A tour I like to take a note of in my dairy

On Jan 1, 2011 (reads 1  1  11 on my watch) on a Kingfisher airbus from Bhubaneswar to New Delhi,

I noted to a fellow passenger from Andhra Pradesh, who thinks Jagan Reddy is struggling to come up with Sonia Gandhi (his idea was they are in collision path)

that Government in India is not doing enough to secure the Indian nation by fully taking advantage of Indian economic growth, e.g. it hasn’t privatized the international air carriers from lunching their business in India like other small forms of business ventures have done,

part of the reason is a myopia and illusion of fear, at least a talk of the fear creates a sensation that prevents Indian customers from the best experience and best airfare possible on international routes, this is similar to the motor vehicle industry, the home grown touts have swindled colossal amount of finance and created a mediocre system,

This is something we never outsourced from the advanced nation, my discussion was longer than this, he described the current political affairs of Andhra Pradesh, a neighboring state of Odisha.

I flew from Bhubaneswar to Delhi and had to change my flight at Delhi for my onward trip to Chandigarh. Delhi airport has come up to some of the best in the world, I had a Coffee and a croissant, the later was stuffed with some masala potato.

I don’t remember exactly the name of the snacks store in the airport, but this lady comes and asks for some change at the store and the store guy jokes with the lady saying Miss Change, the lady reverts Don’t call me Miss Change.

This you can put into your movie and name it sexual harassment or something, I just enjoyed the cozy environ of the airport, sitting on the lounge I stared at the passersby and imagined Nirvana. I have always done that, may be since I started commuting long term distances.

I just reminded myself that much of my life I have been an airport man, so far, when I walk the rollers and take the closest restroom I remind myself I am just a Physicist walking on ground as a true MILF

(Mata Jee I would like some freedom)

I reached Delhi about 10 in the morning and got a happy New Year call from a close friend. The friend wasn’t notified earlier by me that I would be in Delhi so she was surprised but I was elated to tell her that although I am not quite going to head to Delhi downtown, right away, I don’t have a return trip booked.

I am crazy to think that I love airports and rest rooms. But this is an integral part of my life. I took another airbus and in an hour reached Chandigarh, a place I always wanted to see, at least one time since I hear a great deal that it’s a twin city or rather a clone city of Bhubaneswar.

They were designed by the same engineer.

Argue with me, an architect is not an engineer, what a snob I would turn without notifying you. SO in Delhi airport I meet this fella from Nigeria. He studied in the USA and took a degree in architecture, presently lives in Seatle, WA. I saw him using a Mac and thought its best to ask him if the airport internet is working to connect with his laptop.

My laptop which is a good old Mac, a power book, purchased in 2005 August, was overhauled y by more and more powerful PowerBooks, this time they were christened Mac book, this comes with envious features, nobody in his right mind buys another laptop in 5 months because the one you bought was manifestly redesigned.

Neither did I. 5 years and it’s still working. It’s failed on many counts, many hardware parts do not function, I have had several repairs, but it works like a MILF

(Mama I would like some fancy)

Software is something that always fails, every instant, but it effectively shows up in a few occasions like a hang up or something, this is not bad software; this is the limit of how a software would behave in a real environment like a laptop computer or a desktop, king into account  their hardware design etc.

There are natural principles involved that nobody is bothered to excavate. Talk nanotechnology and have a research program, then work on human rights violation. I discovered that Delhi airport is like any other international airport, the Wi-Fi is a paid commodity.

WHY??  

Not because it rhymes with Wi-Fe.

(She is my wife; she works on alimony, and she works wirelessly through a router, some legal obstructions to the freedom of a man in a society where all men are supposed to be chauvinists and are asked to pay a lofty hefty lump some service fee, It’s a men’s world for heaven’s sake.)

This Nigerian person is in India for a while to do some internship or something, in Chandigarh, I bid him goodbye at the airport. Of course we discussed a lot about academics environment in India and US. Chandigarh airport is being upgraded but right now it’s a pretty yet small airport,

I claimed my baggage and asked somebody about, to direct me to the bus stop. Take an exit and take left. OKAY, so I reached the parking lot and there is just no sign of bus stop. SO I asked the taxi people,

(Why would they direct me to the bus stop and not advocate to hire them for a ride??)

SO I asked a cop who was politicking with a taxi guy. Well Sir!! it would be quite a distance, 1.5 kms, take an auto, auto would take 150 Rupees. SO I ask an auto guy. The auto driver also said the same thing, 150 Rupees. (INR)

The ride continued on and on, and Chandigarh is quite chilled, this time of the year, much worse from my native region, but being a true MILF

(Mistress I would like some bad Fahrenheit)

And the fact that subzero is in my blood, I continued to enjoy. When it continued well above 5 kms, I suspected something is not quite like it should be, so I asked the driver why he said me its 1.5 kms, he said “sir I said 150 Rupees, nothing about the distance”, so I pressed him to tell me how far and he says it’s a good 14 kms.

How on earth someone can say me 1.5 kms. He is definitely not a high school jerk who misses the decimal. I assured him his payment o’ 150 Rs since he was being honest and arrived my destination, sector 43, from where I have to take the bus to Ludhiana, my final destination.

Of course it’s a good idea to find some highway recluse and let your abdomen release all the water. Remember it’s a flabbergasting city and truly one. But we got to do what we got to do. I did. The gentle man driving the auto offered me some water to drink but I demanded I use it to wash my hand, so he allowed me to do that without freaking much, I, then, to please him, drunk a little and we set off to sector 43.

