Politics of the Mid-Term Elections bjkumar:

``You did not make too many predictions regarding the political outcomes?!! ``

Yes, that was not the purpose of my essay. But that shouldn`t stop you from making your own.

Thanks again SR for your second post.

Mohammad Gill

Politics of the Mid-Term Elections Interactors:

Thanks for your comments.

SR elaborated the consequences if the Republicans lost their majority control in senate and the house. I had only hinted at them presuming that the consequences would be pretty obvious.. Nonetheless, I thank SR for his comprehensive post.

Kulharee nitpicked on the stem cell research. My point was not so much on the stem cell research per se but on the Michael J. Fox`s tv ad. nasah thankfully clarified the stem cell research issue in his post.

The central theme of the essay was the triviality of the exploitative strategies used by both parties to score points and try to win the votes. Now John Kerry has entered the fray with his ambiguous comments regarding the war on Iraq. Every day there is a new approach for exploitation and winning the votes. John Kerry, a decorated veteran of Vietnam war, would not slur the army. It is just unfortunate that in stead of naming the president directly, his comments became confusing and gave the opening to Republicans, particularly the president and Senator McCain, to accuse him of slurring the army.

The elections circus will continue till November 7 and may become more intense by the day.

Mohammad Gill

Dilemmas of Creative Children Dr. Sohail:
There are all kinds of creative minds. Another name comes readily to mind.
Ramanujan failed every subject excepting mathematics in his intermediate examination. His formal education ended there.
Yet his talent took him to Cambridge to work with great mathematicians of his time.
Mohammad Gill

Dilemmas of Creative Children Dr. Sohail:

Thanks for another thought provoking article.

Highly creative children, like Einstein, will always have dilemmas. They are usually one of a kind in their class and hence lonely. Therefore, they communicate with themselves. It is usually the creative, but not extremely, children who need guidance and direction.

Karl Gauss was so far ahead of not only his class fellows but also his teacher that there were always unpleasant encounters. He would invariably correct whenever his teacher lost track of a mathematical problem. In school, he had developed the solution of a 4th order polynomial equation (Omar Khayyam had given the soultion of a cubic equation).

He used to say about his teacher:

He is a mathematician among poets and a poet among mathematician.

In school, Iqbal had composed the following verse:

Mein jiss kay saath hoo`n ussay hoti nahin shikast
Iqbal meray naam ki taseer dekhna

Mohammad Gill

Revolt in Paradise Allama Iqbal derogated reason (and the derived knowledge of science) to extreme limits. Some of his devoted followers wondered “Iqbal aql kay peechay kyon’ latth liye rahtay hain?” One of the facts which many of us have not resolved is that when the question of his condemnation of reason and science is considered, benefit of doubt is given to him because we worship him as an authority. Even those who haven’t read his philosophy consider him unassailable. In fact, it is largely true of those who haven’t read his philosophy. It does not occur to them that Iqbal could be wrong. The fact is that Iqbal was wrong on many issues; his condemnation of science is only one of them. His devotees quote him as if they are quoting from Quran.

He also said although I am not sure if he said in the context that I understand it:

Sher mardon’ sey hua baisha-e-tahqeeq tahee
Rah gaiy sufi-o-mullah kay ghulam a’ay saqi

The field of scientific research is completely empty of the Muslim scientists.

There was no occasion to bring Iqbal and his condemnation of science here because it is toally out of place in the context of the original article.

Mohammad Gill

9/11: DOB of Islamophobia Islamophobia has become so pervasive that even the Pope jumped into the fray and made a fool of himself. 9/11 or no 9/11, the west has been Islamophobic for ages. I am appending Karen armstrong`s comments on the Pope`s silly speech hereunder. What we need is more Karen Armstrongs and fewer fundamentalists like the Pope and the mullahs.
Mohammad Gill

---

We cannot afford to maintain these ancient prejudices against Islam

The Pope`s remarks were dangerous, and will convince many more Muslims that the west is incurably Islamophobic

