The eighth color of the rainbow

Have you ever wondered what is colour?

As per physics colour is that band of light spectrum (the range of wavelengths) which the human eye can detect. This band of spectrum is passed to the human brain which in turn , helps us to perceive color.

The human eye has three types of cones or colour receptors – Red, Green and Blue(Red , Blue and green are the three primary colours for us). These three types of cones can absorb wavelengths from 420 – 700 nanometres and help us detect about 100 different gradations of colours. The human brain combines these 100 gradations to enable the average human to distinguish about 1 million different colors


But what if our eye can be engineered to detect a wider range of spectrum? Imagine if our eye can have another type of cone to detect more primary colors? This special quality already exists in many animals and some humans, Read - Tetrachromat

Imagine how our new world would be like if we became a tetrachormat or pentachormat or something even beyond?

The rainbow would no longer be of seven colours. The world would be full of new colors and shades. How and with what words would you describe such a world? How would you describe and explain a colour you never saw before. Everything – living or object would look and feel different.

Imagine the impact on culture, art and literature. They would be redefined. All the famous painting of the world would now be fresh. Literature would be at a loss of words. The poetic expressions   - purple rain, green mile; red rose might turn out to be incorrect. The crow might no longer be black.  The grass might not be green now on any of the sides. Pink might no longer be the favourite colour of all the girls.

Imagine the impact technology and fashion. The best resolution monitors would suddenly feel pale. There would now be more shades to permute on the dresses – these new colors would rule the ramp and our minds.

Imagine the impact on our physic. We might initially find it difficult to even identify old and familiar things. We may develop new feelings. We would literally see our old world falling down in front of our eyes and new world takings its place. It would force us to revise the fundamental concept set in our brain. It will make us realize that our perception of things is just a model. There is no absolute truth –

"The sky is no longer blue; it just used to be;
The sky was never blue, we just used to see."

Perhaps we need such a magical experience to crumble down the rigid walls which have trapped our free will. Perhaps we need such an experience to revitalize, the once considered most important trait of humans – ‘To question something and not believe in it blindly’.
Perhaps we need the eighth colour of the rainbow to appreciate the existing seven.

The Physics of Egg Half Fry

The newest bug which has caught me is nowadays is cooking. Now , I  realize that at 26 years of age , I am a late starter in this sophisticated field ,  but none the less , as I always say to myself before trying anything new  - 'Everything is difficult before it become easy' , hence here  also , I decided to venture on this new field with enthusiasm. There was certainly a huge  lack of skill, but apparently no lack of will.
Bear in mind that , that until I caught this bug , I have never even boiled water. So everything I try provides me a  new set of  leanings and new set of rules . It is a different matter that it provides my kitchen with a new set of accidents.(and the set of accidents is , I must confess , is by no means small ).
I know my limits (or maybe not , that's why I am cooking ) , hence I decided to start with the innocuous egg half - fry.Now all of you would say that it is one of the simplest thing in the world - Put a pan on the gas , break an egg on the pan , move the pan here and there a bit and you get an egg half fry as seen in pic below.Add salt and spices as per your taste.And that's about it . Simple !

