Kali & the Kaleidoscope

The scene above is from a 1959 East-German/ Polish science-fiction film variously known as Silent Star or The First Spaceship On Venus. It was released when man had not yet stepped on the Moon, and independent India’s first prime minister Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru was still in office. 

Nehru’s famous jacket, topee and persona is sported by one of the leading characters of this film, based loosely on a work by Polish author Stanislaw Lem. The resemblance of fictional ”Indian mathematician” Professor Sikarna to Pandit Nehru is unmistakable: 

There are more than a couple of women wearing sarees in that control room. 

In the initial shots Professor Sikarna is shown deciphering an alien recording on the Tunguska meteorite. Subsequently he conducts his mathematical analysis aboard the spaceship to Venus. Normally this consists of sitting at some strange digital machine and running his fingers over it like a pianist. 

His mood is foul throughout, for some inexplicable reason.

The movie itself has a juvenile script, and terrible direction, even Stanislaw Lem reportedly hated it. But as a historical document of international relations and India’s scientific image, I think this film is invaluable. 

You can download the film from the Internet Archive or ThePirateBay. Both these are dubbed in English. 

 ….from Silent Running (1972), dystopian sci-fi film set on a bioreserve forest aboard a spaceship. 

This circular pool table has an off centred hole which makes the the game way more difficult. Incidentally, the mathematical version of this problem is known to be very complicated. In the barebones version, you have particles inside a circular enclosure which keep bouncing off the walls indefinitely. Now these particles could be balls of a game like billiards or pinball, or carrom — or photons inside a mirror. I have written about these two cases earlier in The Circular Mirror Of Alhazen. 

One could try to imagine waves generated by pebbles thrown inside a circular pond. After all, the photon is considered both a wave and particle in quantum physics. 

It is noteworthy that in certain dynamics, balls on a circular pool table or photons inside a circular mirror are related to quantum chaos and the Riemann Hypothesis. Instead of a circular enclosure, the models can involve an ellipse…or a stadium. 

In the scene above from A Game of Shadows, Sherlock Holmes is holding a book written by his arch-rival Professor James Moriarty. The name of this mysterious mathematical tome is Dynamics of An Asteroid. 

I have always wanted to open the pages and see what’s inside. Now a physicist named Alejandro Jenkins has written a beautifully speculative and witty piece on the title of that book, and its possible origins. 

……..the title Dynamics of an Asteroid suggests to me that Moriarty’s approach was general and theoretical, closer to pure mathematics than to observational astronomy. This is the opposite of Asimov’s interpretation, who concluded that Moriarty must have had a particular asteroid in mind. It is, on the other hand, a view strongly supported by the fact that Moriarty’s other known publication was his youthful paper on the binomial theorem, a strictly mathematical subject.

I think this is a brilliant piece of speculative history, pataphysics, science outreach, whatever you may call it. 

(Source: arxiv.org)

(Source: his.library.nenu.edu.cn)