Karen Armstrong
Monday September 18, 2006
The Guardian
In the 12th century, Peter the Venerable, Abbot of Cluny, initiated a dialogue with the Islamic world. ``I approach you not with arms, but with words,`` he wrote to the Muslims whom he imagined reading his book, ``not with force, but with reason, not with hatred, but with love.`` Yet his treatise was entitled Summary of the Whole Heresy of the Diabolical Sect of the Saracens and segued repeatedly into spluttering intransigence. Words failed Peter when he contemplated the ``bestial cruelty`` of Islam, which, he claimed, had established itself by the sword. Was Muhammad a true prophet? ``I shall be worse than a donkey if I agree,`` he expostulated, ``worse than cattle if I assent!``
Peter was writing at the time of the Crusades. Even when Christians were trying to be fair, their entrenched loathing of Islam made it impossible for them to approach it objectively. For Peter, Islam was so self-evidently evil that it did not seem to occur to him that the Muslims he approached with such ``love`` might be offended by his remarks. This medieval cast of mind is still alive and well.
Last week, Pope Benedict XVI quoted, without qualification and with apparent approval, the words of the 14th-century Byzantine emperor Manuel II: ``Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.`` The Vatican seemed bemused by the Muslim outrage occasioned by the Pope`s words, claiming that the Holy Father had simply intended ``to cultivate an attitude of respect and dialogue toward the other religions and cultures, and obviously also towards Islam``.
But the Pope`s good intentions seem far from obvious. Hatred of Islam is so ubiquitous and so deeply rooted in western culture that it brings together people who are usually at daggers drawn. Neither the Danish cartoonists, who published the offensive caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad last February, nor the Christian fundamentalists who have called him a paedophile and a terrorist, would ordinarily make common cause with the Pope; yet on the subject of Islam they are in full agreement.
Our Islamophobia dates back to the time of the Crusades, and is entwined with our chronic anti-semitism. Some of the first Crusaders began their journey to the Holy Land by massacring the Jewish communities along the Rhine valley; the Crusaders ended their campaign in 1099 by slaughtering some 30,000 Muslims and Jews in Jerusalem. It is always difficult to forgive people we know we have wronged. Thenceforth Jews and Muslims became the shadow-self of Christendom, the mirror image of everything that we hoped we were not - or feared that we were.
The fearful fantasies created by Europeans at this time endured for centuries and reveal a buried anxiety about Christian identity and behaviour. When the popes called for a Crusade to the Holy Land, Christians often persecuted the local Jewish communities: why march 3,000 miles to Palestine to liberate the tomb of Christ, and leave unscathed the people who had - or so the Crusaders mistakenly assumed - actually killed Jesus. Jews were believed to kill little children and mix their blood with the leavened bread of Passover: this ``blood libel`` regularly inspired pogroms in Europe, and the image of the Jew as the child slayer laid bare an almost Oedipal terror of the parent faith.
Jesus had told his followers to love their enemies, not to exterminate them. It was when the Christians of Europe were fighting brutal holy wars against Muslims in the Middle East that Islam first became known in the west as the religion of the sword. At this time, when the popes were trying to impose celibacy on the reluctant clergy, Muhammad was portrayed by the scholar monks of Europe as a lecher, and Islam condemned - with ill-concealed envy - as a faith that encouraged Muslims to indulge their basest sexual instincts. At a time when European social order was deeply hierarchical, despite the egalitarian message of the gospel, Islam was condemned for giving too much respect to women and other menials.
In a state of unhealthy denial, Christians were projecting subterranean disquiet about their activities on to the victims of the Crusades, creating fantastic enemies in their own image and likeness. This habit has persisted. The Muslims who have objected so vociferously to the Pope`s denigration of Islam have accused him of ``hypocrisy``, pointing out that the Catholic church is ill-placed to condemn violent jihad when it has itself been guilty of unholy violence in crusades, persecutions and inquisitions and, under Pope Pius XII, tacitly condoned the Nazi Holocaust.
Pope Benedict delivered his controversial speech in Germany the day after the fifth anniversary of September 11. It is difficult to believe that his reference to an inherently violent strain in Islam was entirely accidental. He has, most unfortunately, withdrawn from the interfaith initiatives inaugurated by his predecessor, John Paul II, at a time when they are more desperately needed than ever. Coming on the heels of the Danish cartoon crisis, his remarks were extremely dangerous. They will convince more Muslims that the west is incurably Islamophobic and engaged in a new crusade.
We simply cannot afford this type of bigotry. The trouble is that too many people in the western world unconsciously share this prejudice, convinced that Islam and the Qur`an are addicted to violence. The 9/11 terrorists, who in fact violated essential Islamic principles, have confirmed this deep-rooted western perception and are seen as typical Muslims instead of the deviants they really were.
With disturbing regularity, this medieval conviction surfaces every time there is trouble in the Middle East. Yet until the 20th century, Islam was a far more tolerant and peaceful faith than Christianity. The Qur`an strictly forbids any coercion in religion and regards all rightly guided religion as coming from God; and despite the western belief to the contrary, Muslims did not impose their faith by the sword.
The early conquests in Persia and Byzantium after the Prophet`s death were inspired by political rather than religious aspirations. Until the middle of the eighth century, Jews and Christians in the Muslim empire were actively discouraged from conversion to Islam, as, according to Qur`anic teaching, they had received authentic revelations of their own. The extremism and intolerance that have surfaced in the Muslim world in our own day are a response to intractable political problems - oil, Palestine, the occupation of Muslim lands, the prevelance of authoritarian regimes in the Middle East, and the west`s perceived ``double standards`` - and not to an ingrained religious imperative.
But the old myth of Islam as a chronically violent faith persists, and surfaces at the most inappropriate moments. As one of the received ideas of the west, it seems well-nigh impossible to eradicate. Indeed, we may even be strengthening it by falling back into our old habits of projection. As we see the violence - in Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon - for which we bear a measure of responsibility, there is a temptation, perhaps, to blame it all on ``Islam``. But if we are feeding our prejudice in this way, we do so at our peril.
• Karen Armstrong is the author of Islam: A Short History
comment@guardian.co.uk

