The most dangerous assumption

"Nothing is so dangerous to the progress of the human mind than to assume that our views of science are ultimate. That there are no mysteries in nature, that our triumphs are complete, and that there are no new worlds to conquer" -- Humphrey Davy

Brian Cox finishes his brief talk on the LHC at this years TED with this quote. If you wonder what this LHC (The Large Hadron Collider) is, listen to this rap song, or visit its homepage at CERN.

This LHC is quite a fantastic adventure the world's scientists have embarked upon. It is huge, and there was a huge enthusiasm among almost everyone at the academia, especially in Europe and especially in Switzerland before the start of the tests. I was in Zurich last fall when the first tests were scheduled and when it had to be shut down due to the defects. I could feel the excitement in the air before the initial tests, and the disappointment after the defects were found. I hope that they would get it working soon. Not that I suspect a breakthrough to come out of the studies on the tests, but the mere fact that such a huge scientific project was put together with the collaboration of so many nations and so many scientists, and the huge budget that was allocated to prepare the technology that was required to build and maintain such a thing, is already a breakthrough.

Warm enough to trust...

با خودم فکر کردم٬ این طفلکی مال این‌جا نیس. نصف بهار این‌جاها براش هنوز زمستونه. هنوز وقت خوابشه. گرمسیریه. از سرما می‌ترسه. آفتاب باید خیلی گرم باشه که اعتماد کنه. ...

I though, this little thing does not belong to this region. Here half the spring is still like winter for her. It is still sleeping time for her. She is tropical, she is afraid of cold. The sun should shine very warm for her to trust....

(Source)

Fortunate

Dear reader,
there are people in the world who know no misery and woe. And they take comfort in cheerful films about twittering birds and giggling elves.

There are people who know that there's always a mystery to be solved. And they take comfort in researching and writing down any important evidence.

But this story is not about such people. This story is about the Baudelaires. And they are the sort of people who know that there's always something.
Something to invent,
something to read,
something to bite,
and something to do, to make a sanctuary, no matter how small.

And for this reason, I am happy to say, the Baudelaires were very fortunate indeed.
-- Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events

There is indeed always something. Something to invent, something to read, and something to bite. :)

The Deal...

گفتم خراج مصر طلب می کند لبت
گفتا درین معامله کمتر زیان کنند
-- حافظ

"Tis Egypt's tribute thy lips require for fee"
"In such transaction the less the loss shall be."
-- J. Arberry, Fifty Poems of Hafiz

How are you?

How, is but the state following the function of what,
And what I am is a secluded girl,
Whose sober wishes never learned to stray;
Along the cool sequestered vale of life,
She keeps the noiseless tenor of her way.
Seeking virtue yet sustaining vice,
She strives for vivacity in odds with vicissitudes of fate's play.

Volition is the verdict,
Yet held not as a votive, but in vain...

--
Credits goes to V and Gray

Circumstances

"People are always blaming circumstances for what they are. I do not believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they cannot find them, they make them." -- George Bernard Shaw

I'm discovering Bernard Shaw lately, some nice quotes are attributed to him. He has a special way of putting things, there is a name coined for it in English , for his ironic wit, as "Shavian" (see Wikipedia). Here is another quote of his: "My way of joking is to tell the truth. It's the funniest joke in the world."

Measure anew...

The person who behave sensibly is my tailor, he takes my measures anew everytime he sees me. All the rest go on with their old measurements. -- George Bernard Shaw

That is a key point to keep in mind, that people experience, learn, grow, and therefore change as time goes by. The fellow you have seen yesterday, is not the same person today. Life is not a deterministic finite automaton, and not even a probabilistic Markov Chain, you can never predict someone's future or all possible futures, just based on what you've seen from him or her in the past or present. The only thing that stays the same is that people are people, they are human beings, regardless of how cruel or how inhuman they have been so far. So every time we see people, we should treat them as a human being deserves, we should measure them anew.

With no loss of enthusiasm...

Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm. -- Winston Churchill

The importance of stupidity in scientific research

That is the title of an article by Dr. Schwartz, a professor of Biomedical Engineering at U of Virginia. A short and interesting article, and probably helpful for those who are struggling with some research project. If you have done a research project on your own, you are familiar with the moments when you just want to bang your head against the desk, or monitor (or whatever hard place you can find), from the frustration of days and nights of being stuck with apparently unsolvable questions and problems at hand, and feeling you are the most stupid person in the universe. How to manage your stupidity or at a higher level, how to turn it into "productive stupidity", is quite a lesson you should learn in the course of a good research work.

A good adviser could play a key role here, in helping you over come the frustration you'd feel from time to time. Whenever I feel frustrated or hopeless after some time of not making progress or even having results that shows some assumptions from the beginning were false, my adviser here tells me, "hey that is science, if it was supposed to be easy and straightforward, we would have been out of business!"

Anyway, here are some interesting excerpts from the article:

What makes it difficult is that research is immersion in the unknown. We just don’t know what we’re doing. We can’t be sure whether we’re asking the right question or doing the right experiment until we get the answer or the result.

Science involves confronting our ‘absolute stupidity’. That kind of stupidity is an existential fact, inherent in our efforts to push our way into the unknown. Preliminary and thesis exams have the right idea when the faculty committee pushes until the student starts getting the answers wrong or gives up and says, ‘I don’t know’. The point of the exam isn’t to see if the student gets all the answers right. If they do, it’s the faculty who failed the exam.

Productive stupidity means being ignorant by choice. Focusing on important questions puts us in the awkward position of being ignorant. One of the beautiful things about science is that it allows us to bumble along, getting it wrong time after time, and feel perfectly fine as long as we learn something each time. No doubt, this can be difficult for students who are accustomed to getting the answers right.

...but I think scientific education might do more to ease what is a very big transition: from learning what other people once discovered to making your own discoveries. The more comfortable we become with being stupid, the deeper we will wade into the unknown and the more likely we are to make big discoveries.
-- Martin A. Schwartz

Pilgrim

Pilgrim, how you journey
on the road you chose
to find out why the winds die
and where the stories go.
All days come from one day
that much you must know,
you cannot change what's over
but only where you go.

One way leads to diamonds,
one way leads to gold,
another leads you only
to everything you're told.
In your heart you wonder
which of these is true;
the road that leads to nowhere,
the road that leads to you.
...
-- Enya (Pilgrim)

Second after second and day by day

And you can easily gamble your life away...
Second after second and day by day...

Come away, O human child

...
Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim grey sands with light,
Far off by furthest Rosses
We foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances,
Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight;
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles,
While the world is full of troubles
And is anxious in its sleep.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters of the wild
With a faery hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
...
-- William Butler Yeats

Stolen Child is among my most favorite poems. It has such a hallucinative effect on me, perfect for hard and gloomy times, when you really feel you want to take refuge to a place where the wandering water gushes and the drowsy water rats. Oh I wished for little faeries to come and steal me away, to the leafy island, full of berries, and of reddest stolen cherries....