China leaves no stone unturned to keep India worried all the time..

From Kashmir to Arunachal Pradesh, from fake medicines with "Made in India" tag to Extremists in North East, it seems China is very much interested in keeping India worried. After declaring Sikkim as a part of India, China has directed its attention towards Kashmir and North East, the two most unstable regions of India hit by insurgency problem and many others. Needless to mention that China claims several thousands square kilometers of Arunachal Pradesh as its own territory. Having objected to Dalai Lama's proposed visit to Tawang in November, China even raised protest after the Indian PM visited Arunachal. It is also believed for a long time that the militants in the North Eastern states of India who are fighting for so called "sovereignty" get arms as well as shelter in China. According to media report China is also planning to construct a dam in Tibet which will severely affect the flow of the river Brahmaputra in Assam. It has also been reported that China is involved in various civilian projects (and may be military also) in the Pakistan occupied Kashmir (PoK) region, which India considers as illegally occupied by Pakistan. Apart from issuing separate visa to Indian nationals who are from Kashmir, China is now projecting Kashmir as a separate country. The handouts given to invited journalists in Tibet by the Chinese Government says "Tibet borders with India, Nepal, Myanmar and Kashmir". What the hell does it mean? Leave these political issues aside. China is doing more than that. Few months back I have seen in the news that China is exporting fake medicines with "Made in India" tag to African countries. What China wants after all? They would have probably invaded India again like they did in 1962 if India had not developed nukes by now. I hope India will act strongly against all these in a diplomatic way. China may be the fastest growing economy in the world, it may have the largest military strength, but that does not mean they will keep doing whatever they want. I was surprised to see the US president cancelling his meeting with Dalai Lama(during His visit to the US) just to keep the Chinese happy before his visit to China. Anyway I know too little politics to comment more on such issues. Its better to get back to physics...:)

Hitler and IIT attendence...a must watch video..:D

Yesterday one of my friend suggested me to watch this video. This video is originally taken from the movie 'Downfall(Der Untergang)'. But a few clever IIT ians have changed the subtitles in such way that after watching this video people (who don't understant German of course) won't believe that it's fake. Have a look:

Purpose of Blogging

Sometimes I wonder why I am spending my time on the blogosphere. I keep writing random stuffs through which I don't have to carry any information to anyone. And I don't even think whatever I write here may prove to be useful for someone. But personally I was benefited a lot by several blogs. Those sincere bloggers are really doing a great job by sharing their ideas, opinions related to diverse fields. Specially the physics stuffs they write are very recent as well as significant. Whereas I use my blog as an open diary. I just write whatever I learn, whatever I do and all. I don't even know if they are worth writing, but it seems from a couple of months it has become one of my hobbies. I hope after spending another two-three years on the blogosphere I would be able to write some constructive things based on my own ideas.

Beer with Nair

After he got his "awesome-max" job few months back, he has sponsored beer party twice so far for us (his classmates who have not yet got their degree..:(.. ). Yesterday we had the occasion once again for such a beer party. After his first come back from the US, we had the first one where we had some Mexican beer called Corona. I never heard of it before, but believe me, it does not suck at all like Indian beers. It was really awesome. Yesterday I don't remember which beer we had, but it was not bad. Since I drink very rarely nowadays, yesterday I could not drink more than say 600 ml. It seems my capacity has fallen down a lot, not bad huh? Actually nowadays very few such occasions come and without any occasion I do not prefer to drink at all. I hope the next occasion will come again when Nair will come back from the US after six weeks. Thanks a lot Nair, keep sponsoring beer party every time you come home from abroad.

"What is more important is Science, not the country of origin of a scientist"...This is what Chemistry 09 Nobel Winner has to say!!