Well things were somehow not so simple when I tried it.
I certainly put the non-stick pan correctly on the gas and I certainly turned on the gas .(important step else how will the food cook - I thought it myself , it was not even mentioned in the recipe book ! ).
Then I took an egg , hit it with a spoon so that it cracks and dropped the inner contents of the egg on the frying pan. Within 30 seconds I learned , the non- stick pan is a misnomer as my egg got stuck on the pan's surface badly, I somehow scraped it off from the pan and placed it in the only place it was worth placing - the dustbin.
After much extensive research on the internet , I discovered that even in non-stick pan one has to put some oil on the pan's surface to avoid sticky incidents.I started wondering if the 'non stick pan' should actually be called 'nonstick only after using oil pan' , but decided to think over it on a later date and came back to give another attempt to the egg half fry.
On coming back to the cooking area , I realized that  I  had forgotten to turn off the gas.But that's not such a big deal , is it ? I took back the misnomer non stick pan , put it on the gas , put some oil on it , let it heat up a but and cracked an egg on it again.Much to my disappointment , as the egg touched the pan , the inner yellow portion(yolk) of the egg burst open and spill all over the pan.My initial impression was that it must have been an egg of a chicken with weak inner strength and feeble character.But then I though - Chickens cannot be humans , hence there must be some other reason.
And then it stuck me - it the same thing which has been the cause of all those injuries to me during my childhood - Newton's acceleration-due to gravity  g . I realized that I must not drop the egg from a very high height else it will fall down with a faster speed due to gravity and hence spill open on impact with pan. Now the next confusion was what is the 'break point height limit' of each egg. They should mark it on each of the eggs else how will one know after which height the egg will break. But I thought , that it expecting too much from technology.Maybe, after a decade or so it would be mandatory to sell eggs with break point height linit marked on them. I realized , I  was going ahead of my time so I broke the chain of thoughts and came back with a fresh egg.
Now this time , I did everything right -  pan , oil , heat , correct height , but for some reason I got another unexpected output.The yellow(yolk) which is supposed to be in the center (refer the pic) with the white albumen  surrounding it was actually present on the edge of the white albumen. It seems as if the it wanted to leave the white bed and venture the world on it 's own. I know what you are thinking - the egg has the characteristics of traveling , it must belong to a migratory bird.
But alas , my friend - in this world there are no simple explanations.It turns out the culprit was center of mass , trigonometry and of course gravity. See,at the time of cracking the egg, if the egg is not parallel to the surface of the pan , then all the inner contents of the egg will slide to one side of the egg and the force of gravity (mg) will split into mgcos@ ans mgsin@ (will always was a bad thing while solving physics problems in school), which will cause your yellow yolk liquid (which is heavier compared to the white albumin liquid) to fall away from the exact vertical point below on the pan.The white albumen liquid , on the other hand , which has lesser weight and lesser self - ego  will not be bothered by this incline and still fall in the center.The end result will be a displaced yolk in the half fry.
It took me 3 eggs to experiment with and confirm my research. It would have also calculated the angle @ which causes the yolk to fall out of the white portion completely of the half fry - it would have been a breakthrough discovery (just like the calculation of escape velocity - the minimum  velocity which is required by satellites to launch them successfully in the earth's orbit ) but I was running out of eggs , hence I had to put my enlightening research on hold.
Now all excited - with pan , oil , heat up of pan , correct height , no incline - I cracked the egg and VOILA  (or maybe WAKA   - the phrase of the moment - thanks to FIFA and Shakira ) -I got a perfect half fry egg.
I gobbled it up after adding salt to it and rushed to write this blog to tell everyone about it.
After the successful half fry and this blog , I feel so satisfied with my efforts - now there is no chance of anything going wrong - or is it ? Damn , the gas is still on ................

The Disconnect Within

I was reading through "Uncommon Wisdom" by Dr.Frijof Capra , the famous author of "The Tao of Physics".In a chapter named "The Big Dialogue of Sur" , experts from various fields discuss about the basic question -"What is health?".The dialogue drifted across various domains - genetics,economics,psychology,medicine, matter and wave duality, history and so on.An extremely enriching discussion which made me again contemplate as to whether our approach to try to understand concepts by using the abstraction models and modularization techniques have been a success or whether the approach has hidden from us as much as it has revealed.

All our education is based of choosing a model to represent a phenomenon and then understanding it after ignoring off the parameters which we find uncritical to our model. I find all this has let to a broken perception of the world for us.

We play with formulas as to how to move electrons from one circuit point to another and hence produce electric current of the required strength. But we never give a moment to realize how many electrons are moving in and around our body.We never attempt to try and find a connect between these two electron motions - one in the electric wires and one in our body. When we think of electronics circuits and wires  , we think of electronics circuits and wires only .We do not even realize that the same phenomenon is taking place is our body.When we think of the reactions happening inside our body , we block off the electronics.It has become our second nature to try and divide a phenomenon into fragments or into multiple opinions.

But we rarely try to consolidate the different views into one holistic view.
Has there been a fundamental mistake in our model which we have used for understanding things ?
Or it is that we have forgotten that the map is not the territory ? We affix our thoughts on our model believing  it to be true, while forgetting at the same time the model in its base itself is an abstracted approximation.

The more we advance , the more unrest grows. We divide Gods, region , religion forgetting them main reason why these divisions were made.These divisions are not our inherent characteristics, but were put in place to make things easy ?

How to escape and evolve over this ideology of broken perceptions ?