The JEE Saga, Part 3/3: Suggestions

I had originally thought of collecting all arguments and publishing them in a single post, but it would have been far too long for one post; I felt that it my article could be divided into three logically distinct components:

1) Some background on myself, and my recollections of higher-secondary schoolteachers, preparing for the JEE and so on;

2) My opinion on the MHRD's suggested pattern; Also, an FAQ section which I may update from time to time.

3) Some constructive suggestions: How can the system be improved?

The following is Part 3. (Click on these links to access Part 1 and Part 2.)

This post contains some constructive suggestions proposed by others, and some which are original. In any case, I would like to state the following before I offer suggestions:

I am not required to do so. Even if I have no suggestions to offer, the onus is still upon you to prove that your proposed changes are better than status quo. I have the right to protest against bad decisions.

In any case, here are the suggestions:

A) Short-term suggestions (i.e. those which can be put into effect immediately, and will begin to show results immediately)

1) (Sources: Jishnu Bhattacharya and @Piyush on Prof. Sanghi's blog) Hold the JEE as it has always been held, but use it only for selection, not for ranking. In any case, first-year syllabus is common for all students; let them fill in their preferences after their first year. Let every department use any combination it wishes of JEE rank and various first-year subjects to admit students. (e.g. CSE may give more weight to MTH and Programming, CE may give more weight to PHY102 and JEE rank, etc.) This will have another deeply beneficial effect: It is observed that students, when they taste freedom for the first time, suddenly lose interest in studies. This pattern may force them to study in at least their first year; it is hoped that the momentum thus gained will push them through their degree. In any case, this measure will probably greatly reduce stress faced during entrance exams.

2) Remove as far as possible the red tape involved in setting up a school. In particular, remove the requirement that a school must have a primary and secondary section in order to have a higher secondary section. Let there be leniency in availability of infrastructure. This will mean that several sub-standard schools will be set up, but it is the responsibility of the student to ensure that the school he applies to is good enough for him. Most importantly, remove the silly requirement that higher-secondary teachers should be B.Sc./M.Sc - B.Ed. Everyone knows that Class XII physics is as close to B.Sc. level physics as it is to B.E. level engineering, any stream. (In fact, I believe mechanical engineers might actually be learning stuff closer to Class XII physics than physicists themselves.) And a B.Ed. degree is fine upto a class X teacher, but not required for the presumably more mature class XI and class XII students.

This way, many Coaching classes will hopefully convert themselves into higher-secondary schools. Students will no longer have to put up with the farce of attending another school (where they don't study), hence alleviating stress, if only a little bit.

[Update: Such 'junior colleges' already exist in Maharashtra and Assam, and I have heard of one higher-secondary school coming up already in Gujarat (interestingly, set up by a former coaching class teacher). It is quite possible that different State Boards have different criteria - in that case, ensure uniformity across the nation. The rest of my points about the B.Sc./M.Sc. requirement and the B.Ed. requirement, are still valid.]

3) (Source: IIT Council suggestion) The JEE-Main exam should be held more than once a year (Or it can follow the BITSAT pattern, spread over a longer period). That way, students can give the exam whenever they are ready. Anyway, hold this test only for the purpose of screening. Sure, students will be stressed when they give the JEE-Advanced examination, but if they can't handle that much stress, there's nothing we can really do. All alternatives will be stressful. Besides, they need to cope up with stressful situations in order to gain the most from IIT.

B) Long-term suggestions (i.e. those which need time to put into effect, or those which take time to yield results)

1)  Increase the quality of education in other universities, and try to ensure that no good student has to go through a lot of pain to secure a good seat. Start by slowly, and selectively, granting autonomy to all Universities. (Start with Calcutta University, good colleges of the Delhi University, the other Presidency Colleges, MSU Baroda, etc.) One of the primary reasons for the success of the IITs has been the autonomy granted to professors, and the freedom granted to students. If professors are free to decide the contents, examination pattern, and grading of a course, they will teach in an entirely different manner. Not all professors will teach better, but it is hoped that a majority will respond positively to this. Once the cycle is started (good profs->good students->good profs), I hope the level of education (which is shamefully low now) will improve.

2) Do away with all textbooks, except the NCERT one (which should be written only by experts in the relevant field, as, I believe, is done today). Also ensure that there is no binding, legal or otherwise, to limit the syllabus to the textbook, in any exam, including the Boards. This way, students will learn to think beyond the textbook. Sure, this way authors of commercial textbooks will make a killing, but students will soon realise that the quality of a textbook has nothing to do with its price. (NCERT textbooks are good today. Also, look at Irodov - although it is not a textbook, it is quite inexpensive. I can provide countless other examples. Hall & Knight. S. L. Loney - the list is endless.)

