Light Emitting Diodes

Business India, December 19, 2005-January 1, 2006

Chips of light

LEDs convert electricity much more efficiently into light than say incandescent bulbs or fluorescent lamps

Shivanand Kanavi

Can semiconductor chips, which have revolutionized the way we live, give us light? Yes they can. Such chips for lighting are not made of silicon, which is used in electronics but more complex semiconductors, made of alloys of gallium, indium, arsenic, nitrogen, aluminum, phosphorous etc. They are fast becoming the coolest new technology in lighting.

It has been known since the turn of the century that some semiconductors emit light when a current is passed through them. However it has taken almost a hundred years for the technology to do it efficiently and inexpensively. Most of these semiconductors are what are called direct band gap semiconductors and they have led to the development of semiconductor lasers as well. Inexpensive semiconductor lasers drive your CD player, DVD player or even a laser pointer used during a presentation or even your TV’s remote control.

Semiconductor lasers are also extensively used in high speed data communication from the run-of-the-mill office computer networks called LANs(Local Area Networks) to mighty submarine fibre optic cable networks, like the ones acquired recently by VSNL (Tyco) and Reliance (Flag).

The discovery and perfection of direct conversion of electricity into light has also led to the reverse that is the development of more efficient solar panels to convert light into electricity.

The diodes, which emit light when they are conducting an electrical current, are called Light Emitting Diodes or LEDs. They are already becoming quite popular as Diwali or Christmas lights and in traffic signals. Those green and red light dots that indicate whether the device is active or in sleep mode in your digital camera, camcorder, DVD player and TV are also LEDs.

Compound semiconductors are considered the country cousins of the more flamboyant silicon chips that power our computers, cell phones and all electronics. However, without much ado their optical applications are increasing manifold in every day life.

The first bright LEDs to be invented were emitting red light and later orange and yellow. However attempts at producing green and blue LEDs were not very successful till a Japanese scientist Shuji Nakamura invented a bright blue LED and later white LED in the mid 90s. Nakamura’s work brightened up the whole field and intense activity ensued leading to fast growth. He worked hard with very little funding and repeated disillusionment for several years to come up with the blue LEDs. The company he worked for at that time, Nichia is today one of the world leaders in blue and white LEDs and lasers. A few years back he moved out of Nichia and is currently a faculty member in the University of California at Santa Barbara. While Nakamura works in optical properties of Gallium Nitride and other compound semiconductors his colleague Umesh Mishra researches into the electronic properties of Gallium Nitride to produce high powered transistors for cell phone companies and the US Defence Department. If successful Mishra’s Gallium Nitride transistors will replace the vacuum tubes from their last refuge—high power microwave systems in Radar and communication networks. Together Nakamura and Mishra have built up a formidable team of cutting edge researchers in Gallium Nitride at Santa Barbara.

Yes, all you Baywatch junkies, they also do serious science off the sands of Santa Barbara.

On a more serious note, the technology is evolving rapidly and in the next five years might revolutionise lighting. LEDs for lighting purposes have many advantages. They convert electricity much more efficiently into light than say incandescent bulbs or fluorescent lamps. In fact 90% of the energy is wasted in incandescent bulbs as heat. They also last much longer—upto 100,000 hours. That is more than 12 years of continuous operation! Where as in the case of incandescent lamps it is of the order of 1000 hours and in the case of fluorescent lamps it is of the order of 10,000 hours. They also consume much less electricity hence your batteries in a LED flashlight for example, seem to go on forever. That is ideal if you are in a remote area on your own as in camping, trekking or even a natural disaster. For example Pervaiz Lodhie a Pakistani entrepreneur in Southern California dispatched over 2000 solar powered LED flashlights to Kashmir soon after the earthquake hit the inaccessible Himalayan region. Last year his firm had also sent such items to South East Asia after the killer Tsunami hit the area.

What are the weaknesses of this promising lighting technology in an increasingly energy starved world? Primarily three. One the brightness that is measured in Lumens per Watt of electrical power is still nowhere near the standard required for high brightness lighting. Two, the products are still expensive. For example a decent flashlight costs around $15-40. Thirdly the light is extremely bright in one direction hence a LED light directed towards your work bench or a flashlight works well but if you try to light up your room with it then you end up using too many LEDs.

The US Department of Defence and the Department of Energy are heavily funding research into semiconductors to come up with high power lighting and electronics. As a result the developments are feverish in this field.

Recently, the venerable General Electric, a company that was founded by Thomas Edison to sell the light bulbs he invented, has announced Organic Light Emitting Diodes. In layman’s terms, soon there will be inexpensive plastic sheets, which will light up panels and curved surfaces. Cree Research Inc. a Nasdaq listed leader of LED chips, has produced very bright LEDs (more than 90 Lumens per Watt) two years ahead of industry’s expectations.

“A much less fashionable but critical area to work in, is encapsulation of LEDs” says Rajan Pillai of Nanocrystal Lighting Corporation, a research based start-up from New York. He is referring to the fact that the semiconductor chip is surrounded by a transparent lens capsule which act as a protective cover as well as an out let for light. All LEDs emit light of only one colour. In order to generate white light one introduces substances called phosphors into this casing. These phosphors then absorb the original light from the LED and emit light of different colours. An appropriate phosphor would thus create green light from a blue LED or white light from blue LED etc. Thus, if the phosphor can be improved, then the brightness of the led can be improved. Pillai claims that the new phosphors invented in Nanocrystals Lighting Corporation are smaller than the wavelength of light and hence invisible and that they can increase the brightness by about 20%.

You know when a technology has moved out of the lab and VC firms and into the market place, when you find the products on the Christmas shopping lists of visitors at Walmart and other retail chains. That is what LED flashlights have just achieved this holiday season, just as digital cameras and iPods did earlier.

Perception and Technology

Business India, January 29, 2006

Psy-Tech

Can the soft sciences combine with hard technology to produce winners?

Shivanand Kanavi

The word ‘technology’ immediately conjures up in our mind, machines, number crunching or in IT jargon algorithms. Conventional wisdom says that to go up in the technology ladder we need to hone our mathematical skills, analytical skills and the engineer’s practical problem solving skills. So what is this newfangled Psy-Tech? Is it ESP, psycho-kinesis or a pearl of wisdom from Spock—the one with serious face and pointed ears in StarTrek? Or is it something brewed and marketed by Deepak Chopra to gullibles in Mumbai and Malibu?

No. Psy-tech is nothing as fashionable as that. It is a fact that hard sciences and liberal arts rule different worlds, of objectivity and subjectivity, and eye each other with great suspicion. However many technologies have to marry the two to create successful products. Thereby giving rise to psy-tech.

In the world of technology there is nothing new in what I am saying. The Internet, PC and Artifical Intelligence are all a product of psy-tech. J C R Licklider, left MIT to head the Information Processing Technology Office of the Advanced Research Projects Agency, (ARPA), attached to the US government’s Defence Department in the early sixties. He funded and brought together a computer science community in the US in the early 1960s. He also encouraged the development of computer science departments for the first time at Carnegie Mellon, MIT, Stanford and the University of California at Berkeley. This visionary was not a computer scientist but a psychologist. Over forty years ago he championed the need for interactive computing and PC and his ideas drove the creation of ARPANET the first computer network in the late 60s. ARPANET eventually led to the Internet.

In a classic 1960 paper, “Man-Computer Symbiosis”, Licklider wrote, “Living together in intimate association, or even close union, of two dissimilar organisms is called symbiosis. Present day computers are designed primarily to solve pre-formulated problems, or to process data according to predetermined procedures. All alternatives must be foreseen in advance. If an unforeseen alternative arises, the whole procedure comes to a halt.
“If the user can think his problem through in advance, symbiotic association with a computing machine is not necessary. However, many problems that can be thought through in advance are very difficult to think through in advance. They would be easier to solve and they can be solved faster, through an intuitively guided trial and error procedure in which the computer cooperated, showing flaws in the solution.”

“When I read Lick’s paper ‘Man-Computer symbiosis’ in 1960, it greatly influenced my own thinking. This was it,” says Bob Taylor, now retired to the woods of the San Francisco Bay Area. Taylor worked as Licklider’s assistant at ARPA and brought computer networks into being for the first time, through the Arpanet. After he left Arpa, Taylor was recruited by Xerox to set up the computing group at the Palo Alto Research Centre, the famous Xerox Parc, which became the cradle of PC, Windows, Mac, Ethernet and local area networks, laser printer, mouse and so on. No other group can claim to have contributed so much to the future of personal computing.

Another shining example of cross-pollination between liberal arts and science is Herbert Simon, who was a political scientist and a psychologist. He created the first computer based Artificial Intelligence programme at Carnegie Mellon University and is truly considered one of the founders of Artificial Intelligence. Simon received the Turing Award, considered the Nobel Prize in Computer Science in 1975 and later went on win the Nobel in Economics as well in 1978 for his theory of ‘Bounded Rationality.’

These visionaries approached technology from a psychology background. What about engineers who approached psychology to come up with better products? I can think of at least three such and all of Indian origin. The first and the most well known globally is Amar Bose, chairman Bose Corp. Bose finished his PhD with Norbert Wiener, at MIT in 1957. He received a Fulbright Scholarship to spend a year in India. He used it to lecture at the Indian Statistical Institute, Calcutta where P C Mahalnobis was heading it and at the National Physical Laboratory, Delhi headed by K S Krishnan.

While waiting to sail off to India, Bose had bought a HiFi (High Fidelity) audio system, the hottest thing then. Bose had repaired radios at his father’s workshop in Philadelphia since childhood and knew the system inside out. However he found that the sound produced by the system out of the speakers was far from HiFi. As a classical music lover and a violinist himself, Bose could not bear it. This led him to study acoustics by the night during his sojourn of India. He was intrigued by the fact that the speakers, even when they actually adhered to the technical specifications printed in company catalogues, were not producing music as it was heard in a concert hall. At a very early stage, with a stroke of a genius, Bose realized that improvements in circuitry were not the only key to better audio. He decided to venture into the budding field of psycho-acoustics pioneered at Bell Labs in the 30s. Psycho-acoustics deals with the perception of sound by human beings rather than the physical measurement of sound. MIT allowed Bose, then a very popular and a very unconventional teacher of electrical engineering, to set up his company while continuing to teach at his alma mater. After years of painstaking experimentation, it resulted in the revolutionary Bose speakers. To the surprise of all audio experts, they did not have the familiar woofers and tweeters for the low and high frequency sounds and in fact directed almost 90% of the sound away from the audience! In fact a top honcho at a well known Japanese consumer electronics company, told Bose that they never took Bose seriously, since they thought he was nuts! Of course the tables turned later and today Bose is considered the most valuable audio brand globally.

