Music... The most passionate art!

It never fails to surprise me how music somehow never fails to express every single emotion you ever experience in life, represent every up and every down you go through and more often than not help you go through all of that with your head held high and with a new hope for a new and possibly a better day. It’s probably not the same for everyone as every single individual is passionate about a different form of art but I can confidently say that music is the one art form that connects more hearts than any other. The power, the enchantment of tunes flowing through the air grips most hearts in a hold possibly overcome only by love but then again it is also the most beautiful and the most deserving medium of expressing that same love. A sad melody on a bad day can make you feel much better as absurd as it may sound, a happy one on your happy day just adds to your joy, a mix of songs can make you dance your hearts out and make your parties lively, a sweet love song brings out the romantic in you… All you need to do is let the tune flow through your body like it’s your life force, let it drench your soul like the first rain of the monsoon, live with it, feel it like you do your heartbeat! Nothing and I mean no single thing can beat that feeling… that is the power of music! So, next time you plug in your earphones, don’t just play music for the sake of it, let loose your body, heart and soul and let the notes work their magic…. Falling in love would never feel easier. Think about it and enjoy these couple or more of my favourite melodies. Flow with the music people! :) <3  

 

Treading into the realms of life, Discovering myself.

Something to wonder about...

I've been thinking about what is going on in India right now.. Just a few minutes back, I read this amazing comment by someone saying as India is already on a "banspree" lets ban X (X, because it's totally unrelated to the context). So, as it appears freedom of speech and freedom of expression is a far off dream in The Republic of India as of 2015. Ban the documentary BBC, a foreign channel made on a very famous rape incidence that happened in India and not on one that happened in UK or US or some other country, and because according to the statistics the number of rape cases reported in India is far less than what is in US or UK (the percentage of cases actually reported because has absolutely no value!), this is an international conspiracy to malign the name of our country!! *Wow, just wow!!
Then, they go on to ban Fifty Shades of Grey almost 2-3 weeks after it was released because people who really wanted to watch it are so waiting to do so after so many days! Also, apparently movies like that are never/will never be made in India (okay, maybe not on the large scale but can you actually vouch for that?).. *Are you serious???!!
Then comes the phase where stupid people like us try to make certain few people understand that it doesn't really matter, it should be a personal choice of everyone whether or not they want to watch something or not.. This choice should not be enforced on them in any way. How two different individuals interpret something is completely independent of the other. Also, the image and culture of a country is not reflected or affected by singular incidents like these, especially a country like ours.. And if it is being affected, the fault lies with us and not with people who make/produce movies/documentaries like these.
About the BBC documentary, I read somebody's comment saying it generalizes all Indian men as chauvinists and their mentality similar to that of the people interviewed. What I want to ask is how is that?? Aren't the father and the friend of the woman men or Indian men?? Why is their mentality not a reflection of the male population of India?? Why do we have to take up the negative from something and completely ignore the positive?? Why can't we for once accept something without being so closed up?? If this documentary hadn't be made into such a controversial topic, probably most of the Indian population wouldn't even come to know about its existence!! You don't like something but still you are the one imparting undue importance to that very thing.
I know nobody has the time to read just a stream of thoughts, so unorganized too, but if you can make sense of it... just give it a thought. Life is not the black and white, there are many more colors to it. If you can, try to accept it in its entirety and not typecast something into good or bad. It's completely up to us to decide the take-home message from something... It doesn't depend on the creators but the viewers.

Treading into the realms of life, Discovering myself.

On an epic journey of Science: Interstellar 2

In the last part, we got to know about the astounding science behind the wormhole. But that’s not all, Interstellar’s greatest spectacle is its blackhole and the accretion disk surrounding it. A major plot point of the movie is the time dilation effect experienced near the blackhole. Kip Thorne, Caltech physicist and theorist, as well as the scientific advisor for Interstellar told them straight off the bat, that to accomplish such a time dilation effect realistically on a massive scale, they would need a humongous blackhole, or as properly termed in astrophysics, a supermassive blackhole. This kind of supermassive blackholes  are generally found in the center of galaxies, and keep the galaxies rotating. To show such a massive blackhole with extreme mathematical accuracy and its gigantic size when being shown against the tiny human spaceship was real hard work and to portray it realistically, 3D was written off.

The blackhole that was generated using Thorne’s calculation was extremely big, and if compared in size to our solar system, the body itself would extend up to earth’s orbit and its accretion disks beyond the orbit of mars. This was named Gargantua in the movie.

This blackhole, Gargantua’s mass is 100 million times of that of the sun. It is 10 billion light years away from earth and rotates at an astounding 99.6 % of the speed of light.

