10 most important scientific questions - part I

This is my list of 10 most important scientific questions.

1. What is consciousness? How does it "emerge"?
2. What is the fate of universe? If universe collapses in big crunch what will happen after that? Endless void? What does it even mean? BTW, what was "before" big bang? I know time started in big bang. But suddenly why some 14 Billion years ago, universe had to start? And it started out of what? I placed consciousness before this question as answer to 1) may have implications for this, although it is probably even deeper question.
3. Are there other intelligent creatures in the universe? [I am pretty sure there are organisms outside earth, at least single celled ones like bacteria]
4. How exactly quantum wave function collapse to an eigen value occurs upon observation? Is it a "real" feature or an artifact of our current incomplete quantum theory?
5. How to build physical theories based on discrete space-time? It is obvious, that real numbers are anything but real [talk about infinite precision!]. Time can only be measured through some periodic activity and there is definitely a limit to fine grained granularity we can go into. Since time and space are interchangeable it implies there should be a limit to space measurements as well. That said why is our calculus [continuity] based theories working at all?
6. Are there any near earth objects which has high probability of collision with earth and wipe out humanity, in say next 1000 years? On a related note, are there any other 'planets' outside solar system within 10-15 rocket speed year distance we can live in?[in 1000 years we definitely would have colonised whole of solar system - Jupiter, Mars etc.]

Next 4 are in next post...

When to give solid feed to baby

We were confused as to when to give solid feed [cerelac etc.] to our baby. We researched quite a bit and found this from The American Academy of Pediatrics very informative.

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) believes that breastfeeding is the optimal source of nutrition through the first year of life. We recommend exclusively breastfeeding for a minimum of four months but preferably for six months.

 

Why plants reject green, most abundant wavelength in sun?

When we look at the solar spectrum it has its maximum around green.

 
So it is really odd, that plants reject green light  when it has the most energy. Is it simply the quirk of evolution [chlorophyll won out as the top photo synthesizer] or is there a deeper reason?

Very courteous and helpful Bangalore police!

I was pleasantly surprised when I went to Ulsoor and Indira nagar police station near me. Upto that most of my experiences in Coimbatore, Hyderabad and Guwahati were par for our country.

But when I went to Ulsoor police station I went straight to traffic police station and they very helpfully redirected me to law and order police station. In Ulsoor station they were very helpful and when I asked for a particular document they promptly gave it instead of making me run around.

In Indira nagar police station as well they were very helpful and one of the officer there actually even xeroxed one of my documents for me [can you believe that?] In fact one of the police man actually gave his seat to me [I am not an old man, BTW] for me to fill some forms along with an officer. To top it all, when I asked for Indira Nagar police station number, the officer actually gave his number and asked me to call him in case the document doesn't go through etc.

During whole of this exercise I was very pleasantly surprised by How courteous and helpful Bangalore police, particularly in these police stations are!

A real big thanks and shout out to Bangalore police!

Installing Firefox5 on RHEL5

I found these instructions Godsend after a lot of blind alleys.

CentOS 5.x FireFox 5 working install

Standard model looks ugly...

I was reading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subatomic_particle

Elementary particles of the Standard Model include:[2]
Six "flavors" of quarks: up, down, bottom, top, strange, and charm;
Six types of leptons: electron, electron neutrino, muon, muon neutrino, tau, tau neutrino;
Thirteen gauge bosons (force carriers): the graviton of gravity, the photon of electromagnetism, the three W and Z bosons of the weak force, and the eight gluons of the strong force.

and was thinking to myself, holy crap - standard model for sure looks ugly. It looked more like intelligent design theory of physics rather than theory of evolution - that is every particle [species] was created independently instead of being essentially variation on the same thing .

So I looked in the net and even Great Stephen hawking seems to feel that way!

If we understand the universe, then we control it, in a sense. The standard model is clearly unsatisfactory in this respect. First of all, it is ugly and ad hoc. The particles are grouped in an apparently arbitrary way, and the standard model depends on 24 numbers whose values can not be deduced from first principles, but which have to be chosen to fit the observations. What understanding is there in that?

Clearly something needs to be done, and it is not complicating life more by introducing multiple universes [To me all the universes comprise to become one true universe - which is what I would call THE universe. No universes] - It is inaccessible to us is irrelevant. Even in our universe, observable part is not the whole universe - It is only what is called 'observable universe'.

Thomas Nagel's interesting papers!

I came across these two papers from Philosopher Thomas Nagel by accident.

Sexual perversion

and

What it is like to be bat?

Both are amazingly well reasoned arguments and for the first one I was happy someone tried to scientifically define 'perversion' and second one is better known for his arguments for taking human mentality seriously quite independent of its physical reduction.

Both are nice read!