10/9 – I’m very conscious that I’ve scarcely mentioned the fourth artist of the Khoj residency, Rohini Devasher. She makes menacingly beautiful, dense, photoshop compositions of outlandish hybrid plants, operating on the border between chaos and order. As a Delhi resident, she has to commute three hours each day to the studio, and so there has simply been less opportunity for casual interaction, although during the first two weeks she patiently dealt with dozens of agitated phone calls from the two helpless Europeans. Rohini was also, as a part time staff member of Khoj, responsible for making contact with Delhi’s scientific institutions during the organisation of the residency. In the last ten days this has begun to bear fruit, as people return from holiday.
I was visited at the studio by Professor Anu Venugopalan, visibly alarmed by having had to pick her way through the mud and stinking, bloated bodies of rats that had drowned in the most recent downpour. When I told Abishek, later, he said “Probably another Tam Bram”, the highly educated and successful Tamil Brahmins who dominate a lot of the professions. I was painfully aware of how implausible the situation must have looked through her eyes, providing a further blow to my confidence at that point. However, we had an interesting conversation about the mental imagery that quantum physicists somewhat furtively use, although I was unable to freeze frame her thinking in the mini lecture on decoherence that I requested, and maybe I’ll have to record explanations in order to analyse them. I’m sure she was as puzzled when she left as when she arrived, but she very kindly provided an introduction to the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai.
On Monday I went over to the Indian Institute of Technology, known as IIT, to meet Professor Thyagarajan. (The joke among more theoretical physicists, according to Abishek, is “What is the value of iit?” Quite funny, if you know a little maths.) He was a very engaging guy, in a book-strewn windowless den, whose shock of springy curls seemed to perfectly suit his intellectual playfulness. His work involves cryptographic applications of photon entanglement. I’m very tempted to explain it here, but I’ve also got to write about my experience of Kashmir, to which I escaped for the weekend. The conversation with Thyagarajan was very entertaining. I was astounded to discover that wave particle duality, as revealed by an experiment in which you fire particles through one or two slits, is still observable when you use C60 molecules, comparatively enormous structures composed of 60 carbon atoms, and tangibly solid enough that nano-engineers can actually build functional things using them. But in this experiment they behave as if they were simply vibrations of pure energy. It’s as if the Eiffel tower turned into a piece of music. From there we somehow got onto metamaterials, which can exhibit wildly unusual properties such as a negative refractive index, through being assembled at a molecular level. That suggested the possibility of modelling these structures at a macro scale, and investigating the resulting optical properties. I doubt that anything is going to result immediately from these ideas, but this doesn’t pose a problem now that I have redefined my project as a series of conversations.
