A lesson from Feynman

Don't think it is so different, being a scientist. The average person is not so far away from a scientist. He may be far away from an artist or poet or something, but I doubt that too. I think in the normal common sense of everyday life that there is a lot of the kind of thinking that scientists do.....

Really all we (scientists) do is a hell of a lot more of one kind of thing that is normal and ordinary! People do have imagination, they just don't work on it as long. Creativity is done by everybody, it's just that scientists do more of it.  What isn't ordinary is to do it so intensively that all this experience is piled up for all these years on the same limited subject. 

A scientist's work is normal activities of humans carried to a fault, in a very exaggerated form. Ordinary people do do it as often, or, as I do, think about the same problem everyday. Only idiots like me do that! Or Darwin, or somebody who worries about the same question. "Where do the animals come from?" Or, "What is the relation of species?" A scientist works on it, and thinks about it for years! What is do, is something that common people often do,but so much more that it looks crazy! But it's trying to find the potentiality as a human being.

For example, neither you nor I have muscles that stand way out on our arms like these fabulous guys. For us that would be impossible. Well they work and they work and they work on it. In that case, it might be a fault. How big can you make those muscles? How can you make the chest look great? They try to find out how far you can go.And therefore, they do something with an intensity that is out of the ordinary. It doesn't mean that we never lift weights. All they do is lift weights more. But, like us, they're trying to find the greatest potentiality of human beings' activity in a certain direction.

-Richard Feynman
Feyman's rainbow, A search for beauty in Physics and in Life. By Leonard Mlodinow

The book chronicles some exchanges between Mlodinow, then a new postdoctoral fellow at Caltech unsure of himself and Feynman, the resident genius, during the last few years of Feynman's life in the early 1980s as he was battling cancer.

New running experiment

Back after almost a month's hiatus! Didn't realise it had been so long. When work is going at a great pace, it becomes easier to ignore other things. But I made some deliberate time today to write, even if it only a short post (as I suppose most of my posts will be for some time)

I've kept up with running and added weight training to it. Although I wanted to do free weights, the instructor was more keen on machines. Once the body gets used to it, the free weights are to be added later on. I don't understand the logic behind this. Would've loved to start a program like the Stronglifts 5x5. But that would be more time commitment than I can handle right now. Minimalism in goals is important too.

The new running experiment I'm doing is simply to run shorter distances but at a faster pace. Why? Because it's more fun, takes less time, is more intense (hence better cardio and adds power) and I'm terribly slow at running anyway. So, increasing the baseline pace will probably help me run a faster marathon next time. Let's see the results six months from now.

Poverty

Found this on facebook, unusually informative for that social network. Will put down my thoughts on this later.

Late last year, two young men decided to live a month of their lives on the income of an average poor Indian. One of them, Tushar, the son of a police officer in Haryana, studied at the University of Pennsylvania and worked for three years as an investment banker in the US and Singapore. The other, Matt, migrated as a teenager to the States with his parents, and studied in MIT. Both decided at different points to return to India, joined the UID Project in Bengaluru, came to share a flat, and became close friends.

The idea suddenly struck them one day. Both had returned to India in the vague hope that they could be of use to their country. But they knew the people of this land so little. Tushar suggested one evening — “Let us try to understand an ‘average Indian', by living on an ‘average income'.” His friend Matt was immediately captured by the idea. They began a journey which would change them forever.

To begin with, what was the average income of an Indian? They calculated that India's Mean National Income was Rs. 4,500 a month, or Rs. 150 a day. Globally people spend about a third of their incomes on rent. Excluding rent, they decided to spend Rs. 100 each a day. They realised that this did not make them poor, only average. Seventy-five per cent Indians live on less than this average.

The young men moved into the tiny apartment of their domestic help, much to her bemusement. What changed for them was that they spent a large part of their day planning and organising their food. Eating out was out of the question; even dhabas were too expensive. Milk and yoghurt were expensive and therefore used sparingly, meat was out of bounds, as were processed food like bread. No ghee or butter, only a little refined oil. Both are passionate cooks with healthy appetites. They found soy nuggets a wonder food — affordable and high on proteins, and worked on many recipes. Parle G biscuits again were cheap: 25 paise for 27 calories! They innovated a dessert of fried banana on biscuits. It was their treat each day.

Restricted life

Living on Rs.100 made the circle of their life much smaller. They found that they could not afford to travel by bus more than five km in a day. If they needed to go further, they could only walk. They could afford electricity only five or six hours a day, therefore sparingly used lights and fans. They needed also to charge their mobiles and computers. One Lifebuoy soap cut into two. They passed by shops, gazing at things they could not buy. They could not afford the movies, and hoped they would not fall ill.

However, the bigger challenge remained. Could they live on Rs. 32, the official poverty line, which had become controversial after India's Planning Commission informed the Supreme Court that this was the poverty line for cities (for villages it was even lower, at Rs. 26 per person per day)?

Harrowing experience

For this, they decided to go to Matt's ancestral village Karucachal in Kerala, and live on Rs. 26. They ate parboiled rice, a tuber and banana and drank black tea: a balanced diet was impossible on the Rs. 18 a day which their briefly adopted ‘poverty' permitted. They found themselves thinking of food the whole day. They walked long distances, and saved money even on soap to wash their clothes. They could not afford communication, by mobile and internet. It would have been a disaster if they fell ill. For the two 26-year-olds, the experience of ‘official poverty' was harrowing.

Yet, when their experiment ended with Deepavali, they wrote to their friends: “Wish we could tell you that we are happy to have our ‘normal' lives back. Wish we could say that our sumptuous celebratory feast two nights ago was as satisfying as we had been hoping for throughout our experiment. It probably was one of the best meals we've ever had, packed with massive amounts of love from our hosts. However, each bite was a sad reminder of the harsh reality that there are 400 million people in our country for whom such a meal will remain a dream for quite some time. That we can move on to our comfortable life, but they remain in the battlefield of survival — a life of tough choices and tall constraints. A life where freedom means little and hunger is plenty...

Plenty of questions

It disturbs us to spend money on most of the things that we now consider excesses. Do we really need that hair product or that branded cologne? Is dining out at expensive restaurants necessary for a happy weekend? At a larger level, do we deserve all the riches we have around us? Is it just plain luck that we were born into circumstances that allowed us to build a life of comfort? What makes the other half any less deserving of many of these material possessions, (which many of us consider essential) or, more importantly, tools for self-development (education) or self-preservation (healthcare)?

We don't know the answers to these questions. But we do know the feeling of guilt that is with us now. Guilt that is compounded by the love and generosity we got from people who live on the other side, despite their tough lives. We may have treated them as strangers all our lives, but they surely didn't treat us as that way...”

So what did these two friends learn from their brief encounter with poverty? That hunger can make you angry. That a food law which guarantees adequate nutrition to all is essential. That poverty does not allow you to realise even modest dreams. And above all — in Matt's words — that empathy is essential for democracy.