3) Provide plenty of scholarships to the less privileged (in any sense - poor students or those from rural areas, for instance), on the basis of all of the following: (There could be a quota for each) i) Class X exams ii) NTSE exams iii) Olympiads iv) KVPY v) Any other exams which I may have missed or which may come up later. Let every state Government tie up with several coaching classes, and partially pay the fees, in addition to providing such students with free lodging. Let the rest of the fees be borne by the coaching institutes themselves. (They will agree to do so, not just out of a sense of duty, but out of the pragmatic desire to improve their results. Who will leave the chance to coach a bunch of good students, and garner social support in the process?) If the problem is where to get the money from, register all coaching institutes and charge an 'education tax' of, say, 5% per enrolled student. This will not make much of a difference to the privileged. I have not worked out the numbers, but I am sure you can finance hundreds (if not more) scholarships per state this way. Another major advantage of this is that it will completely remove the need for reservation - a policy that has done much to harm the state of education in all IITs and, indeed, in the nation.

The JEE Saga, Part 2/3: Problems with the Proposal; also, FAQ

I had originally thought of collecting all arguments and publishing them in a single post, but it would have been far too long for one post; I felt that it my article could be divided into three logically distinct components:

1) Some background on myself, and my recollections of higher-secondary schoolteachers, preparing for the JEE and so on;

2) My opinion on the MHRD's suggested pattern; Also, an FAQ section which I may update from time to time.

3) Some constructive suggestions: How can the system be improved?

The following is Part 2. (Click on these links to access Part 1 and Part 3.)

The new examination pattern suggested by the MHRD is as follows:

1) All students are to give the Board exams. Students who wish to apply for any engineering or science course will have to give at least one exam, which will probably be called JEE-Main.

2) Students who wish to apply for admission to any IIT will have to give an exam called JEE-Advanced, held on the same day as JEE-Main.

Here is how admissions to major institutions will be decided:

1) For NITs, and all Centrally Funded Institutions, a combined merit list will be drawn as per the following weights: 40% weight to class 12 Board, 30% weight to JEE-Main, 30% weight to JEE-Advanced.

2) For the IITs, a combined merit list will be drawn as per the following weights: 50% weight to Class XII Boards, and 50% weight to JEE-Main. On the basis of this merit list, about 50000 students will be selected. (So this will act only as a 'screening'.) Ranking among these 50000 students will be decided solely on the basis of the JEE-Advanced exam.

Here are the reasons for the introduction of the new pattern, according to the MHRD:

1) The MHRD feels that the number of exams students have to give is large. This creates stress, which is not good. So we must have a small number of exams.

2) Coaching classes have recently become a major industry. Students are (it is felt) taught to think linearly in terms of problem-solving and memorization. Also, the system is unfair to poor students. So coaching classes must be stopped. Implementation of the proposal will help in doing this.

3) Students pay too little attention to the Class XII Boards. This is worrying, and improper. So we should give weight to Class XII Board results. This will also reduce the importance of coaching classes.

4) A near-perfect normalisation, based on percentile, is possible between the different State Boards and the CBSE.

Let me deal with the issues one-by-one:

1) The Question of Stress
Why are students stressed today? I believe the answer has nothing to do with the number of exams they give. Societal (and in particular, parental) pressure to perform is very high. Sadly, India is in a position where the available number of decent engineering jobs is far less than the supply of students. Only students in very good colleges (such as the IITs, NITs and a few good regional universities) can hope to survive in the race for good jobs. The possibility of a good future 'placement', as it is called, is the one factor which worries students. Combine this with the Indian tendency to take the safest possible route, and you have a situation where all of society urges you to score as well as possible for a human (and, unfortunately, chastises you if you fail to do so.) As long as there is an imbalance in demand and supply, stress is not going to go away.

In fact, the proposed changes may serve to increase stress. Earlier, if you did not do well in JEE for some reason, you could always cover up in AIEEE and gain admission to NITs (some of which are reputed to be better than many IITs). Now your future depends very much on your performance on one day. Will this not increase stress?

2) The Coaching Conundrum
I fail to realise what the problem is with coaching classes. Is it that they provide a better alternative to the Board teachers? Then I see no problem, because students learn better from good teachers. Is it that they are worse than Board teachers? This can't be true, because then students would not attend the classes at all. Is it that they focus on rote and linear training rather than creative thinking? Well, sure, some classes do, but the great thing about JEE is that students from these classes will not do well in the exam at all. Such classes eventually fall out of favour - besides, there is nothing to guarantee that all Board teachers will focus on creativity.

