Maneka slams proposal to construct observatory in Mudumalai santuary

[Guest guest]

http://beta.thehindu.com/news/states/tamil-nadu/article36623.ece

 

Animal rights activist Maneka Gandhi has slammed the government’s proposal

to construct a Rs. 900 crore Neutrino Observatory in Mudumalai sanctuary in

Tamil Nadu, saying it would destroy the region’s flora and fauna.

 

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MP voiced concern over the location of the

science project on the buffer zone of the Mudumalai Tiger Reserve and the

Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve, which, she said, was a “prime elephant and tiger

habitat.â€

 

Ms. Maneka, who had been recently nominated as the member of the National

Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA), told PTI that the “project is an

ill-conceived idea just to keep some of the retired scientists busy.â€

 

But those backing the project are not looking at the environmental

destruction it would cause in the long-term, she added.

 

The NTCA, in its recent meeting chaired by Environment Minister Jairam

Ramesh, had strongly opposed the INO, planned to be built a km under the

surface and to be funded by the Department of Atomic Energy, the Department

of Science and Technology and the UGC.

 

“NTCA member secretary Ramesh Gopal will soon visit the proposed site which

is home to 15 threatened species. But we would ensure that it does not come

up at whatever cost,†she said.

 

After surveying the impact of the project on the wildlife in the region, Mr.

Gopal will submit the report to the ministry.

 

Neutrinos are one of the fundamental particles which make up the universe.

Essential geographical requirements to set up a neutrino observatory are a

360 degree curve, rock-mass for at least a km, mountain feature which is at

least a km or km and a half tall, little or no gorge area among others — one

of the reasons why the Nilgiris was chosen.

 

More than 50 scientists from about 15 institutes and universities have

promoted the INO believing that neutrinos hold the key to several important

and fundamental questions on the origin of the universe and energy

production in stars.

 

Tiger expert, Belinda Wright, said the tunnel portal is less than one km

from the boundary of the Mudumalai Critical Tiger Habitat.

 

“The proposed site is within the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve — the first

Biosphere Reserve in India and of global importance. As per the United

Nations guidelines, research initiatives that feed conservation are welcome.

But the INO research has no bearing on conservation,†she said

 

नरेश कादियान http://nareshkadyan.blogspot.com/

अधà¥à¤¯à¤•à¥à¤·,पीपलà¥à¤¸ फॉर à¤à¤¨à¤¿à¤®à¤²

हरियाणा,

Naresh Kadyan http://nareshkadyan.webs.com/

अंतरराषà¥à¤Ÿà¥à¤°à¥€à¤¯ पशॠरकà¥à¤·à¤¾

संगठन के भारतीय पà¥à¤°à¤¤à¤¿à¤¨à¤¿à¤§à¤¿

Representative of the International Organization for Animal Protection in

India,

http://www.oipa.org/oipa/news/oipaindia.html

Chair PFA Haryana http://www.pfaharyana.in

+91-9813010595 , 9313312099

http://nareshkadyanbook.blogspot.com/

 

 

 

[Guest guest]

Hello,

The concern that the proposed laboratory could destroy natural

habitat is valid. The statement that the “project is an

ill-conceived idea just to keep some of the retired scientists busy " is not.

Neutrino research is an integral component of pure science research, ie.,

research for the sake of research. There is nothing wrong with it and indeed

some of the most useful technologies developed owe their roots to

fundamental scientific research. These technologies also include ones used

by animal rights activists to convey their ideas around the globe via email

and internet. And indeed some of the researchers of particle physics have

been supporters of environmental preservation and wildlife conservation. It

makes very little sense to belittle scientific research to promote wildlife

conservation. The location of the laboratory is disputable, the importance

of the research is not.(See attached article below by Nobel laureate Murray

Gell Mann).

