Rumi Nations

I want to talk about real heroes today à not the kind we elevate to the status of demi-gods too easily and unthinkingly. “There’s a secret society of geniuses who weave and shape the fabric of our culture,” somebody had said about Subrahmanian Chandrasekhar (he was known among his colleagues as ‘Chandra’) on the occasion of awarding a medal to Chandra. Yes. Chandra was such a genius and so was Srinivasa Ramanujan. It is not widely known that one of NASA’s space telescopes (‘Great Observatories’) is named after him? à the Chandra X-Ray Observatory. The most well-known of the space telescopes is of course the Hubble Space Telescope which has revealed so much about the wonders of our universe in its 20 year long lifetime. Every educated person must consider it his or her bounden duty to be acquainted with the images and the results of these great space projects. To give just a bit of a primer about Chandra, some of his areas of work included these ·    ...

Are we alone in the universe? The one question that fascinates me more than any other. And my perspectives are these. The sheer complexity of biological forms makes me think that the evolution of intelligent life forms (such as humans) is likely to be a rather sparse occurrence. There will be many Earth-like planets … perhaps at least millions in the outer arms of the Milky Way revolving around stars like the Sun that the Earth revolves around. But the temperatures have to be just right for water to be plentiful in all three states. What were the stuff available in the early Earth that created the conditions that led to the emergence of primitive life forms? A planet with a lot of volcanic activity, lot of carbon-based complex organic molecules, a planet with continental plates slowly drifting, pushing, merging, separating, rising, and falling, lots of lightning, etc. How many planets will have all these enablers? Reduces the candidate planets to perhaps thousands. Then on pl...

to Razzle and Dazzle ... http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/news/H-10-299.html It's strange how talk about black holes has become so common place and 'merely' the stuff of science and not folklore. And unfortunately, for ordinary people, science is considered to be a very dry and starched kind of topic bereft of all romance and suspense and excitement. Of course, it's exactly the opposite which is the truth.

One can't be completely dispondant about the human condition as long as there are organizations like NASA in this world. Take a random moment in time like today and let's see what NASA is upto right now. Of course, Ares 1X was launched successfully on its first flight yesterday ... hopefully heralding a new era of manned exploration exploration of space. Shuttle Atlantis will be launched in November ... as we approach the end of the Shuttle Era. NASA also does fundamental science ... with the Great Observatories such as Hubble and Chandra. The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has completed one year in space. It's doing spectacular science!