The second example is that of N Jayant, Executive Director of the Georgia Centers for Advanced Telecommunications Technology (GCATT). A PhD student of B S Ramakrishna, a pioneering teacher in acoustics and signal processing at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, Jayant joined the Bell Labs in 1968. The focus in communication then was how to get good quality voice signals at low bit rates. Those were the early years of digital signal processing. Normally one would require 64 kbits of bandwidth but can it be done at much lower bandwidths that are encountered in wireless and mobile situations? Among others, the US military was keen on developing low bit rate technology. The mathematicians and engineers came up with innovative coding and compression techniques to send as much data as possible in as thin a bandwidth as possible. However if one wanted good quality sound, one could not go lower than 32 kbits. Bishnu Atal another alumnus of Indian Institute of Science working in the Bell Labs came up with his Linear Predictive Coding techniques that allowed telephonic conversations at 16 kbits using a very unconventional approach and in fact a version of his method is used in all cell phones the world over. But we can discuss Atal’s fascinating story at another time.

Going back to digital music on which primarily Jayant was working, Jayant too discovered that pure mathematical and algorithmic approach had limitations and instead adopted a perceptual approach. This led to major study of the frequency components actually heard by the human ear. They discovered that if a sound at any point in time had a thousand frequencies then the ear was sensitive to only a hundred of them. That is 900 (90%) of the components of a sound could be thrown away without affecting the sound heard by the human ear. If the sound is sampled into 1000 frequencies every 100th of a second then one could figure out which 900 of them could be thrown away. All that one needed was processing power that was fast enough, which became possible in the late eighties and early nineties with developments in chip technology. It is this approach that led to MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and the now hugely popular MP3. We all know that MP3 technology has made digital music industry possible. Once again perceptual studies provided the break through.

While Bose and Jayant have seen their studies leading to consumer products soon enough, in the case of Arun Netravali it has taken nearly three decades of waiting. Netravali joined Rice University for a PhD in application of mathematics in communications soon after his graduation from IIT Bombay in 1967. After his PhD however he found US enveloped in a recession post Oil-shock of 1973. With no jobs available in industry, he found an offer from the venerable Bell Labs, most welcome. He was asked to work in the video signal-processing group. Those days the hot thing that was being discussed was the “Picture Phone”, where the speakers can see each other. Obviously it was an idea whose time came three decades later through video conferencing and 3G mobile phones. But in the seventies soon after putting a man on the moon, everything seemed possible, at least to engineers in the US.

Once again the main obstacle for sending pictures and video through a wire was limited bandwidth. A TV signal requires 70 MB bandwidth where as the good old copper wire networks of AT&T offered only a thousandth of it. Once again all sorts of ingenious techniques were thought up by engineers to assist in compressing the video signal. If the subject of the image (say the head and neck of the speaker on the other side) is not moving very fast then one could assume that in the next frame of the picture being sent the image would have changed very little. So instead of sending the whole image again one could send just the difference from the previous one. Going further if the subject’s motion can be reasonable predicted (says the head moving from side to side in an arc of a circle) then one could calculate the possible position of the image in the next frame, send that information and the difference between the calculated and the actual and so on. These are called adaptive differential coding in the jargon of digital communication engineers. But all these ingenuity had limited use since the amount of compression needed was huge.

Then once again perceptual studies came to the rescue of Netravali. Which colours are the human eyes sensitive to? If a lady is sitting on a lawn and you are sending that picture across then what elements of that picture are more important that others? For example the grass in the lawn may not bee noticed in detail b the viewer other than its green colour where as the face and the dress worn by the lady may be noticed immediately. Then why not send the relevant parts of the picture in greater detail and the others in broad strokes? Can patterns in an image be recognized by the sender and just a predetermined number be sent to denote a pattern rather than the whole pattern and so on and so forth. The result was the development of many video compression techniques at bell labs, in which Netravali played a major role.

This led to the concept of high quality digital TV broadcast rather than flickering analogue images. But there is a long chasm between a consumer friendly concept and a whole industry accepting it as a standard. To persuade the skeptics Netravali and his team set up the demonstration of such a digital TV broadcast in the 1984 Olympics at Los Angeles. However we remember the 1984 Games today for the success of Carl Lewis and the heroics of our own P T Usha and not the digital TV. Soon enough Netravali got enormous peer recognition. The IEEE medals, fellowship of the US National Academy of Engineering, the position of President of Bell Labs,National Technology Medal from the US President and Padma Bhushan from the Indian government, however he could not get over the fact that the global politics of broadcast standards the cost of leaving the old analogue technology by broadcasters, TV makers and the viewers would always brand his work as “one ahead of its time”. But the 21st century has changed all that. Today the rage of US TV industry is High Definition TV (HDTV) and Arun Netravali is a fulfilled man.

What is the moral of these stories?
Technology, unlike science, does not lead to a new theorem or another charmed quark or the secrets of a fold in a protein, all of which will be appreciated as breakthroughs in knowledge. But it creates products, which are primarily used by other human beings. Thus the user—human being—and his intelligence, stupidity, frailty, habit, curiosity, variable sensory and cognitive capabilities have to be kept in mind while developing products. An engineer is normally not sensitive to these things. He looks at speed, robustness, reliability, scalability, power consumption, life cycle cost etc. There are innumerable examples of such products of pure engineering genius, bombing in the market place. But we in the Indian tech companies have not learnt the lesson yet. A North American colleague recently remarked, “I have seen enough philosophy, psychology, history and English majors in US companies but in India I see 99.99% engineers. And that is their strength and weakness!”

If innovation is the bridge to survival and prosperity in the new economy then a diversity of knowledge bases, soft sciences and hard technologies need to be put together in the cauldron and hope for the best to come out of the brew!

Linux and all that

Business India, October 13-26, 2003

The penguin has arrived

Tux, the penguin, symbol of Linux, is spreading out of the sweaty rooms of ponytails into boardrooms of pin stripes, as it promises the Nirvana of lower IT infrastructure costs while making it more secure.

Shivanand Kanavi

If one were inclined towards numerology then one could try playing around with the number 1991 in many ways, to read a turning point hidden somewhere. After all it proved to be so. That year the cold war ended with the collapse of the former Soviet Union and changed the bipolar world. It started a massive wave of economic restructuring the world over that still continues. That was also the year two seemingly innocuous initiatives were taken by technologists that are changing today’s world.

One was an information management idea at the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN), Geneva, penned by Tim Berners-Lee in a proposal to his boss. His ideas led to the World Wide Web. Tim Berners-Lee refused to patent the idea and earn money from it. Today, he is evangelising the development of next generation Web technologies called the Semantic Web, as head of the W3C forum at MIT.

The other was a piece of specialised software called an Operating System (OS), written by a computer science student, Linus Torvalds, at the University of Helsinki, Finland. He posted it on the Internet with a modest comment: “Hello everybody out there, using Minix. I'm doing a free operating system. Just a hobby, won't be big and professional. This has been brewing since April, and is starting to get ready. I'll get something practical within a few months, and I'd like to know what features most people would want. Any suggestions are welcome, but I won't promise I'll implement them :-) Linus”.

Torvalds was using a PC with an Intel 386 chip and did not believe that his operating system would work on anything more complex than the hard disk of his PC. Today his OS, appropriately named by him—Linux, is powering a growing number of servers, thereby causing any number of managers in technology giants like Sun and Microsoft to reach for antacids and aspirins.

Unix, Windows, and Linux
Unix has its origins in the frustrations faced by researchers in pioneering projects. The project involved developing a computer utility—way back in the early sixties—which could be shared by many users like power or water. It was called MULTICS (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service). If it sounds like the current buzzwords like ‘grid computing’ and ‘computing on the tap’, then you know exactly how ‘original’ those terms are!

The project involved MIT, Bell Labs and GEC. The project led to many pioneering concepts in software and operating systems but took too long to fructify. As a result GE which at one time had a plan to enter computing in a big way altogether exited from the field. Bell Labs too dropped out of the project while MIT chugged along for a long time.

A couple of engineers at Bell Labs, Ken Thomson and Dennis Ritchie, (who also created the programming language C), who had worked on as part of the DARPA project developed a single user operating system and called it UNIX (Uniplexed Information and Computing Service). It was also a pun on the name of the original OS.

Thus was born UNIX in 1971. However, due to strict anti-trust laws which prohibited AT&T (which then owned Bell Labs) from entering other fields than telecommunications, the company was forced to give away the source code to various universities. Thus Unix became very popular at Stanford and Berkeley. In fact Sun Microsystems was inspired by the Stanford University Network and later developed its own version of Unix called Solaris. Berkeley developed its own free version of Unix called BSD.

Novell another networking company saw the possibility of client server networks proliferating and developed its own network operating system called Netware, which is still very popular. As Microsoft saw an opportunity to grow from desktop operating systems (DOS and Windows) to a network operating system it developed Windows NT and later Windows 2000, which obviously had several features of Unix and Novell’s Netware.

Mean while Andrew Tannenbaum, a well-known tech teacher and writer wrote a small operating system to teach his students in 1987, called Minix. It was a great teaching aid. But it also had deficiencies. Tannenbaum, however refused to answer his critics and increase the complexity of his Minix. Linus Torvalds went ahead in 1991 and tried to improve Minix and called it Linux. According to Ragib Hasan, a Linux enthusiast from Bangladesh, “The nerds of the world took up Torvalds’ challenge. Of Linux today, only about 2% was written by the ‘master’ himself, though he remains the ultimate authority on what new code and innovations are incorporated into it. Because the original quantities and instructions that make up Linux have been published, any programmer can see what it is doing, how it does it and, possibly, how it could do it better. Torvalds did not invent the concept of open programming but Linux is its first success story. Indeed, it probably could not have succeeded before the Internet had linked the disparate world of computing experts”.

