Need for Geology Museums in India

An year back, I was at a small Swiss city called Lausanne for a business visit. Adjacent to Lake Geneva and on the back ground of snow mountains, Lausanne is blessed with natural beauty. At Lausanne railway station, I found a large banner displaying the places of tourist interest within the city. I was surprised to find that a Geological Museum was among the list. Instantly, I decided to give a visit to this Geological Museum. Believe it or not, I spent nearly six hours in the geological museum, absolutely blown away looking at the colors and shapes of different minerals on display. The museum had collection of minerals found from all parts of the world, including from different states of India. Imagine, watching the rocks of India on display in Switzerland! I asked myself, what’s the purpose of this Museum? Just when I was thinking this, I was distracted by a little girl, who asked her mother pointing towards a white rock with blue spots, about what those blue spots are. The mother explained her that, its Cavansite, a calcium vanadium silicate, a mineral found at Maharashtra, India. I got the answer to my question.

In India, we often complain that, everyone either wants to be either engineer or doctor. What about explorers, physicists, chemists, botanists and GEOLOGISTS? I think, the part of problem lies with the attitude of the people. How can we expect students to take up studies in earth sciences passionately when they can find no inspiration around? How inspiring it would be for Indian school students to visit a Geological Museum, where they can see thousand different minerals and understand where they were found? There is so much of beauty in the minerals of earth… Unfortunately, Indian student gets to know about that beauty only when they reach the level of graduation. There are less than 10 public geological museums in India. Some Indian Geologists, especially the geology professors might argue saying, our geological department has museum, I ask them, how many visitors, especially school students, they had in last one year?

Feels Good…

Couple of things I noticed today. Sharing the screenshots.

Signal Processing Framework for Quantum Communication Systems

Few years back, I had applied for enrolling into Ph.D program at an Indian University. However, the university didn’t accept my proposal for a part-time Ph.D.  Below is an abstract of the problem statement I proposed. It’s titled “Signal Processing Framework for Quantum Communication Systems”. This is still an open problem and I would be glad if someone takes it up.

Abstract: Signal processing in Communication systems is based upon the classical properties of signals. In classical physics, the effects of measurement, cloning, uncertainty and detection have no or little impact on the signal. As we move from classical communication systems to the system built using quantum mechanical properties of matter, effects such as measurement, cloning, uncertainty and detection have profound impact on the way system works. In [1], quantum signal processing was studied for the two quantum mechanical properties namely measurement and detection. This thesis intends at developing a formal framework that takes into account the measurement and detection of signals, no-cloning theorem, Uncertainty of canonically conjugate variables, superposition principle and other quantum mechanical properties [2-5].

The following studies are to be aimed to be done as part of thesis

1. Impact of quantum mechanical properties such as No-Cloning theorem classical signal processing algorithms

2. Validity of Shannon’s sampling theorem for quantum band-pass signals*

3. Effects of Energy-Time uncertainty in transforming signals from Time domain to frequency domain**

4. Design of basic modulation/demodulation techniques for signal processing.

*Original proposal of Shannon’s sampling theorem and Nyquist rate was performed on classical communication systems. The author is unaware of any study on this based on quantum mechanical properties.

**Note: In classical signal processing, theoretical signal transformations from frequency domain to time domain doesn’t impact the final result [6], whereas there is a possibility that due to energy-time uncertainty, transforming signals from time domain to frequency domain might introduce an uncertainty. This needs to be thoroughly studied from the signal processing prospective.

References:

[1] Yonina Chana Eldar, Alan V. Oppenheim, Quantum Signal Processing, PhD Thesis, MIT, 2002.

(Available at http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/16805)

[2] E.B. Manoukian, Quantum Theory – A wide Spectrum, Springer, 2006.

[3] K.T. Hecht, Quantum Mechanics, Springer, 2000.

[4] A.C. Phillips, Introduction to Quantum Mechanics, John Wiley and Sons, 2003.

[5] Gary E. Bowman, Essential Quantum Mechanics, Oxford University Press, 2008.

[6] Simon Haykin, Communication Systems, John Wiley and Sons, 1983.