Comprehending Time tehshah:

Physical time is different from the metaphysical, subjective and psychological time. We are progressively gaining more and more knowledge of the physcial time. Divine time whatever it may be is of no use to us - pardon me; it is useful to the poets for writing their verses.

Jo thaa naheen` haiy, jo haiy nah hoga....

And good poetry is part of our life.

Mohammad Gill

Comprehending Time In the last chapter of his book (About Time), Paul Davies noted, “In 1905, Einstein plucked time from philosophy and placed it at the heart of physics….Nearly a century later, our understanding of time has advanced enormously, yet the Einstein revolution was clearly just the beginning. We are still a long way from solving the riddle of time.”

To enable us solve the riddle of time, he proposed the following twelve questions that need to be answered.

1.Tachyons: can we rule them out?
Tachyon is a particle “that might occasionally flip into another universe, where time was running backwards, and then flip back again.”
2.Black Holes: do they really exist?
Are there such things as white holes? What are white holes? Davies stated, “They are ‘black holes’ in reverse. “Instead of swallowing things up voraciously, they spew them out.” They are not known to exist and most scientists discard them out of hand.
3.Time Travel: just a fantasy?
4.Quantum questions.
5.Is time just a relic?
6.The origin of time.
“If time existed before the big bang, we have to explain what physical processes predicted this dramatic and violent event, and how it was caused.”
7.The age of the universe.
8.The cosmological term (Einstein’s cosmological constant): blunder or triumph.
9.Beyond the standard theory.
10.The arrow of time.
“The theory that there may exist spacetime regions where time ‘runs backwards,’ or that the entire universe may be time-symmetric or even cyclic in time, is still popular in some quarters. There is plenty of scope for further investigation – and disagreement.”
11.Time symmetry violation.
12.The flow of time: mind or matter.

Mohammad Gill

Comprehending Time tahmed:

The way you expressed your thoughts on the limitations of the human brain was quite confusing; it was difficult at least for me to understand your viewpoint. Your nomenclature of “extending the capacity of the human brain” perhaps meant developing the intellect further. We need not worry about it; it continues developing more and more.

