Applications of Group Theory ~~ A Brief Intro!

Group theory you see has many interesting applications in varied fields of science and technology because group theory is inherently a theory of symmetry and structure. I will not go through the details of any of these applications but rather discuss how I, as a physicist, personally use and appreciate group theory on daily basis.

On Woman!

Hundreds of thousands of years ago, long before the dawn of the earliest human civilizations, when our new species descended from the apes, there had been a division of labor. Man became the hunters and woman stayed behind looking after their children. The only reason for this division of labor was this undeniable nature of woman that she was a mother and the infant depended on her.

What we see today in this dear world of ours is a result of hundreds of thousands of years of evolution. Man turned physically stronger. Woman became more mentally mature. Civilizations grew. Cultures flourished. Religion became the cornerstone of proud societies. And today we face the evil side of these outcomes as much as we face the positive sides.

While it is true that men and women are not equal in all aspects and fundamental differences exist, it is also true that times have changed and the present structure of civilization demands equal opportunities for both men and women. It has only been recently realized that the female kind too are human beings with feelings and deserve more respect than man for they bear the seeds of our future generations in addition to being capable of serving humanity on a par with other men. It was not until the end of the Dark Ages of medieval Europe, that the western people started talking about human rights and the liberation of woman. A rapid decline of religious preoccupation was witnessed in people as atheists grew in number during the nineteenth century. In the late twentieth century Europe went so far as to spring into existence something called the Sexual Revolution. In the meantime, the Orient still lingered in darkness and woman continued to be treated as mere instruments of pleasure and were tortured brutally without any sign of mercy or compassion. The condition still prevails in many of the Muslim countries today. The non-Muslim countries are no exceptions either, although they have recently started to reform and move towards modernity.

It has been a male dominated society for quite a long time. Woman became objects for man to own. They were locked indoors like furniture in the house when men left for work. They were used for pleasure and household chores, then tortured at will, beaten black and blue, and sometimes murdered. It was all fair to society because women were possessions of men and the latter could do anything with them as he liked. It was a society where great thinkers like Aristotle believed woman to be an inferior species than man, who could own and use them at his will. And religion was woven in such ways to give pride to woman in being subjected to man, and religion encouraged such atrocities among men because religion was written down by the hands of men for their own profits.

I do not intend to belittle or insult any Prophet who walked on the face of earth for the sake of humanity. Rama the noble king of Ayodhya taught men by example the grace and victory of truth and justice. Moses led the entire nation of the Children of Israel out of slavery and hardship from the Pharaoh of Egypt. Jesus came unto earth as the Prince of Peace teaching men and women the power of love. Muhammad was sent as a mercy to mankind, whose mission statement was to build a nation where a beautiful young woman laden with jewelry will be able to travel alone long distances without any fear. However men have always gone astray after their Prophets left them and returned to their evil ways. They played around with the Scriptures, changed their meanings to suit their needs and invented lies against God to lead men away from truth and justice. Man fabricated religion with his own hands and this has brought down a plague on all of mankind that perhaps haunts even the angels of God. Evil is rampant today. Injustice is proud God-service. Women are raped, murdered and burned in the name of God, and people crowd together and watch the tamasha without even a sign of disgust.

Not long ago, there was the Sati system in India where women were burned alive with their dead husbands. The widows that lived were treated worse than dogs. They were confined in rooms to remain in seclusion, denied good food or even full meals, denied good clothes and other amenities of life, rebuked and tortured as if they were untouchables. It was better to be dead than to live as widows in India. The birth of a girl child was considered to be a curse. These infants were then murdered mercilessly. Many a times they were sacrificed before altars in temples. I would not mention about the practices of mentally sick priests or men who claimed divinity and their nasty rituals with women. Child marriage is still practiced openly in India although it is constitutionally banned.

Koheleth narrates the Ecclesiastes of the Old Testament. Agreed that he speaks great words of wisdom that man should try to learn, but when he speaks of woman, I must say he is being prejudiced against them. For instance he says, “I find more bitter than death the woman who is a snare, whose heart is a trap and whose hands are chains. The man who pleases God will escape her, but the sinner she will ensnare... While I was still searching but not finding, I found one upright man among a thousand, but not one upright woman among them all.” (Eccl. 7:26-28) In another context he says, “No wickedness comes anywhere near the wickedness of a woman... Sin began with a woman and thanks to her we all must die.” (Eccl. 25:19,24) You can see the grudge that this man bears against woman. Even St. Paul speaks in a severe tone about woman in the New Testament, “A woman should learn in quietness and submission. I cannot permit a woman to teach or have authority over man; she must be silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner.” (I Timothy 2:11-14). In another place, Paul tries to reason that women must veil their head, and to enforce this he goes so much as to command that the woman who does not cover her head must have her head shaved. (I Corinthians 11:6) And in Ecclesiasticus 22:3 we read that the birth of a daughter is a loss. Believe me there are numerous other citations as such that undermine woman and preach against them. Myths are forged to give a divine connotation to the subhuman treatment of woman. More evil goes in the name of God than any other name in this world.