Is it that poor students cannot afford them? If so, this is an exceptionally silly argument. Well, guess what, the world is unfair to poor people. Poor students cannot afford AC bedrooms, or even tables and chairs. Does this mean you should ban AC bedrooms and tables and chairs? I agree that the Government should try to equalise opportunities as much as possible. But this does not mean taking good facilities away from people perceived to be privileged. The solution is to provide similar facilities, at Government expense, to the poor. One possibility could be scholarships. I shall write more about how to finance this in my third post.

3) The Boards
Please read my recollections of Board teachers in part 1. I am sure that contacting other students who have recently passed Class 12 will yield more horror stories. These are the same people responsible for setting and correcting the Board papers! The fact is that most questions in the Board are repeated verbatim from the textbook (in most cases, even the ordering of options is the same) and, as if that were not bad enough, repeated from previous years' papers! There are several aspects of intelligence. However, the only aspect important in a future engineer or scientist (conceptual understanding) is simply not tested in the Board exams. Therefore, a student's performance has absolutely no correlation with his ability to become a good scientist or engineer later.

As for the argument that giving weight to the Boards will somehow reduce the influence of coaching, that is blatant nonsense. In my entire Class 12 batch, I remember only one student who did not take coaching for the Boards. The number of students taking coaching for the Boards is probably far, far greater than the number of students taking coaching for JEE. I fail to understand how giving weight to Board exams will improve this situation.

4) Normalization
Someone once commented that even though CBSE students form only ~5% of students in India, their proportion in the IITs is ~45%. I think 45% might be an underestimate, but even if this is true, does this not imply that the CBSE is better than the Boards? After all, JEE was not based on the CBSE syllabus. (In fact, our Board textbook in Mathematics was far better than its NCERT counterpart.) Even so, the majority of students doing well in JEE were from CBSE. By putting a 98 percentile CBSE student on the same footing as a 98 percentile Board student, does the proposed system not do a great dishonour to a Board that has been putting so much effort into training its students well? The problem is not just that CBSE schools have better teachers and better students. Notice that most schools in rural areas (where average scores are very low) belong to the State board. Does this fact alone not push up the percentile scores in the top range for State Board students?

An argument is that if indeed CBSE students are better, they will make up for their losses in JEE-Main. But that is a foolish argument! The whole concept is that JEE-Main and Boards should be independent estimates of a student's intelligence! Ceteris paribus - in this case, if the JEE-Main scores are the same - a 98 percentile CBSE student is, and should therefore be treated as, superior in any measure of ability to a 98 percentile Board student! The proposed system should, and does not, take care of this fact.

FAQs

Reproduced below are some arguments from the other side of the debate. I have only included arguments which I felt were somewhat reasonable. So there are no questions like: "But the State Boards have agreed! What is your problem?" (My problem is that I don't care tuppence about the Boards' agreement.)

1. The Boards are a tried and tested system. After all, they have successfully chosen medical doctors over the decades!

This is the best argument I have from the other side.

Firstly, if 'tried-and-tested'-ness is desirable, it does not matter: The JEE is also 'tried-and-tested'.

Secondly - and here I will strike a controversial pose - the abilities required of a medical doctor are extremely different from those required of a scientist or engineer. As I have already stated above, there are different aspects to intelligence. The fact is that we vilify rote-learning and memorisation so much that no doctor will agree to being guilty of memorising. However, memorisation also means the ability to recall things at will, or to assimilate them according to your understanding. Since experience is more important to a doctor than to a scientist, this ability can indeed help. This does not mean that a doctor does not need conceptual understanding - I am merely stating that the kind of conceptual understanding required for a doctor is easier to develop than that required for a scientist or engineer. For example, in all the 2092 pages of the 38th edition of Gray's Anatomy I do not know how many conceptual details there are that cannot be understood by a slightly higher-than- average person. Remembering them, yes, that takes a lot of time and effort. (In fact, I believe medical students work far harder than engineering students.)

Please bear in mind that I have nothing but the highest respect for the custodians of our health. I believe that they, too, are intelligent, but just in a different way, and that the Boards test this particular aspect admirably well.

However, I am not entirely sure of this. If you are a doctor or a student of medicine, and if you are reading this, I would appreciate your comments below.

