Dr.Mulugeta: Inspiration beyond Physics

"I was in prison for seven years, and the first four years of imprisonment, there were 45 of us in 4m x 4m room in the central prison in Ethiopia", reminisces Dr. Mulugeta Bekele from Ethiopia, not with remorse, but with a tinge of sadness of the time spent then, and a subtle nationalistic pride.
Dr. Mulugeta is an associate Professor Physics at Addis Ababa University (AAU), Ethiopia. He completed his Ph. D in Physics from the Indian Institute of Science, India in the year 1997 and now he's back at his alma matter for a month. It has been a deeply inspiring experience to have interacted with him, firstly to know the Physicist he is, and with subsequent interactions, I have known other nuances of this humble science and math enthusiast from Ethiopia with a life long of struggle.

Dr. Mulugeta was the only Physics major student at Haile Sellasie University, and he pursued his passion Mathematics via Physics during late 1960's, as a lone student during his under-graduate days.

After the monarchy in Ethiopia was overthrown by a military regime - socialist for name sake; although it did nationalise banks, industry and land, it was far from being the encapsulation of people's aspirations. As Dr.Mulugeta says, "The monarchical hierarchy under which Ethiopia was ruled until the 1974, using military had just lost its head - the monarch alone was gone, and there was a total military oligarchy. With zero representation of the people's voices, the new military regime had to suppress numerous popular people's struggles".

The people's struggles which were taken up in the form of student movements, workers unions, and other representation of the common man in Ethiopia ended up in a ghastly phase of Ethiopian history. During this time, Dr.Mulugeta was teaching at AAU and did participate in the revolutions during the monarchical oligarchy, and post that against the military oligarchy.

The military regime was ruthless and suppressed all forms of uprisings, and in doing so killed hundreds of youth and imprisoned thousands of them even without a trial.
The Physics teacher from AAU that Dr.Mulugeta was during the people's uprisings against the military regime did participate in all the youth movements. “As the educated section of the society, all young students and teachers were actively participating in the demonstrations, and it was natural for me to join in those struggles”, he says. 
 
The ruthless regime in order to curtail such people's struggles killed hundreds of the young students and put a whole lot of them into prison. Dr. Mulugeta was put into a prison during one such retaliation by the military. He speaks of the uncertainty about the term they would be serving, or even the future of all the captured people, for, there was reckless genocide going on.

"We weren't given a trial or anything; Directly dumped into the prison and we did not even know for long....And when one of my other physicist got a trial and was sentenced seven years in prison, we started thinking of the same luck for each of us. We did not know how long could seven years in prison be. The first year is Sunday, second year was Monday, third year was Tuesday and so on, like the seven days of the week, each year was to become a really long day for each of us...”, recollects Dr. Mulugeta from his prison experience.

Describing the inhumane conditions of the prison cells and the tortures they had to endure he says that the cell in which he spent his first four years of term was 4m x 4m, and 45 people had to live in that! With very little time when they were allowed to go out from the cell, it must have been really hard. Although he does not talk of his own difficulties at any point of time, he says that before he could be put into that cell, previously there were 88 prisoners in the same 4m x 4m cell!

Apart from the imprisonment, severe torture on the prisoners was common, where they used to be chained, beaten, broken and several severed to death.

After four years in the central prison, where he was moved to a larger main prison where each prisoner the space alloted to each prisoner is more or less similar to the central prison, but the solace was that they could walk around the prison compounding walls.

When Dr. Mulugeta was released in 1985 at the age of 39, after spending seven years in jail he went back to AAU and in 1991 he comes to India to pursue his Ph. D at the Indian Institute of Science. Today he is one of the most respected Physicists from his region and in recognition to his efforts in contributing to Physics and his struggles he is being awarded the Andrel Sakharov prize by the American Physical Society, about which he says,” My Ethiopian students in the USA recommened me for this and I am happy about it”.

A simple, humble, erudite physicist with a life story which moves and inspires the young, not only of his own country but well beyond.

The emerging mind, and the overwhelming awe

The ability to be able to do Science is the grandest gift that has been bestowed upon us Homo sapiens, during the course of evolution, while we were trying to 'survive'.

To be able to understand the intricate patterns of the Universe, decipher the codes of the nature, reason out the fallacies in our presumptions and to inch closer to rationality: Are we not gifted enough?
Why do we need any more miracles?

My latest read, that has increased my inquisition about neuroscience is the book, The Emerging Mind - a long pending read I must admit, and it comes in at the right time - when I'm all engrossed in an involuntary and obsessive spree of revelation after revelation. Written by one of the brightest of the neuroscientists - Vilayanur Ramachandran, the book is a must read to all Science afficiondos.

A somewhat gratifying compliment while reading the book is the presumption of the author that his readers are all Darwinians (which I so am), and would make zero sense in case you are a creationist or the "magic wand-life happening" believers!

The book has lot of medical jargon. It was quite a homecoming of sorts, after a gap of few years since my pre-university Biology and the little gyaan I assimilated there!

Knowing about the least known thing - The Human Brain, is an excellent appraisal of realizing where we stand today in terms of understanding everything. Although, this book by itself is highly speculative at certain claims, mostly it is convincing and I must add that the book is a lovely read, overall. Interestingly, the book has an equal number of pages dedicated to Notes , which are interesting case studies.

Another important aspect of the many of the arguments presented are that, they are efficient in disproving some of the exaggerated Freudian ideas and approaches using the physiology (if there's anything of that sort) of the human brain.

So, I am lesser a Freudian, and more in awe of the chronicles and adventures of the human brain after having read this book.

As Feynman puts it, "Wondering at the wonder of wondering" - Isn't the idea of being able to ideate, and to be able to contemplate the process of ideation itself something unbelievable.