But there is still some confusion about how you express your ideas. For example, you say “..that scientific advances have reached a stage where our ``reach`` has exceeded our ``grasp.``” At the frontiers of our scientific knowledge, there was always some vagueness, some gray areas, some tentativeness.. There were several possibilities at such junctures and the scientists didn’t know which of them would bear fruit. In due time, the mist lifted and the way ahead was lighted. A similar situation exists now.

There are many physicists who believe that the string theorists are wasting there time because they believe that this theory will not unify the fundamental forces. Such a strong ‘negative’ conviction is harmful for science. Many string theorists have staked their professional lives to pursue the trail in string theory. May be we’ll see the ‘light of the day’ soon or in the next fifty years (Weinberg) or perhaps never. It took more than three hundred years to find the proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem. The scientists can continue creatively only if there is hope for them to achieve something meaningful. Pessimism is the bane of scientific pursuit. Caution is the buzz word.

The way you tried to communicate your ideas on the limitations of the human brain was quite pessimistic. My supervisor had advised me never to believe “it cannot be done;” it may be only a matter of time.

The examples you have given prove my point. Your examples point to the achievements of the human intellect (brain). Please don’t believe that we have reached the end of the road. While we are exchanging these interacts, hundreds of scientists are busy attempting to understand the things which we might think are incomprehensible (or beyond the grasp of the human brain).

Mohammad Gill

Comprehending Time netizen:

Thanks for sharing your knowledge with the readers.

Mohammad Gill

Comprehending Time tahmed:

We should not feel discouraged if some concepts are too complex for physical visualization. If we were restrained by such constraints we would have already closed the shop. Mathematics is the strongest and most effective tool that we have; it helps us to progress into the darkest domain.

Four dimensional spacetime was an unfamiliar concept at the beginning of the twentieth century; now we use it as a matter of routine. Likewise ten or eleven (nobody mentioned 9 dimensions) dimensions in which the string theory seems to work are no longer daunting (not excessively); the physicists are working with them (mathematically, of course) and forming new concepts. If we close the shop simply because we cannot easily visualize what we are doing, we’ll not march ahead. The physicists and mathematicians fumble around and try everything and whatever seems to work, they take it and develop it further.

To say that our brain is limited hence we cannot go any further is very unscientific. I lose you and your argument when you say “..it would be necessary to extend the capacity of the human brain itself.” How do you know that our brain is not evolving every instant of the time? Is there any specific and direct method of extending the capacity of the brain (extending it mechanically, or what?).

In the second decade of the twentieth century, Kaluza had sent his paper to Einstein in which he had unified the theory of relativity and theory of electromagnetism in five dimensions. The idea of the fifth dimension was so outlandish and unreal to Einstein that he sat over Kaluza’s paper and did not send it for publication. That was a mistake!

P.S:

You’ve solved your own problem when you say “..Why should I waste my time with an individual who writes insults over the internet that he would never have the courage to repeat to anyone`s face in real life?” Avoid interacting with masadi if he doesn’t stop insulting you. The same goes for masadi also. You guys can make your point without hurling insults over each other.

Mohammad Gill

Comprehending Time tahmed:

Progress in science is systematic. Theory of relativity could not be developed before Newton`s laws of gravitation and Maxwell`s theory of electromagnetism were discovered. Newton had to follow Galileo and Kepler. Likewise, theory of quantum mechanics came to us at its opportune time. Miracles just don`t happen in science. And remember there would, most likely, be always some unanswered questions otherwise the human life would become very insipid and unexciting. If there are no problems to work upon, there will not be any research.

masadi has correctly mentioned the progress of human knowledge by ``incremental`` steps although he said it in a rather deprecating manner. Why don`t you two show some respect for each other?

Mohammad Gill

Comprehending Time tahmed:

You take a very dim view of the progress that science has made over the last couple of centuries. If we do not yet know the ultimate truth, it doesn’t mean that we are still as ignorant as in the past.