In any case, if it turns out that I am wrong and doctors too require this aspect of intelligence as much as scientists, I still stick to my belief that the Boards are a terrible way to gauge it, and that medical schools should also conduct their own entrance test. The fact is that AIIMS and AFMC, arguably the best medical schools in the country, already do conduct their own entrance tests - and this is not to mention AIPMT.

2. Several great engineers and scientists have come out of institutions other than IITs, and have been selected on the basis of their Board marks. For example, the only home-grown Nobel laureate, V. Ramakrishnan, did not get selected for JEE!

Firstly, there is no denying the fact that once, the Board exams used to be good. Not every Tom, Dick and Harry could pass (unlike the situation today). There were also excellent Board teachers. So where did they all disappear? I don't know. I think they were unintended victims of India's economic development; gradually, far more attractive jobs were available to Science students. Whatever the reason, it is clear that the quality of Board exams and Board teachers has eroded over the years.

Secondly, I have never claimed that only the IITs are capable of producing good engineers. The only claim is that, on an average, an engineer selected on the basis of JEE will be better than one selected on the basis of board rank.

Thirdly, whenever anyone gives throws such examples of famous people at me, they conveniently forget to mention whether or not the person had got a district rank within the top 5 in the Board (which is roughly equivalent numerically to clearing the JEE; there are 640 districts in India; multiply that by 5, and you have roughly the number of seats in JEE before the recent increase.) If the person did not do well in the Boards either, then your argument fails.

I believe the JEE is not perfect. In fact, it is far from perfect. The reason I have not stated this explicitly before is that the comparison here is with the Boards. If you are comparing heights with a garbage heap - here, the Boards - Mont Blanc and Mount Everest will appear equally tall. The point is not whether JEE is perfect or not (it is not), but whether or not it is better than the Boards. (It is much better.)

Fourthly, the point of an Entrance exam is to gauge ability at the time of admission. If the IITs fail to capitalise on the talent, then the fault lies within the IIT system, and not with the Entrance examination. (Actually, I believe that IITs have succeeded admirably well in some respects and not-so-well in others, but there is little doubt that their alumni are of very good quality - however, even if you disagree with this, the argument is still valid.) It has happened many times that geniuses have flowered very late in their life. Einstein was rejected as a researcher by the same German university system that had worked admirably well otherwise. (Of course, this requires a more nuanced understanding.) I also note from Prof. Ramakrishnan's Nobel lecture (available online) that he stood among the bottom third in his class for two years. Does this mean we give up school examinations?

3. The Board is to be used only for screening, and anyway IITs are free to decide their own admission process (like IITK is doing)! What's your problem?

I remember reading somewhere that Kapil Sibal had, ominously, made the statement that IITs would also shift to the new system by 2015. The interim system is proabably designed to soften us up before the blow. In any case, even if we use boards only as a filter, it is still a terrible, terrible idea. If JEE is imperfect (and it is), make changes to JEE, don't bring in the Boards. Who is to say how many very good students would fail to gain entrance just because some incompetent teacher corrected their Board papers?

Let us do a back-of-the-envelope calculation: I know that in Gujarat, which has about 5% of the nation's population, about 70,000 students gave their Boards this year. That means that in India, about 1,400,000 students gave their Boards this year. How many students' scores will be counted in the advanced JEE? Let's say 50,000. That means that, to stand a chance, you have to obtain approximately a 95 percentile score in your board, just to pass the 'filter'! Many good students I know would not have obtained that score (which requires memorizing).

Most students cannot (and should not) be confident enough that they will clear IITK's entrance exam. Therefore, even if only three or four other IITs stick with the MHRD's asinine proposal, most students will have to waste time preparing for the useless Boards. Earlier, good concepts would have at least ensured that you cleared the low cut-off. Now good concepts will no longer be sufficient. Students will face more stress preparing for the Boards as well.

I shall add more to the FAQs if I encounter other worthwhile questions.

The JEE Saga, Part 1/3: Recollections

The MHRD's recent decision to conduct one single exam for all engineering applicants, and to give some weight to a student's Class XII performance in the Boards, has generated controversy. The MHRD claims this is a 'one-cure-for-all-ills' solution - while opponents claim that not only will the solution not work, it will actually backfire and spoil the brand name of the IITs.

I strongly believe that the MHRD's solution, if implemented even by a fraction of IITs or NITs, will be disastrous. In this and the following blog-posts, I shall try to explain why.

I had originally thought of collecting all arguments and publishing them in a single post, but it would have been far too long for one post; I felt that it my article could be divided into three logically distinct components:

1) Some background on myself, and my recollections of higher-secondary schoolteachers, preparing for the JEE and so on;

2) My opinion on the MHRD's suggested pattern; Also, an FAQ section which I may update from time to time.

