A TOUCH to remember...

Back after a strenuous mid semester examination Pingu’s page is hungry for some more gossip… For a change there are no disclaimers…Or may be just one at the end!

Prelude:

"Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a 

listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all
of which have the potential to turn a life around."
Leo Buscagliga..( I have no idea who he is!)

Based on a true story as told to me by my very good friend…

A scene right from a movie:

“Excuse me, what’s the time?”, she TOUCHED him and asked.

Too busy in his dream world the hero of the tale could not reply her.

She repeated yet again, “Time yeshtu?”

“Ahh…6.25am…….

I mean 6.25 pm..

I mean 18.25!”, he said.

And a drop sweat rolled down in a matter of milliseconds.

There are these moments when you experience zero gravity with the faintest stimulus of touch. The laminar flow of blood in the veins seizes leading to a chaotic and turbulent blood gushing in out of your heart. Vibrations so loud that the brain senses the discomfort. The hair over your body stands tall with respect for the touch a state which we call Goosebumps. The nose forgets its primary function to breathe and instead fills the lungs with her perfume.

You tend to wonder what the physicists mean when they say that coefficient of friction can never be zero! (Yes her skin was smoothJ)

All these while when you wondered why do girls spend so much money on waxing in parlours..

And what does Katrina mean when she shows the victory sign in the Veet advertisement.

And how much your mom tells you to bath every day when at hostel.

And how much you regret for not looking into the mirror for the past one month..

All this flashes in those few seconds when the act of touching is being performed by her highness.

My friend told me she looked like Deepika Padukone( that’s because she is my favourite heroine and he wanted to keep me interested!)

A wise man once said ( that would be me;)), “There are only two kinds of girls in this world.

The ones who are within your reach and the ones who aren’t!”

This chick as I feel was well out of our reach. Was it just a coincident that she didn’t wear a wrist watch? Was her IQ so low that it did not strike her to check her mobile?

( no she wasn’t a blonde J) Was he the only person she found to ask the time in the entire mall? (Yeah it was in a mall)

Did she fall for the NITK t-shirt? (I gave off yet another clue about the person’s identity! )

Discussions were hot in the hostel. Such an irony when people spent hours on a 2 second incident. In the end it was concluded that this phenomena could only be explained by the new deodorant in the stores…

As they say it. THE AXE EFFECT…

Deo or no deo, but my friend still has her aura in his mind. His first contact with the higher order feminine species after a long time. It may be a unnoticed event in the girl’s calendar but he could never forget those few blissful seconds with her highness.

Disclaimer: Some great poet has once said( this time its not me!), that You come alone in this world and you go alone. You don’t have any good friends, YOU ARE YOUR ONLY BEST FRIEND!

No prize for guessing who plays the lead character in this tale! ;)

And the page gets a break…

When Schrödinger meets Nolan...

Disclaimer:

The following article is an original piece of the author’s imagination and has no scientific relevance.This article would be of interest to those readers who have seen the movie Inception. (For those who haven’t seen this masterpiece; May the Lord forgive you for this crime! You can still make amends by reading the synopsis on IMDB. But it’s a compulsory pre-requisite)

The readers have every right to question the timing of this article. Inception is no longer the “gossip talk” in friend circles. The hype has been neutralised; Mr Nolan’s art has been got all the kudos it deserved and the viewers have had their every single penny worth it!

Long and heated discussions and arguments outside the movie theatre was a natural scene at many places. It happened with me as well. Doubts over the authenticity, rationality and the out of the world plot! Some of my friends even termed it as ‘absurd’ (The actual word used wasn’t absurd, but for the dignified English men it means something close to absurd ;) )

But there was something in this absurdity; every genuine idea which one cannot understand feels absurd. And then I set to out with the whole Inception Investigation.

 So what exactly must have inspired Mr. Christopher Noran? And my search ended (or may be it is just the beginning!) with QUANTUM MECHANICS.

Recall: Pauli’s Exclusion Principle

• It states that no two electrons can have the same all four quantum numbers. More generally no two fermions (particles with half-integer spins) may occupy same Quantum States simultaneously.
• In contrast, integer spin particles, bosons are not subject to the Pauli’s exclusion principle. For bosons, any number of identical particles can occupy the same quantum state.

Note: Quantum numbers in laymen terms can be defined as the address of the particle.

So how many of you can already smell inception in Pauli’s theory? The people living the dream are simultaneously occupying more than one Quantum state. This means that a person can be at as many different levels as possible at the same instant of time. Either this is a direct violation of Pauli’s principle or may be Mr. Noran has assumed the characters and projections in the dreams to have Boson like characteristics!

Assume the characters are in a particular stage of the Dream and let then have the Quantum numbers Q₁.

Where Q_i = ( n_i, l_i, m_i, s_i )

n =principal quantum number

l  =azimuthal quantum number

m=magnetic quantum number

s  = spin number

Then according to the movie they go to a higher stage in some other mental state which has some other Quantum state; say Q₂. But there is an every possibility of a Q₃ or even a Q₀.

So according to Pauli only one of these quantum state is the right state, as it is physically impossible for a particle to occupy two different positions at one time!

Now the onus is upto the individual in the dream to identify which is the actual quantum state he/she is occupying. Here it is of extreme importance to understand what happened with ‘Mal’, wife of Cobb in the movie. She fell in love with a entirely different quantum state far away from reality. And she could not decide what is real and what is a dream. If only Mal had heard about the “Schrödinger’s Cat”!

