Planetary Dreams

Title: Planetary Dreams – The Quest to Discover Life Beyond Earth

Author: Robert Shapiro

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, 1999 (First)

ISBN: 978-0-471-17936-8

Pages: 273

Life is the most wonderful phenomenon mankind has stumbled upon so far, through the entire length of its existence. Atheists and believers alike stand in awe at the marvel, arguing among themselves on how this miracle originated. And we, or some of us, are much too concerned about super intelligent beings sending messengers in the form of UFOs or flying saucers to tinker with mankind. Life, even though taken for granted on our dear earth, has been a question of deep concern to societies from time immemorial. They dreamed about grand vistas and intelligent beings on the planets of the solar system, including the moon which was considered a planet till Galilean times. Colourful but fanciful accounts were made about the life forms existing on these worlds and for a time, there were arguments among the scientific community itself regarding the presence of sentient beings in Mars. Manned exploration to the Moon and unmanned ones to Mars has finally set at rest speculations about the habitability of these worlds, which were found to be stone dead. Robert Shapiro, who is an expert in DNA research and a professor of chemistry at New York University, brings out various scenarios in which life may be encountered in the solar system and speculates about the multitudinous forms they may assume. The readers may however be warned that the author’s remarks and suggestions sometimes veer uncomfortably towards pseudo-science which may mislead beginners, or unsuspecting readers.

Many of the contents of the book may not be admissible as hard scientific fact. Many arguments fall short of the rigor required in convincing the public. Moreover, the witnesses listed by the author are not altogether fit to perform the role they are asked to fulfill. We see Al Gore whose opinion is masqueraded as scientific evidence! Then again comes a patent attorney in Germany who conducts biochemical experiments in his free time, contributing to the evidence pool. To add to the chaos, opinions of noted scientists are given when the given sentiment does not relate to their chosen fields of work. Shapiro quotes Lord Kelvin, one of the most prominent physicists of the 19^th century to assert that “overwhelmingly strong proofs of intelligent and benevolent design lie all around us” (p161). What the author does not tell is that Lord Kelvin is considered to be a poor judge of events, even in his specialized field of study. He is remembered for his pompous and ridiculous remarks around the 1890s that all concepts in physics would be understood in a few years of time and physics would be dead by the new century! That was when revolutionary concepts like quantum mechanics and relativity were not even thought of. Whatever may be the author’s true intention, the book appears to be a clever device to plant in the reader’s mind the illogical principle that life originated as a result of intelligent design. Time and again, Shapiro glorifies design, but observing a tactical economy of words. He lets a sentence drop here, a hint there and a clue over there, all pointing to the same destination – intelligent design. This greatly eats away at the relevance and desirability of the work.

The book presents a ‘Life Principle’ which predicts that life will sprout everywhere the right ingredients are present. The final form may differ from what we get to know on Earth. Silicon-based and quite extraordinary beings are possible. In a survey of probable locations in the solar system, Shapiro asserts that intelligent life may not be viable anywhere on the solar planets other than the Earth. Mars, Europa (Jupiter’s satellite) and Titan (Saturn’s satellite) are the best candidates for the time being. Mars was considered to be the habitat of intelligent beings till only a hundred years ago, when the ‘stretch marks’ on its surface was confused with irrigation canals familiar to us. However, the Viking missions and the Pathfinder mission put paid to our hopes of finding a living there. But the author doesn’t let go of it easily. He argues that the automated probes chose a landing site which is perfectly calm, level and not likely to be interrupted by anything, whether organic or inorganic, such as large boulders. This precaution defeats the very purpose of finding life there, as any area present with life forms may not offer ideal conditions for a supposed ‘vehicle parking lot’. Ever partial to controversy, he further goes on to declare that some of the Viking experiments designed to detect traces of life turned up positive results. The author’s departures from established scientific procedure are tiresome and confusing for the general reader who may think that ‘is’ science.

The book must be credited for coming up with an idea of representing the whole of the known world in a scaled model, which he calls Cosmic Museum, that is of course imaginary but made as a proposal for the government to spend money on. The concept of scaling up or down the artifacts – depending on whether it is a bacterium or a galaxy – is really a remarkable exercise not seen in many other books of this genre.