The extremist Muslims are known for their barbaric ways. Women are mostly stoned to death without fair trial in a court of law. A man can marry up to four wives at a time, and have extra concubines too. A man is even permitted to involve into temporary marriages for a few days. For they say they are only following the Sunnah (lifestyle) of the holy Prophet. (What a blasphemy!) So there is nothing wrong in it. However in some places the woman is supposed to guard her eyes even from looking at another man unless he belongs to her household. Otherwise she will be accused of adultery and stoned to death. You can find the clergy with the closed Quran on one hand and an amulet on the other, screaming repeatedly with others “Allaho-Akbar” (God is great) while public prosecutions of these victims take place. Women who are raped keep silent because their plea is almost always turned back on them and they are proven guilty of fornication or adultery.

Hardly any Muslim reads the Quran with understanding. It is only supposed to be recited properly, with or without understanding. The ordinary Muslim depends on the clergy for his religion who in turn relies on the Shariah laws derived from Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh) which again in turn is almost fully based on Hadith which is nothing but baseless hearsay about the sayings of Prophet Muhammad collected almost two hundred years after his death. This turning away from the Quran and falling for fabricated Hadiths has caused the decline of the once glorious Muslim community. For instance, Sahih Bukhari (the most famous and revered collection of Hadith) reports the Prophet to have said, “The best man among my followers is one who has the greatest number of wives.” (Bukhari, Book of Nikah, Vol 3) On the other hand, the Quran teaches that the best of man is he who is best in conduct. (Ch. 49, V. 13) In another place, the Prophet is reported to have rebuked women as being deficient in intellect as well as religion, for which he saw them entering Hell in large numbers. (Bukhari, Book of Menstruation, Vol 1) On the other hand, the Quran teaches gender equity and good will towards women as in Ch. 4, V. 34:

“Men are the protectors and supporters of women. They shall take full care of women with what they spend of their wealth. God has made men to excel in some areas and women to excel in some areas. Righteous women are obedient to God's Ordinances and guard the moral values even in privacy, the values that God has commanded to be guarded.”

And the Quran also says this in Ch. 4, V. 1:

“O mankind! You have a common origin. There was one entity of life that divided into two, male and female. Eventually, numerous men and women came into existence on earth. Be careful of your duty to God in Whose Name you expect rights from one another, and reverence the wombs that bore you. God ever watches you!”

The Shariah laws must be banned in every country. The State government must take total control over all jurisprudence. The community of women must be educated and made to stand on their feet in society. No one can help people if they do not learn to help themselves. Woman! Raise your damn voice and claim what is rightfully yours. To keep silent during injustice is again injustice.

Much is left unsaid if I have to end here. This discussion can go on for several pages. But I must end here.

Is Man the Roof and Crown of God's creation?

We should first understand the differences between man and other creations of God in order to appreciate or renounce the ideology that man is the greatest of all creations. Let us explain this concept in view of the Quran which is the last of the scriptures in the Abrahamic or Semitic faith. 'Man-above-all' is a view highly regarded by the Judo-Christian faith, if not by other cultures all around the world. God speaks of the creation of mankind in allegorical terms as such:

Your Lord announced His Plan to the angels, “I am about to place on earth a new creation that will have supremacy over it.” They exclaimed, “Will you place on it such creation as will cause disorder therein and shed blood! - whereas we strive to manifest Your glory (in the Universe)!” He answered, “I know what you do not know.” And God endowed mankind with the capacity to attain knowledge. Then He showed the angels certain things and said to them, “Tell me if you have the capacity of learning about these, if you are truthful (and better qualified to have supremacy on the planet earth).” They humbly said, “Glorified are You, High above all! We only know what You have taught us (the tasks assigned to us). Most certainly, You, are all Knower, all Wise.”

