“Where The Mind is Without Fear”Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection:
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is lead forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action—
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

—from Gitanjali by Rabindranath Tagore.

Little must Tagore have known when he wrote this wonderful poem that even emotions like fear are programmed into our DNA!Yes, that is what a recent science magazine report says. Scientists may have found a gene for fear — a gene that controls production of a protein in the region of the brain linked with fearful responses.

Does it mean that most of our feelings are progammed ones. To what extent does the environment we grow up in, affect our emotions?

(c) Suresh Damodaran,2007

One of the first books I ever read was about quantum mechanics; Dad got it for me because the library on the air base was auctioning its old books. I was in the 6th grade and didn’t understand a word! But the fascination stuck on through the higher grades and through college. Today,
I stumbled upon this lecture (Does God play dice) by Professor Stephen Hawking. Heisenberg’s uncertainity principle, Neils Bohr’s atomic model, Schrodinger’s wave equation, Schrodinger’s cat, Einstein’s theory of relativity – all these were part of the oft used language then!For those of us who have forgotten the beauty of the universe brought forth by these wonderful gentlemen, this is a must read lecture. It is just 5 pages long and Professor Hawkin’s is exemplarily articulate and convincing with amusing analogies to explain the complexities of space and time. Throughout the lecture everything sounds so simple; Finally, you are left wondering at the uncertain possibilities the universe can throw up – Professor Hawkin’s himself being a living example of that!

The html version of the same lecture and other public lectures by the Professor are available at http://www.hawking.org.uk/text/public/bot.html

Happy reading!

(c) Suresh Damodaran,2007