When all is said and done, we must accept that the book failed to deliver on its promises. The subtitle of the volume claims to describe the ‘quest to discover life beyond Earth’, but the subject matter don’t adhere faithfully to the spirit. True, the details of the quest is briefly outlined in about 40 – 50 pages, but most of the time, Shapiro dabbles in quasi-scientific, quasi-religious blabber. He seriously considers arguments of creationists and flying saucer observers so as to stoop to answer their folly questions! Moreover, Shapiro further says, “the three-way debate between advocates of creation, luck and cosmic evolution has been going on for a long time, and will not be resolved unless we can collect some new evidence” (p251).

Books of the popular science genre are generally riddled with measurements of distance represented in metric system and in miles, because most of the books are printed in the U.S. Many of the authors are based there and presumably, most of the readers too. Though almost all of the modern nations have already migrated to metric system including the UK, where the imperial system originated, the U.S still steadfastly latch on to the imperial units causing irritating double unit entries in books like ‘the speed of light in vacuum is 186000 miles per second or 300000 kilometer per second.’ But Shapiro, an American himself, deviates from this practice and follows a welcome tradition of using metric units alone, because he rightly felt that ‘continual insertion of equivalents in terms of miles and inches would clutter the text’. As the number of international readers grows, we may hope to see more such ventures in future.

A few colour plates are included to add visual depth to the arguments presented in the text. However, these appear to be forced, and lacks any attractiveness. Even the natural curiosity one experiences while gazing on pictures of outer space and distant planets fails to arise with Shapiro’s collection of pictures. Readers who are really interested to read about extra-terrestrial life may do well by reading 'Life As We Do Not Eat It' by Peter Ward, reviewed earlier in this blog.

The book is not recommended as strong elements of pseudoscience abound in the work.

Rating: 2 Star

Religion, Tradition and Ideology – Pre-colonial South India

Title: Religion, Tradition and Ideology – Pre-colonial South India

Author: Champakalakshmi R

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2012 (First published 2011)

ISBN: 978-0-19-807059-7

Pages: 638

An encyclopedic tome from an eminent historian – such a comment would suffice to put the worth of the book in perspective. Champakalakshmi is a retired professor of the Jawaharlal Nehru University, but her works in the form of essays, seminar papers and writings are renowned for the depth of coverage, originality of thought and references to primary sources. This book, as remarked by Dr. Rajan Gurukkal, is indeed representative of the knowledge base of a high order and hence widely accepted and least debated by the experts. It narrates how religion sprang its roots in the ancient South Indian society, how it was developed and could elbow out heterodox sects like Buddhism and Jainism, how the concept of temple came into being and the springs from which its architectural idioms originated and how a tribal, clan-based society transformed itself into a state in the modern sense, or medieval sense, rather. The modern world gapes in wonder at the architectural pinnacle of Brihadisvara Temple in Tanjavur, but few are aware of the historical undercurrents that fed the masonry of its prime movement. The chronological span of the work is impressive, as it extends over nearly two millennia from 300 BCE to 1700 CE, though the depth of coverage is not uniform over the entire span. We get to know a very good description of the times from about 500 CE to 1300 CE.

The author begins with a decent introduction of the subject matter integrated over the period under consideration. The interval is divided into three broad periods of early historic (300 BCE-300 CE), early medieval (400-1300 CE) and Vijayanagara (1350-1700 CE). In the earliest period, gradual Aryanization took place in South India. The development of religion took three distinct steps in the north – Vedic, Smarta (Upanishadic) and Puranic. But in the south, the three stages merged into one and came as a package. The Brahmin proponents of the new religion were faced with firmly established Shramana religions of Buddhism and Jainism in the south. The lever to praise the two religions out of the society was provided by the Bhakti movement that attached much importance to devotion to a personal deity sanctified in a temple or cult centre located across the territory of Tamilakam. The evidence for the subtle shift is seen in literature as well, as the hero worshipping traits of Sangam works gave way to the worship of a transcendental god. Local gods and cult figures were assimilated to the Puranic pantheon, like Murugan – an ancient Tamil God – was accepted as the son of Lord Shiva and goddess Kottavai, being transformed as an aspect of Durga, Shiva’s consort. We must also note that the Vedic gods of Surya and Indra didn’t have any influence on the southern mind, as very few temples were devoted to them. The reason for this disparity is mentioned above, that is, the transition to Puranic gods occurred only in North India and the reformed religion came as a package to the South. Even though the Puranic religion was riddled with notions of caste, it still could establish itself on the people, because of the egalitarian values professed by Bhakti hymnists who propounded equality of all the disciples before their god of devotion.