Also see attached news item. The Nobel laureates who are speaking in favour

of the project have their reasons too. The way to deal with the issue at

hand is to have a round table discussion with both interested parties rather

than saying, " I am right and all important, you are wrong and dispensable. "

Regards and best wishes,

 

http://www.indiaenews.com/technology/20090925/223101.htm

Nobel laureates decry delay in India's mega science project

By K.S. Jayaraman. Karnataka, India, 11:31 AM IST

Prominent scientists from around the world have called for 'urgent action'

by the Indian government to prevent any further delay in the construction of

the proposed underground physics laboratory in Nilgiris, Tamil Nadu.

 

The mega science project has been stalled for the past three years as the

scientists have not received the mandatory clearance from the state forest

department to go ahead with the construction.

 

In a letter to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, eleven physicists -- including

Nobel laureates Sheldon Glashow of the US and Masatoshi Koshiba of Japan --

have urged his personal intervention so that the 'important' project can

move forward.

 

First proposed in 2001, the Rs.6.7 billion ($139.4 million) India-based

Neutrino Observatory (INO) was to have been completed by 2012. The

scientists had planned to dig huge caverns inside a hill to house a 50,000

ton iron detector for studying the elementary particles known as neutrinos.

 

There are only half a dozen underground laboratories in the world trying to

unravel the properties of these elusive, almost massless, particles which

rarely interact with matter. The 1,300-metre rock cover over the INO will

ensure all particles other than neutrinos will be filtered out.

 

'The detector prototype is ready and the first instalment of Rs.3.2 billion

for the project has also been sanctioned by the Planning Commission,' INO

spokesman Naba Mondal, a physicist at the Tata Institute of Fundamental

Research in Mumbai <http://www.indiaenews.com/mumbai/> told IANS. 'But we

cannot start construction of the lab. We applied for a permit in December

2006, and there has been no reply to date (from the forest department),' he

added.

 

The proposed INO site at Singara, about 250 km south of Bangalore, is within

the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve (NBR), a prime elephant and tiger habitat. NBR

Alliance, a coalition of Indian organisations concerned about the reserve,

fears that digging the two km long tunnel to set up the lab and the

resulting truck traffic will cause a lot of disturbance to the region that

is a vital corridor for the movement of tigers and elephants.

 

'The Alliance, in a resolution signed by over 25 eminent conservationists,

says that 'based on presently available data, the INO should not be allowed

to come up in the Singara area of the Nilgiris'.

 

Mondal says the critics are exaggerating. 'Singara's selection out of all

sites was based on safety, seismicity, as well as year-round accessibility.'

The INO team has submitted a detailed plan to mitigate the disturbance

during the construction phase to the forest department. 'There will be

negligible impact once the lab is up and running,' he says.

 

The world physics community agrees. 'Having visited a number of underground

facilities throughout the world, I do not think there are any real dangers

to the wildlife in Mudumalai and its environs, only imagined ones,' says

Maury Goodman, head of neutrino group at Argonne National Lab in the US.

 

'The INO facility would be a unique laboratory for the study of fundamental

physics. It would be a shame if this could not be brought to a realisation,'

he said.

 

The INO team that met Minister of State for Environment and Forests Jairam

Ramesh Sep 4 is hopeful that the issue will be resolved in favour of the

selected site at Singara.

 

'The importance of INO in the context of international science cannot be

overemphasised,' the Nobel laureates and others said in their letter to

Manmohan Singh. 'Other groups in other countries are waiting for the

operation of, and results from, INO (but) they are not going to wait

indefinitely.'

 

The letter further said that plans are already afoot both in the US and

China for building huge underground neutrino labs. 'Time is running out and

the competitive edge that INO had is slipping away. Any further significant

delay will be very detrimental to the success of the whole project, and may

indeed make the project moot.'