According to independent technology market researchers like IDC, Linux is today the fastest growing OS in servers. True it does not sound as revolutionary as the World Wide Web. But large number of people in India and other countries cannot afford to buy expensive software for home use. Governments starved of funds cannot use IT extensively for the much needed citizen services and governance. Consequently, the ‘digital divide’—a term used to denote the lack of access to computing and Internet to the masses—can turn into an unbridgeable chasm. That is why free Linux and a low cost IT infrastructure built on it seem to be the way out of the digital cul-de-sac.

Even if big businesses can afford IT costs, a rupee saved is a rupee gained and nobody can afford to be profligate. In these days of tech skepticism when CFOs of even the largest corporations in the world are asking questions on IT spending and the return on investment, any development that reduces the cost of technology sounds very attractive. That is the reason big bets are being placed on Linux, by giants like IBM, HP, Dell and Oracle. Despite its youth several users are also ready to bet on Linux.

According to a cover story in Business Week (March 3, 2003), Wall Street’s Investment Bankers—one of the most tech savvy crowd in the world—have already switched a majority of their in-house servers to Linux. Morgan Stanley for example hopes to save $100 million in the next five years by switching 4000 high-end servers to much cheaper Linux based servers.

Our own technologist-politician, President APJ Abdul Kalam, warmed the cockles of many a techie’s heart, when he said recently (see Financial Express May 29, 2003), that it is imperative for India to go for ‘open source’ software. Linux is the most well-known open source code software.

Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Sun Microsystems and a leading venture capitalist in the Silicon Valley, agrees with Kalam. “I do believe India and China should coordinate their strategies in technology and software. There are many open source technologies, all the way from operating systems to applications that will work well if the two countries work together. It will help them train their people, keep costs much lower and improve their strategic importance to the world of technology”, he adds.

Competing OS like Unix and Windows have earned their vendors tens of billions of dollars but the guy who started the Linux movement in 1991, Linus Torvalds, did not earn a cent from it. He gave it away free. Anybody could download it from the web, improve it and put up the improvements on the web for others to scrutinise and use but not sell.

Naturally, what Tim Berners-Lee and Torvalds miss in dollars is more than made up by the huge fan following they have.

When Michael Douglas in his award-winning role of a takeover tycoon, in a Hollywood movie Wall Street, said, “Capitalism is based on greed”, he was only stating the stark truth that is rarely mentioned in polite company. However, the quality of our life has changed not only by the enlightened self-interest of individuals, but even more profoundly by the ideas and deeds of visionaries and savants who give it all away.

Is ‘open source code’ such a novel thing? Did Amir Khusro claim intellectual property rights over Hindustani ragas, or Purandara Dasa on Karnatak music? In our own times, Bohr did not patent quantum theory nor Einstein relativity and E=mc2 , nor did John von Neumann his path breaking architecture of the digital computer. All of science, mathematics, classical music or philosophy is ‘Open Source Code’. They are all ‘peer reviewed’ and they inspire new developments.

If Linux is geeky flower power, a product of software ponytails, then how does it fit into the business plans of pin stripes in big companies like IBM and Oracle, HP and Dell? Linux can be downloaded from the Internet for free or bought for a very small fee from various vendors who provide it in a set of CD-ROMs along with several applications. Once you buy a copy you can install it on any number of PCs without the fear of being called a software pirate, because it is legal.

However, while Linux itself is free, applications built to be compatible with it, need not be. Thus an Oracle 9i database built on Linux is not free but Openoffice, which does everything that Microsoft Office does, is. More over one needs to spend money on Linux consultants for support, customisation, implementation etc. But considering the total cost of ownership, according to an IDC white paper, Linux still scores over other competitors by a wide margin. In Internet related services Linux scores in costs by leagues and even in other services the gap is considerable.

The need for consultants and the growth rate of Linux technologies and applications in western markets has piqued the interest of Indian IT services companies as well. Infosys is involved in acquiring Linux skills though it is too early to talk about it according to company sources. But TCS is already knee deep into Linux. According to Gautam Shroff, who heads the architecture and technology consulting practice at TCS, “We have a main frame Linux lab in Chennai with IBM mainframes, an Intel Performance Lab in Mumbai for testing Linux under stressful conditions on Intel servers. In Delhi we have a dedicated lab to provide proof of concept for end-to- end Linux solutions for enterprises. Some of our packaged banking solutions are already available on Linux. As consultants we are also helping our customers chalk out their Linux strategy, based on our experience with the Linux platform”

If the market expands due to lower cost to the end user then clearly the application software companies will be more than happy to eliminate a layer of proprietary OS vendors like Microsoft and Sun. In the case of Microsoft they might even do so with a glint in their eyes. The move is already paying dividends. For example Intel was a late entrant into the server market but inexpensive Intel servers called blade servers, are selling like hot cakes. PC assemblers like Dell who diversified into cheap servers are also showing a high rate of growth. Loading Linux on them has definitely helped. The Intel-Microsoft alliance called ‘Wintel’, dominated the PC market. But today there is a much talked about ‘Lintel’ as Linux servers being sold by Dell and IBM are showing huge growth rate. No doubt the absolute numbers are still small. For example according to a Merril Lynch report dated March, 5, 2003, the sales of Unix servers in the Sep-Dec, 2002, amounted to $5.6 billion, and those of Windows based servers accounted for $3.8 billion, while those based on Linux only amounted to a ‘paltry’ $681 million.

Then why antacids at Sun and Microsoft? Well, it is the growth rate, silly. In the last quarter of 2002, Unix server sales fell by 10% (year over year) and sales of Windows servers rose by 6%. But Linux servers clocked a scorching 38% rise!

IBM’s CEO Sam Palmisano is reputed to have asked his colleagues in December 1999 as he took over the leadership of Big Blue, on what new technologies to bet on. One clear answer from his team was Linux. As a result IBM has already spent over a billion dollars in developing the hardware, software and services for Linux platform. IBM has also built alliances with five global Linux distributors: RedHat, Caldera Systems, SuSe, Turbolinux and Connectiva. Today, it has deployed over 1500 engineers for Linux development. No wonder when Palmisano made very low profile visit to Bangalore last year, Chief Minister S M Krishna invited him to set up a Linux development centre at Hubli, in the North of Karnataka.

IBM’s conversion to Linux is all the more remarkable because IBM pushed its own proprietary operating system called AIX on its own RISC chips till recently. Today it is not shy of evangelising the open source Linux on servers with Intel chips.

Oracle’s Larry Ellison too has been very bullish on Linux. “We are already practicing what we are preaching. Oracle Corp is converting all its IT infrastructure to the Linux platform. In fact we expect the next quantum of cost savings leading to a higher profit margin of close to 40%, to come from this migration among other things” says Shekhar Dasgupta, MD, Oracle India.

“Oracle is fully committed to supporting the Linux operating system. Ours was the first commercial database available on Linux. We believe that Linux is more attractive today than it ever was, as customers are looking for cost-effective solutions. Over the past few years Oracle and its customers have learned a tremendous amount about running Oracle on Linux for enterprise class deployments. Combining this knowledge with the opportunity to drastically reduce IT infrastructure costs has provided the catalyst for Oracle to move to the next step which is to even provide front-line technical support for the Linux itself in addition to supporting the Oracle stack”, adds Dasgupta.

It is not just a matter of price, there is also increasing concern, bordering paranoia, on security and reliability. Corporations and governments cannot afford a downtime in their servers because the OS crashed nor can they tolerate a virus or a hacker attack. On that score Unix has had very high standards and consequently dominated high-end mission critical servers. Windows however has had a checkered history in this regard and hence few want to risk basing critical applications on it.

But Linux, which has Unix like features, has proved to be very robust. Says, D Seetharam, country manager, government relations, IBM, India, “Among other technical things, the very design of Linux makes it more difficult for viruses to spread. More over since the source code is open for inspection and public comment of the entire developer community, the glitches get ironed out before official release.”

Naturally, one of the biggest users of Linux in India are defence related servers. According to Javed Tapia, director Red Hat India, Linux deployment in Pakistan is ahead of India and it is growing in Sri Lanka as well. Governments elsewhere too are recommending Linux. Governments in Germany, China and Taiwan are already big users and European commission too has issued a circular regarding the same.

Many users in India seem to be waiting for the lead to be taken in western markets. However, Tapia waxes eloquent on the Linux deployment in Central Bank and IRCTC. Central Bank has used Linux in all its 619 branches in total banking automation solution while the IRCTC has deployed Oracle’s ebusiness suite to automate and streamline processes in over 30 locations across India.

“We are implementing an ERP solution on Red Hat Linux Advanced Server. Our initial reaction—Linux seems to be the answer for enterprise wide low cost computing. The final word will of course have to wait for the full roll out”, says Amitabha Pandey, group general manager IT services at IRCTC. “We are probably the first full scale ERP implementation on Linux in India”, he adds.

Seeing the direction of the wind, Sun Microsystems too is running behind the bandwagon to get a look see. It recently backed Linux in a limited way for desktop computers. A segment, which is not its forte. It has released a Linux based version of an office productivity tool called StarOffice, which is much like Microsoft’s money spinning MS Office.

RedHat’s Linux 9.0 comes prepackaged with OpenOffice and other tools, games and even a programming environment. “If you look at a comparable package from Microsoft then you will probably spend at least as much on the software as on the hardware. There by doubling the entry barrier to home personal computing”, says Shashi Unni, a RedHat training expert.

Under these circumstances, Linux should spread like wild fire in desktop PCs. But it is not so. The reason is two fold. One relates to environment and the other to the youth of technology. Small enterprises and home users in India use illegal copies of both OS and applications without any compunction. Thus if you tell them that Linux comes almost free, it makes no difference to them. It is only when they see virus attacks, frequent crashes etc that they can start seeing the advantage of using Linux. Secondly Windows has been the most successful the desktop. Hence manufacturers of hardware peripherals like modem cards, web cameras, scanners, printers etc. have invetsed in writing software called ‘drivers’ based on Windows so that the machine automatically recognises the new peripheral. Most of these hardware manufacturers are yet to provide Linux compatible drivers to users. So one can find after loading the latest version of Linux that the internal modem card is not recognised by the OS. A major irritant as Internet access is one the main functions of a PC.

