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Javier E

What to read as an introduction to India | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...ad-as-an-introduction-to-india

india introduction economist

shared by Javier E on 15 Aug 22 - No Cached
  • The book (which we reviewed in 2021), is two things in one: it is a relatively straightforward chronicle of eight centuries of Indian history, a period that gave rise to many things thought of today as quintessentially Indian, from biryani to the Hindi language
  • it offers powerful evidence, backed up with hundreds of examples from Professor Eaton’s scholarship, that Indians before the arrival of the British saw each other and themselves not through the lens of religion, as the leaders of the country today would have their citizens believe, but through the varifocals of language, ethnicity and community.
  • It is not uncommon to encounter, among a certain class of English gentleman, the notion that, on balance, India did not do so badly from British rule. Not only were Indians spared the horrors of French or Spanish—or, worse, Belgian—colonisation. But the British built the railways, the postal system and the administrative infrastructure of the country. They left behind the gifts of parliamentary democracy and the English language. In under 300 pages, Shashi Tharoor, a former under-secretary-general of the UN and a serving member of parliament in India, demolishes those arguments
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  • the many sins of empire, from draining India of its resources and destroying its industry, to the manner in which the British implemented a policy of divide-and-rule, giving rise to conflict between Hindus and Muslims, which ultimately led to the partition of India and Pakistan
  • As for the railways, post and industrialisation, he asks, “Why would India, which throughout its history had created some of the greatest (and most modern for their time) civilisations the world has ever known, not have acquired all the trappings of developed or advanced nations today, had it been left to itself to do so?”
  • Mumbai is in many ways unlike the rest of India: it is far richer, less caste-bound and a lot more easy-going. Yet it is also all of India in a single place
  • As the country’s commercial capital, it has long attracted migrants from all over the country. Most of India’s communities, languages and cuisines are represented here, if not all of its pathologies. The cliché about Mumbai is that it is a place of extreme contrasts: sprawling shantytowns nestled in the shadows of multi-million-dollar homes
  • He explains with great clarity the links between big Indian business and politics, and the implications for India’s industrial economy. Even so, India is no post-Soviet Russia. The historical analogy Mr Crabtree uses instead is America in the era of the Rockefellers and Vanderbilts. In America, it gave way to a progressive era of greater prosperity for all, he writes. The fate of nearly 1.4bn people hangs on whether India makes a similar journey.■
Javier E

A Tantalizing 'Hint' That Astronomers Got Dark Energy All Wrong - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...nomy-universe-dark-energy.html

science research universe age dark energy

shared by Javier E on 05 Apr 24 - No Cached
  • Dark energy was assumed to be a constant force in the universe, both currently and throughout cosmic history. But the new data suggest that it may be more changeable, growing stronger or weaker over time, reversing or even fading away.
  • . If the work of dark energy were constant over time, it would eventually push all the stars and galaxies so far apart that even atoms could be torn asunder, sapping the universe of all life, light, energy and thought, and condemning it to an everlasting case of the cosmic blahs. Instead, it seems, dark energy is capable of changing course and pointing the cosmos toward a richer future.
  • a large international collaboration called the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, or DESI. The group has just begun a five-year effort to create a three-dimensional map of the positions and velocities of 40 million galaxies across 11 billion years of cosmic time. Its initial map, based on the first year of observations, includes just six million galaxies.
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  • “So far we’re seeing basic agreement with our best model of the universe, but we’re also seeing some potentially interesting differences that could indicate that dark energy is evolving with time,”
  • When the scientists combined their map with other cosmological data, they were surprised to find that it did not quite agree with the otherwise reliable standard model of the universe, which assumes that dark energy is constant and unchanging. A varying dark energy fit the data points better.
  • “It’s certainly more than a curiosity,” Dr. Palanque-Delabrouille said. “I would call it a hint. Yeah, it’s not yet evidence, but it’s interesting.”
  • But this version of dark energy is merely the simplest one. “With DESI we now have achieved a precision that allows us to go beyond that simple model,” Dr. Palanque-Delabrouille said, “to see if the density of dark energy is constant over time, or if it has some fluctuations and evolution with time.”
  • “While combining data sets is tricky, and these are early results from DESI, the possible evidence that dark energy is not constant is the best news I have heard since cosmic acceleration was firmly established 20-plus years ago.”
  • praised the new survey as “superb data.” The results, she said, “open the potential for a new window into understanding dark energy, the dominant component of the universe, which remains the biggest mystery in cosmology. Pretty exciting.”
  • what if dark energy were not constant as the cosmological model assumed?
  • At issue is a parameter called w, which is a measure of the density, or vehemence, of the dark energy. In Einstein’s version of dark energy, this number remains constant, with a value of –1, throughout the life of the universe. Cosmologists have been using this value in their models for the past 25 years.
  • Dark energy took its place in the standard model of the universe known as L.C.D.M., composed of 70 percent dark energy (Lambda), 25 percent cold dark matter (an assortment of slow-moving exotic particles) and 5 percent atomic matter. So far that model has been bruised but not broken by the new James Webb Space Telescope
  • As a measure of distance, the researchers used bumps in the cosmic distribution of galaxies, known as baryon acoustic oscillations. These bumps were imprinted on the cosmos by sound waves in the hot plasma that filled the universe when it was just 380,000 years old. Back then, the bumps were a half-million light-years across. Now, 13.5 billion years later, the universe has expanded a thousandfold, and the bumps — which are now 500 million light-years across — serve as convenient cosmic measuring sticks.
  • The DESI scientists divided the past 11 billion years of cosmic history into seven spans of time. (The universe is 13.8 billion years old.) For each, they measured the size of these bumps and how fast the galaxies in them were speeding away from us and from each other.
  • When the researchers put it all together, they found that the usual assumption — a constant dark energy — didn’t work to describe the expansion of the universe. Galaxies in the three most recent epochs appeared closer than they should have been, suggesting that dark energy could be evolving with time.
  • Dr. Riess of Johns Hopkins, who had an early look at the DESI results, noted that the “hint,” if validated, could pull the rug out from other cosmological measurements, such as the age or size of the universe. “This result is very interesting and we should take it seriously,” he wrote in his email. “Otherwise why else do we do these experiments?”
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