The origin of Bhakti movement coincided with the establishment of regional states. The kings found legitimation in the new religious concepts sweeping the countryside. Large temples were constructed during this period and land grants on a large scale were conferred on them for maintenance. The Bhakti movement was noted for two major aspects – protest against the monopolization of divine grace by Brahmins and the hostility to Buddhism and Jainism. Non Brahmin castes like Vellalas dominated the movement. The socio-religious concepts of the period changed in the 14^th century with the emergence of Vijayanagara Empire, which was the first trans-regional state in south India. All regional states like the Cholas and Pandyas became vassals and were later replaced by the Nayaks, local military commanders of the Vijayanagara army. This state was also burdened initially with a legitimating device for their dominance. This heralded a new era in which Sanskritization worked in full swing and all religious ideas were sought to be rooted in Vedic postulates. The author brings out a curious argument here that Shankara, the philosopher born in Kerala and who is credited with establishment of monastic schools across the corners of the subcontinent, was unknown till the establishment of Vijayanagara. She argues that Vidyaranya, the spiritual guru of the founders of the Empire and the chief teacher of Sringeri monastery was instrumental in finding a base on the teachings of Shankara for the religious ideology prevalent in his time.

If the author’s arguments are taken at face value, we have to conclude that the foundations for the present-day religious lineup of South India were established at the time of Vijayanagara period. It was the first supra-regional state in the south and needed to have solid legitimacy on religious sanction. They sought to obtain this with the Vedicization and Sanskritization of the existing customs, beliefs, rituals and even deities. Every act of religious persuasion came to be backed by Sanskrit scriptures and on the philosophical arena, Shankara was coronated as an Acharya with Vedic roots.

Champakalakshmi devotes special attention to explain why the Shramanic and heterodox religions of Buddhism and Jainism are out of the main stream in today’s south India. This makes interesting reading to those who wonder at the obviously Buddhist/Jain symbols existing in temples where Vedic rituals are now being followed. The author states that Buddhism never really took off in the south, but the Jains had a sizable following till 7^th - 8^th centuries, when the burgeoning Bhakti movement submerged the isolated outposts of Jainism. Brahamanism could engineer the coup, because it was prepared to accommodate tribal and regional cults and deities in its pantheon. Jainism didn’t provide this flexibility and their belief systems had already solidified hard to offer any accommodation. Royal patronage soon shifted to Saivism and Vaishnavism. Jains were driven out from their possessions, sometimes even by violent measures.

The author limits her description mainly within the confines of the present-day Tamil Nadu state. No doubt, some of the aspects of Karnataka and Andhra are considered, but mainly when dealing with heterodox sects who made these regions their strongholds. Kerala is totally left out and it seems that the professor’s knowledge of Kerala’s geography is rather limited. Many places in Kerala indicated in the map showing Vaishnava pilgrim centres are wrongly located. What’s more, the capital of Cheras, Vanchi is mentioned to be near Karur, Tamil Nadu, which is the stubborn position taken by many Tamil historians, but which is not based on fact. The dismal disregard exhibited by the author is all the more made evident when she discusses the epigraphic evidences from temples in Kanyakumari district, without stopping to mention the dynasty in Kerala who created those inscriptions. This outlook sometimes leads to contrary argument when she describes a painting in which Cheraman Perumal sets on a pilgrimage to Kailasa, where the king is said to come from Kerala!

The language is terse, uninspiring and repulsively drab. The book lacks a clear structure. Even though painstaking research had gone behind the encyclopedic volume, the effort is made worthless by the author’s lack of imagination. The chapters, being the product of various seminar papers and essays, are riddled with repetition and monotony. Absence of an index really curtails the utility of the book, as there are lots of names, which must have been listed out in an index. Devoid of an original theme, the book at least would have served as a handbook, if a comprehensive index was provided. One could only wonder at the publisher’s dire oversight in not bringing out an index.