Holy Quran, Ch. 2, V. 30-32

(English rendition by Dr. Shabbir Ahmed)

Knowledge and wisdom is what is unique to mankind. The capacity to think rationally and deduce from the abstract structure of the world the difference between truth and illusion, right and wrong, is what places us above all creations of God, as rulers of the planet Earth. In the language of science, homo sapiens are social animals. But there are other kinds of social animals too such as ants, bees and elephants. In fact, some creatures appear to be more social and altruistic than human beings. Take the example of squirrels. If a squirrel finds a forsaken infant squirrel it adopts the baby and raises it like its own child. Whereas even today some human beings dispose off their own girl infants in dustbins and never look behind. However compassion is as natural as violence. The famous biologist Richard Dawkins remarks,

“I shall argue that a predominant quality to be expected in a successful gene is ruthless selfishness. This gene selfishness will usually give rise to selfishness in individual behavior. However, as we shall see, there are special circumstances in which a gene can achieve its own selfish goals best by fostering a limited form of altruism at the level of individual animals.”

It is indeed a scientifically proven fact that everyone of us are selfish by virtue of our genetic instincts. No matter however generous and altruistic an animal might seem at first sight, deep down inside its genes are serving some selfish purpose. But there is a huge difference when it comes to human beings. We can choose to be different. We are endowed with the power to act different from what millions of years of evolution has brought us to. To quote the words of Richard Dawkins again,

“Be warned that if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly towards a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature. Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to.”

And that is exactly what makes us the roof and crown of God's creation – our intelligent choices!

Therefore the real question to ask is this: do we act today like the roof and crown of God's creation is supposed to act? Are we making wise and intelligent choices?

No, we are not! We are not using our brains these days. We are giving in to our basic animal instincts and forgetting who we truly are. The world is not at peace. There is violence all over. People are divided, each with their own set of beliefs and dogmas, intolerable towards other people who share a different opinion. This is all the result of ignorance and a mockery of human wisdom. Mankind is capable of doing miracles – setting voyages out for infinite space, traveling unimaginable distances at the blink of an eye, creating machines that can think and dream, and many such wonders that are yet to be witnessed in future. Art and science are but signatures of mankind's noble design. But as Voltaire said, “with great power comes great responsibility.” We must understand that. See what we have made of ourselves. Look upon history and you will find a world soaked in blood and gore. God made just one mankind. We made the Hindus, Muslims, Christians and Jews. God gave us one planet to live in. We made India, Pakistan, America and Iran. Lo and behold! We are fighting our own kind and gradually moving towards the destruction of this majestic race called mankind. We are blinded by some persistent delusion that makes us think that we are obliged by some divine command to murder innocent people, rape their women, slaughter their children, pillage their cities and leave them burning.

See what Hitler did to the Jews. The Nazi bureaucrats sat together and worked out ways for the systematic slaughtering of all the Jews in Europe. Almost fifty million people were killed because of the war waged by Hitler – the World War II. Nearly twenty three million innocent civilians who wanted nothing but a simple life of peace, were brutally killed. Nearly six million Jews were murdered mercilessly in unimaginable barbarian ways. One million gypsies, Jehovah's witnesses, homosexuals, political dissidents and the disabled were murdered. Of the nearly seven million thus murdered, more than one and a half million were innocent children who knew nothing of the world.

This kind of tyranny is not new or old. Take for example the cannibalism and bloodbaths of the “Holy” Crusades. Of all the religious wars that have ever been waged in the history of mankind, none have been more bloodier, more genocidal and more barbaric than the two-hundred-year “holy war” by the Western Crusaders against the Arabs and Muslims. Their motive was simple and clear: to cleanse the holy land of Palestine and its vicinity by murdering all the Arabs (whether Muslim or Jew) “...on the ground that they had no right to inhabit their part of the earth, while for a Christian the whole world is his country.” (James David Barber)

Take the recent communists for an example too. Their goal was noble: to achieve an utopia where there was no poor and no rich, and everybody lived as equals in peace. See what they did in the name of this cause. In less than a hundred years, communism has claimed more than hundred million lives. Hundreds of thousands of Cossacks were destroyed. Forced famine was introduced in Ukraine and more than six million people were starved to death. Mao murdered tens of millions of Chinese peasants for this cause in his “Great Leap Forward”. Eight hundred and fifty thousand Vietnamese were sent to their graves in education camps. Many such atrocities happened in the name of socialism.

The United States' eleven years of aggression against countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Pakistan, Yemen and now Syria, have resulted in civilian deaths far in excess of military casualties. Then we have the tyranny of the terrorists too! There is no need to light much upon this topic because everybody knows. Most of the terrorist organizations in the world are Muslim. Islam is seen as a fascist and violent religion because of these people. There are other groups of terrorists too, like the Maoists and Naxals in India. The oppression on Muslims in countries like Burma and Myanmar is also well known. The religious bigotry between the Hindus and Muslims is a classic example. In 1984, more than four thousand Sikh men, women and children were slaughtered. Women were raped while their terrified families pleaded for mercy, little or none of which was shown. In 2002, Hindu fundamentalists carried out a genocidal ethnic cleansing of Muslims in Gujarat. Nearly twenty thousand Muslims were brutally killed. Over one hundred forty thousand were thrown out of their lands. Businesses and houses were burned. And thousands of women were gang raped and burned alive.