 

By K.S. Jayaraman (Staff Writer, © IANS)

*http://www.santafe.edu/~mgm/complexity.doc*<http://www.santafe.edu/~mgm/complex\

ity.doc>

**

 

**

 

* *

 

*WHAT IS COMPLEXITY?*

 

**

 

*Murray Gell-Mann*

 

* *

 

* *

 

*What is complexity? A great many quantities have been proposed as measures

of something like complexity. In fact, a variety of different measures would

be required to capture all our intuitive ideas about what is meant by

complexity and by its opposite, simplicity. *

 

*Some of the quantities, like computational complexity, are time (or space)

measures. They are concerned with how long it would take (or how much

capacity would be needed), at a minimum, for a standard universal computer

to perform a particular task. Computational complexity itself is related to

the least time (or number of steps) needed to carry out a certain

computation. *

 

*Other suggested quantities are information measures, referring, roughly

speaking, to the length of the shortest message conveying certain

information. For example, the algorithmic information content (or AIC) of a

string of bits is defined as the length of the shortest program that will

cause a standard universal computer to print out the string of bits and then

halt. *

 

*As measures of something like complexity for an entity in the real world,

all such quantities are to some extent context-dependent or even subjective.

They depend on the coarse graining (level of detail) of the description of

the entity, on the previous knowledge and understanding of the world that is

assumed, on the language employed, on the coding method used for conversion

from that language into a string of bits, and on the particular ideal

computer chosen as a standard. However, if one is considering a sequence of

similar entities of increasing size and complexity, and one is interested

only in how the measure behaves as the size becomes large, then of course

many of the arbitrary features become comparatively negligible. Thus

students of computational complexity are typically concerned with whether a

sequence of larger and larger problems can be solved in a time that grows as

a polynomial in the size of the problem (rather than an exponential or

something worse). It is probably safe to say that any measure of complexity

is most useful for comparisons between things at least one of which has high

complexity by that measure. *

 

*Many of the candidate quantities are uncomputable. For example, the

algorithmic information content of a long bit string can readily be shown to

be less than or equal to some value. But for any such value there is no way

of excluding the possibility that the AIC could be lower, reduced by some as

yet undiscovered theorem revealing a hidden regularity in the string. A bit

string that is incompressible has no such regularities and is defined as

" random. " A random bit string has maximal AIC for its length, since the

shortest program that will cause the standard computer to print it out and

then halt is just the one that says PRINT followed by the string. *

 

*This property of AIC, which leads to its being called, on occasion,

" algorithmic randomness, " reveals the unsuitability of the quantity as a

measure of complexity, since the works of Shakespeare have a lower AIC than

random gibberish of the same length that would typically be typed by the

proverbial roomful of monkeys. *

 

*A measure that corresponds much better to what is usually meant by

complexity in ordinary conversation, as well as in scientific discourse,

refers not to the length of the most concise description of an entity (which

is roughly what AIC is), but to the length of a concise description of a set

of the entity's regularities. Thus something almost entirely random, with

practically no regularities, would have effective complexity near zero. So

would something completely regular, such as a bit string consisting entirely

of zeroes. Effective complexity can be high only a region intermediate

between total order and complete disorder. *

 

*There can exist no procedure for finding the set of all regularities of an

entity. But classes of regularities can be identified. Finding regularities

typically refers to taking the available data about the entity, processing

it in some manner into, say, a bit string, and then dividing that string

into parts in a particular way and looking for mutual AIC among the parts.

If a string is divided into two parts, for example, the mutual AIC can be

taken to be the sum of the AIC's of the parts minus the AIC of the whole. An

amount of mutual algorithmic information content above a certain threshold

can be considered diagnostic of a regularity. Given the identified

regularities, the corresponding effective complexity is the AIC of a

description of those regularities. *

 

*More precisely, any particular regularities may be regarded as embedding

the entity in question in a set of entities sharing the regularities and

differing only in other respects. In general, the regularities associate a

probability with each entity in the set. (The probabilities are in many

cases all equal but they may differ from one member of the set to another.)

The effective complexity of the regularities can then be defined as the AIC

of the description of the set of entities and their probabilities.

(Specifying a given entity, such as the original one, requires additional

information.) *

 

*Some authors have tried to characterize complexity by using the amount of

mutual algorithmic information rather than the length of a concise

description of the corresponding regularities. Such a choice of measure does

not agree very well, however, with what is usually meant by complexity.