External modems however have no problem with Linux. “But this problem cannot be wished away”, admits Tapia of RedHat. “Till hardware vendors start providing Linux compatible drivers, which is not too far away, we have an alternative strategy. We are working with PC vendors and providing Linux certified hardware list to them so that one can just load Linux and plug and play”, he adds.

Already major PC vendors in India are offering Linux loaded PCs at a price, which is almost 30% less than Windows loaded ones. After all who would not like to have an IBM PC or an Acer Laptop, which comes with all warranties and legal software but competes with the neighbourhood assembler’s price?

The low cost and technical robustness along with the opportunity to modify and develop it further, has made Linux highly popular among India’s tech power houses like IITs, BARC and TIFR. In the US too four leading scientific laboratories: National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois (NCSA), San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago; California Institute of Technology in Pasadena are building a very high powered grid of supercomputers powered by Linux.

If we want an IT enabled nation then clearly Linux offers the best bet at the moment. Already Linux distributors and consultants like RedHat are working on Indian language support in Linux making it even more attractive.
We say Amen to that.

A Hollywood Beauty and CDMA

Business India, January 25 - February 7, 1999

Reaching out with spread spectrum

A 60-year-old idea patented by a Hollywood actress is revolutionising wireless technology.

Shivanand Kanavi

Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, the famous Hollywood star couple, are deeply upset. Recently, a man used a commonly available frequency scanner to find out what frequency their cellular phones were using. He then proceeded to not only snoop into their private conversation but tape it and sell it to a tabloid in the US. The episode brought into the limelight the lack of privacy in a cellular phone call. However, if they were using a cell phone based on spread spectrum technology like CDMA then such snooping in would not have been possible.

Spread Spectrum technology assures a high level of security and privacy in any wireless communication. It has come into the limelight in the past decade and especially in the past five years, after a US company, Qualcomm, demonstrated its successful application for cellular phones. Since SS technology can be used for secure communications, which cannot be jammed or snooped into, the US military has done extensive research and development on it since the 1960s and 1970s. Ironically, this hi-tech, and revolutionary concept in radio communication was patented by a Hollywood diva, Hedy Lamarr, nearly 60 years ago.

Hedy Lamarr--Unlikely inventor
Though gorgeous and glamorous, she was not a bimbo. Hedy Lamarr hit headlines as an actress with a nude swimming scene in her Czech film Ecstasy(1933). Later she was married to a rich pro-Nazi arms merchant, Fritz Mandl. To Mandl she was a trophy wife, whom he took along to many parties and dinners, to mingle with the high and mighty in politics, military and arms trade of Europe. Little did he suspect that beneath the beautiful exterior lay a sharp brain with an aptitude for technology. Hedy was able to pick up quite a bit of the technical shop-talk of the men around the table.

When the war began, Hedy, a staunch anti-Nazi escaped to London. There she convinced Louis Mayer of MGM studios to sign her up. Mayer, having heard of her reputation after Ecstacy, advised her to change her name from Hedwig Eva Marie Kiesler to 'Hedy Lamarr' and to act in "wholesome family movies", which she promptly agreed to.

As the war progressed and US entered it after Pearl Harbour, Hedy informed the US government that she was privy to considerable amount of Axis war technology and she wanted to help. The Defence Department had little faith in her claims and advised her to sell war bonds. Hedy, however was unrelenting. She, along with her friend George Antheil, an avant garde composer and musician, patented their 'secret communication system' (1941) and gave the patent rights free to the US military. The patent discussed a design to provide jamming free radio guidance systems for submarine launched torpedoes based on the frequency hopping spread spectrum technique. It consisted of two identical punched paper rolls. One roll, which was located in the submarine, changed the transmission frequency as it was rotated and the other embedded in the torpedo aided the receiver in hopping to the appropriate frequency. The enemy jammer would be thus left perennially guessing the guiding frequency.

The idea though ingenious was too cumbersome as it involved mechanical systems and was hence not applied by the US Navy. However, in the late 1950s as electronic computers appeared on the scene, the US Navy revived its interest in Hedy's ideas. Subsequently, with the development of microchips and digital communication, very advanced secure communication systems have been developed for military purposes using spread spectrum techniques. In the telecom revolution of the 1990s, these techniques have been used to develop civilian applications in cellular phones, wireless in local loop, Personal Communication Systems and so on. The unlikely inventor showed that if you have a sharp brain even party hopping could lead to frequency hopping!

Spread Spectrum
Instead of using one fixed frequency, what if the transmitter keeps jumping from one to another in a random fashion? Then by the time the "enemy", who wants to snoop in, or who wants to jam the transmission, finds the frequency with a high-speed scanner, the frequency would have changed. As long as the hopping does not have a pattern that can be detected and the receiver knows the exact sequence of hopping then both snooping and jamming would be impossible. Thus a user does not use a channel but many users can use a band as long as their sequences do not dash. This technique is called frequency hopping spread spectrum. Hedy's idea belonged to this set.

Another set of techniques belongs to the direct sequence SS, where a signal is mixed with a strong dose of noise and transmitted. Only the receiver knows the noise that has been added and hence he subtracts the same from the received signal, thereby recovering the transmitted signal. This technique works best when the added noise is very powerful. (In reality, noise means a completely random jumble of power output in all frequencies. In this case the jumble is not totally random but only the receiver is privy to it hence it is called pseudo-noise). Normally noise is acquired during transmission, like the static hiss and other crackling sounds in a radio during a storm. Hence, every radio engineer tries to broadcast the signal at a high power so that at the receiver's end the signal to noise ratio is high enough for the message to be intelligible. After all, the received power falls inversely as the square of the distance from the transmitter while the "noise" level does not. Direct sequence SS turns this situation upside down; it needs a weak signal and a strong noise to be effective. An everyday example of this can be seen at a cocktail party. When the -wise level is very high, there is maximum privacy for conversation between neighbours because both ears discount the same background noise while the third person hears only the noise! Qualcomm's CDMA belongs to this set of direct sequence techniques.

Breaking out of channelsSS techniques violate all conventional wireless wisdom. Traditional wireless systems however sophisticated, are based on the channel separation principle. That is, each user has to use a fixed radio frequency or a small part of the spectrum exclusively. In the very early days of wireless itself, when two pioneers, Marconi and De Forest, were vying to show off the superiority of their respective radios, the problem of interference appeared that has dogged wireless to this day. Both of them were then trying to sell their ideas to the public and went on to broadcast the first-ever live commentary of a yachting event. However they found to their dismay that their broadcast frequencies were too close to each other. This led to interference or unintentional jamming and all that the listeners could receive was garbled sound. Hence the principle, "only one transmitter can use a frequency at any time". Since the radio frequency spectrum is limited, the allocation of frequencies has become a major regulatory job. It is done by the International Telecom Union at the international level and bodies like the Wireless Planning Committee in India and the Federal Communications Commission in the US at a national level.

Channelisation is ingrained into the thinking of radio engineers. They strive for better transmit filters to contain the transmiSSion in a narrow channel. They strive for better receive filters to reject any interference that may assault their receiver. They strive for hyperstable frequency synthesisers to keep the carrier tuned as sharply as possible. Because of scarcity of spectrum, radio engineers continuously look for ways to narrow bandwidth by channel splitting, various multiplexing techniques, better coders and modulators-demodulators (modems) and so on. Thus each cellular operator in India who has been given about 12.4 MHz of spectrum can accommodate about 200 simultaneous users in each cell. However SS techniques developed in the past decade have demonstrated that even in a mobile environment they can accommodate 10-20 times more users than analog cellular systems and four-seven times more users than traditional digital systems, though they violate the basic concept of channelisation. In fact, SS techniques work better and hence more efficiently in wider bandwidths. To a traditional radio engineer, SS enthusiasts appear as wild-eyed hippies.

Similarly, a major problem in mobile phones is what is called "multipath", that is the same signal gets reflected by various geographical features and reaches the receiver at different times leading to fading in and out of voice. Multipath is a frequency dependent effect hence it does not affect SS based systems as the broadcast is not at one frequency but a whole bunch of them in a wide band.

Having proven its superiority over traditional wireless technology, SS is becoming more and more popular especially in fixed wireless applications. Most of the new basic telephone operators who are using wireless in local loop to connect their exchanges with customers will be using CDMA. Even the next generation of traditional cellular phones- 3G, will incorporate this technology.

Nuclear, anti-nuclear

The Sunday Observer, June 20-26, 1993
Our lonely nuclear high priests

Shivanand Kanavi

In a ceremony at Trombay on January 20, 1957, to name the first swimming pool type reactor, APSARA, Jawaharlal Nehru made some perceptive remarks. “I am happy to be here,” he said “not because I know very much about atomic energy or reactors, in spite of the numerous attempts Dr Bhabha and Dr Krishnan have made to educated me, but without understanding the intricacies of these mysteries, I hope I have some conception of the importance in this world of ours, of the release of this great power.”

“In the old days, the men of religion talked about mysteries. In ancient Greece, there were the mysteries. High priests who apparently knew about these mysteries exercised a great amount of influence on the common people who did not understand them. In every country that was so. The high priests in those days possibly dominated the thinking in many countries with their mysterious functions, ceremonies and rituals.”

“Now we have these mysteries, which these high priests of science flourish before us, not only flourish but threaten us with; and at any rate make us full of wonder or full of fear. Whatever it is, we have got these new mysteries of science, and of higher mathematics, which are unveiling various aspects of the physical world to us. No one knows where this will go.”

In a flash of brilliance, Nehru had captured the predicament of the common man when faced with the mysteries of nature and high priests of science –feeling both wonder and fear.

Our atomic scientists, who best represented the growth of science and technology in modern India, are no longer the unalloyed heroes they were in the fifties and sixties in the public perception. Why is this so? Have we come half circle from wonder to the fear that Nehru perceived?