The awe I have developed about the wonders of nature, and that is growing exponentially on a daily basis now has another element added to it.The human brain is equally diverse and obscure as the Universe itself. It is not just the awe about the human brain, but one step ahead, the ability of these jellies of neurons to contemplate and dig into the secrets of the universe, and almost as a recursion be able to stand out as a separate entity and wonder at itself! Wow, what an exercise!


Aren't we the miracles, we keep looking for in fables and gospels, stories and fantasies!

The God Delusion

How lucky we are to be alive, given that the vast majority of people who could potentially be thrown up by the combinatorial lottery of DNA will in fact never be born. However brief our time in the sun, if we waste a second of it, or complain that it is dull or barren or (like a child) boring, couldn't this be seen as a callous insult to those unborn trillions who will never even be offered life in the first place?

Think about it. On one planet, and possibly only one planet in the entire universe, molecules that would normally make nothing
more complicated than a chunk of rock, gather themselves together into chunks of rock-sized matter of such staggering complexity that they are capable of running, jumping, swimming, flying, seeing, hearing, capturing and eating other such animated chunks of complexity; capable in some cases of thinking and feeling, and falling in love with yet other chunks of complex matter!

-Excerpts from the book "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins

I have already attributed Richard Dawkins to have facilitated my transition to become the ardent and absolute atheist that I am now, in previous posts. And like in his documentaries, he is cleverer and super accurate with his arguments in The God Delusion.Impeccably convincing!

Turning towards the book itself, it is a quick and joyous read in the literary sense. But, this book symbolizes an apprehension of serious scale and it ain't just the literature one needs to ponder about. What actually dawned upon me while reading the book was the intent of the book itself. Pushing science and rationality amidst the infinite bandwidth white noise of religion, Gods, and the related blah blah!

Religion is ubiquitous, and it certainly is perilous, whatever small subjective positives one might have experienced. This ancient dogma has to be stigmatized for, eradicating it would take a long long struggle against many maniacs.

Nevertheless, increasing the consciousness of people pertaining to the futilities encapsulated in religion as a whole will slowly evolve to eliminate this weird but natural seeming, artificial digression of us humans.

While Science is what has given us answers, drawing us out from the shrouded clouds of ignorance, into light and still leading, Religion is that strong regressive force holding back majority of the Homo sapiens , bound to the shackles of faith, blind faith and dumb blind faith!

The God Delusion is a must read for everyone: Of course it will be offensive to the strong theists. But, for anyone who's just swaying away from the absolutism attached to religion, it will certainly help and enable them start drifting farther away from religion and closer to rationality - All for the good.

I might personally want to see religion eliminated from the face of the earth; But, it is even more complexly interleaved than even Dawkins himself projects.

Let's hope there's light, sometime soon, if not spontaneously!

I don't try to imagine a personal God; it suffices to stand in awe at the structure of the world, insofar as it allows our inadequate senses to appreciate it.
Albert Einstein

Science: A religion for Life

"When I call myself an atheist, it is not that I do not have a God to believe in, or a religion to piously follow:
Nature is my God,
Science is my religion...."

While clarifying my stand on religion and God to a certain sect of 'believers', who were unhappy to see me wear the tag of an Atheist, I happened to articulate the above statement.
It does encapsulate my 'faith system' clearly. Nevertheless, an elaboration of this statement was over due for sometime now. And in this post, I simply speak of my religion.

Why do people endorse and live by religions?
They need a system to provide comfort and solace; To seek and understand answers to the big questions of the Universe; A rulebook of sorts to help them lead their lives.
That is what religions are/were supposed to be doing. I shall not delve into analyzing how religions of believers has either succeeded or failed in this objective. I shall contain it to only the arguments for my religion:Science.

We humans are the niche results to have culminated until now in the race to evolution. We have accomplished something that none of the other species hitherto had even tried to, i.e, to curb the grand and ultimate arbitrator: Nature.
We are undoubtedly the first species to have successfully honed the forces of nature to favor our comfortable existence, although to a small, but substantial extent . This advantage humans exercised over nature,has been purely based on Science.
Now, the concept of hope and faith got imbibed into us and became aspects of our lives when we were less equipped to blend with the environments, mainly due to the lack of scientific advancements. To cling on to something because it is antique is, as ironic as it might seem, is also very absurd. Our forefathers weren't equipped with all the reasoning which comes to us as almost intuition.
All that was ignorance, is transpiring to become cognizance with the help of Science, and today we are privileged to inherit this cognizance as intuition.
When such is the case, Science has to be the most rational way of life.
Without hope, faith, illusions, delusions, Gods and Demons, our lives would be less intriguing and would certainly put us into positions of self responsibility. Science hands over the control of our lives back to us. On the other hand, popular faith based religions try to shift this responsibility to irrationality. If irrationality and irresponsibility is what someone seeks, faith based religions are what they'd endorse. Science presents us with the simple truth and sensible rationality, coupled with common sense and quintessential responsibility, with an extra topping of Math! Math, not being mandatory for the followers of this religion, the rest of it is what we need to inculcate 'to live simply and happily'.

Imagine the bliss one could regularly experience, when looking at the world with a paradigm endorsing 'verifiable reasons and convincing explanations' to all the small nuances and all the humongous wonders of nature. Isn't that the bliss which every religion entices its followers with? It would be the blessing unreachable by any other fictitious Deity or Godmen.
Further, the fruit of worshiping Science is Technology which helps us lead a life of ease, comfort and satisfaction.

Rationality is what each one of us should perpetually try to endorse and live by. To do this Science is the best religion.

The Priesthood of Science