Take, as a simple example, any string of bits consisting entirely of pairs

00 and 11. Such a string possesses an obvious regularity, but one that can

be very briefly described: the sequences of odd-numbered and even-numbered

bits are identical. The quantity of mutual AIC between those sequences is

enormous, however, for a long string. Evidently the complexity here is

better represented by the length of the brief description than by the amount

of mutual algorithmic information. *

 

*Since it is impossible to find all regularities of an entity, the question

arises as to who or what determines the class of regularities to be

identified. One answer is to point to a most important set of systems, each

of which functions precisely by identifying certain regularities in the data

stream reaching it and compressing those regularities into a concise package

of information. The data stream includes information about the system

itself, its environment, and the interaction between the environment and the

behavior of the system. The package of information or " schema " is subject to

variation, in such a way that there is competition among different schemata.

Each schema can be used, along with some of the data, to describe the system

and its environment, to predict the future, and to prescribe behavior for

the system. But the description and prediction can be checked against

further data, with the comparison feeding back to influence the competition

among schemata. Likewise behavior conforming to a prescription has real

world consequences, which can also affect the competition. In this way the

schemata evolve, with a general tendency to favor better description and

prediction as well as behavior conforming more or less to the selection

pressures in the real world. *

 

*Examples on Earth of the operation of complex adaptive systems include

biological evolution, learning and thinking in animals (including people),

the functioning of the immune system in mammals and other vertebrates, the

operation of the human scientific enterprise, and the behavior of computers

that are built or programmed to evolve strategies—for example by means of

neural nets or genetic algorithms. Clearly, complex adaptive systems have a

tendency to give rise to other complex adaptive systems. *

 

*It is worth remarking for readers of this journal that John Holland, for

example, uses a different set of terms to describe some of the same ideas.

He uses " adaptive agent " for a complex adaptive system as defined above,

reserving the name " complex adaptive system " for a composite complex

adaptive system (such as an economy or an ecological system) consisting of

many adaptive agents making predictions of one another's behavior. What I

call a schema he calls an internal model. Both of us are conforming to the

old saying that a scientist would rather use someone else's toothbrush than

another scientist's nomenclature. *

 

*Any complex adaptive system can, of course, make mistakes in spotting

regularities. We human beings, who are prone to superstition and often

engage in denial of the obvious, are all too familiar with such errors. *

 

*Besides the possibility of error, we should also consider difficulty of

computation. How much time is involved in deducing practical predictions

from a highly compressed schema, say a scientific theory, together with some

specific additional data such as boundary conditions? Here we encounter time

measures of " complexity, " for instance logical depth, which for a bit string

is related to the time required for a standard universal computer to compute

the string, print it out, and then halt. That time is averaged over the

various programs that will accomplish the task, with an averaging procedure

that weights shorter programs more heavily. We can then consider the logical

depth of any entity if a suitably coarse-grained description of it is

encoded into a bit string. *

 

*A kind of inverse concept to logical depth is crypticity, which measures

the time needed for a computer to reverse the process and go from a bit

string to one of the shorter programs that will generate it. In the human

scientific enterprise, we can identify crypticity roughly with the

difficulty of constructing a good theory from a set of data, while logical

depth is a crude measure of the difficulty of making predictions from the

theory. *

 

*It is often hard to tell whether something that is apparently complex

really possesses a great deal of effective complexity or reflects instead

underlying simplicity combined with a certain amount of logical depth. Faced

with a fairly detailed diagram of Mandelbrot's famous fractal set, for

example, we might attribute to it a high effective complexity until we learn

that it can be generated from a very simple formula. It has logical depth

(and not even a gigantic amount of that) rather than effective complexity.

