May 2005 BLOG

It talks about how ringtones are spreading, their quality, origins and all that. Like Linus Torvalds, Vesa-Matti Paananen is Finnish and give the world ringtones by realizing that Nokia's smart messaging for text will also work with bits of music. He put his software "Harmonium" on the internet for downloading and missed making a buck (or a billion). New players on the block are Jamster, Xingtones etc. There are polyphonic and master tone versions. Most good songs can not be transposed to these small bits. If a song does sound good on a cell-phone, may be it has music hardy DNA, or the song itself is just like a ringtone.

The following ringtone experience I had in Hyderabad in Dec 2005 is worth mentioning: It was the HydStat meeting being held at International School of Business. We were gathered in a big hall for the inauguration. As is customary, all were asked to turn off their cellphones. To start with, we all rose to maintain a minute's silence for the Tsunami victims. While we were thus standing, from a lady's cell 'phone rang out "Saare jahan se achchaa ...". It was rather ironical. You proudly use such a ringtone, but do not follow standard courtesies :-(

Plato, the great Greek philosopher, wrote a series of `Dialogues' which summarized many of the things which he had learned from his teacher, who was the philosopher Socrates. One of the most famous of these Dialogues is the `Allegory of the Cave'. In this allegory, people are chained in a cave so that they can only see the shadows which are cast on the walls of the cave by a fire. To these people, the shadows represent the totality of their existence - it is impossible for them to imagine a reality which consists of anything other than the fuzzy shadows on the wall.

However, some prisoners may escape from the cave; they may go out into the light of the sun and behold true reality. When they try to go back into the cave and tell the other captives the truth, they are mocked as madmen.

Of course, to Plato this story was just meant to symbolize mankind's struggle to reach enlightenment and understanding through reasoning and open-mindedness. We are all initially prisoners and the tangible world is our cave. Just as some prisoners may escape out into the sun, so may some people amass knowledge and ascend into the light of true reality.

What is equally interesting is the literal interpretation of Plato's tale: The idea that reality could be represented completely as `shadows' on the walls.

In 1993 the famous Dutch theoretical physicist G. 't Hooft put forward a bold proposal which is reminiscent of Plato's Allegory of the Cave.
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All of the information contained in some region of space can be represented as a `Hologram' - a theory which `lives' on the boundary of that region. For example, if the region of space in question is the DAMTP Tearoom, then the holographic principle asserts that all of the physics which takes place in the DAMTP Tearoom can be represented by a theory which is defined on the walls of the Tearoom.
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To many people, the Holographic Principle seems strange and counterintuitive: How could all of the physics which takes place in a given room be equivalent to some physics defined on the walls of the room? Could all of the information contained in your body actually be represented by your `shadow'?
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In fact, the way in which the Holographic Principle appears in M-theory is much more subtle. In M-theory we are the shadows on the wall. The `room' is some larger, five-dimensional spacetime and our four-dimensional world is just the boundary of this larger space. If we try to move away from the wall, we are moving into an extra dimension of space - a fifth dimension. In fact, people have recently been trying to think of ways in which we might actually experimentally `probe' this fifth dimension.
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