The book is recommended only to serious readers and students of history.

Rating: 2 Star

Minding the Heavens

Title: Minding the Heavens – The Story of Our Discovery of the Milky Way

Author: Leila Belkora

Publisher: Institute of Physics Publishing, 2003 (First)

ISBN: 978-0-7503-0730-7

Pages: 369

Anyone looking up at a very dark night sky would fail to be mesmerized by the panoply of the celestial sheet of stars adorning, as it seems, the roof of the sky. Stars have been providing unending inspiration to many young ones to identify their future career in science. Most people are aware of what stars are, how they form and die, why they are being at their present locations and take for granted the painstaking research and study that went behind our present knowledge of the stellar systems. Leila Belkora puts up a brilliant effort to narrate the history of our understanding of the Milky Way, our parent galaxy. Ask any school student and he will answer that we belong to the Milky Way, but we must read this book to understand the story of the quest that finally culminated in getting us to the point where we are now. The book does not merely describe the discoveries as such, but proceeds to make the reader conversant with the socio-political background and the personal lives of the astronomers who made the breakthrough. The book is so structured and lucid as to make it readable like a work of fiction. And the author is a renowned scholar, dividing her time between science writing and teaching astronomy at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

It is said that every well begun job is half done. Belkora does a wonderful job in laying out the preliminaries with a good introduction and a thorough discourse on the general concepts of astronomy and its history – how the pieces nicely fell in to the pattern. The narrative is concise and the economy of words gives it added significance as a prelude to the subject matter. The author answers a recurring question in the minds of students of astronomy, that of why many of the stars possess Arabic sounding names. The answer is curious to know. First work on naming and categorization of stars based on the luminosity was taken up by Hipparchus of Greece in second century BCE. This was compiled and published by Ptolemy of Alexandria as ‘Almagest’. However, great tribulations were taking place in the near east during the first few centuries of Common Era. Then came the onset of dark ages and learning took a back seat. The mantle of scientific enquiry shifted to Baghdad which held it high for nearly four centuries. A renowned astronomer, al Sufi published a treatise in Arabic around 900 CE which was translated to many European languages in the Middle Ages and found their entry into modern lore.

                   

Europe continued to hold on to the concepts originated by Ptolemy and Hipparchus even during the times of Newton. The suns, stars and planets were thought to be moving along three-dimensional, concentric spheres around the Earth. The celestial spheres were thought to be put in motion by God. The first stirring in the right direction was taken by Thomas Wright in the 18^th century. Even though a theologian and philosopher, Wright first suggested that the Milky Way is seen as a stream because we might be looking at it edge on. Wright published his observations and results, but didn’t gain much credence due to his metaphysical and religious arguments that crept into the subject matter. But his ideas were noted by William Herschel, A German by birth, but naturalized in England. Herschel, working with his siblings, was instrumental in discovering a new planet, Uranus. This discovery was the first of a planet since recorded history. A musician-turned–astronomer, his fame lay in building optical telescopes himself and using them to estimate the distances at which stars are separated from us. A consensus had dawned among the astronomers that the huge distances of stars could be measured by accurately finding the parallax of stars – the apparent shifting in position of a star caused by the Earth’s movement around the sun and taken at diametrically opposite points in the orbit, say in June and December and situated 300 million km apart. Unfortunately, Herschel’s results were in error.

In any field of study it is not unusual for an idea to get stagnated for a while for want of instruments of sufficiently advanced technology to verify its predictions. Belkora establishes that this was true in the case of measuring stellar parallax also. It fell to the lot of Wilhelm Struve and William Huggins to compile these figures of a vast numbers of stars. At the same time, the author identifies the transition that was taking place in astronomy in early 20^th century. Up to that period, Europe led the field in the form of excellent observatories equipped with instruments that were in league of the world’s largest. Americans didn’t even have a decent telescope till the 1830s, as exemplified in the lament of John Quincy Adams, President of the US at that time. But with the immense progress that was lifting America from the clutches of primitive technology, lots of new observatories began to spring up across university towns and some of them rivaled competing installations anywhere in the world. Harlow Shapley was a senior figure among the American astronomers.