3) Some constructive suggestions: How can the system be improved?

The following is Part 1. (Click on these links to access Part 2 and Part 3.)

I attended Rosary School, a good school in the city of Vadodara, the cultural capital of Gujarat. My schoolteachers in the primary section were excellent, and I shall always remain grateful to them for laying the foundations of a very good education. (I suppose I am privileged in this respect. My school was a Catholic institution run by the Jesuits, and discipline was a strong part of our ethos. Not all students imbibed this, of course, but the strict discipline ensured that there was an absolute absence of bullying or any similar puerile nonsense. Therefore, in spite of being diminutive in physique and rather shy, I was treated well by my teachers and peers because I was a reasonably good student.) My recollections of my primary and secondary schoolteachers are, however, irrelevant to the JEE question, and so I shall simply state that my primary teachers were excellent and my secondary teachers were, on an average, good.

I have always been interested in science from a very young age. The answers it provides are clear and testable, and so scientists have always been my role models. Luckily or unluckily, near my residence, there was no one near my age sharing similar interests, so I became a voracious reader. I used to devour books, and my fondest recollections include getting lost in good books for hours on end. (I remember that, one summer, I had to join three libraries!) Then, when I was in Class 8, I read Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, and I was immediately captivated. I did not understand several things, of course (I still don't), but the idea that cosmological mysteries can have beautiful, clear, and testable answers, was fascinating. Ever since then, I have always wanted to become a physicist; I was not sure how much I would be able to contribute (maybe nothing at all), but I was sure of the fact that I wanted to learn the answers properly. So we approached, of all places, an MBA coaching centre that had recently opened in Vadodara, in the hope that they might provide us with some guidance. I was in class 9 at the time.

Today, awareness about the IITs has increased in Gujarat. But seven years ago, awareness was extremely poor: Believe me, I had not heard of the IITs till class 9. So when the director of the MBA coaching institute told us that there were places where the best students from all over India flocked to study, and that they had a Physics course as well, I was captivated. Our local university (the Maharaja Sayajirao University, MSU, named after an erstwhile Maratha ruler of the princely state) offered a Physics course as well, but the students who entered the course were those who had failed to gain admission absolutely anywhere else in an engineering course, and therefore tended not to be serious in their studies. There were reports of frequent strikes by the students, and it was not at all an attractive environment for me. So when I heard that IITK offered the best pure science course in the country at that time, I decided that was where I would try to go.

By the time I passed my class 10 exams, a new coaching centre run by IITians - Yukti Classes - had opened in my city. However, for several reasons, I decided to take the safe route. I knew that getting admission into an IIT was difficult, so (I decided) I would prepare properly for the Board for two years. (Which meant memorising the textbooks.) This would assure me admission in a good university in my state. Then I would, simultaneously with first-year studies, prepare for JEE as well. It seemed at that time to be a good plan.

But then, "The best-laid schemes of mice and men often go awry." Higher secondary teachers in schools affiliated with the Gujarat Board tend to be very poor on an average. I shall not take names here, but I remember the following incidences:

1) A mathematics teacher claimed that pi, being 22/7, is rational.

2) A chemistry teacher claimed that all seawater is a saturated solution of sodium chloride.

3) A physics teacher claimed that the units of resistivity changed if you changed the shape of the substance.

4) An English teacher pronounced 'fury' as 'furry'.

5) The "Thomson effect" was described in our physics textbook; it was predicted by Sir William Thomson, who later became Lord Kelvin - this little nugget of information was also mentioned in the textbook. So one teacher had the brilliant idea to ask in an exam: "Explain the Kelvin effect." (I guess the next question was: State Isaac's first law of motion!)

6) Most Board questions (about 90%) were, and continue to be, copied-and-pasted from the textbook. Of the remaining 10%, most are minor modifications, such as changing a number here and there or changing the ordering of options in MCQs. Just let this fact explode in your head for a moment: Students actually remember that the answer to so-and-so question is option B! Not just 10 microcoulomb - that is too much to remember - but option B! And if my Board exams were a joke, my practical exams were an utter and complete farce. The less said about them, the better.

[Update: When I read my own post recently, it seemed to me that these points pointed to a feeling of disrespect for teachers. Believe me, that was far from my mind. If there is a way these points can be stated without implying disrespect for teachers, I would do it. I have always felt that my schoolteachers were quite devoted and sincere. If few students were willing to learn at school, the transgression, I am afraid, was committed by us students - attendance was regularly very low. In spite of these circumstances, my teachers probably did the best they could.]