In contemplating natural phenomena, we frequently have to distinguish

between effective complexity and logical depth. For example, the apparently

complicated pattern of energy levels of atomic nuclei might easily be

misattributed to some complex law at the fundamental level, but it is now

believed to follow from a simple underlying theory of quarks, gluons, and

photons, although lengthy calculations would be required to deduce the

detailed pattern from the basic equations. Thus the pattern has a good deal

of logical depth and very little effective complexity. *

 

*It now seems likely that the fundamental law governing the behavior of all

matter in the universe -- the unified quantum field theory of all the

elementary particles and their interactions -- is quite simple. (In fact, we

already have a plausible candidate in the form of superstring theory.) It

also appears that the boundary condition specifying the initial condition of

the universe around the beginning of its expansion may be simple as well. If

both of these propositions are true, does that mean that there is hardly any

effective complexity in the universe? Not at all, because of the relentless

operation of chance. *

 

*Given the basic law and the initial condition, the history of the universe

is by no means determined, because the law is quantum-mechanical, thus

yielding only probabilities for alternative histories. Moreover, histories

can be assigned probabilities only if they are sufficiently coarse-grained

to display decoherence (the absence of interference terms between them).

Thus quantum mechanics introduces a great deal of indeterminacy, going far

beyond the rather trivial indeterminacy associated with Heisenberg's

uncertainty principle. *

 

*Of course in many cases the quantum-mechanical probabilities are very close

to certainties, so that deterministic classical physics is a good

approximation. But even in the classical limit and even when the laws and

initial condition are exactly specified, indeterminacy can still be

introduced by any ignorance of previous history. Moreover, the effects of

such ignorance can be magnified by the phenomenon of chaos in nonlinear

dynamics, whereby future outcomes are arbitrarily sensitive to tiny changes

in present conditions. *

 

*We can think of the alternative possible coarse-grained histories of the

universe as forming a branching tree, with probabilities at each branching.

Note these are a priori probabilities rather than statistical ones, unless

we engage in the exercise of treating the universe as one of a huge set of

alternative universes, forming a " multiverse. " Of course, even within a

single universe cases arise of reproducible events (such as physics

experiments), and for those events the a priori probabilities of the quantum

mechanics of the universe yield conventional statistical probabilities.*

 

*Any entity in the world around us, such as an individual human being, owes

its existence not only to the simple fundamental law of physics and the

boundary condition on the early universe but also to the outcomes of an

inconceivably long sequence of probabilistic events, each of which could

have turned out differently. *

 

*Now a great many of those accidents, for instance most cases of the

bouncing of a particular molecule in a gas to the right rather than the left

in a molecular collision, have few ramifications for the future

coarse-grained histories. Sometimes, however, an accident can have

widespread consequences for the future, although those are typically

restricted to particular regions of space and time. Such a " frozen accident "

produces a great deal of mutual algorithmic information among various parts

or aspects of a future coarse-grained history of the universe, for many such

histories and for various ways of dividing them up. *

 

*But such a situation, in which there is a great deal of mutual algorithmic

information generated, corresponds precisely to what we have called a

regularity. Thus, as time goes by in the history of the universe and

accidents (with probabilities for various outcomes) accumulate, so do frozen

accidents, giving rise to regularities. Most of the effective complexity of

the universe lies in the AIC of a description of those frozen accidents and

their consequences, while only a small part comes from the simple

fundamental laws of the universe, (the law of the elementary particles and

the condition at the beginning of the expansion). For a given entity in the

universe, it is of course only the frozen accidents leading up to its own

regularities that contribute, along with the basic laws, to its effective

complexity. *

 

*As the universe grows older and frozen accidents pile up, the opportunities

for effective complexity to increase keep accumulating as well. Thus there

is a tendency for the envelope of complexity to expand even though any given

entity may either increase or decrease its complexity during a given time

period. *

 

*The appearance of more and more complex forms is not a phenomenon

restricted to the evolution of complex adaptive systems, although for those

systems the possibility arises of a selective advantage being associated

under certain circumstances with increased complexity. *

 

*The second law of thermodynamics, which requires average entropy (or

disorder) to increase, does not in any way forbid local order from arising

through various mechanisms of self-organization, which can turn accidents

into frozen ones producing extensive regularities. Again, such mechanisms

are not restricted to complex adaptive systems. *

 

*Different entities may have different potentialities for developing higher

complexity. Something that is not particularly distinguished from similar

things by its effective complexity can nevertheless be remarkable for the

complexity it may achieve in the future. Therefore it is important to define

a new quantity, " potential complexity, " as a function of future time,

relative to a fixed time, say the present. The new quantity is the effective

complexity of the entity at each future time, averaged over the various

coarse-grained histories of the universe between the present and that time,

weighted according to their probabilities. *

 

