If anatomy is the body's hardware, physiology is its operating software—and physics reveals the source code. This blog explores medical science through an analytical, biophysical lens.
On this Pi Day, the 14th of March, let me share
some thoughts which I long sought to pen down for quite some time. Pi is
transcendal, but it's completely rational and worthy to celebrate today's date on this
irrational number. Remember, the dialogs in the movie The Matrix or by the
villain of the Bond movie Spectre?
"The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us, even
now in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you
turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work, when you go to
church, when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your
eyes to blind you from the truth."
I remember in a course of Quantitative Biology, on the MIT MOOC platform and edX, renowned Professor Eric Lander also referred to this famous dialog "Matrix
is everywhere" drawing on the movie quote when he was telling us about matrix
calculations. This omnipresence also applies to pi too!
We find that somehow, pi permeates to almost all
aspects of our life: arts, geometrical figures, all the sounds around
us, mathematics, physics, computer science, electronics, astrophysics, nuclear
spin, DNA, time and space, galaxies, the universe and so on. You name it, you
have it there!
Now let me clarify, why today is pi day. The value of Pi,
the ratio of circumference to diameter of a circle; is close to about 3.14 [or 22/7, pi
approximation day.] Thus, the 14th of March (3.14) and 22nd July (22/7) are
called pi day and pi approximation day respectively. Both are actually only
approximations as we can only get near it, never quite reaching it.
BTW, did you notice that the
favicon of my Blog is also pi (π). Naturally today's Google doodle also honours this
date.
Another important event that occurred on this day is Albert Einstein's
birthday.
In the preceding article we found out that there must have been a mingling of population and cultures of the people of ancient India (Bharat) and Europe, and we were pondering about the "direction" of migration. An article by Sri Subhash Kak, The Gundestrup Cauldron and its Indian Connection, discusses about this diffusion of culture in his article well.
Few other evidences worth mentioning here [Source: Recovery of the Foundations of Indian Knowledge Systems; IIT, Kharagpur]. The Vedic culture and Indus Valley Civilazation dated back to 7000 to 1500 BCE, much earlier than the European relics were found; and there are concrete evidences to prove this point. The colonial rulers were desperate to disprove this obvious fact to promote their racial agenda and philological superiority.
It is also however important to mention at this point that like many other nations, the left-leaning politicians and 'woke' elements are always there to discredit any indigenous systems/history for favor of something which feeds their agenda to make them appear "politically correct". An account of such an attempt at assassination may be found here.
But why was this Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT) forged and forced, first of all? The colonial invaders found out 'millions of similarites' between Indian languages and the European language tree, and it suited them best to design an invasion, which was the easy way out. But ancient Vedic civilisation or Indus Valley Civilisation never actually believed in any kind of aggression or invasion, rather they always fostered brotherhood and unity.
"In what Veda, in what Sukta, do you find that the Aryans came into India from a foreign country? Where do you get the idea that they slaughtered the wild aborigines? What do you gain by talking such nonsense?"- Swami Vivekananda: The East and The West
Regarding India's contribution in Arithmetic, Laplace, the famous French mathematician, statistician, physicist, a versatile polymath had this to say:
"It is India that gave us the ingenious method of expressing all numbers by the means of ten symbols, each symbol receiving a value of position, as well as an absolute value; a profound and important idea which appears so simple to us now that we ignore its true merit, but its very simplicity, the great ease which it has lent to all computations, puts our arithmetic in the first rank of useful inventions, and we shall appreciate the grandeur of this achievement when we remember that it escaped the genius of Archimedes and Apollonius, two of the greatest minds produced by antiquity.'
[Kumar, Raj (2003). Essays on Ancient India. Discovery Publishing House. pp. 196–. ISBN 978-81-7141-682-0.]
Now, this second installment of AIT and Sanskrit is also timely, considering that there are recent papers coming out to suggest and consequently prove that Sanskrit originated from outside India. It's as if saying that humans came from Saturn! Certainly, as one would expect, the woke Indian media will only be very happy to toe the line.