All this started getting to me. My Board coaching class teachers were better, but they too were bound, as if by an invisible hand, to the textbook. Any question even slightly different from anything in the textbook was deemed irrelevant and a wastage of valuable time. This was not their fault; this is just how the exams were constructed. Then something happened; Following the advice of a cousin, I gave the Olympiads without any preparation save my useless Board education, and I qualified for the Indian National Mathematics Olympiad (third in class 11 students in Gujarat, if I remember correctly), and the Indian National Astronomy Olympiad (the only one qualified from Vadodara, if I remember correctly). (Later, I did not clear the National level tests for either.) Noticing my performance in both, the director of Yukti Classes, Amit Sir (Amit Dixit, an alumnus of IITB), called me and told me I stood a reasonable chance of clearing JEE. So at the beginning of my class 12, I started attending Yukti Classes.

As I prepared more and more for JEE, my disillusionment with the Board grew. Preparing for JEE was enjoyable! Here, at last, was an exam where your handwriting would not count; where no question was ever repeated; where concepts were tested relentlessly; where questions were always challenging; in short, a complete and utter meritocracy! I enjoyed learning from my coaching teachers too. Questions were encouraged, and answered! Challenges, many of which I could not meet, were set! Concepts were clarified! In short, I received at Yukti classes an education that I would have received at an ideal school.

At this point, let me put in a good word for Yukti Classes. Since I had joined too late, I could not sit in the same class as regular 2-year students. So I sat in the 1-year batch, but feeling that this was not sufficient, Amit Sir (who taught Maths) coached me personally several days a week, as did Kamal Sir (IITD Mechanical Engineering), who taught Physics. Kamal Sir, by the way, is one of the best teachers from whom I have had the privilege of learning Physics. And for all this extra effort (for which I should have paid double), Amit Sir accepted only about one-fourth of the regular 2-year batch fees (and probably one-eighth of what he charges now), and that too at our insistence! Let this fact be absorbed by all those who claim that coaching institutes are money-making factories headed by ruthless businessmen.

To anyone who has recently given the Board exams, it will be clear that my life then was not very easy. I simultaneously prepared for the Boards (in coaching classes as well as in school), and for the JEE - although, as time progressed, I gave disproportionately more attention to JEE. The long and short of it is that I finally cleared JEE at my first attempt, and received admission in IITK - M.Sc. (Integrated) Physics.

Since then, I have enjoyed every moment of my life here (well, mostly). I have excellent teachers who understand their subjects well, and I have friends with whom I can carry out intelligent conversations on topics of common interest. (This is not to belittle my friends at home, many of whom were also very intelligent; it is just that topics of common interest were rare.)

If anyone feels that the above is an exercise in pretentious self-glorification, I sincerely apologise. It is anything but that. Since I came here, I have heard many inspirational stories of students working a lot harder than me preparing for JEE, and being much more successful than me here. I am just telling my story, and the message I hope to convey to the reader is that the JEE is unparalleled as a great equaliser. To students like me, it was the only hope of escape from a tyrannical Board and the mentality that went with it; an ideal that, even if I did not clear it, would certainly inspire me and so many others that good things were possible. I will therefore fight tooth and nail against anyone who wishes to destroy that ideal.

Astrology: A Disgrace to Any Rational Society

Astrology(noun): the divination of the supposed influences of the stars and planets on human affairs and terrestrial events by their positions and aspects, from Middle English astrologie -- Merriam-Webster online

At the outset, I must say I know little of the details of how astrology is practiced today. My refutation of its principles, then, might seem a little brash: How do I refute something without knowing what it is I am refuting? But please bear in mind that my only assumption about astrology in the following post has already been stated above: namely, that it presupposes the existence of an influence that affects humans on earth, and that this influence depends on planetary positions, particularly at the time of birth. (It might depend on other things too, but this does not invalidate the fact that it depends on planetary positions.) I understand that Indian and Western astrologers, and the Chinese, and the Native American, and no doubt the Aztec and Mayan in their time, all had different ways of doing astrology. Yet the following argument is sufficiently general to encompass all of them, as they presumably made the above assumption too. Do not, therefore, chastise me for 'outing the emperor's nudity while ignoring learned tomes on ruffled pantaloons and silken underwear'.


