29 August 2006

Democratization of knowledge: Part 1; What is knowledge?

How does one define knowledge? A quick search through the various online repositories, viz. definethat,answers.com, the freedictionary.com, dictionary.com yield the result (in a condensed form) that knowledge is the state of knowing, familiarity, acquaintance, awareness from study or investigation, but knowledge differs from data or information in that new knowledge may be created from existing knowledge using logical inference. If information is data plus meaning then knowledge is information plus processing, knowledge is an appreciation of the possession of interconnected details which, in isolation, are of lesser value. The crux of the matter is: knowledge is a dynamic thing and evolves as the humans evolve. And one needs to keep on exercising the grey cells, continuously, ad-infinitum.

Knowledge is the corner stone of all activities, viz. academic, artistic, emotional, business, etc. The purpose of any human activity employs the usage of the current knowledge with the (mostly unperceived) aim of augmenting it. Knowledge is power (to quote some anonymous), and power gives you freedom, and hence the ultimate quest of humans on this earth is the quest for knowledge. All adventures, journeys into the unknown, are the manifestation of this quest.

Since knowledge is equated with power, and rightly so, the history is more than replete with instances of a few 'powermongers' making all desperate efforts to keep a tab on the knowledge base from reaching the general mass. The business of the 'powermongers' critically depend on the ignorance of the people over whom they want to rule, be it the king over the subjects, the president (or the chancellor, or whatever the nomenclature of a democratic setup may be) over the citizens, the priest over the devout believers, or the corporate over the consumers. The business of these 'powermongers' prospered in the medieval ages due to the generic laziness of the majority of population in taking up the responsibility of their lives with the attitude of 'whatever will be will be.........', until renaissance and democracy woke up the western world (Europe, to be precise), and their colonization of the rest stirred the long buried concept of freedom and knowledge.

The flame of knowledge could never die, for that is the essence of human existence. It was always preserved, and will always be preserved, by some small fragments of the societal set up (which at times may constitute of individuals, the smallest fragment of a society). The essence of democracy is to pervade the whole society with the availability of knowledge, rather, to put it more correctly, remove the obstacles from path of gaining knowledge for any and every branch of the societal set up. Knowledge is not something that you earn or gain, it is a level of realization that you attune yourself to, and the purpose of democracy is to setup up a system which will not generate unnecessary obstacles in the path of self realization to the level each and every individual aspires to. That is the ultimate state, the loftiest goal, that any society can aspire for, it is the utopian dream of the small societal fragments that toil day and night to keep the flame burning, and they find their purpose of existence in this toil.

28 August 2006

Picture of the earth

What effect does a picture of the earth shot from space (that includes moon) have on the general public?

Imagine the cave man, looking at the passing of the seaons as heavenly wonders that he has no control on. He has grown up seeing the strange phenomenon of moon, changing its size with a definite periodicity, appearing, disappearing and reappearing, giving the impressions of Godlike forces acting on the heavenly bodies. His perception tells him that he is at the centre of the universe, a unique flat land engulfed by a bowl of blue sky that turns dark when the sun goes to sleep revealing the twinkling stars. He is a usual chap, not the philospher kind who ruminate over the mankind's past-present-future as well as its location in the this whole scheme of things. His worries are the same as the worries of the usual guy of today, providing food, shelter etc. etc., but the connotations of the images that he has grown up with gives him his bearing on this earth, in this life.

Now imagine the 21st century average guy who grows up seeing the following picture since his childhood:-


Does this picture alter the subconscious awareness of one's being in the mind and heart of Mr. Joe Average? Does it fill his heart with awe, his mind with the feeling of extreme beauty and vastness of this universe? Will this affect the the way the Mr. Joe Average looks at his life, bothered with his mundane worries and works? Will it affect the way he lives his life? Will it anyway change the way he starts his day in the morning and hits the bed at night? Does the the distance from which the photograph of the earth is taken alter his perspective through which he views himself, his life and his aspirations? Does this view of the earth from space change his life in any small or big way? Or to use the current fashionable phrases, 'Will his quality of life improve in any way' on seeing this picture and growing up with the attitude that the earth is unique as well as not so unique in this macroscopic scheme of things called the universe?