But does all this discussion about an invasion that never was make any difference? No! In Sanskrit it is said "Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam": Maha Upanishad. The World is one family, we are all related. Let us evolve as one, that should be our motto, keeping aside all prejudices. 'Till we set up a colony on Mars riding on a Elon Musk rocket, the Earth is our one and only home.
As I was watching the James Bond film Specter a couple of months ago, I spotted the Spanish for "The Day of The Dead", "Dia de Muertos" flash across the screen. The scene was when Daniel Craig was visiting Mexico City on an unofficial purpose.
I was overawed once more! How could there be so much semblance between languages, given that they are spoken by people separated some several thousands miles apart? Here in this case for example, dia stands for day in English and din in Bengali; while muertos (dead) is phonetically and alphabetically related to mrityu (death, in Bangla). Not only do they retain their meanings across languages/dialects/cultures so disparate geographically but also the phonetic pronunciation remain almost intact. I have been, for a long time, amazed at the astounding similarities between English and other European languages with that of Bengali and Hindi. Please note that these similarities existed way before the British came to India: some 15,000 years ago! (see references below). More recently, "in the 16th century, European visitors to the Indian subcontinent began to notice similarities among Indo-Aryan, Iranian, and European languages." Here are only a few examples. More examples can be found here, here and here.
Well, then how are these languages so intricately related? How likely is it that the "cognates" are just coincidences?
[Cognates are words which have the same linguistic lineage. When you do a voice search on Google Assistant or Apple's Siri, the server breaks-up your voice command into 'phonemes' and they then try to match the word that appears most likely to be spoken by comparing with its database. Cognates are thus likely to be confused by the computer since they are so phonetically similar. Generally, most cognates have a linguistic half-life of about 2000-4000 years. This means that there is 50% chance that a cognate will be replaced by a non-cognate (not similar sounding) one. But it has been seen that pronouns, numerals and some other words tend to persist much longer, and are less prone to erosion.]
The semblance unequivocally points to a common origin; and that these words did not originate 'separately' on the planet!
However, the linguistic similarities are noticed between European and North Indian languages only.
Clearly, the etymological similarities between the said language families strongly suggest a single single linguistic superfamily (Proto-Indo-European superfamily) from which civilizations diverged. So it is certain that there were some ancient populace who migrated and somehow some of the words still managed to survive the language erosion.
But is there any proof that these ancient people really traveled or migrated? There is, indeed! Not only the similarities in language, there are also other clues that prove that this migration really happened. It is bolstered by archaeological, ecological, genetic and anthropological evidences. Though it is innate human nature to forage and advance just for the sake of adventure, the early migration may have arisen out of necessity. The early hunter-gatherers may have moved to a favorable place where farming and agriculture was prevalent, so that they could feed themselves and their cattle and horses. Perhaps a harsher winter in Europe forced these population to leave their original homeland (Urheimat hypothesis or the primary homeland hypothesis).
Consider the Gundestrup Cauldron (below) adored as a beautiful example of Celtic art, discovered in Denmark in 1891 and was thought to date back to about 100 BC.
There are other artefacts of proto-Indian-European (PIE) religion that suggest the linkage of ancient Indian items to that found in Europe.
Of all the possible theories that explain our common ancestry, the most interesting perhaps is the Genetic theory.
There are 46 chromosomes in humans. 22 pairs of autosomes and two sex chromosomes: XX in females and XY in males. In addition to these strands of DNA that these chromosomes contain, there are mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) that also contains the 'four letters' (ATGC) of the nucleotide alphabetic lexicon. What's interesting about these mtDNA strands is that they are inherited "exclusively" from the maternal side.
So it's certain that migration of population did take place but in which direction? The Aryans migrated from Europe or the other way? I'm sure that if you have seen the 2 pictures above and noted their dates as well, you've already drawn your conclusion!
We will next discuss about the faint 'possibility' of a plaussible "Aryan Invasion Theory" in our next blog post. Till then hang on!