From the euphoria of the fifties to anti-nuclear agitations and litigations of the eighties and nineties, a section of our intelligentsia seem to have made an about- turn. Some even sound like anti-science mystics. This phenomenon is worth investgating seriously. Otherwise, we will be lost in pro-nuclear, anti-nuclear dogma and rhetoric.
Pro- nukes call the anti-nukes irrational, stubborn, callous towards mass poverty-alleviation, radical chic and even agents of western imperialism who are trying to force India to go slow on its nuclear programme and eventually sign the hegemonistic nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

The anti-nukes call the other side ivory-tower technocrats, science fundamentalists, reductionists (a new abuse), brainwashed by western concept of material progress etc. it is clear that the dispute has crossed limits of decency and has become a them and us confrontation

A good example is that of Dr Shivaram Karanth. More than four decades ago he compiled and published, at his own cost, a beautifully illustrated and lucidly written three-volume children’s encyclopedia called Bala Jagattu in Kannada and a two-volume science encyclopedia called Vijnana Prapancha .

It was a pioneering effort in popular science writing in Kannada. Today, Karanth, a Gyanpeeth laureate and a nonagenarian intellectual, is fighting a prolonged battle in the Supreme Court against the nuclear power plant at Kaiga, 60 Kilometeres from Karwar, in Karanataka.

These developments appear to have demoralized nuclear scientists and engineers. They have not come to terms with their transformation from heroes to villains, from nation builders to potential destroyers. I have seen bewilderment expressed in numerous conversations. More than the resource crunch, what seem have hit them is this fall from grace.
The Pressurized Heavy Water Reactor that is being installed in Kaiga has been developed by Indians and is a credit to their skills, it is much safer than the type that was used in Chernobyl. It uses natural uranium as against the enriched uranium that Western nation have refused to sell to India if it does not sign the NPT.

The Kaiga plant will produce 440 Mw of electricity to begin with and ultimately 1,400 Mw, shoring up the infrastructure in power-hungry Karnataka. The plant has enough in-built safety devices. Of course accidents can happen any were. The rain forest cut to clear the land for the project has been adequately compensated by reforestation both in Kaiga and in distant Chamarajnagar and Mandya. It is to be noted that the forest cleared is about five percent of what has been destroyed in 1,200 Mw Kalinadi hydroelectric project.

Taking note of all these factors, the Supreme Court in a recent judgment clubbed all the petitions filed against the Kaiga project together and dismissed them. The court has advised the Department of Atomic Energy that if it so desires, it can give a hearing to the petitioners’ grievance. The department has given the petitioners opportunity to prepare a brief using the National Environmental Engineering Research Institute(NEERI) report on environmental impact of the project if necessary and submit it for discussion.

Clearly, the Supreme Court verdict is a vindication of the stand of the nuclear scientist and not that of the anti-nuclear movement that had concentrated on the safety aspect and destruction of the rain forest in Kaiga. Has the issue been settled? It is doubtful. There may be agitation again. “Why is it that issues, which can be explained with facts and figures and reasoning are not understood by some of our intellectuals?” asked an exasperated nuclear scientist.
It could be pointed out to him that issues regarding waste disposal and even closing down the reactor after its useful life –normally 25 years- are still to be solved satisfactorily. Moreover why should people blindly believe the high priests of science? For example, did our framers know about the use of chemical pesticides for thousands of years? Then came the Green Revolution in the sixties and our agricultural experts from universities and agro-corporations taught our farmers the new technology.

About two decades later, a factory manufacturing pesticides in Bhopal leaked deadly methyl iso-cyanate and killed thousands in their sleep. Now how can you expect the common man to take your word for it? There is bound to be adverse reaction against science and technology. Some of it may be justified and a lot of it may be irrational fear. But the science establishment has not yet learnt to deal with it.

There are basically two reasons for this development and they have to be dealt with separately. One is the lack of information about science and technology among laymen, which naturally means increased effort in popularizing science. A number of organisations are finally realizing this.

The establishment of the Directorate of Environment and public Awareness within the Nuclear Power Corporation is an example of this. But the second reason is more complex and needs to be dealt with at different levels. That has to do with the alienation of the state and governance from the people. The marginalization felt today is so acute that anything that has to do with the government and comes from some office in New Delhi or a state capital immediately raises the hackles of many people.

The corruption, arrogance and later brute violence that is increasingly being associated with the state, repels many Indians. Scientists working with the government are tainted, by association with such an apparatus.

The solution is not within the ambit of scientists alone. It is an urgent national problem that requires effort from all of us. But scientists working in the government have to be more responsive to public opinion and do their best to win over their opponents. The haughty style of innuendo and ridicule and answering questions only when they are asked in the Lok Sabha has to change.

For example when I asked our nuclear scientists why they do not meet Dr Karnath and others and win them over, they had no answer. Their approach was limited to a few pamphlets, press statements and a debate five years back in Bangalore.

I think they should read Nehru’s speech carefully and emerge from their ivory towers.

Arthashastra

The Sunday Observer, February 2-8, 1992
The Real Chanakya is lost in CHANAKYA, the TV Serial

Shivanand Kanavi

Many viewers are beginning to see red on seeing saffron in the popular TV serial, Chanakya. This, in turn, has sparked off a debate in the media about the serial’s historical authenticity. Some have voiced skepticism over whether a saffron flag had existed in the fourth century B.C. Others have implied that Dr. Chandraprakash Dwivedi, the writer-director-actor of the serial, is using it to propagate Hindutva.

The Controversy is unnecessary. The serial, set against a historical backdrop, is fictional. In fact, the controversy would not have arisen if Doordarshan had learnt a lesson from the dispute over the historical authenticity of The Sword Of Tipu Sultan, and made an announcement before every episode that the serial is fictional. But who was Chanakya or Kautilya? We know nothing about his personal life. We have some details about Chandragupta Maurya from Greek sources, who refer to him as Sandrokottos. But even these reports survive as fragmented quotations in other works- the original is untraceable. As D D Kosambi points out, as far as Chanakya is concerned, we only have legends fictionalized through the famous Sanskrit play, Mudra Rakshasa, written by Visakhadatta in the fourth century AD.

Today, all we know about Chanakya is only through his work, Arthashastra. This work was studied until the twelfth century and then was lost for many centuries. It was rediscovered in 1905, but only in parts. As R P Kangle, in his preface to Arthashastra – Part II (Bombay University Publication, Second edition, 1972) points out, no entire copy of Arthashastra has been recovered so far. The ancient Sanskrit used in the text is also open to many interpretations besides the copiers’ errors and interpolations. At the end of it all, Arthashastra is a treatise on political economy and does not say anything about the author direct. Thus anybody claiming to know about Chanakya the person should not be taken too seriously.

But having said all this, one cannot help but be impressed by the author of the Arthashastra. In fact, we have to be extremely thankful to him for providing invaluable information about the economy and politics of fourth century Magadh. He writes in a clear-cut, terse style with no scope for cant.

A quick glance at the Arthashastra yields rich insights into the state of Magadh. The title translates as “the science of material gain”. In the very first verse, the author acknowledges his debt to other ancient theoreticians and modestly says that he has done nothing more than compile and survey other masters’ views. He puts fourth the aim of the book as teaching the ruler “how to acquire and protect his Kingdom”.

The state Magadh appears very privileged indeed. It was the main land-clearing agency in the primeval forests surrounding pockets of population in the Indo-Gangetic plain and later also in the Deccan. It was the largest landowner and the principal owner of mines. Even a quick scan of the Arthashastra yields a rich insight into Magadh. After detailing all the precautions the ruler should take against corrupt state servants, Chanakya admits that it is as difficult to detect an official dipping into the state’s revenues, as it is to discover how much water has been drunk by swimming fish. The monarch, as he emerges in the Arthashastra, far from wallowing in luxury, was the most hard-working person in the kingdom, with his entire day strictly charted out with time set aside for sports, consultations with ministers and the head of the treasury and army, receiving secret reports from spies, interspersed by short spells of leisure.

Strife for the throne is treated as a minor occupational hazard of kingship. In fact, Chanakya quotes a predecessor’s axiom: “Princes, like crabs, are father eaters!” The Arthashastra never contemplates any interruption in the policy of state, no matter what happens in the palace. Externally the armed tribal oligarchies maintaining tribal exclusivity and some democratic traditions are considered serious obstacles to the absolutist state, both politically and ideologically. Ways to break up and subdue these tribal oligarchies are detailed in chanakyaneeti. Secret agents are not only used to spy on officials but also to monitor public pinion and even try to mould it through disinformation campaigns.

As far as the economy was concerned, Chanakya vigorously prompted direct settlements on waste lands and clearing forests for cultivation. Land was divided into leased land, on which taxes were collected, and vast crown lands, which the state cultivated. Productivity was a paramount consideration and if a lessee’s heirs did not cultivate the land properly then the lease was cancelled.

There was a form of social security for the aged, infirm, widows and pregnant women. The state maintained buffer stocks, not only of grain but also of essentials like timber, rope, tools, etc. to be distributed to the public during times of crises like famines or epidemics. Prostitution and wine production were legalised and taxed; in fact, there were separate ministries for them.

A more developed cash economy cannot be imagined. But all this was confined to the towns. The villages belonging to the vast crown lands were like camps of forced labour –increasing productivity was the only thing that mattered. The villagers were allowed no diversions of any kind.

The state also maintained a huge standing army estimated at half a million with handsome salary for the soldiers. But the cash was mopped up by the state by retailing the essentials to soldiers at inflated prices. The state monopoly in mining was crucial and Chanakya says, “the treasury is based on mining, army upon the treasury. He who has both can conquer the whole wide earth!”

In the event of financial emergency, methods similar to modern deficit financing was practiced. Chanakya also suggests alternative methods like state loans and National debts and even framing charges on rich merchants and making them pay in times of emergencies!

Chanakya certainly evokes interests among historians and students of political economy – but the Arthahshastra is of interest to students of Indian philosophy as well. In the very beginning of the Arthashastra, Chanakya enumerates what he considers as sciences worthy of being studied by the prince, who is training to be the future king. There he mentions philosophy; three (not four) Vedas, economics and science of politics as the four sciences to be studied diligently. In fact, he disagreed with the followers of Manu who regarded only the Vedas, economics and politics as the sciences. Chanakya extolled philosophy as the “lamp of all actions, support of all laws”.