The answer to all the questions above is a resounding YES! Forget the philosophical implications, scientific aspirations and understanding or the academic interest. At a practical level life is a series of problems, and all our efforts to live can be classified as a list of solutions that we are searching for, trying out and implementing for the problems that our lives dish out at every moment. The key factor that affects the finding of solutions and implementing them is the perspective from which we see the problems, i.e. this world, and a wider perspective gives us a better understanding of the system in which we live and solve the problems, and it is imperative that Mr. Joe Average of the 21st century will have a broader database to define his problems of life, find and try out solutions from the perspective he has developed (perhaps unconsciously) by growing up with the picture of earth rising as viewed from the moon. Even an unlettered man will look at the problems, i.e. his life, with a different attitude once he grows comfortable with the picture from the moon, it affects each one of us to the core of our thinking, no matter how distanced our day to day life is from the the ones who are gathering funds for further missions to shoot some more such pictures!

23 August 2006

Distance and perspective

I will not be writing long (hopefully), but I will surely elaborate on the theme that got me started with this blog, an astronomer's perspective, and what does it add to the understanding of a down to earth practical world.

Perspective is a complicated issue, mainly because you can never remove your personal bias. In fact it has everything to do with personal bias, but a good analysis tries to wedge in different perspectives to get a more or less complete picture. The idea is that one can never really remove bias, as all students of the 'theory of relativity' learns that observation depends on observer (rather the observer's frame of reference), but a good observer will be able to transform from one frame of reference to another and foretell what the other observer is seeing. So, in effect you can never really remove bias, but you can surely try to see things from others' bias and (hopefully) after seeing things from a few different perspectives you will get a general idea of the real picture.

The most important factor that affects the perspective of any observation is the distance. Then comes the orientation and, of course, the fourth dimension of our spacetime, i.e. time. A physicist will immediately recognise these concepts, but I guess even a sociologist or an artist will understand that this scientific mode of thinking doesn't just confine to the modellling of the physical universe. These general principles are the corner stone of all logical reasoning, without which mankind ('humankind'? to be politically correct?!) wouldn't have reached the level of abstract as well as material understanding which we claim to do so now today.

So maybe, I feel, being brought up to think from a third person's perspective, by looking at systems from a long distance, and trying to infer the macroscopic as well as microscopic details from the long distance observations, my understanding of the human, social, political, material, emotional, mental, physical issues will render some extra understanding of the general principles that underlie our world, that includes its people and their more often than not strange bahavioural patterns.

Having written all these, I am really wondering if these musings are meant for others to read and understand and appreciate? Although I would love if people do understand and appreciate what I have written so far, I guess all I have achieved is that I have set up my mind as to what direction I need to move, ultimately it is for me to formulate where I am moving, and justify my existance by deciding that particular direction is the purpose why I have come to exist. At a more philosophical level, I guess we all write and do things to understand oursleves and explain oursleves to oursleves, at least that is what in introvert does, who learns to focus inside rather than outside.

01 August 2006

Astronomer's view of the earth (& beyond!)