*The era may not last forever in which more and more complex forms appear as

time goes on. If, in the very distant future, virtually all nuclei in the

universe decay into electrons and positrons, neutrinos and antineutrinos,

and photons, then the era characterized by fairly well-defined individual

objects may draw to an end, while self-organization becomes rare and the

envelope of complexity begins to shrink. *

*

 

These remarks summarize some of the material in my book

**, The Quark and the Jaguar* *, which is intended for the lay reader

interested in science. A more precise and mathematical version will be

presented elsewhere, with proper references to earlier work.

 

It is a pleasure to acknowledge the great value of conversations with

Charles H. Bennett, James Crutchfield, James B. Hartle, John Holland, and

Seth Lloyd.

*

 

 

 

On 10/21/09, Kadyan <kadyan.ipfa wrote:

>

>

>

> http://beta.thehindu.com/news/states/tamil-nadu/article36623.ece

>

> Animal rights activist Maneka Gandhi has slammed the government’s proposal

> to construct a Rs. 900 crore Neutrino Observatory in Mudumalai sanctuary in

> Tamil Nadu, saying it would destroy the region’s flora and fauna.

>

> The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MP voiced concern over the location of the

> science project on the buffer zone of the Mudumalai Tiger Reserve and the

> Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve, which, she said, was a “prime elephant and tiger

> habitat.â€

>

> Ms. Maneka, who had been recently nominated as the member of the National

> Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA), told PTI that the “project is an

> ill-conceived idea just to keep some of the retired scientists busy.â€

>

> But those backing the project are not looking at the environmental

> destruction it would cause in the long-term, she added.

>

> The NTCA, in its recent meeting chaired by Environment Minister Jairam

> Ramesh, had strongly opposed the INO, planned to be built a km under the

> surface and to be funded by the Department of Atomic Energy, the Department

> of Science and Technology and the UGC.

>

> “NTCA member secretary Ramesh Gopal will soon visit the proposed site which

> is home to 15 threatened species. But we would ensure that it does not come

> up at whatever cost,†she said.

>

> After surveying the impact of the project on the wildlife in the region,

> Mr.

> Gopal will submit the report to the ministry.

>

> Neutrinos are one of the fundamental particles which make up the universe.

> Essential geographical requirements to set up a neutrino observatory are a

> 360 degree curve, rock-mass for at least a km, mountain feature which is at

> least a km or km and a half tall, little or no gorge area among others —

> one

> of the reasons why the Nilgiris was chosen.

>

> More than 50 scientists from about 15 institutes and universities have

> promoted the INO believing that neutrinos hold the key to several important

> and fundamental questions on the origin of the universe and energy

> production in stars.

>

> Tiger expert, Belinda Wright, said the tunnel portal is less than one km

> from the boundary of the Mudumalai Critical Tiger Habitat.

>

> “The proposed site is within the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve — the first

> Biosphere Reserve in India and of global importance. As per the United

> Nations guidelines, research initiatives that feed conservation are

> welcome.

> But the INO research has no bearing on conservation,†she said

>

> नरेश कादियान http://nareshkadyan.blogspot.com/

> अधà¥à¤¯à¤•à¥à¤·,पीपलà¥à¤¸ फॉर à¤à¤¨à¤¿à¤®à¤²

हरियाणा,

> Naresh Kadyan http://nareshkadyan.webs.com/

> अंतरराषà¥à¤Ÿà¥à¤°à¥€à¤¯ पशॠरकà¥à¤·à¤¾

संगठन के भारतीय पà¥à¤°à¤¤à¤¿à¤¨à¤¿à¤§à¤¿

> Representative of the International Organization for Animal Protection in

> India,

> http://www.oipa.org/oipa/news/oipaindia.html

> Chair PFA Haryana http://www.pfaharyana.in

> +91-9813010595 , 9313312099

> http://nareshkadyanbook.blogspot.com/

>

>