But what is starling is what Chanakya considers as philosophy. He mentions only Samkhya, Yoga and Lokayata. Samkhya, it may be noted, is an intensely atheistic Indian trend which was naturalistic in outlook. Yoga here is not the Yoga of asanas but another name for Nyaya-Vaiseshika. This school extols doubt, debate, inference, syllogism and moreover, the atomic and molecular theory of matter. The third leg of his triad-- Lokayayata, is another name for Charvaka, a primitive materialistic trend. This trend was apparently highly respected by Chanakya, whereas later it was suppressed by followers of Manu. Lokayata now remains only in the polemics against it by its opponents and none of its works have been discovered. As Debiprasad Chattopdyaya noted, Chanakya while extolling philosophy and putting himself apart from the followers of Manu on this question, was actually extolling philosophy, in the broad sense of the term, and particularly those trends in Indian philosophy that had rational elements in them. Chanakya, thus, emerges from the Arthashastra as clear-thinking, bold, and rational theoretician.

Having said this, I would urge you all to watch the fictionalised Chanakya every Sunday morning and enjoy the histrionics of Chandraprakash Dwivedi and Co.

Amar Bose--A Portrait

Business India, January 22-February 4, 2001

In pursuit of excellence

Shivanand Kanavi

Amar Bose

(Photo Credit: Palashranjan Bhaumick)

While we were preparing the list of hi-tech entrepreneurs in the US, and discussing optical networking, gigabit routers, switches, chips and software, it struck us: how could we forget the original Indian entrepreneur in hi-tech, Dr Amar Bose of Bose Corporation? Starting way back in 1964, when most present-day entrepreneurs were in graduate schools or even in high schools, Bose set up his company to produce speakers. The privately-held com­pany is considered the biggest audio brand in the world today, and its revenues are expected to cross a billion dol­lars this year. The name Bose is whispered in hushed tones by audiophiles. His speakers and audio systems are perva­sive and can be seen in NASA programmes, US Air Force, homes, stadiums, theatres and auditoria. However, very little is known of Bose, the man himself.

The media-shy Dr Bose graciously agreed to meet us for an interview and photo session at his headquarters in Framingham, Massachusetts. When we mentioned that we would be meeting Bose, Desh Deshpande told us: "I know very little about him and would love to read his story in Business India.” And Mukesh Chatter said: "That man is way up there. He is the dean of all of us."

Bose Corporations' headquarters, popularly called "the mountain", is on top of the now verdant dirt hill, created in the early part of the century, during the construction of the US highway system. It is a gleaming glass structure shaped like a, take your guess, an audio system. We entered it with certain awe, but we were pleasantly surprised to meet the legend, a friendly, informal and animated speaker. The 45-minute interview stretched to two-and-a­ half hours as he realised that we were as interested in his life story as in his research in statistical communication theory and acoustics at MIT.

Technically, Bose is not an India-born Indian-American, like most people we met, but his bonds with India and its struggle for independence are as strong as you can get. His father Noni Gopal Bose was a member of a revolutionary group, while he was studying physics in Calcutta University. Two weeks before his University examinations, the British police caught on to him. Luckily, Bose Sr. made a successful escape to the US in 1920 on a boat with no passport and $5 in his pocket, with the Special Branch hot on his heels. After coming to the US, Bose Sr. worked full-time with a New York-based revolutionary group headed by Dr Taraknath Das, mobilising moral and material support for India's struggle for indepen­dence. He married an American schoolteacher and settled down in Philadelphia. "In a sense, my mother was more Indian than me. She was a vegetarian and deeply interested in Vedanta and Hindu philosophy," says Bose. The connec­tion with Indian revolutionaries did not go away. Amar Bose vividly recalls the hush-hush meetings in his house and the visit by a person who had escaped the horror of Jalianwala Baug. The stories of British atrocities, which he heard from this visitor as well as from others, have left an indelible impression on him even 60 years later.

Bose's childhood in Philadelphia was not easy either. One pictures the deep south of US as the seat of racism and bigotry, but during the '30s and '40s, right in Philadelphia, the home of Bill of Rights, the Boses had to suffer intense racial discrimination and humiliation. "Nobody would rent a house for us. We had to send my mother house hunting. Every time we used to enter a restaurant we would keep on waiting and nobody would serve us. Finally my father would call the manager, the whole restaurant would suddenly fall silent and father would make a short speech: 'Sir, we are good enough to cook and wait and serve you. We are good enough to die for this country in the wars, but we are not good enough to pay and be served. Why is that?' Obviously, it was largely rhetorical and used to have no effect on the proprietor. We all used to then stand up and leave the place. My father never tried to say that he was not an African-American but an Indian. When I met Bill Cosby - he is also from Philadelphia - he said: 'What do you know about .racism? You grew up on the other side of the railway tracks.' I said, just hold on, and told him a few stories," reminisces Bose. "One cannot for­get that things were not as they are now. But all said and done, as far as recognising talent for what it is, there is no country like the US."

Bose showed a penchant for engineering pretty early in his childhood. He could not afford toys but he learnt to repair toy trains and started earning a little pocket money at the age of 13. During World War II, he started repairing radio sets and developed the largest network of radio repairs through small advertisements placed in different stores in Philadelphia. His brilliance in academics led to admission in MIT and later BS (1952), MS (1952) and DSC (1956) from the same institution. His actual thesis advisor was the legendary Norbert Wiener, but since Wiener was in Math­ematics department and Bose was registered in Electrical Engineering, another advisor Dr Y.W. Lee nominally filled in as his advisor.

After he finished his doctoral thesis and was waiting for an appointment in the EE department at MIT, for a faculty position, he got a Fullbright Fellowship. He chose to visit the National Physical Laboratory, Delhi and lecture on Sta­tistical Communication Theory, which was just being developed in the world. Since there was a month to leave for Delhi, Bose had nothing better to do and bought a so-called hi-fidelity system after checking out its technical specs. But when he played it at home he was terribly disappointed. Since he did have some free time on his hands, he decided to get to the bottom of the audio sys­tem. This led to mathematical calculations, redesigning electronic circuits and conducting actual experiments on people to see what they find pleasing to listen to. Then just before he went to Delhi, the chairman of the EE depart­ment casually mentioned, when Bose was corning out of the pool, that when he came back from Delhi, he would be given office and lab space. "I could not believe it. The uncertainty was over just like that, he had confirmed my appointment at MIT," recalls Bose. His days at NPL with its illustrious director, K.S. Krish­nan, a few lectures at the Indian Statistical Institute and discussions with P C Mahalnobis, a giant in statistical theory, are etched indelibly in Bose's mind.

After he returned to MIT from Delhi, the acoustics experiments were carried on in a corner of the lab as a skunk project. Finally, in 1964, he decided to commer­cialise his research and set up Bose Corporation. His first employee and the only one for more than a year, was Sher­win Greenblatt, a former student of Bose, who is now the company's president. MIT encouraged Bose to set up the company while continuing as faculty member of MIT. Till today, Bose teaches at MIT part-time and his course on psy­cho-acoustics - an area in which he holds many patents ­is one of the most popular electives there.

Bose holds the company 100 per cent. When asked why he has not taken it public he said: "As far as employees are concerned, we pay them top­ of-the-line salaries as deter­mined every year by an outside consultant, so they do not feel the absence of stock options. I myself don't need the cash. In fact, every dollar of profit made in the company has been ploughed back. Moreover, taking it public will mean others telling us how to spend our dollars in research, whereas some of the research pro­jects we are working on will take decades and some may not even be completed. I am sure we could not have taken up such projects if we were not free to do what we want to."

Clearly, knowledge creation is what excites Bose. We could see that in the sparkle in his eyes and the alacrity with which he jumped up to explain technical points about wave guides, normal modes and spherical speakers or a subtle point about non-linear systems. But this acade­mic engineer has taken up commercial challenges as intellectual challenges and either licked the competition or created totally new technologies. The way he conquered the Japanese market is an abject example to American corporations who constantly wring their hands about 'fortress Japan'. When he found that passenger cars were being given lousy audio systems, he studied the interior of every car model and designed the audio system for each interior. He spent over $13 million on R&D before he could sell a single system to GM. Today he occupies the throne in car audio market with Mercedes Benz, Accura, GMC, Nis­san, Mazda, Audi, Cadillac, Infiniti, Oldsmobile and Ponti­acs flaunting custom-made Bose systems. His latest product, which has taken American homes by storm, is an ordinary alarm clock radio, with a CD player in it. Usually alarm clocks are considered a necessary evil in a bedroom. One feels like throttling them early in the morning, but to the owners' surprise Bose wave radio incorporated the new wave guide technology and reproduced sound as well or better than the much larger and more expensive audio sys­tems in the drawing rooms. When Bose realized that retail­ers may not do justice to this product, he directly sold it to consumers and made it a great success.

To use a cliché, Amar Bose is 71 years young. He simply oozes energy, visibly cringes if anybody calls him an icon but jumps up to the blackboard and waves his hand all over the room if you discuss physics.

His two grown-up children have clearly shown no intention to run their father's business. Son Vanu 35, an MIT alumnus himself, has an IT company which is selling the concept of Software Radio and daughter Maya, 34, is a chiropractor.

When told that his systems are very popular among the audio cognoscenti in India, his eyes go damp and he says: "I wish my father were here to see it".

Nuclear Engineering--PHWR

BUSINESS INDIA, October 7-20. 1996

Nuclear Heart Transplant

The heart of the 16-year-old Rajasthan-II reactor is being removed and replaced by a more robust brand new one, in a marvel of nuclear engineering

Shivanand Kanavi

In 1967, when Dr Christiaan Barnard conducted the world's first successful human heart transplant in South Africa, he created history. The engineers of Nuclear Power Corporation (NPC) are carrying out another type of heart trans­plant at Rawatbhatta, by changing the coolant channels of the nuclear power reactor. Thereby, they hope to extend the life of the Rajasthan Atomic Power Sta­tion-II (RAPS-II) by roughly 30 years.

On successful completion of the job to take roughly three years, NPC would have also mastered a new proprietory technol­ogy, developed indigenously at a highly competitive price. Thereby posing seri­ous competition to the Canadians in the international reactor services market for Pressurised Heavy Water Reactors (PHWR).

Nuclear heart surgery involves a great deal of analysis, design, precise planning, skill as in human heart surgery and in addition great radiation risk too, if mis­handled. Hence, to appreciate the com­plexity of the operation, it will help to know how the workhorse of the Indian nuclear programme - the 210 MW PHWR works.

