Tomichan Matheikal's blog

 An "acute awareness of our ignorance is the heart of scientific thinking," says Carlo Rovelli, a physicist and author of Reality is not what it seems: The journey to quantum gravity . Science never hesitates to say "I don't know" when it does not know. Science does not take leaps of faith. Science is ready to admit its own errors when it learns better and it is ever ready to correct its errors.  Rovelli's book concludes with such thoughts. I understood only that concluding chapter. Hence this is not a book review. I bought the book seeing a few reviews which implied that a lay person could understand quantum mechanics by reading it. All the quantum mechanics I learnt from this book may be summarised in the following diagram from the book itself: The book is mostly an elaboration of the above evolution of understanding the reality. There are a lot of technical terms and even scientific formulas which remain beyond the grasp of anyone who lacks at least a sen

One of the most moving songs of Donovan Phillips Leitch is 'Universal Soldier' [link above]. Written in early 1960s, the song tries to tell us that we are all warmongers at heart, fighting for one ism or the other, one piece of land here or an antique god there, like the old feudal lords bossing over their vassals and peasants.  He'a a Catholic, a Hindu, an Atheist, a Jain A Buddhist and a Baptist and a Jew And he knows he shouldn't kill And he knows he always will Killing you for me my friend, and me for you That's one of the stanzas. All of us have one cause or another to fight for irrespective of our religions or whatever holy phantoms. We in India today have been fighting for quite a while now for a god who was supposed to have lived in some prehistoric period. Now we have managed to retrieve his birthplace by usurping another god who had at some period in history turned a usurper himself. We're going to construct a glorious house for this particular god. Wi

  If you have an option to tell something to your younger writing self, what would you tell? Writer Damyanti Biswas raised this question recently. I was fascinated by the question if only because I would have liked to be an entirely different person in my youth (or at any phase, in fact). I have often described my life as a series of blunders. I am not much wiser today either though a lot of summers came and went with many sparrows chirruping various melodies. If only we could start all over again to begin with whatever semblance of wisdom we have acquired so far. I think it was a sheer coincidence that Damyanti’s question came just as I put down the book I was reading, Reality is not what it seems by Carlo Rovelli. This book is about the uncertainty of reality from the point of view of quantum physics. Rovelli is a physicist. It is a serious book, very serious, but a particular page of it made me laugh out uncontrollably so much so Maggie began to wonder whether I had gone crankie

Fiction Father was in high spirits though he looked older and weaker than ever. Joshua picked up his whisky glass once again as he watched his father stealthily. He had come home on a weekend holiday. ‘I want to have a drink with you,’ father had said in his last phone call. ‘It’s quite a while since we sat down together for a relaxed chat, isn’t it?’ They were the best of friends, father and son. Joshua worked in the city and lived there with his family. He would visit his parents on some weekends, once a month usually though the frequency had dwindled considerably after the breakout of Covid-19. His father, Stephen, retired landlord, would be delighted to buy the best whisky for the evening with his son. ‘Do you think anyone is able to die without any regret?’ Stephen asks his son putting down his whisky glass. This is the first time father is broaching the topic of death, Joshua recalls with a shocked sadness. But he decides not to reveal his emotions. He smiles and says,

  You show stress symptoms, the doc said, What’s it that bothers you?   Nothing, I said as he wrote the prescription of the usual pills and one more. You need some good sleep, he said.   There’s nothing that should steal my sleep, I repeated but he didn’t believe me.   The truth is that I was losing sleep. Over an ambulance driver who rapes the Covid patient he is taking for medical care. Over film stars and heroes who are arrested for drug pushing. Over the topmost bureaucrat arrested for smuggling in kilograms of gold. Over God’s own men on the road who lynch peasants taking home their cows.   Bolo, Jai Sri Ram! The lynch mob’s scowl looms like a spectre over my bed stealing my sleep.   Why to bother you, doc, with my spectres? Even gods are helpless, what can you do? Except prescribe tabs for my symptoms?      

  Outside a church in Kerala Philosopher Spinoza identified three ethical systems that human beings generally tend to follow. One of them centres on the heart, the second on passion for power, and the third on the brain. The first is the way of the saints and religious people. Jesus and the Buddha, Mahatma Gandhi and Mother Teresa followed this path of the heart. These people consider everyone as equally precious, resist evil by returning good, identify virtue with love , and inclines to total democracy in politics. Conquerors and dictators follow their passion for power. From Alexander the Great to Narendra Modi (whose greatness has apparently been acknowledged by quite a few million people of India), many people who were perceived as “strong” leaders or rulers belong to this category. Spinoza argued that for these rulers some people are superior to others. They don’t care two hoots about equality and such stuff. They relish the risks of combat, conquest, and rule. They identify

  Book Review Title: The Shadow of the Wind Author: Carlos Ruiz Zafon Publisher: Phoenix, 2004 Pages: 510   Some plots are too perfect to be credible. But they keep the reader hooked to the last. Add some mysteries and complexities, the novel becomes a terrible whirlpool that draws your very soul in. Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s The Shadow of the Wind is one such novel. The novel is about memories and vendettas, love struggling against hate, virtue struggling to survive in a world of evil. Originally written in Spanish, the novel is set in the post-civil war Barcelona. But the pre-war Barcelona keeps coming up throughout the plot. In fact, the plot moves like two intertwined serpents that are inseparable. The past is resurrected at every turn on the present road, that too with a new vengeance. There is poison all along. There is blood spilt at some places. There is more darkness than light. Is it evil that makes this world so dark? ‘Not evil,’ says Fermin, one of the chief charac