We already know how a singularity is created. In case of Gargantua its mass and speed of rotation create an extremely strong gravity field, which bends the space time fabric beyond the event horizon, and pulls light and time from beyond the ascension of the singularity in the bulk. Einstein termed this as the time dilation effect experienced around a blackhole. This means, if you were close to a blackhole, then our perceptions of time and space would diverge. Relatively speaking, time would seem to be going faster for me. This is in accordance with relativity, according to which time passes slowly in high gravity fields.

In Interstellar, the planet they visit exists at a distance from the event horizon that 1 hour on the planet they visit is equal to 7 years on Earth. Graphically this dilation can be shown as shown in the following figure.

Another problem they faced during the making of the film was the scientific plausibility of the survivability of the planets orbiting close to Gargantua. Now, it seems that no planet can endure the extremely high gravitational field resulting from the blackhole, which is the reason for time dilation. However, it turned out that it in fact is possible but the condition is that the blackhole needs to be spinning very fast, fast enough that the any other object in circular orbit around Garagantua be spared the destructive effect of such a high gravitational field. Hence Garagantua rotates at 99.6 % of the speed of light.

In addition to this, the accretion disk of the blackhole also posed a problem. Accretion disks are ring like circular disks made of gases that flow into the blackhole and are comparable to rings present around Saturn. The problem with the accretion disks is that they are very energetic and emit a lot of fatal x-rays and gamma rays which should have fried the astronauts alive as soon as they reached anywhere near a blackhole of Gargantua’s size. But this was rectified by placing the blackhole in such a phase where its accretion disk is in an anemic state and is cooling down with its temperature at the time of visit similar to temperature of the surface of sun. This doesn’t emit the x-rays and gamma rays a normal energetic accretion disk would, thus not killing the astronauts as well as making life possible on the planets orbiting the blackhole. Now, of course such a cooled down state of an accretion disk has never been discovered but that is due to the lack of sensitive technology for far out space exploration, as the existing technology can only read high energy outputs and such cooled down states are invisible to it. In fact, Igor Novikov, a Russian scientist had worked out the relativistic theory of thin accretion disks back in 1970.

After making the existence of Gargantua in the movie as scientifically accurate as it was possible, the team faced the problem of creating the phenomenon on screen. For the wormhole, they had designed a new renderer which could treat light’s path curved rather than just straight, and had successfully gotten a wormhole out of it. So, they decided to use the same method for the blackhole. But blackholes as suggested by the name are a murder of light, such that light coming from a source wouldn’t keep travelling to infinity as is the property of rays, but dies within the black hole. This caused an Einstein-ian effect called gravitational lensing in the renderer due to which the bendy bits of distortion, i.e., wherever the light bent and wasn’t travelling in a straight line, overtaxed the computation such that some of the individual frames each took up to 100 hours to render. In the end the movie brushed up against 800 terabytes of data.

But the movie was in 2D, and after all this innovative imagery used in making of the blackhole, it would have ended up looking like a flat 2D disk in the 2D visual medium, despite its existence as a fully sized 3D render. Chris handed the task of making the blackhole look like a 3D sphere, rather than a flat disk to the head of the CGI team of Interstellar, Paul Franklin. He picked up the idea of using an accretion disk found around some blackholes to define its sphere. This accretion disk would later become a major plot point in the story as we all know.

Franklin had Von Tunzelmann attempt a tricky demo to try out how the blackhole looked like with an accretion disk. She generated a flat, multicolored ring- a stand-in for the accretion disk—and positioned it around their spinning black hole. This resulted in something unprecedented and extremely amazing. The space warping around the blackhole also warped the accretion disk. So instead of looking like Saturn’s ring, the light created an extraordinary halo around the blackhole.

The Double Negative team (the company working the CGI of Interstellar) thought of it as a bug until it was shown to Thorne. It lead to a moment of discovery where Thorne realized that the team had correctly modeled a phenomenon inherent in the math he’d supplied.

No one knew how would a blackhole looks like until they built one. Light, temporarily trapped around the blackhole, produced an unexpected complex fingerprint pattern near the black hole’s shadow, And the glowing accretion disk appeared above the black hole, below the blackhole, and in front of it. Thorne had never expected it, but later he realized that the phenomenon had been there in the math forever, just waiting to be unlocked. In the end Nolan got his visually immersive movie, Thorne got his wish of making a movie that taught its audience some accurate science and both of them got something they never expected, a scientific discovery. That’s why the appearance of the blackhole in the movie is visually so complex, because it’s accurate.