Frequently, I have heard people argue that astrology uses mathematics, as if this somehow gave it extra credibility. Numerology also uses mathematics. So does my five-year old cousin, though not in a sophisticated fashion. (After all, mathematics is logic, and infants have to be very good logicians in order to make sense of the world.) Yet, we know that infants can sometimes entertain very wrong notions about Nature: We trust mathematics only insofar as it presupposes reasonable assumptions about Nature. As a case in point, consider Ptolemy's model of the solar system, with its cycles and epicycles. The elaborateness of the mathematics involved did not guarantee its status as a good physical theory. [UPDATE:  In retrospect, I believe this argument would have warranted a discussion on the metaphysics of truth. While interesting, it would be post-length in itself, so I'll postpone that argument for another post. In the meantime, please bear with me if the above argument appears unconvincing to you.] This argument, that the usage of mathematics, however intricate, validates any of its results, seems to me so irrational and crude that I shall not touch upon it further.

Let me begin my argument with the self-obvious statement: Supernatural influences do not exist. (In this context, 'natural influences' are those that are observable and measurable.) Indeed, the phrase 'supernatural influence' is itself an oxymoron. If there is an influence, it should be observable and measurable; if there is no measurable effect, we should not care about it. Notice that 'measurable' does not imply 'visible on present scientific instruments' - real influences, for example, can be measured statistically. In order to 'detect' (in the above sense) an influence, it is sufficient to use statistics and to show that, for example, on an average significantly more people born between certain date ranges become sportspersons or doctors.

In all the accumulated scientific knowledge of all the previous centuries, there seems to be no hint of any force even close to the type that would be required to produce such an influence on Earth. The only influence of the planets on the earth is the electromagnetic radiation we receive from them (it is a different matter altogether that much of this radiation in fact originated from the Sun and was later reflected off the planetary surfaces), and their gravity, neither of which are strong enough to actually drown out the ambient noise: (nearby obstetricians, tables, and walls produce a far stronger gravitational effect, and nearby electric lights and ubiquitous radio signals produce a far greater electromagnetic effect.)


Yet the absence of knowledge about such an influence does not imply the absence of the influence: Perhaps our science isn't developed enough yet. So let us, for the moment, assume that such an influence exists. It is certainly neither gravity nor electromagnetism, for we understand both these phenomena well enough to say that their influence on our futures will be negligible. What are the properties of the influence?


1. The influence acts only on humans, and possibly on other living beings, but not on things such as mountains or oceans. This seems to me very strange. A planet several astronomical units away is somehow able to influence puny-sized humans but not the Earth or other planets. (If there were such an influence on large objects, we would have discovered it by now. The most precise trajectories of the heavenly bodies can today be explained by gravity and general relativity. If there were an influence sufficiently strong to affect humans, we should have expected there to be a sufficiently strong influence on the earth's trajectory as well, and it should have been picked up in experiments till now.) Apparently there is something special about humans that forces a planet several AU away to influence each of us personally.


2. The influence scales in a very weird way with the sizes of the planets. The moon, Mars, the Sun, and Jupiter all influence us to more or less the same extent. (Certainly, there might be an order of preference, but the fact remains that they are all able to influence our future.) Why not Uranus, or Ceres, or Titan, or Ganymede? Any dependence of the influence on masses and distances has to be extremely complicated; no simple function of masses and radii would enable Uranus, Ceres, Ganymede and the Moon to produce a similar influence on earth. (For instance, we would have a hard time explaining why Saturn's influence is of the same order of that of the Sun. The Sun is 1,000 times as massive and about 1/9 times as far as Saturn. If the influence scales directly with the mass, then the only mathematically simple possibility is that the influence scales directly with the distance too (if we are to believe that Saturn produces a similar effect), but that would lead to an absurdity; it would mean that even tiny dust particles in far-away solar systems would have a much greater impact than either Saturn or the Sun. Likewise, assuming that the influence scales inversely with the mass seems ludicrous.)


This, however, does not mean that such an influence cannot exist. After all, the simplicity of currently observed laws is not required by mathematics as we know it; the Universe could have been a lot more complicated. The difficulty of constructing a mathematical model for the influence does not imply the nonexistence of the influence. In science, we have access to one tool, and one tool only: experiment. No matter how exquisite or beautiful your theory, it is useless if experiments contradict it. Nature simply doesn't care, it doesn't exist for our convenience. Why, then, did I present the two points in the previous paragraph as an argument? The answer is: 'Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence', and I sought to convince the reader that astrology squarely falls into the category of extraordinary claims. (Carl Sagan's famous quote on extraordinary claims is not so hollow as it first sounds. Consider Russell's famous teapot analogy: You are not only allowed, but expected, to doubt and disbelieve the existence of a teapot in the Asteroid Belt in the absence of scientific evidence, regardless of the dreams of some crackpot. In other words, you can make an intelligent guess on the basis of your present knowledge about teapots and the Asteroid Belt. However, if such a teapot is indeed observed, it must be taken as fact, regardless of our previous bias.) Let us, then, turn to the final part of my argument: Experimental evidence.


