .

All told, my first statement has to be qualified as Bhupen Hazarika long back showed us in his song as to what constitutes an ideal relation between man and nature or for that matter between human and non-human world in his song(which is purported to be sung by a farmer): O mur dhoritri aai /soronote diba thai(my translation)…( O’my mother earth I prostrate myself in thine feet….I am orphan…I plead, be my mother). All other nature songs (in Assamese) are nothing but a description of beautiful nature as the subject is enthralled and spell bound. Mark the lyrics of Bishnu Rabha’s( translations are mine) :’ bilote halise dhunia podume’ (lithe lotus move and bend gracefully in water)or Jyoti Prasad’s ‘Gose gose pati dile phulore xorai(all trees are in bloom) or Nirmolprabha Bordoloi’s:’phulore mela te pokhi e geet gai…( Birds sing in this flower fair). All these songs describe nature and says nothing about our relationship with her. Bhupen Hazarika’s aforementioned song has blazed the trail.

Let our relationship with nature be like what Bhupen Hazarika’s song outlines. This relationship is life-affirming and not exploitative.
Once we cultivate this relationship I am sure there will be no man-made disaster to deal with.

TWO CULTURES

Let me begin with a quote from C.P.Snows’ 1959 Rede Lectures: “I believe the intellectual life of the whole of western society is increasingly being split into two polar groups.”  The split envisaged here by Snow between Art (by Art I include Humanities and Literature and social sciences) and pure Science is still widening and this is primarily due to the elitist attitude being harboured by  both the groups that  help perpetuate the split. Snow recounts his personal experience when he says that in  many a learned gatherings of persons belonging to the discipline of  Art he poses the question as to how many of them can really explain the second law of thermodynamics. And all  of them remain invariably silent.  Snow , however,maintains that it is as good as asking an Art student about Shakespeare.

Many men of Science believe that Art is a luxury and hardly contributes to human progress and development. 'Was this the face that launched a thousand ships....' is an articulation of aesthetic experience for the poet whereas for a man of science the 'truth' in fact is in the act of seeing. In other words the image getting captured and journeying through  Retina and finally the intrusion of brain and so on. 

But are Art and science  such watertight compartments?

I do not think so. And I am sure many of you will agree to my view.

There are many aspects of Art and Science that are shared and together further knowledge-both self-knowledge and public knowledge. Scientist writers like Fritjof Kapra, Paul Davis , Michio Kaku to name a few, have helped me straddle both the worlds. Kapra has shown us in his 'Tao of Physics' and for that matter Paul Davis in his 'God and the new physics' have clearly demonstrated how at one level particle physics and (Primarily eastern)mystical thoughts converge. In some ways Art and Science can be the two sides of the same coin. One illuminating self-knowledge and the other public knowledge. Both are inquiry into nature , the ways are different though. Art is also a discovery. An artist uses his own medium in his effort of discovery and is not aware beforehand about the nature of his discovery until the work is done. In that sense, it may be mentioned, Art is different from craft for craft knows the final shape beforehand. The medium of Science are more abstract-experiment and Mathematics. But the aim is to discover. Yet Science never knows where it is  heading for( On Science by B.K.Ridley). Both Science and Art are built on firm foundations. What was considered beautiful in past is still regarded so and inform creativity.

The  history of Art and Science are both fascinating. The growth and power of Science forced Art to focus more on subjective elements. However, both permeate each other in their growth and develpment. Hermatism of ancient Egypt helped Copernicus to conceive the idea of a helio-centric model of our solar system. We are aware how the hypothesis of hyperspace influenced Dali and Piccaso in their artistic creations (Hyperspace by Michio Kaku).

One fundamental difference between Art( Let me repeat by Art I mean Humanities and literature and Social Sciences also) and Science is that the problems in Science always converge whereas the problems in Art always diverge. All super specialists  will agree that Losartan Potassium is the most suitable drug for treating Diabetic Hypertension. On the other hand Social Scientists will debate how Diabetic Hypertension will impact social gerontology.

One thing is certain. It is foolish to view the world with the narrow view of Science. All great scientists in the world came out of the confines of their laboratories and let their world view permeate with humanistic philosophy. Einstein is  a case in point. His oft-quoted line 'Science without religion is lame,religion without Science is blind' is profoundly thought-provoking. 

So the elitist attitude harboured  by both the groups will be an impediment in the way of human progress. The need of the hour is to listen to and understand each other. That is ,I am sure going to bridge the gap between the 'Two Cultures'.

Christmas Musings

Today is 12th December, at 12 pm,12th minute and 12 seconds, the date and time will be 12//12/12/12/12/12
Maa Kasam! Sardaron ko kaun sambhalega...??

This is the message that I received on my mobile on 12th December from a fast friend of mine. And I am sure you too had received such text messages on the day.
The brouhaha surrounding the date and time as mentioned ranged across the world from Fiji to Hawaii. In Guwahati also people organised special feast to celebrate the date and time. Besides, many insisted their obstetric surgeons to perform Cesarean section in such a way that the baby is made to be born coinciding the momentous moments.

But a little reflection on the date stirs up our thoughts as to what significance the date(and time)encapsulates and also to the extent  of  casting serious doubt if at all the date has really taken place.

The celebration of this date and time means the triumph of a model which is Christian and European. The calculation of ab anno Domini is essentially christian. In early Middle Ages years were counted not from the birth of Christ ;but from the presumed creation of the world. In the seventeenth century  the protestant Issac de la Peyriere observed that the original sin involved only the descendants of Adam,not other races ,born far earlier. He was declared a heretic. China and India had flourishing civilization before the year 0. Thankfully Plato and Aristotle's births are recorded as 'before Christ'.