It’s no doubt that Interstellar came around together beautifully; the merger of real science and stunning visuals have transformed this movie into a science fiction classic, where the science is barely fictional but yet so beyond our reach that it can be realized right now only in fiction but might be tapped into in the future. Thorne also hoped that this movie might act as a bait for the viewers as some of them might be attracted towards the field of astrophysics and consider a career in it rather than become a lawyer, a doctor and other professional jobs. In writing this article, I resound the same feeling as Thorne that after reading this I hope someone starts taking the field of astrophysics seriously as their future, which is right now the field of physics with the most possibilities, with so less known and so much still to discover. And who knows? In some dystopian future, this might just save us. 


 

Credits:

The Science of Interstellar - Kip Thorne.

Wrinkles in Space Time, The Warped astrophysics of Interstellar – Adam Rogers [Wired.com]

The Science of ‘Interstellar’ Explained – [Space.com]

 

[Credits: Atul Aditya]

Treading into the realms of life, Discovering myself.

On an epic journey of Science: Interstellar 1

Whether you actually agree with the science or not, Interstellar is generally considered a masterpiece. A visual treat with truly great acting and story. But that is not all Interstellar is. The visual treatment of the blackhole isn’t made out of pure imagination, though the depiction is unlike anything ever seen. The truth is it’s due to interstellar, this visual form of Interstellar was discovered. The movie actually lended itself in making of two research papers by Caltech physicist Kip Thorne one for the astrophysicist community and one for the computer graphics community, who worked as a scientific consultant for the film. I will divide this into two parts – one explaining the science used in wormholes, and the other in the blackhole.

Let’s begin with the wormhole used in the movie for interstellar travel. Before Interstellar, any and all movies depicted a wormhole as a flat circular hole in space. But under the supervision on Kip Thorne, Christopher Nolan sought to correct that. It has always been theorized that a wormhole is a spherical hole in space-time. It is because the three dimensional universe of ours is connected by extending a singularity on both sides through the fourth dimensional space called bulk, thus any tear connecting two points in our universe have to be a spherical hole. Let’s understand this by simple graphics, of course it is impossible to represent a four dimensional space here so this graphic would use a simple trick of collapsing a dimension like we do in our eg sheets.

To understand how two singularities connect two points in space time, we must first understand how a singularity works. According to Einstein at a point in space, the presence of mass means presence of gravity. Gravity effects the local space time of its surrounding region. So when infinite density is present a point it extends the local space into the bulk, as if it were made of rubber sheet giving it a cone like projection with the tip being the singularity where the gravity and mass become infinite and time almost doesn’t exist. Such infinite mass is achieved naturally in the universe when a star collapses into itself where its mass gets concentrated in almost negligible volume, giving it almost infinite density. Let’s understand this now.

If the universal plane was considered folded, and the two singularities were extended into each other, they will form a tunnel through bulk and a shortcut through space time will be created and anyone in the plane can fall through one opening of the tunnel to reach the other end quickly. So this can be viewed as this.

Now we were understanding the model of a wormhole with one dimension collapsed with our universe visualized as 2D plane, and the opening mouth of the wormhole as a circular flat hole. But since the universe is actually three-dimensional, the opening of the wormhole would also be three dimensional and would be a spherical hole in the space. Exactly as depicted by Interstellar.

For the computer graphics team behind Interstellar, this proved to be a problem, to depict a spherical hole out of pure imagination, so the visual effects supervisor of the Interstellar team asked for help from Kip Thorne not wanting to compromise the accuracy of depiction of the phenomenon in the film, who provided him with general equations which would help the team trace behavior of light rays around a wormhole.

The first thing they made out was that light wouldn’t behave classically around a wormhole, which is it won’t travel in a straight line. Any of the rendering software available at the time wasn’t able to do so, so the CGI team had to write a completely new renderer which would be able to do so based on the equations provided by Thorne, and then rendered the wormhole. The result turned out to be nothing like what anyone could visualize. The wormhole was like a crystal ball reflecting the universe, a spherical hole in spacetime. The reflection of space if the wormhole was viewed in person would be of the space at the other end of the wormhole. This is the most accurate depiction of wormhole ever and gave new insights into the phenomenon to Kip Thorne who helped design it.

The wormhole depicted in the film is 2.5 miles in diameter and connects two points in space nearly ten billion light years apart. The most interesting part is that it accurately said to be placed there by someone, i.e. it’s not a natural phenomenon because such a merger of two singularities in the bulk is not possible without some external force which is in this case humans from far future and this information is neatly integrated into the story. 

I’ll explain the same beautiful and accurate science behind the science of the blackhole Gargantua and the relative passage of time depicted in the movie in the next part. Till then watch this space for other great articles.

Credits:

The Science of Interstellar - Kip Thorne.

Wrinkles in Space Time, The Warped astrophysics of Interstellar – Adam Rogers [Wired.com]

The Science of ‘Interstellar’ Explained – [Space.com]

 

[Credits: Atul Aditya]

Treading into the realms of life, Discovering myself.