Random Thoughts

You are walking and suddenly you hear a tune, coming from some distance unseen place, and it instantly starts a video of your childhood in your imagination. You can’t help but go through the entire experience again. As if all these memories were just waiting there to be unleashed, and that tune, that music opened the door. We all have had such experiences in our life. At least I have. So, this is a simple note on my thoughts on music. I have always divided thinking into two types, Abstract thinking, and Imaginative thinking. Imaginative thinking is the one that involves imagination, i.e., thinking in terms of images. Further, we can divide imaginative thinking into a number of dimensions involved. You can imagine in 2 dimensions, 3 dimensions, and if your name happens to be Einstein then perhaps 4, 5 …..N dimensions. I didn’t include 0 and 1 dimensions because our imagination of a dimension is always an embedded image in a higher dimension. So, I am not sure how many of us can imagin...

People say Mr. X was great. People talk about the greatness of people like Einstein for ages. But what makes someone great? What is that parameter, the accumulation of which qualifies one to be called great and remembered for years? Is it wealth? Is it success? or is it the ability to cook maggie in 2 mins? I will try to put my thoughts on this. If we make a list of people who are generally considered great say, Newton, Einstein, Tesla, Dirac (I am a science fan so deal with it, just kidding), Elon Musk, Edison, Gandhi, Mandela, Hitler (Yes you heard it right)...and the list goes on. One thing that is common in everyone is the number of lives they affected, or if you are a little poetic then the number of lives they touched, be it in a good way or bad way, was massive. Gandhi affected the lives of all the people in India. The light bulb invented by Edison is still giving jobs to thousands of workers, light to millions of students, and content to a few like me. Hitler even though in a ...

Chintu: Universe is so kind to be following mathematical rules. Mantu: Yeah Chintu: But why is the universe so logical?  As always our hero Chintu has once again asked something. Now you can understand why the title is a question.  But first, what do we mean by logic? It has to do with patterns. When among a set of events we find some links or some pattern, we call the sequence of events logical. These are the patterns that we have represented in the form of mathematical equations and named them as laws of nature. So our question is, why does the universe follow laws? And even if it follows laws, why are they not changing rapidly with time for us to notice? We would try to answer this using the anthropic principle. In our known universe the laws of nature have been constant for a long period of time, For example, Newton's Law of gravity was, is, and will be the same for a long time. The same can be said about other laws too. Now imagine the laws start changing every day. What ...

Chintu: Mantu, I want to be creative. What can I do? Mantu: For starters, find an answer to that. What is a creative brain? In loose terms its a brain that can make many ideas. But aren't all brains thinking all the time? coming up with things every instant? Yes, but not all thoughts are usable. Let's look at an individual idea and try to trace where does it come from and how does it come. For that let me ask you a question first. Suppose you have a square and you want to divide it into four equal parts, how will you do it? Pause here, take some time and come up with a solution. Done? Let's proceed. Here are a few solutions to the problem. I hope you got something like this. Here the solution isn't important but the thought process is. Rewind back a little and try to think how did you arrive at the solution? Did you build it or it just popped up? Don't worry if you couldn't figure it out this time, try the following 3 questions and observe how they are coming, i...

Alice showed two baskets filled with apples, and asked, " Which one does have more apples?".  Chintu after counting replied, "Left one.". Next Alice showed two bottles of water and asked, " Which one does have more now?".  Chintu replied, " The blue one". Then, Alice, this time showed two flowers and asked, " Which one is more beautiful?". Chintu took some time, but couldn't answer.  Alice: What's wrong? Chintu: I can't figure out which is more beautiful? Alice: But you did well in the first two questions, what happened now?  Chintu: In the earlier cases I had numbers to compare, I could count the number of apples and compare the numbers, I could measure the volume and compare the numbers, but how to count beauty? Without a number how can I compare? Alice smiled. Chintu is right in his question. Every time, the question of  'which one is more/less' we encounter, we associate a number to each of the subjects and then ...

Say you have three alphabets A, B, C. How many 2 letter words can you make?  The answer is 9 (3x3). (AB, BC, CA, BA, CB, AC, AA, BB, CC). If you knew one more alphabet, say D, you could now make 16 words (4x4). Just by knowing one more alphabet, you can now do 7 more arrangements to create new words. Knowledge and ideas are no different. With knowledge of 10 things, you can do more permutations to create new ideas than you can do with knowledge of 5 things.  And in most cases of our lives, the appearance of ideas aren't deliberate, they just appear seemingly from nowhere disrespecting space and time. But only if we have the necessary tools (knowledge) to work on those ideas, we won't be able to identify them. For example, one day you are walking and you saw a car. Suddenly you got the question: if I run fast I will run my engine for a lower span of time but at a higher fuel rate. If I go slow fuel rate is low but I have to run the engine for a long period of time. So then wha...