["The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either": (William Jones, Philologist)]
Published on 30/06/2018, last updated on 02/03/2025
It was 4:30 in the morning and this man was preparing himself for his daily chores when he felt a sudden pain in the back. It was excruciating. He suffered a grand mal seizure and passed into unconsciousness. The doctors put him into ventilation with a diagnosis of meningo-encephalitis. He was in deep coma. The CSF glucose level read 1. He was as good as dead, with a total neocortical shutdown. But it was in this abyss of unconsciousness Dr. Eben Alexander discovered the hyper-reality of the superconscious. And he came back, to recount his tryst with the unfathomable.
What is life, what happens when we die, do we really die, or does the soul (or whatever) continue to live on? These are indeed quite hard to comprehend or imagine. Erwin Schroedinger, the renowned quantum physicist, in his book ‘What is Life’, assumed that living organisms defied entropy by “‘drinking orderliness’ from a suitable environment” and thus avoiding itself falling into the decay of atomic chaos. Could it be that we are drawing from a single super-conscious entity by means of some kind of tuning in much the same way we tune our radios?
From a human perspective each life can be said to have its own unique consciousness, essentially the “I”ness which seems intimately connected with the physical body. This might automatically point to the possible presence of as many souls as there are physical selves. Schrodinger surmised that the apparent plurality of souls was nothing but an illusion, the same way we perceive so many images in an array of mirrors and he drew a parallel to the mystic Indian Maya.
Now, let us go back to Dr. Alexander’s Near Death Experience (NDE) revelation. He felt like he was a speck on a butterfly’s wing, and he wafted like a breeze from flowers to flowers amid a sweet hymn-like melody on its wings. There were countless other butterflies around, flowers were blossoming right in front of his eyes, indescribably beautiful waterfalls and “angels”. He also saw a beautiful orb of light, he was with the Divine presence! All this while he was in deep coma with a Glasgow coma scale of 6 to 7.
Could all this arise from O2 lack, CO2 build-up, from previous religious conviction or something psychological? Or was it simply the manifestation of the diseased state? Dr. Alexander, a reputed academic neurosurgeon himself, strongly dismisses this. The ‘hyper real’ state which was so vivid and crisp, he argued, could just not simply occur in any other case or disease, or in ketamine induced dissociative anesthesia. Also NDE experiencers across different cultures spread far apart narrated a very similar incident and it did not tally with the person’s education or religious background. Eben himself had no previous bias, rather he was the typical science guy sort. There had to be life beyond death and he was certain that he witnessed that.
So, does all this conflict with science? Does or can consciousness/soul reside outside of our brain or our physical realm? While purists would stick to the reductionist approach that soul existed only within the realms of the brain, Dr. Alexander thinks otherwise: “I think part of the problem is it’s like the guy looking for his keys under the streetlight. Reductive materialists are under the streetlight because that’s where they can see things.” Thus it would be foolish to analyze such an esoteric matter in the light of prevailing science. Our existing knowledge about neurons flounders helplessly to explain how a single neuron can recognize objects or landmarks (Halle Berry neuron).
Again our body parts don't die at the same time. Some body parts still remain active and this is exploited in organ transplantation. PCs often collapse when its "registry", a database which communicates with low-level settings, is corrupted. Could death be the result of a breakdown or corruption of the ‘registry’database in some hitherto unknown ‘hive’s of our system? Or is death some kind of a link failure so that we are in some way not being able to drink orderliness from somewhere?
Finally, there may not be any life after death at all. It could be just another wishful thinking. Or we could even be both alive and dead at the same time in the limbo of Superposition (Schrodinger's cat?). Or worse, life could be hellish after death! No one really comes back to tell their tales! What do you say?
But let me clear things a bit first. I am not a white, no longer in my youth, not a blue-collar and not a drug user. Yet the music just fills me with adrenaline rush, I feel energized and above all, the melodies just mesmerize me!