PHWR produces power by bombarding neutrons on natural uranium (99.3 per cent U238 and 0.7 per cent U235). The right neutron speed can split the uranium nucleus into two nearly equal halves, releasing energy and more neutrons than consumed in fission. The released neutrons are slowed down through a series of collisions with deuterium in heavy water without being absorbed, much like a sprinter is slowed down while passing through a crowd.

Ordinary water is a compound of hydrogen and oxygen, whereas heavy water is made up of deu­terium - a heavier isotope of hydrogen - and oxygen. The resulting compound is about 10 per cent heavier than ordinary water and hence the name. While ordinary water absorbs neu­trons thereby stopping the reaction, its heavier cousin does not do so. This prop­erty of heavy water makes it a good 'moderator'.

With more neutrons released than consumed by fission, a chain reaction sets in. Neutron absorbers like cadmium are used to strike the right balance between neutron release and absorp­tion rates, thereby prevent­ing a run away reaction leading to a nuclear explo­sion, while still sustaining enough of the reaction for power production.

Uranium mined by the Uranium Corporation at Jaduguda, Bihar and converted into 'yellow cake' is refined and converted into fuel bundles by the Nuclear Fuel Complex at Hyderabad. These fuel bundles are placed in coolant channels made of zirconium alloy which is almost transparent to neutrons. Pres­surised heavy water flows through the coolant channels and carries away the heat produced during nuclear fission. The hot heavy water at 270 degree celsius then transfers the heat to ordinary water in the steam generator. The steam thus produced then turns a conventional tur­bine-generator producing electricity.

The coolant channels are housed in a cylindrical steel vessel called the calan­dria. The calandria contains heavy water which acts as a moderator. The two ends of calandria are cov­ered by nearly a metre thick steel end shields housing a lattice of 306 coolant channels. The entire reactor is inaccessible and is in a metre thick con­crete vault, once the reactor starts up. All defuelling and fuelling has to be done through remote control. Thus unlike a conventional power station, any minor repair later, is a herculean task and needs careful planning and execution.
The boiling water reactor technology developed in the US by General Electric, Westinghouse, etc, needs enriched ura­nium requiring expensive enrichment processes. The PHWRS developed by Canada as pointed out earlier, use natural uranium. Moreover, Canada offered the technology at very attractive terms and even showed willingness to involve Indi­ans to some degree in developing and sta­bilising the design.

However, Pokharan in 1974, exploded all international nuclear co-operation with India. Canadians even abandoned RAPS-IT halfway. There was an embargo placed on all nuclear-related sales to India and every wheel had to be painstak­ingly reinvented by the Department of Atomic Energy and then taught to the Indian industry.

Today a veritable nuclear industrial infrastructure has been built. Industries like L&T, Walchandnagar, Bhel, Machine Tool Aids & Reconditioning, KSB Pumps, etc, are doing high precision fab­rication of end shields, calandrias, coolant channels, fuelling machines, steam generators, pumps and other sub­systems for the PHWRS.

The technological embargo, however, led to another serious problem. There was a fracture in a coolant channel in the reac­tor at Pickering Unit-II, Canada, in August 1983. Such a fracture leading to what nuclear engineers call a 'loss of coolant accident' is every reactor opera­tor's worst nightmare, as it might lead to 'core melt down' and a serious nuclear accident as in the Three Mile Island in the US or even worse. Some readers might also remember the Hollywood version of loss of coolant accident in Jane Fonda & Jack Lemon’s China Syndrome.
Fortunately, the loss of coolant in a PHWR does not lead to a core melt down. It is one of the inherent design superiori­ties of PHWR. But due to the embargo, Indians, who were using the same design in Rajasthan, were denied detailed knowledge of the accident, its cause and the remedial actions taken. They had access only to some general discussion in international conferences.

While some problems are expected due to ageing, after 30 years of run­ning the reactor, it was significant that the accident at Pickering occurred after only ten full operating years. The accident at Pickering, however, alerted Indians and some design modifications were made in all reactors after Rajasthan I & II and Madras I &II. In Kakrapara II, Kaiga-I &II and RAPS-III & IV a new zirconium alloy with an addition of 2.5 per cent niobium was used for coolant channels. The new alloy has vastly better characteristics than the earlier zircolloy-2 and should give no problem for 30 years.

However, such a coolant channel frac­ture could still occur at RAPS-I&II and MAPS-I&II, which use the old design. Hence they were closely monitored. To take remedial action, NPC set up a core group of engineers called Coolant Chan­nel Replacement Group to work out the entire details of an exercise to replace all the 306 coolant channels in the older designs starting with RAPS-II.

NPC engineers in Bombay and on site at Rawatbhatta have risen up to the task admirably and are today probably the most excited group in the entire DAE. In fact, V.K. Chaturvedi, the project director at Rawatbhatta has become a legend of sorts with his hands-on leadership. The best place to meet him is not his residence or office but the reactor site itself where he is found at all odd times.

In a record time of four months they have already cut and removed all the 306 coolant channels at RAPS-II and sealed the highly radioactive channels in a spe­cially constructed underground concrete mausoleum. According G.R. Srinivasan, director environment and public aware­ness at NPC, "The task has been carried out with a surprisingly low radiation exposure to personnel, well below safe levels, a fact which has amazed many."

Canadians had done the same, taking longer time and using advanced remote controlled equipment. It was rumoured internationally that either Indians cannot develop the technology or they will use crude and callous methods and expose their personnel to heavy doses of radiation. The achievement of the coolant channel replacement group led by R.C. Arya, director, reactor services and the on-site team led by Chaturvedi, increases in significance in this background.

If everything goes well then even fit­ting the new channels will be finished between December 1996 and September 1997. They would then have completed the entire project, from defuelling to handing over for start-up within 36 months, as opposed to 44 months taken by the Canadians.

This has commercial implications. The Canadians spent nearly $300 million whereas the Indians would spend $72 million to do the same. With PHWRS operating in South Korea and Argentina there is a good opportunity for the Indians to offer coolant channel inspection and replacement services at highly competi­tive rates.

The genesis of the coolant channel problem, lies in a confluence of factors. These pressurised tubes are separated from the calandria tubes by a concentric gap of 8 mm. The separation is main­tained using two garter springs kept at certain intervals. While the heavy water in coolant channels is at about 270 degree celsius, the calandria tubes are sur­rounded by the moderating heavy water at 70 degree celsius. Due to vibration within the tube the springs in the old design, tend to move from their positions leading to lack of support at certain portions of the coolant channel. The weight of the fuel bundles (uranium is heavier than gold!), thermal stresses and irradiation, lead to sagging of the coolant channels.

In the extreme conditions existing inside the coolant channel, minute amounts of heavy water break into deu­terium and oxygen. Normally zirconium forms an oxide layer by combining with oxygen while deuterium is released as gas. But tiny amounts of deuterium are also absorbed by zirconium forming a brittle 'hydride'. This deuterium pie is so slow that one need not worry about it for 30 years.

However, if the sag in the coolant channel leads to contact with the colder calandria tube then the cold spot devel­oped at the point of contact leads to accu­mulation of deuterium in the zircolloy at that point. This can lead to blistering and even a possible fracture, as it happened in Pickering Unit-II. Niobium-stabilised zirconium however has much less deu­terium pick up and better thermal creep characteristics. Thus the replacement of old channels by the new niobium-sta­bilised zirconium alloy channels with four tight fitting garter springs, which will not move easily, will prevent sagging and add another 30 years to reactor life provided all other systems continue to work well.

Nuclear Power Corporation today has under 2,000 MW of gen­erating capacity. For NPC to gener­ate funds through internal accruals for further expansion it needs a minimum of 5,000 MW of generat­ing base. At a crucial phase in NPC'S evolution, funds from the Central government have slowed down to a trickle with extreme short sightedness. With no interna­tional institution like World Bank ready to fund nuclear power, the NPC has been left high and dry. Since building a new power plant is always very expensive, every megawatt squeezed out of existing old plants at a marginal cost, is heavenly light for NPC and a power-starved India.

Shishunal Sharieff Saheb

The Weekend Observer, 25 July 1992

Kabir of Karnataka

The nineteenth century saint Sharieff Saheb of Shishunal, though born in a devout Muslim family was well versed in Veerashaivism and had a Brahmin, Govinda Bhatt as his guru. He left a legacy of hundreds of mystic poems in Kannada and more importantly a tradition of samanvaya—harmony.