As long as we do not learn to rise above our animal instincts, we cannot call ourselves the best of creations. Indeed we have proved ourselves before God to be the meanest of all creations. Sigh!

“Surely, greater than the creation of the humans, is the creation of the heavens and the earth. But most people never know (what it implies).”

Holy Quran, Ch. 40, V. 57

(English rendition by Dr. Shabbir Ahmed)

How good is Christ University, Bangalore, esp. for a BSc degree?

It's been one year since I joined this college for a BSc course, and I will tell you my honest opinions about this college, because I want you to get your facts right and be careful lest you fall into a trap without enough information.

I am very passionate about physics and I had this dream of getting into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology there at the United States but it was too great an ambition for me and I could not realise this dream unless I first got an undergraduate degree from India, then maybe I thought I could apply for a graduate program there later on. That would be more affordable I thought.

(By the way, I became a fan of MIT after I watched some really awesome lectures by Prof. Walter Lewin from the MIT OpenCourseWare website. I highly recommend you to watch them.)

THE GREATEST MISTAKE I DID WAS BEING AWFULLY LESS INFORMED! You ought to do a lot of research before you join any college, which I did not do. I applied to a lot of colleges here at Bangalore, but when I entered the campus of Christ University, I was blinded by its awesome infrastructure and greenery. The campus was so well maintained, and as I went inside the Central Block in order to get the admission form, I was mesmerised by the looks of the walls, the lifts and the shining floor. I even liked the bathroom a lot. I wished in my heart and prayed that I should get admitted only in this college and nowhere else.

Even today I have positive feelings towards the campus and infrastructure of Christ University. There's everything: the Bird's Park, the gym and even a small kind of a mall inside Gourmet. And you have nice food courts too. I love that aspect of Christ University. Sit in the park under the shades after lunch and plug some music into your ears, and enjoy the fresh wind blowing at you. That's a nice feeling.

By the way I got admitted into St. Joseph's  college too, and I even attended one class there. But I din't like the classroom there, nor the campus. I din't even know there was an observatory in that college, and it was much better than Christ University in terms of science studies. I thought after all Christ is ranked as one of the top ten colleges in India and by the looks of it, it ought to be much better than this.

I was wrong. I made the dumbest decision of my life. First of all, there is no Physics honors here. You have to give equal weightage on all the three subjects (Physics, Math and Chemistry/Electronics). And it's a damn three years course which is in no ways equivalent to a US bachelor's degree.

See I'm fcuked up now!

I ought to have applied for an honors course in Bangalore University, if I had to stay here at all. They have this four years integrated BS course quite similar to that of IISc but much more easier to get into. I met two students taking this course a few months back, and I learned that they were doing a project in which they were trying to build a cyclotron under the guidance of their teacher and funded by the university because there's a lot of money going into it. That was so cool. Do you know what we do here at Christ University?

We come to class only for the sake of attendance and meeting our friends. That's all. Even most of my classmates are nerds basically. But don't you ever think they are intelligent intellectuals or something, because they are not. They mug up formulas and stuff, cram up all the notes fed by teachers for the sake of passing the semester, and may be getting good decent marks sometimes. But that is all they do, these goddamn slaves of teachers! I do not see education here. (I must tell you I have some exceptional friends though.)

And the teachers, I should tell you about them. The entire Physics department is full of shit people, hypocrites basically! There is only one exception to them I think. He never came to teach us Physics, but I found the passion in him, the craving for knowledge that defines a scientist. I like him. Apart from him, the others are just plain bull's shit, trust me. If you love Physics, for God's sake, never come here. You might end up losing your interest in Physics at all.

The Mathematics department is better though. They have a monopoly here in all things. And they offer you an honors course too. I have no complains against this department. (Mind you! There are exceptions in every damn thing in this world.)

I think apart from the department I am most interested in, the other ones such as humanities and management etc are really awesome. I only came across the English department because I have to learn this subject for the first four semesters, and I loved the teachers. They are just so awesome people, so passionate about their work and really wise educated beings who can inspire you to do something.

I think if you are doing anything besides science, I must recommend Christ University to you. (I don't take the responsibility though.)

By the way, I must tell you the Library here is really good. If you genuinely want some education, you find it here only.

This is my experience at Christ University after one year. Hoping to see better things from next semester.