Well, that seems to be a decent title for a blog! Not too funky, rather, not at all funky, it's just a plain simple archaic way of saying 'Hey! I am an intellectual, I am here to give insights from a perspective that only few possess......blah..blah..!' It does give a classical ring to the ear, so different from the current trend of throwing all intellectual meat down the drain. It does provide a sense of egoistical satisfaction of being different, yet classical. To quote Eric Hoffer, 'If you give too much of freedom then people tend to copy one another' (well, I may have messed a up a few words here & there in this short sentence, but this was indeed what he had meant to have said!), which implies that (in case you belong to the generation of blockheads who fail to perceive a metaphor's implication) that majority of humans are incapable of making proper use of their freedom, and hence they just peep inside someone's door (or window, you can take your pick of your favourite mode of voyeursim), and copy whatever they see and believe that he/she (again, you can take your pick of the poltically correct pronoun) is unique as only he/she is copying his/her neighbour! Well, he/she would've been absolutely right if the habit had remained confined to one individual, but unfortunately/fortunlately (again, you may take your pick, depending on your philosophy of life, that is, if you have any, else don't bother) he/she is not the the only one to come up with such a fantastically simple idea. Homo-sapiens are ingenious and innovative creatures, they can think of many ingenious and innovative ways of not doing or thinking ingeniously or innovatively but instead ingeniously & innovatively copy others and present the ideas, actions, concepts, etc. etc. as their own, and hence Eric Hoffer came up with that ingenious observation summed up succinctly in the innovative one liner quoted above. Academicians and intellectuals even have a big and impressive word for it, 'plagiarism', and reams of laws are being written nowadays to justify the creation of this word by trying to prevent it, under the aegis of another impressive lexilogical conundrum "Intellectual Propert Rights"! Now, given that majority of people make up the average (that is what the statistical definition of average implies, believe me it is so!) are the ones who end up copying each other, the ensuing collaborative effort results in mediocrity. Then these vast majority decide (well actually, one bright spark perhaps accidentaly decides it, and others quickly follow) that it is too boring and unfashionable to keep on doing the same thing that others do, hence, why not copy from the past (meaning 20-40 years), and recycle those oldies with a new funky package, and there's even a technical name for this too(!!!), 'remixing'. So we have remixes of old music, movies, art, literature, apparel and what not, bypassing the dirty word of plagiarism, and feeling cool about it!!! This, again, leads to mediocrity in the eyes of few like me (who bothers about them anyway!). And so the likes of me, the residents of a dilapidated mansion dedicated to the old style of elegance and simplicity come out in the sun looking for sponsors to spruce up the old structure, take pleasure in proclaiming our classical individuality through our expressions which are decidedly uncool, but hopefully pervasive if not incisive. Hence, the title of this blog that I conjured up in less than a minute does give me a sense of pleasure, simply because it is so uncool that it makes me feel cool (kewl)!!

But if one tries to unearth a deeper meaning of that innocuous (unkewl but cool) one liner that constitutes the name of this blog then one can come up with more interesting conjectures, like 'Hmmm..... I am here to provide an outsider's impression of the inside things.....'; sounds vague? Well, you see, we astronomers are always outside viewers, we use some simple technological equipments like telescopes & electronic detectors mounted in huge observatories (many of them our now space borne satellites) and use computers (at times super-computers, or more commonly a poor man's cousin of these behemoth like structures, viz. linux clusters) to do some tedious data analysis using physics, statistics and what not, in order to see the extremely distant objects called cosmic sources (stars and galaxies and related structures, if you like!), and try to fathom what goes on inside them. So we are forcefully limited to exterior views and yet all our efforts go into understanding the interior workings. Hence, we assume that we are very good at understanding systems by just viewing from outside!

Well, effectively, to understand any system, one does need to observe it from outside, for the complete view always eludes the observer who is a part of the system. Therefore all science, cosmology as well as all philosophical studies of life, universe, etc. are extremely difficult things to do in life, akin to the proverbial elephant being looked at by a few blind people. Hence, to get a proper view of any system one needs to look at it from a distance just enough to cover the whole field of view and just near enough to resolve all the details (ask a photographer how to accomplish this!), and then go about observing and inferring. And it might be obvious from the title that that is what I have set out to accomplish, understand this earth along with the all the non-living and living organisms that populate it! ;-) At least, you can never accuse me of not having lofty goals. Wise men (nowadays that is synonymous to management gurus) say that having a lofty goal clear in your mind implies the work is half done. :-) The only difficulty is persisting with this dream for long enough time, guess I will have the perseverance to keep up with the demands of it, a small part of which includes informal documentations of the observations, inferences and thoughts. I guess this blog seems to be quite a nice place for it.