Recall: Schrödinger’s Cat

For the better part of the last century, the most accepted explanation for why the same quantum particle may behave in different ways was the Copenhagen interpretation. It was first posed by physicist Niels Bohr in 1920. It says that a quantum particle doesn't exist in one state or another, but in all of its possible states at once! (gotcha Mr. Nolan! So that’s where you got the damn idea..) It's only when we observe its state that a quantum particle is essentially forced to choose one probability, and that's the state that we observe.

In Quantum mechanical terms this state of occupying different quantum states is called ‘coherent superposition’. This Copenhagen interpretation was proved wrong by Ervin Schrödinger.

In his theoretical experiment, ­Schrödinger put his cat in a box, along with a bit of radioactive material and a Geiger counter- a device for detecting radiation. The Geiger counter was designed so that when it sensed the decay of the radioactive material, it triggered a hammer which was poised to break a flask containing hydrocyanic acid, which, when released, would kill the cat. During its stay there, the cat came to exist in an unknowable state.

The only way to find out whether the cat is alive or dead is to open the door! Schrodinger’s cat in Inception is nothing but the ‘Totem’!

All that Mal had to do was to spin the totem, open the door and life would be as smooth as silk!  The totem remained locked and thus the Copenhagen interpretation stays!

Hats off to the director’s creativity with physics. All that I have investigated is the Quantum aspect of inception. I have completely ignored the preposterous space-time logic behind the movie. That’s for general relativity to take care. Time slowing down, zero gravity whacky stunts is not in the scope of this blog. May be a sequel is to follow, but that depends on the viewer response.

There may be people out there who may find this blog as absurd as my good friend found Inception! Whatever may be the opinion but comments are always welcome. 

NOTE: Some physicist may argue that Quantum mechanics is applicable only to microscopic particles and not to the projections in the dreams which are hugely macroscopic (I agree that Ellen Page is a bit short but that doesn’t make her microscopic!:P). Even if you consider the smallest elementary particle of each projection and apply the quantum theory than it would suffice! And if the arguments are withheld for every particle than obviously quantum theory can be generalised to macroscopic characters in Inception!

And the page gets a break…

Awesome Threesome

Disclaimer: 

Any resemblance to a place/person either dead or alive is purely "incidental". The author has no regrets if any sentiments of any person are hurt; on the contrary he has every intention to make his point felt, even if it goes to the extent of breaking the rules of diplomacy. Most of the characters portrayed hence forth in this page are fictitious, but the author hopes that the readers can find their own selves in them.

So here begins the journey,

PAGE 1 of "Pingu's Page"

Its been two days since it stopped raining out here. By the time I finish with this blog it might start pouring yet again! Such is the case with the weather at this part of the country, so readers please do not doubt my creditability as a writer. If u do not like the article, you are free to throw the "PAGE" out of the window; I am not viable to any damage caused to your monitor/laptop by the rains out here.

Speaking of changing weather, a lot has changed in the past few days. But nothing can change as fast as FORTUNE!

Introducing the three guys whose fortune graph has had an abrupt decrease this past week:

1. The Captain Mr. Butt

(Some wise guy has once said the people with the first name same as yours have to see the prison gates atleast once in a lifetime. Ask your namesake, Mr. Khan :P)

2. The kiddo

(no comments on this minor or else the Pak Women n child ministry may have objections to my blog. Playing it safe, its Pak after all!)

3. Ustaad Mohammad ASSif

(The famous VEENA player)

At every "FIXED" interval of time the world of cricket has been rocked by controversies. But this one was huge! Now as the world sees them, they are in a SPOT of bother. Nobody would ever like to have a sit at this Spot..not even Dr. Sheldon Cooper!

To make things more clear, i have a graph to explain the phenomena of change in fortune.

This plot is for the kiddo, the user inspired from it can make their own plots for Mr Captain and the Ustaad.

fortune vs age plot for
Mohd. Aamer

Here on the x-axis is the age axis and y axis we have the fortune axis. The graph is not upto scale.

The point O is the point when the kiddo was just born, as he was born in a country as unfortunate as Pak, the graph does not have any 'y' intercept!

The graph is a straight line with positive slope till the point A. Point A is the age when 'the kiddo' got a break in the Pak cricket team, hence we see a discrepancy at A.

( NOTE: Points of change in fortune have always been non differentiable! Be it a lottery jackpot or a dacoity .There are these abrupt changes in ones lives which even newton could not account for!)

Here I would like to define a term for dF/dA; ie differential of fortune wrt age.

dF/dA=L*H

F=Fortune

A=Age

L=Luck

H=Hardwork

The kiddo worked very hard to get into the team hence the positive slope. The Point B is the day when the spot fixing scandal came into light. Since then, there has been a exponential change in his fortune. Pandemonium strikes at B, and the fortune goes down the slide! At B, instead of choosing the path of work, the kiddo chose the easy way out. As hardwork was very less and as his luck went below 0, we get negative value for the slope. 

The graph has been further extrapolated (i have just learnt numerical methods ;) ) for years still to come. As his cricketing career is over it is assumed that the 18 year old will go back to Pak and join a local school. He may put as much as work as he wants, but due to the cycle of karma, the luck factor will continue to elude him. Hence there is very little change in fortune.

So this sums up the kiddo. The author is hopeful that both Mr. Butt and Mr Ustaad have positive slopes in their life still to come. Ustaad has made up his mind that he'l continue to play (with) his VEENA even if she gives any statements against him to the cops. Wonder what is up in the captain's mind?!

So now its the time when the PAGE gets a break..

N yeah it did start to rain!

comments are welcome. :)