Belkora implies that the confirmative evidence of the structure of the universe came with the work of Edwin Hubble, who is also the most famous astronomer of the last century and known eponymously with the space telescope that is still working wonders in a Near Earth orbit. Till Hubble’s time, the scientific community was divided on the question of whether the Milky Way was the only galaxy or it was only one among millions. The three-dimensional space is viewed through the two-dimensional sky and distances to various stars could be deduced only through ingenious schemes. Hubble established that the immense distances which separate us from some of the observed stars imply that they are too far away from the regions bounded by our own galaxy. But one of his other observations caused a paradigm shift on the theories on the origin of the universe. Hubble saw that galaxies are receding away from us. The more distant they are, the faster they are moving apart. This means that the universe as a whole was expanding. And it also suggested that there was a time when the expansion began from a point in space-time, euphemistically called the ‘Primordial Atom’. See how quickly Hubble’s discovery paved the way for concepts of Big Bang to take the centre stage.

Belkora attempts to teach even the most ignorant reader some of the fundamentals of astronomy. The collection of finely illustrated diagrams and the richly detailed colour and monochrome plates prove their assertion. She does not resort to go after a difficult argument without introducing it at a prior occasion, so that the readers would be in sync with their ideas. The books became endearing to all classes of people precisely because of the apparent effort taken by the author to clear up doubts on fundamentals.

The book’s subtitle says that it is a story of our discovery of the Milky Way. But this description would be a case of underestimating the utility of the book. Belkora not just stops at the Milky Way, the attempt continues forward to cover the entire history of astronomy for two centuries beginning from the 1730s. Readers should not get confused by the humility of the subtitle, the book’s scope far outgrows our own galaxy.

Being a scholar of astronomy, the author presents the arguments in a well balanced way. She has visited every region of the Milky Way, like its centre, where the current consensus is that a black hole is lurking. It is rare to see such comprehensive treatment in books of astronomy. At the same time, a cautionary note is also sounded about the limited knowledge we still possess about the star system as not to mistake knowledge of the foam of a braking wave with that of the ocean.         

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

Prisoners of the Japanese

Title: Prisoners of the Japanese – POWs of the Second World War in the Pacific

Author: Gavan Daws

Publisher: Pocket Books, 2007 (First published: 1994)

ISBN: 978-1-4165-1153-3

Pages: 396

The Second World War was the bloodiest act of aggression among men. Millions perished in the flames raged by this Great War, many millions got injured, the lives of a lot many were changed forever and once again the folly of war dawned right and clear in the minds of sensible people anywhere in the world. Asia also carried more than its fair share of the bitter fruit of war than spawned in Europe. Japan aggressively moved into the game, harbouring hopes of establishing an Asian empire of its own – like that of UK, France and Holland – from where they could obtain raw materials for their industries and they could sell the finished products in the colonial markets. The Allied forces opposed them and for a time it seemed that Japan would have the last word. Thousands of American, British, Australian and Dutch soldiers surrendered and were taken as prisoners of war. This book describes the circumstances which led to their capture, grimy details of their lives in the camps, the inhuman treatment meted out to them in work details and special killing projects such as the Burma – Siam Rail road. Apart from expounding the progress of war as a backdrop to the human trauma unweaving before the reader, Daws also looks into the life of the prisoners after they went back home at the end of the war. The narrative is so stunning in its impact and so forceful in its choice of expressions that the reader becomes at one with the prisoner in his suffering. Gavan Daws headed historical research in the Pacific region at the Institute of Advanced Studies and is the author of twelve books with a slew of awards for his documentary films.

The Pacific war was really hard on the Americans. Though they had seen it coming for a long time complacency got the upper hand and it was impossible for them even to contemplate that Japan might be able to give them a good thrashing on the field. Concepts of racial superiority and aversion to Asiatic races prompted many to reside in fool’s paradises, never taking the deteriorating conditions seriously and vainly hoping that the war, if at all it comes about, would last for only a maximum of two weeks, by which time – they thought – Japan would be brought to its knees. But Pearl Harbour altered all calculations and rudely jolted the giant out of slumber. The ruthless efficiency and surgical precision with which Japanese bombers sowed death on that remote Pacific naval base astonished American strategists. The little Asian country appeared on the verge of playing another David, which it did against Russia in 1904-05 when the giant European nation was humbled on the battle field. In Pearl Harbour they could exploit the advantage of surprise to the hilt. Other US bases in the Pacific soon surrendered to Japanese efforts. For a time, it seemed that Japan had established an invincible shield around itself, after subduing American forces in the Pacific. East Asia had already fallen to them in earlier stages of the war – Korea, Indo-China, Indonesia, Thailand and Burma had fallen much earlier. The book presents the conditions and the war situation in general, before going on to describe the actual process in which American troops were overwhelmed and taken prisoner in the Wake islands and Philippines.