Well, you guessed it right. I find a lot of physics and maths in it. Whereas most of you would disagree on the issue that hard rock had anything to do with any melody of any sort and would label it as high decibel noise, a very organized pattern of music can be discerned if one just judged it from a neutral and impartial standpoint. However, to be really be able to get into the heart of it, one ought to have a high musical processing power in 'real time', akin to having a faster CPU (Central Processing Unit) in computer jargon. What (musical tone) gets interpreted as a square wave to one's auditory cortex (or along the tonotopic pathway/basilar membrane), may actually turn out to be a composite of various other frequencies (their harmonics). This can be decoded in mathematical terms by the Fourier Transform. Thus what seems to you as a guitar belching out a harrowing 'noise' may actually be two or three guitars which differ slightly in phase, frequency or tune on careful scrutiny. It could be that I follow the music so well because I don't pay much attention to the lyrics or that English is not my first language that I can drift myself to the luxury and intricacy of the wafting melodies. Anyway, I must mention that some lyrics such as Iron Maiden's are so hard to overlook for they are so rich in Philosophy! Psychedelic drugs may enhance in understanding and following these artistic intricacies by inhibiting the dominant left hemisphere and thereby allowing the art-interpreting right half of the brain to be in charge.
Another aspect that baffles me is that how the 'disorganized' crowd synchronize themselves into the organized dancing movements at live concerts [see video:Lamb of God-Walk with me in hell; warning: explicit lyrics]. This might throw some light on herd behavior as well. This pattern of dancing is quite different from the "Mexican wave" that is observed especially in Football matches [see video]. In the latter case, the crowd performs the act consciously with inputs supposedly coming from the cerebral cortex, and the crowd is well organized. This behavior is also seen in honey bees as a means of communication, in their own language. And language of any kind is considered a higher function. In contrast, in the former case, the activity is more likely be originating from a lower CNS area, such as the locomotor pattern generator at the spinal cord level, (with assisted inputs from a higher region in the brain, perhaps) which appears more like a 'reflex' phenomenon than a well coordinated effort.
Then the faint and whispered insinuations seems to imprint a 'suggestion' in our psyche [see video, and watch out for the words "it's only getting worse": Lamb of God]. After all, music is about perception per se and not the mere analysis of mechanical vibrations. There are also cases of suicides arising out of the 'subliminal messages' contained within the lyrics, although they remain yet to be confirmed.
Lamb of God 512 on Jimmy Kimmel live & Moshers
Now, in a recent development, two doctoral students from Cornell University [don't miss the videos and the simulations in this website!] have found some deep similarities between crowd movement in mosh pits, which to them looked so fundamentally similar to randomly moving gas molecules bumping into each other. The moshers run, bash and bump into each other in a chaotic way. Schools of fish and flocks of birds show this type of behavior too. Needless to say, I am in full agreement with their research. Bear in mind, moshpits can be deadly and you might end up with a black eye!
Some interesting questions keep popping up. Why is the representation from black people into this genre of music so poor, despite many of them staying in the US or UK for generations? I hope you won't marginalize me alongside James Watson or Shockely, if I were to suggest that a genetic cause was more likely than an epigenetic one, because I feel that the latter would wear out with passage of time. A notable exception to this is the great vocalist Howard Jones of Killswitch Engage, who is black. Some women are also in the metal arena as well, including Lena of "Infected rain" and Leaves' Eyes' Liv Kristine, encroaching on this so called "masculine" bastion.
That metal mania has carved its niche in the general populace can be exemplified by the ghastly terrorist attack in the Bataclan concert hall in Paris.
We can only pray "Heal the world, make it a better place, for you and for me and the entire human race." as Michael Jackson said.
Jesse L. Silverberg, Matthew Bierbaum, James P. Sethna, & Itai Cohen (2013). Collective Motion of Moshers at Heavy Metal Concerts 10.1103/PhysRevLett.110.228701 arXiv: 1302.1886v1
Last modified: June 30, 2018 Reference: hyper-links, unless specifically mentioned