It turns out that experiments, far from furnishing the extraordinary evidence necessary, have conclusively disproven the existence of at least one kind of influence. For an excellent review, please look at:
http://www.astrology-and-science.com/d-meta2.htm


I shall only single out one test from the above. (As you can see from the above link, its results are fairly representative of the general consensus among serious researchers.) Recently, researchers (one of whom was a former astrologer) published results of one of the most elaborate studies undertaken: they tracked the futures of about two thousand 'time twins', babies born within minutes of each other at the same location. The researchers tracked (for about forty years) more than a hundred different parameters for each of the twins, such as occupation, anxiety levels, marital status, IQ levels, ability in art and mathematics, and general physical characteristics. If indeed the location and time of your birth determine your future, the studies should have found a definite positive correlation between the corresponding characteristics of the time twins. Instead, it showed no statistically significant correlation whatsoever. This result is characteristic of nearly every major study performed so far to test predictions. Of course, as expected, astrologers jumped to the defence of their charlatanry by claiming that a time difference of even minutes could manifest itself as a different 'house cusp', whatever that is supposed to mean. However, it is difficult to see how a former astrologer could entertain such negligence; furthermore, professional astrologers seem perfectly happy with information that is far less accurate, while drawing up birth-charts. I also doubt that such accurate timekeeping was available when astrology first gained credibility in the eyes of the public.


In spite of the sheer unbelievability of it all (stars affecting human desires -- really ?), and in fact in spite of such strong evidence to the contrary, why do so many people believe in astrology? I shall take up this issue in a future post. In the meantime, please leave your comments, particularly if you disagree with anything I have written above.

Wir müssen wissen, wir werden wissen!

The explanation for the blog's name: wirmuessenwissen.

For a physicist, if there is one place of pilgrimage (without the religious connotation), it is the German university-town of Göttingen. Giants among men have lived and worked, and are buried, here: among them Carl Friedrich Gauss, Friedrich Wöhler, Wilhelm Weber, Max Planck, Walter Nernst, David Hilbert, Karl Schwarzchild, Max von Laue, Otto Hahn, and Max Born. Others who are not buried in Göttingen but have been associated with the university (either through studies or through teaching) include Bernhard Riemann, Johann Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet, Felix Klein, Victor Goldschmidt, James Franck, Eugene Wigner, Leó Szilárd, Edward Teller, Emmy Noether, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Walther Bothe, Peter Debye, Richard Dedekind, Paul Dirac, Enrico Fermi, Werner Heisenberg, Ernst Ising, Irving Langmuir, Hermann Minkowski, Wolfgang Pauli, Otto Stern, Hermann Weyl, Wilhelm Wien, Ernst Zermelo, and Richard Courant. The only two contemporary notable names I could think of that are missing from the above list are those of Schrödinger and Einstein.

Those who do visit Hilbert's tomb will see the following inscription:

Wir müssen wissen
Wir werden wissen.

(Translated as: We must know, we will know).

These famous words are from his 1930 retirement address at Königsberg to the Society of German Scientists. The context is as follows: "We must not believe those, who, today, with philosophical bearing and deliberative tone prophesy the fall of culture and accept the ignorabimus.  For us there is no ignorabimus, and in my opinion none whatever in natural science.  In opposition to the foolish ignorabimus I offer our slogan:
We must know,
We will know."

I quite agree with the sentiment. I thought myself lucky to obtain the name. I wonder why it was still available.

Why blog?

Hello world!

Quite a while ago, I decided to start a weblog of my own. My tendency to procrastinate pushed the idea somewhere back to the remote recesses of my brain, but could not get rid of it completely. And so, dear reader, you find me blogging away, for better or worse.

Why did I decide to start blogging? Whilst there are many blogs around whose purpose is art for art's sake, some that are travelogues, and some that are of an autobiographical nature, my blog is meant to be an online repository of my ideas and my views on several topics; I believe that the effective exchange of ideas is a prerequisite to the growth of the individual as well as the society as a whole. In recent times, blogs have come up as a great informal portal for the exchange of ideas. This informal nature  is both a blessing and a curse; while it encourages reticent people to open up, the ease of electronic data transfer does little to discourage sloppiness in ideas, adding to the petabytes of junk already there on the Internet.

Until next time!