I saw a Times of India article today titled "A little less nationalistic hero worship, please" (http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/india/A-little-less-nationalistic-hero-worship-please/articleshow/5129529.cms) by 2009 Chemistry Nobel winner (with two others) Prof Venkatraman Ramakrishnan. It was quite natural for the billion Indians to cheer for him after he got the prize. But what he wants from us is to appreciate science more than nationalistic worship. Well, from my point of view he is correct. In the age of globalisation we after all have to work together to make earth a better place to live in rather than confining within the country barriers. However, I don't think Indians overreacted when he got the prize. Looking at the fact that there are very few Nobel laureates from this country which however has given birth to many great scientists as great as Nobel Laureates, people became naturally overwhelmed with joy. As mentioned in the article, many Indians were offended when Prof Ramakrishnan said "nationality being an accident of birth", and that's why he has come up with this TOI article to apologise as well as to convey a very important message why appreciating science is more important. Some of his lines as quoted from the article are ....

"...The best way to take pleasure in someone’s achievement is to take an interest in their work and feel motivated to learn more about science. I remember reading about Gellman’s work as an undergraduate in Baroda, and, when he won the Nobel prize, rushing upstairs to tell my parents. It did not matter to me whether he was Indian or not. In my case, I am lucky to have had a combination of education, opportunities and a great team of co-workers to have made a contribution to an important problem. I am not personally that important. If I hadn’t existed, this work would still have been done. It is the work that is important, and that should be what excites people....."

It is after all his capability to come out of country barriers and work for the human being as a whole which makes him so special. Think Global..Act Global...:)

SERC XXV Main School in Theoretical High Energy Physics

The official announcement for the 25th SERC (Science and Engineering Research Council) school in theoretical high energy physics to be held in Punjab University, Chandigarh, India from 2-22nd April, 2010 came almost one month before. However the official poster for advertisement came two days back. The courses this year seems interesting like those of the previous school. Usually what happens is that people don't attend two consecutive SERC main school since the topics are totally different in two consecutive schools. But to my surprise, this SERC school topics are not too much unrelated to those covered in the previous one. In the previous main school we had basic string theory course and in the coming one there is a course on AdS-CFT and hydrodynamics. Similarly we had cosmology and particle physics course in the previous school and there is a course on GUT and leptogenesis in the coming one. So it is very difficult to resist from applying for the coming school as it appears (to me at least) that the topics covered in the previous school may come out to be of much help while attending the coming school. The poster for the school containing the details is below(click the image to get a better view):

After attending string theory lectures by Prof Sunil Mukhi in the previous SERC school, I am really looking forward this time to attend the AdS-CFT lectures by another big shot in string theory, Prof Shiraz Minwalla. The course on GUT, leptogenesis will be an another attraction of this school since the lecturer is Goran Senjanovic from ICTP, Trieste and the tutor is Borut Bajc. These names are very familiar to me for a long time since I have been reading couple of papers written by Goran, Borut, Aulakh et al. It will be a great privilege for me to meet these three big shots in High Energy Phenomenology at the same time. I just hope I will get selected to participate in the school.

FERMI does not confirm the rise in positron fraction with energy...:(

Today I saw a paper by W. de Boer titled "Indirect Dark Matter Searches in the Light of ATIC, FERMI, EGRET and PAMELA" (http://arxiv.org/abs/0910.2601). It is related to the Invited talk at SUSY09, the 17th International Conference on Supersymmetry and the Unification of Fundamental Interactions, Boston, 2009. The author gives a good comparison between the results from various experiments related to cosmic ray positron excess. I must say after looking at the FERMI results in this paper I am not that much enthusiastic about working on the dark matter interpretation of positron excess as I was when I first saw PAMELA results. The basic difference between latest FERMI data is that it does not confirm the peak in positron fraction at several hundreds GeV. The FERMI spectrum is more or less flat. The plot shown in the paper is as follows

The author has mentioned all the attempts so far for the positron excess explanation and commented that all the explanations seem correct and nobody can rule out any one of them. He has considered contribution of all such effects in the paper. I was particularly interested in dark matter interpretation of this excess which was quite interesting as well as challenging, since you need to make your particle physics model such that the proposed dark matter candidate unlike neutralinos annihilate primarily into leptons and not hadrons. Anyway as the author says we should wait for the future FERMI data which might focus more on possible dark matter link.