Khagol_114

No. 114 - April 2018 04 If you keep tackling research problems which require, say, eighty percent of your ability, you will probably never write a wrong paper. But you will also be wasting your talent. If you keep tackling problems worthy of your steel, then, simply due to random fluctuations, a fewof your papers will turn out to be wrong. His own estimate was that it is perfectly fine - even desirable! - to choose problems such that about two percent of your papers arewrong! What is interesting is that Donald's scientific career also proves that you can make great contributions to the front-line research even if you take a couple of days off to solve brain teasers or re-invent a result already present in Born and Wolf. Obviously, exercising of your brain is never a waste; the training that your brain gets from tackling these little problems helps it in solving much bigger problems. More importantly, this also leads you to make connections between completely different problems which you might not have thought existed. The only preprint which I co-authored with Donald stands testimony to such a connection. At that time Donald was interested in the possibility of tackling the Local Group dynamics by simulating on a computer the action principle - rather than the equations of motion - for the particles. In the conventional action principle, you would fix the three coordinates of the particle at the end points. But for celestial objects, what we often know with some accuracy are the two (transverse) coordinates and one (radial) velocity. So Donald asked me whether the standard action principle can be re- formulated withmixed boundary conditions. We found a way of doing it fairly quickly, but what was interesting was that the structure of such an action principle happened to be exactly the structure exhibited by the Einstein-Hilbert action, a connection neither of us originally suspected. It is gratifying that a question about Local Group dynamics can lead to the holographic nature of gravitational action. Given the current trend in science, which confuses technical expertise with scholarship and craftsmanship with creativity, the best homage one could pay to Donald, is probably to recognize the values he held important and try to incorporate them in your own approach to science. The more people do this, the better it will be for the future of theoretical physics. Colloquia 04.01.2018 Rishi Khatri on The information hidden in the shape of the CMB spectrum . 15.01.2018 José Antonio Font on Towards astero- seismology of core-collapse supernovae from gravitational-wave observations. 15.02.2018 Patrick Brady on A spectacular collision: Observations of a binary neutron star merger. 19.02.2018 Alexander Vilenkin on Black holes from cosmic inflation. 15.03.2018 Sushanta Dattagupta on Saha ionization equation: Acentury of hindsight. Seminars Joydeep Bagchi, Shishir Sankhyayan, Prakash Sarkar, Somak Raychaudhury, Joe Jacob, and Pratik Dabhade, on being selected for ASI NewDiscoveryAward for the discovery of the Saraswati Supercluster. Congratulations to... SanjitMitra , on being selected for Outstanding FacultyResearchAward fromCareers360. 03.01.2018 Arunava Mukherjee on Neutron stars in gravitational waves: Key results from recent BNS-Event. 17.01.2018 S. Ganesan on Errors and correlations in big data science with nuclear data covariance as example. 24.01.2018 Aditya Rotti on Novel tools for analyzing CMB polarizationmaps. 07.03.2018 Andrew Matas on Searching for the astrophysical stochastic gravitational wave background. 28.03.2018 Reetanjali Moharana on Gamma ray burst duringmulti-messenger era.