In physics, twentieth century alone gave us theory of relativity, theory of quantum mechanics, and theory of Big Bang. Before relativity, time was considered as absolute; it was there and that was that. Relativity told us that time was not absolute; it is relativistic.

These new theories gave us new vocabulary and the terms that our forefathers had never used before; they are mere routine now. Twentieth century also gave us computers and artificial intelligence. We, who are outside of the mainstream of science, fail to appreciate what science is doing for us, the humans. Theory of biological evolution is one of the most prominent milestones of human knowledge. We have much better comprehension of physical time now than ever before.

Science is different from metaphysics which seeks to provide final answers (mostly wrong) to our questions. Science answers one question and raises two new ones. It should not frustrate us because we will never be able to answer all the questions correctly. Search for the answers is the exciting pursuit. Hopefully, twenty first century will give us the so-called Theory of Everything and then we shall be able to comprehend the natural phenomena much better.

I don’t agree with you when you assert “even the finest minds working at the frontiers of physics and math - cannot intuitively grasp the meaning of time any more than a dog can grasp the meaning of algebra. That is, our minds are simply not wired to be able to understand this.” And you know that that’s not true. Progress in science is both heartening and sobering at the same time.

Like everyone else, I am also affected by what is going on around us in the world. So I do write on the political issues also. I have sensed that a Chowk writer writes the essays and articles with a different viewpoint than the interactors most of whom are inextricably trapped in petty politics of India and Pakistan. No matter what the subject matter is, they drag the old and trite petty political issues invariably into the discussion. So please try to understand that when I write on current affairs, my intention is not to prompt meaningless discussion. Most of the interactors do not have anything else to write about. If I were managing Chowk, I’ll cut the trivial and meaningless discussion without a second thought.

Mohammad Gill

Comprehending Time Netizen:

Let me confess at the outset that although I am familiar with the broader concept of wormholes, I do not know much about their physics.

The physics of wormholes is paradoxical and implies transmission of information at a speed greater than that of light. Hence the possibility of time travel. Many physicists are engaged in discovering ``a physically realistic example of how to beat the clock - and survive,`` (Paul Davies).

Allow me to quote from Paul Davies, ``So horrendous are the physical and philosophical problems with time travel that Stephen Hawking has proposed a `chronology protection hypothesis,` according to which nature will always find a way to prevent wormholes and other contrivances from permitting travel into the past. That way, remarks Hawking, the universe can be made safe for historians. There is no general agreement about whether chronology protection is valid, and if so whether it is contained in existing physics or requires something new. All the known examples of time travel have pathological features that would render them unphysical or unstable in practice. But without a general theorem to rule out all loopy spacetimes, there is always a chance that some clever researcher will come up with a physically realistic example of how to beat the clock - and survive.``

Mohammad Gill

Comprehending Time drsohail:

There are many metaphysical descriptions of time. Iqbal also believed (metaphysically) that `Time is God.` Iqbal wrote (The Reconstruction…, p.73), “The problem of time has always drawn attention of Muslim thinkers and mystics. This seems to be due partly to the fact that, according to the Quran, the alternation of day and night is one of the greatest signs of God, and partly to the Prophet’s identification of God with ‘Dahr’ (time) {Surah 76} in a well-known tradition…”

The tradition that he referred to states, “Don’t speak ill of time because time is God.” I have read this Hadith from Iqbal’s quotation but I cannot pinpoint it because I have lost the reference.

However, I am more interested in physical time than metaphysical.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on time at Chowk.

Mohammad Gill

Comprehending Time nasah:
The unidirectionality (arrow of time) of time is still not understood very well. As I had mentioned in the article, the fundamental equations of physics are symmetrical with respect to time but time is unidirectional. We cannot recover the eggs from the omelet.
I had also mentioned Vafa Cumrun, a Harvard physics professor, who has hypothesized that time is two dimensional. We still have a lot to learn about time before we find reliable answers to these puzzles.
Like St. Augustine, I know what time is (intuitively) if you don`t ask me to describe it. But we`ve come a long way from Augustine and Kant. We know time is not absolute; it is relativistic. And so is simultaneity.
I wish I knew better.
Mohammad Gill