Now the adventure begins, like 14 km wasn’t enough. I asked for a ticket to Ludhiana in an AC bus. The rowdies at the bus stop were deadly against a man’s freedom to choose what bus he wants to take. SO they asked me to wait for an hour when the bus would leave or that’s what they made me believe. They were more interested in sailing the non AC tickets, it does not matter it’s a Government bus stop.

Government isn’t good enough to do anything worthwhile for its citizen. At least the rowdies prove the Government wrong. So after waiting for an hour I asked them for a ticket, the young hook was quite an annoying guy, like he owned the whole place, denied me any civilized response, the others kept on pretending they would give me a ticket.

I knew they are playing and its 5 in the evening; I started my journey 6 in the morning, so I didn’t want to quite take my last resort, shear MILFism. On the other hand they were all Sikhs with turbans, 10 of them, ruling the bus stop like Taliban is ruling the Afgans. I decided to take a taxi, 15 times expensive, 100 kms to my destination.

So I asked the next good looking guy. He said the taxi would be Rs 1500. When I asked him to take me to the car, he asked me to ride his manual man driven cart, man rickshaw. I thought he was going to drive but it usually takes me some time before I recognize that there is even a difference quotient between a rickshaw puller and a taxi man.

He pulled the rickshaw for a mile or so to sector 42, for my cab. So I am sitting in the Rickshaw with my small luggage and thinking I am the Maharaja of India, getting a Chivalry honor.  I paid the rickshaw man a Rs30, he had wanted a Rs20 from me. The cab owner fixed a deal at Rs 1600, despite o’ the fact that there was no heating in the cab.

I agreed, in couple hours we reached my destination, the cab driver wants a few more Rs100s. From Rs1500 I ended up @Rs 1740

(I paid for a coffee for the driver)

OK for keeping a record. the cab owner and the driver were two different guys and the owner did not come along. SO this is my story in the last couple days, there are more? I appeared for this interview for a local University where I was asked these (Physics) questions.   

1. Explain the research you have done. My answer  I am an experimental particle physicist. I have worked in high energy accelerator research organization, Japan where I worked in a laboratory experiment similar to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment at Geneva. It’s an electron positron collision experiment.
2. Tell more precisely what you have done, My answer  I worked to measure an asymmetry in the decay of neutral charmed mesons
3. Tell (still) more precisely, (about) your thesis research

 

(I liked someone asking this than saying; tell us briefly about your research in terms in which we understand this, rather than in terms in which you are doing this)

I answered, how a neutral charmed meson decays into two different channels with different branching functions, this difference is experimentally measurable. This is not CP violation

(This incidentally was mentioned by the interviewer, he seemed quite interested about Physics)

But rather a so called interference in amplitudes of a Favored and suppressed modes of the decay.

(Actually I described that in the discussion)

1. What’s the status of Particle Physics? Is it going to foreclosure? My answer  NO. There always will be something or other going to come out of these efforts.
2. Do you know what string theory is?

 

(NO I just get to hear about it) my answer is its esoteric it draws more upon mathematics and it talks about reality that are experimentally not making much sense, as of yet. But it’s a good theoretical development towards a GUT. A grand unified theory that Einstein envisaged.

1. What’s GUT, explain. My answer is how we intend to unify all 4 elementary forces of nature, how we have been successful at unifying strong force with quantum mechanics and call it QCD. Then that’s a standalone patch. In another patch we have quantum mechanics (of course with relativity) unified with the earlier unification of weak force with QED called electroweak theory. Whereas QED is the unification of quantum mechanics with the electromagnetic forces, Electromagnetic forces are the unification of Electricity with magnetism through Maxwell’s equations and these are formulated to take into account relativistic effects.

 

1. Give us a demo of your lecture to students.

 

Now there were no blackboards or any chosen topic here SO I said I would have a lecture note or something from where I can give a demonstration.

SO they instructed a topic, explain Beta decay. My answer is when there is an electron that comes out of an atom because of a weak force (that I had just explained) it’s called a beta decay.

SO one of the panel members asked if an electron exist inside a nucleus. How can it come out of the nucleus?

SO I said an atom consists of nucleus and electron, nucleus does not have an electron. But an electron may be created inside the nucleus, what happens is a neutron converts into a proton and an electron and this electron is released through quantum mechanical tunneling. This process is called Beta decay

(Beta meaning electron that comes out of nucleus, because that is where it’s produced)

This is a weak interaction process.

1. I think that is where it ended; there could have been more questions that I certainly don’t remember. May be the last one, about what mesons are. What’s CP violation, is parity or charge alone conserved. My answers were, mesons are 2 quark particles, baryons are 3 quark particles (e.g. proton), have quarks been found, confirmed? YES, we don’t see them singleton because we have asymptotic freedom, but I have studied mesons and these are built from quarks.
2. There was another session where I was asked more Physics questions, in a single member panel, different than this one. The questions were, what’s an atom, what is the character of an atom. Is atom divisible further

 

(My answer is YES, atom into nuclei and electron, nucleus into proton and neutron, protons and neutrons are made of quarks, each from two different types of quark. The atom is the smallest chemical constituent of matter or as we know the elements of chemical periodic table)

1. What’s a Fermion and what’s a Boson? What’s the difference?? my answer is fermions are half integer spin particles, bosons are integer spin particles, Fermions produce ordinary matter but Bosons are force carrier particles such as photons (light quantum) , gluons, etc  Examples of fermions are electrons and protons.
2.  There were no more Physics questions if I remember.