Daws’ description of how the conquering Japanese treated their American and European prisoners is shocking and provokes repulsion at the wanton cruelty and sadism of the victors. He ascribes racial prejudices also to the extraordinary strictness of the Japanese, by hinting that the smallness of the Japanese in physique against their Western prisoners must had fed their inferiority complex to inflict maximum pain on the physically superior body. We have to note here that many of the author’s remarks are outright racist for which he warns us beforehand that the racist remarks are reproduced as such as it came from the prisoners themselves. This argument is so flimsy and lacks any substance or decency. If the author is deputed to report on a street brawl, will he be casual enough to reproduce the exchanges verbatim?

                  

Whatever may be the lapses in discretion on the part of the author, there is no denying that he had captured the grisly details of prison life under the Japanese. Shocking descriptions of the Bataan death march in Philippines, the forced transportations over the sea in undersized vessels and the utter inhumanity of the Japanese administration of POW camps abound in confounding the reader with a realization about the psychological change that comes about in victor against the vanquished. A prisoner’s death due to malnutrition, overwork, disease or all of them combined was nothing of significance to the conquerors. POWs started to die in droves when the Burma – Siam railroad project began.

Japan wanted to conquer India, which was the jewel in the crown of British Empire. However, Burma was a strategically inconvenient place in terms of movement of troops and material. A railroad from Thailand to Burma would ease the Japanese the trouble of moving ships through the Malacca Straits and Bay of Bengal. They could offload them in Thailand at the South China Sea coast and transport through the forests bordering Burma. Hundreds of thousands of prisoners were drafted for building the rail road, mostly out of bare hands. Ravaging diseases and lack of food killed 20% of the prisoners of the war. In this stretch Japan forced East Asians also to toil as slave labour. These Romushas, as they were called, were cheated to sign up. This act was in direct contrast to Japan’s moral stand that the war they are waging in Asia was to liberate the Asian people from the Western yoke and to share the resulting prosperity. But the Asian workers’ plight was more pathetic than the westerners. If the latter were treated as enemy prisoners, the former didn’t have a higher claim than animals with the Japanese. About half of them, running to nearly 150,000 perished on the wayside.

When the war was grinding down to a close, the POWs were faced with another threat. The Japanese tried to move them to the home islands, in ships which increasingly came under attack from Allied planes and submarines. Then came the firebombing and cluster bombing of Japan for which the prisoners bore collateral damage. And at last came the atom bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki – these towns were selected for annihilation on the assumption that very few prisoners were held there, but still a few of them died in the nuclear holocaust. The new and devastating weapon finally broke the back of Japan. It surrendered on Aug 15, 1945 and the prisoners went home at last.

The book is distressingly replete with racially charged references and disparaging remarks about the Japanese and Asians in general. It would have been pardonable had this book came out immediately after the war when emotions were flaring hot and high. But, coming after a remove of 60 years, such foul mouthing of the enemy on openly professed racial lines is in bad taste. The author goes on to provide a moral basis for indiscriminate killing of the Japanese, by narrating an incident in which young children spat at the prisoners caught parachuting from downed Allied planes. The narrow-mindedness goes to its extreme when he says that those guards who behaved humanely with the prisoners were Christians practicing their faith in secret. Quite unexpectedly, the author is cross with General Douglas MacArthur who was the commander of the Pacific fleet and played a larger than life role in the war history. But Daws does not spare an opportunity to malign him. If I am asked to hazard a guess on the real motive of the author to produce a book of this sort, I would definitely conclude that it is to provide a moral justification for the terrible nuking of two cities, along with a mostly innocent population. And, to do justice to the author, we have to appreciate that he had succeeded to a large extent in achieving this objective. The descriptions of the war years are so original and absorbing.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 3 Star