After the independence , the government of India constituted a commission under the scientist Meghnad Saha to examine various calendars that were in use among different communities ( Even today the Assamese have a different calendar) and the commission was dumbfounded by the bewildering number calendars that various communities in India were using(and perhaps are using at the moment). A friend from Manipur once told me that there the child's birthday is recorded from day of his or her rice ceremony. A different calendar again!

Now the most pertinent question. Was the day really 12th December?

As we know that 23rd April in 1564 is not the same as 23rd April 2012. By the mid sixteenth century, the Julian calendar had fallen ten days behind the solar year and so in 1582 Pope Gregory xiii introduced the Gregorian calendar that we follow today. Many European countries immediately made the changes. Accordingly Thursday 4 October 1582 was followed by Friday 15th October.The anti-papal England rejected the idea and did not catch up till 1752,when 2 September was immediately followed by 14 September. In other words in 1564 in England, the date referred to then as 23 April corresponds to what we would today call 3 May.
This observation ,without doubt. complicates the whole issue of 12/12/12/12/12/12.

Nevertheless a very happy Christmas to you all!


Reference:

On Anniversary by David Crystal( A lecture delivered on the occasion of 425th Anniversary of Cambridge University Press in 2009)
Five Moral Pieces by Umberto Eco(Vintage,2002)
Argumentative Indians by Amartya Sen( Penguin Books)

Conversation with Umberto Eco



Umberto Eco appeared before me like a vision of God. Lately he has cottoned on to the fact that our state has developed a lot in the health sector and therefore he flew from Bologna to Guwahati for a consultation with a doctor from Gauhati Medical College. But as the luck would have it , there broke out a clash between the medical representatives and the doctors and as a result the OPD  was cancelled. He had nowhere to go so he came to my apartment. He was in a flowery shirt that went well with his personality and the brown corduroy that hides his well-formed legs lent  an extra dimension to his sartorial casualness. He was wearing a pair of  sports shoes.

He seated himself in the computer chair  in my small and cozy bed room that I sometimes use for reading my my electricity and medical bills.
In no time we launched ourselves into a desultory and freewheeling conversation. I hope it is conversation and not merely interrogation.  Following is an excerpt:

NJK: Ever since I read your 'The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana' , I have become enamored of you and should you  had been a girl or a lady-as you know I have special fascination for elegant elderly lady- I would have told 'I love you' and would have sung' drink to me only with thine eyes and I shall....

UC:  Ha ha....(he laughed loudly and his chubby cheeks were sunk into tiny hollows).It is indeed a pleasure to have  a fan like you who is  half-sane and half-insane...

NJK: Can there be an absolutely sane person or mind?

UC: You are right. There can be no absolutely normal mind. The dividing line between normal and abnormal mind is very thin.

NJK: ...but where is mind?

UC: My mind is elsewhere.

NJK: Where?

UC: In the play I enjoyed last night. Bhul Nubujiba Bhupenda(Do not misunderstand Bhupenda). Oh! Just mind-blowing! The auditorium, you call it pandal right?, was crammed with spectators. Electrifying! I have come to know that the playwright has written more than thirty plays in a single year which is a remarkable feat and a record of a sort. Even Shakespeare could not write as many plays during his life time. How many did he(Shakespeare) write?

NJK: I do not know.

UC: But you told you studied literature in the university?

NJK: Yes. But that was the question which was never asked in my exams.

UC: OK. I see...

NJK:  That is a good lead-in...

UC: Which one?

NJK: Bhul Nubujiba Bhupenda...

UC:  Which way?

NJK: Bhupen Hazarika , of course...

UC: He is a great singer and composer. Bhupen Hazarika dead is more powerful than Bhupen Hazarika alive.

NJK: Very well said. Explain please...

UC: See the amount of soundbites and the reams of  paper that have been wasted on controversies surrounding him.

NJK: And the latest one...

UC:  Well Nayan, I must tell you that culture is a filtering process. What is relevant to our culture remains and irrelevants just sink into oblivion. Just see, Calpurnia was relevant as long as Ceaser was alive. After his death she became culturally(or historically) irrelevant. Have you ever inquired about Shakespeare's sons? Or about the family of Indira Gandhi's husband? They are just culturally irrelevant.  So it boils down to the fact that a singer or a writer should be judged only on the basis of his or her work.

NJK:..so it is not necessary to know how many plays Shakeapeare wrote to appreciate him?

UC: Ha...(No this time he did n't laugh loudly. He became grave instead.)

NJK: What else did you like about our city?

UC: The big garbage can without lid installed by the city's civic authority.

NJK:  A  filth phile...ha ha...

UC: No.It stirs your thought. It reminds me of your great writer Raja Rao who said that there can be no India without( I was told that there is no crow in a place called Barpeta in Assam. Is any Barpetia reading this? Can you please verify?) crow. These crows feed on those garbage. Besides this provokes us into thinking if mankind as technological beings and mankind as civilized  social beings are going hand -in -hand.

NJK: Can you crisscross the city without ever finding such a garbage can?

UC: Nayan, you have never been original. This is from Gerges Perec.

NJK: You have n't read Piere Manard?

UC: Ha ha....

NJK: no, I am serious. Can there be an Einstein  without Newton? The very concept of originality is flawed  Is Shakespeare original?

UC:    NJK ,you so-called educated people are very intelligent or rather cunning. you can rationilse . And you always rationalise to your favour.

With due apology to Umberto Eco.

For the full text of the conversation, please log onto the website: www.njkmadtalk.com