Shivanand Kanavi


SHARIEFF in Persian means one with lofty ideals and high culture. Perhaps with prescience Imamsaheb, a humble and devout peasant, and his wife named their belated off spring thus. Born in Shishunal a small village in Dharwad district of Karnataka, in 1819, Sharieff Saheb in his seventy years of life ingested all that is lofty in the culture of Karnataka. Its tradition of harmony, of the protestant Shaivaite culture of the Veerashaiva saints of twelfth Century, of the Vaishnavaite dasas of sixteenth century and a great poetic heritage compris­ing 'high' poetry of Pampa and centuries of oral folk poetry of Sarvajnya and others. The first available work on poetics and criticism in Kannada belongs to the tenth century.
Sharieff left behind him hundreds of poems expressing his spiritual anguish, critical and ecstatic comments on different faiths and spiritual contempor­aries and most importantly his message of different spiritual paths leading to the same end. He did not write them down. Those who heard them have jotted down a few for posterity but most of them are still sung in the villages of Karnataka purely based on the memory of a people.
Sharieff spent his childhood surrounded by the love and affection of his parents and discussions with his father on the importance and meaning of Namaz, nature of Allah and whether he is listening to our prayers only in a mosque, etc.
After the fall of the Peshwas in 1818, the East India Company amalgamated this region into the Bombay presidency. One thing that was common to all these rulers was the utter neglect of education in the region. The burden of mass education was largely borne by schools run by Veerashaiva religious institutions.
Imamsaheb entered his son in one of them. Seeing his eagerness the teacher introduced him to the vast Veerashaiva literature. At this stage Sharieff showed interest in Vedic studies and his father entered him in a Vedic school run by Govinda Bhatt in a temple in a near by village where he was taught Vedas, Upanishads, Smriti, Ramayan-Mahabharat, Puranas etc. Later he independently stud­ied the Koran and the Hadith.
Even though equipped with such a rich background in religious studies at a tender age Sharieff was a normal young man actively interested in the activities in his village and surroundings.
Taking advantage of a new scheme of partial support for local schools, announced by the newly formed Board of Education in the -Bombay presidency, Sharieff successfully mobilised the village elders to start a school in the backward Shishunal. He taught all that he had learnt from various teachers in his childhood to the children of his village. Soon he took initiative in starting similar schools in the surrounding vil­lages and became popular as 'Sharieff Master’.
In his reformatory enthusiasm one of the cultural events that came to his notice was the celebration of Mohurram in the area. It had two characteristics. Firstly it was celebrated by the two major local communities, Muslims and Veerashaivas, to­gether in very real display of brotherhood. Secondly the par­ticipants often used to forget the religious significance Mohurram as homage to the martyrdom of Hazrat Hussain and his followers in Karbala nearly fourteen centuries ago at the hands of the tyrant Yezid. Instead, it used to degen­erate into raucous revelry.
Sharieff got down to changing the situation. He wrote the story of Karbala in a popular folk form riwayat and choreographed a group dance to go with it using the folk form of hejjemela. His riwayats became immensely popular though at times he cried in anguish in his poems that people still did not understand the significance of Mohurram.
When he came of age, his parents arranged his marriage with a girl, Fatima, from a nearby village. The couple lived happily and soon there arrived a baby girl. Sharieff lost himself in domestic bliss and responsi­bility of farming to provide for his family.
But great distress soon befell him in wave after wave. First his parents died of old age. Then his dear daughter fell victim to cholera. This was followed by the death of his heart broken wife.
Now Sharieff was left with no one dear in his life. Shaken by his misfortune, he reflected on the fragility of human life. His early interest in spiritual questions led him to seek a way out of the misery through a spiritual pilgrim's journey that took him back to his teacher of childhood, Govinda Bhatt. Govinda Bhatt was delighted to accept him as his shishya, despite acute peer pressure and threats of excommunication.
Guided by his guru, Sharieff soon started having mystical experiences. He sought wisdom and mysticism wherever it came to his notice among his contem­poraries in North Karnataka. Along with spiritual wisdom came the unstoppable flow of religious poetry, which to this day is sung in the villages of Karnataka.
In simple rustic Kannada, Sharieff commented on the hy­pocrisy among followers of vari­ous religions who do not under­stand the tenets of their religion but engage in empty rituals while leading lives of deceit and hedonism. He wrote number of poems on the need for self restraint and detachment.
At the ripe age of seventy when he had spent his life in progressing poverty and hunger Sharieff decided to end it in a yogic fashion and surrounded by people he went into trance and never regained conscious­ness.
On his death there arose a dispute regarding his funeral, both Hindus and Muslims claim­ed him as their own. Finally realising the message of his life, both communities jointly organised it. There was reading of the Koran as well as Hindu scriptures. There was Allah ho Akbar as well as Har Har Mahadev. Since then his grave is visited by both communities. While on the left Muslims per­form Namaz, on the right Hindus perform pooja and arati.
People come in thousands to pay respects to this Kabir of Karnataka. On new moon days and Mondays during the month of shravan and during the relig­ious fairs in his honour, his songs are sung by numerous folk singers.
In the cool shade of neem trees and fragrant jasmine the spirit of Sharieff, the spirit of communal harmony and toler­ance flourish.

A Tribute--Stephen Hawking turns 50

The Weekend Observer, 22 February, 1992
Hawking, God and the Big Bang

Shivanand Kanavi

Physicist Stephen Hawking, well known for his contribution to the theory of black holes and even better known as a science communicator, just completed fifty. Crippled by ALS or motor neuron disease that has confined him to the wheelchair, Hawking has lately lost his ability to speak and write as well and communicates through a computer which synthesises speech and helps him write. Though he is being helped by the wonders of the micro-chip, it should be remembered that he was given two years to live, by doctors, 29 years ago! This brilliant physicist completing 50 is a celebration of human grit and an occasion of joy for all.
Hawking’s “A Brief History Of Time”, an international best seller, is a model of science communication. He conveys in the book, the evolution of man’s understanding of the macrocosm and the microcosm in lucid terms and addresses himself to the questions “Where did the universe come from? How and why did it begin? Will it come to an end? If so, how?” On his fiftieth birthday, the ultimate tribute has been paid to Hawking’s communicating abilities. Now, nestling along side paper back pulp from Jackie Collinses, Jeffrey Archers, Sidney Sheldons et al, one can find, “A Brief History of Time” on the pavements of Mumbai’s Flora Fountain.
While discussing the present day understanding of universe, its structure, evolution and ori­gin Hawking examines many times the role of God, if any, in it. Till the nineteenth century all things heavenly: sun, moon planets, stars and all things earthly: animals, plants and earth itself were looked upon as given, and not as products of a long evolutionary pro­cess. Not that there was no speculation regarding it, but there was no scientific evidence for it. In the mid nineteenth century, evidence accumulated towards Biological and Geological evolution which were a big blow to scriptures of various religions that had spoken about genesis of earth and creation of all plants and animals by God, more or less suddenly. To allow for some historical development of mankind the Church in Europe had even fixed 4004 BC as the date of creation. However in the 19th century, scientific evidence showed up a time lapse of millions of years for the evolution of different species of plant and animal life including man, showing natural laws in action rather than the hands of a creator.
Stellar evolution from gaseous Nebulae had been hypothesised by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant in the 18th century, however there was no direct evidence of evolution of universe itself. It was the discovery by Edwin Hubble in 1929 that galaxies are moving away from each other that led to the acceptance of the theory of expanding universe. But an expanding universe presupposed that matter and energy were expanding in all directions after originating at a point. Thus the name Big Bang was given to a theory that explained the expansion of universe, as due to the very creation of universe at a point billions of years ago. Then came in 1965 the discovery by Penzias and Wilson that weak electromagnetic radiation filled the space and it was not coming from any source, but it was just there, in the background! This is known as Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation. They received Nobel Prize for its discovery in 1978. Since Big Bang theory had predicted that some of the energy released during the creation would still be around, as weak electromagnetic radiation, this discovery thereby established the Big Bang theory.
According to the "hot Big Bang model", the history of universe in brief runs like this: at the Big Bang itself the universe is thought to have had zero volume and so to have been infinitely hot. But as the universe expanded, the tempera­ture of radiation decreased. One second after the Big Bang the temperature was ten thousand million degrees. This is about a thousand times the temperature at the centre of the Sun. At this time the universe contained mostly photons - packets of electromagnetic energy, electrons and neutrinos -extremely ­light and weakly interacting particles and their corresponding anti-particles viz. positrons and anti-neutrinos, together with some protons and neutrons.
About hundred seconds after the Big Bang, the temperature would have fallen to a billion degrees centigrade. At this temperature protons and neutrons would fuse to produce Deuterium or heavy Hydrogen nuclei, which in turn will fuse to form Helium nuclei and small amounts of Lithium and Beryllium.
After that, for another million years universe would have just expanded. Once the temperature had dropped to a few thousand degrees, electrons and nuclei would start combining to form atoms. In regions where matter was denser than the average, gravity would start coming into play. Thereby leading to the formation of galaxies, like our own Milky Way.
As time went by, Hydrogen and Helium gas in the galaxies would break into small clouds that would collapse under their own gravity and start the formation of stars. As these clouds contracted, temperature of the gas would increase until it became hot enough to start nuclear fusion reactions. Some would use up their Hydrogen in only about 100 million years, contract further and convert Helium into heavier elements Carbon and Oxygen. Then the central region of the star would collapse to a super dense Neutron Star or even a Black hole & the outer cloud would be blown away in a Super Nova explosion. Our own sun is a second or third generation star, formed some 5 billion years ago out of the debris of Super Novae. Small amounts of heavier elements in the debris collected together to form the planets round the sun.
This extremely brief and sketchy outline of evolution of the universe, might have many gaps but generally seems to agree with all observational evidence, that we have today.
What happened at the Big Bang, or before it? Physicists say these questions cannot be answered in the present model. Big Bang represents a critical point in the theory. At that point certain quantities like density become infinite, certain others like volume become zero, or in mathematical terms, Big Bang represents a singularity in theory. For the same reason we cannot extrapolate the model backwards in time to the period before Big Bang. Though the Big Bang model satisfactorily explains the observed data so far, scientists do not like infinities appearing in theory. Thus, attempts are on, to avoid the Big Bang singularity. Hawking himself has worked on one such attempt where there is no singularity. But in this model we have to give up our present concept of time. Here, time has to be treated as any other space dimension or in mathematical terms we have “Euclidean space-time”, where as theories like relativity treat time as different from space.
So far, the predictive capacity of various cosmological models is extremely limited. This is natural, when even basic data regarding distances of various galaxies from ours, the rate of expansion of the universe and the total matter in the universe etc. is still not available. Any way, till more observational data is available, may be from the Hubble Space Telescope launched through the Space Shuttle we have not much to chose from one model from the other. They explain the expansion of the universe and the left over, premordial Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation.
As we see, there is little scope for God in this scheme of things. In fact, once the scientists took on the job in earnest of observing nature and discovering laws of nature, they rejected the view that every thing goes according to the leela of an all powerful, eternal, all perfect, unlimited God. The laws of nature according to which matter seems to interact and develop, our understanding of which is developed and improved upon as new data and new phenomenon are found, seem to circumscribe the “unlimited” “all powerful God”.
Thus started the view that God started off everything, and decreed the laws, which, then took over the running of the universe. Many scientists in Europe accepted this type of eclectic outlook known as deism. Issac Newton was one of them. He discovered the law of gravitation and described planetary motion accurately but assumed that God started it all or in philosophic terms God was the “efficient cause” of the world, or the “first impulse”. Later developments in science described the evolution of the earth, the biological world, the origin of species, and even gave insights into bio-molecular origin of life itself. Thus there developed an agnostic view among most scientists who refused to take a stand on existence of God, but said “we don’t have any proof of his existence or non-existence”. The famous French mathematician Laplace, is supposed to have presented the theory of solar system in the court of Napoleon Bonaparte and then when Napoleon noticed the absence of divine intervention in Laplace’s theory, he is said to have boldly replied “but I have no need for that hyopothesis”!
Strangely the evidence in fa­vour of Big Bang, has given fillip to the religious minded, who say "God created the universe at the Big Bang!”