The Elegant Universe - 2

As I had mentioned in the earlier post about continuing here I am. Well the last part of the series was aired on sunday night from 10 to 11. Believe me it was a treat to the eyes to watch all the happenings in the Atomic scale.

If one has read Atomic and Modern Physics in detail let us say from standard text like the Reznick and Halliday, one would come across the Fermilab. A fermilab is basically a research laboratory which provides leadership and resources for qualified researchers to conduct basic research at the frontiers of high energy physics and related disciplines. One of the foremost discovery which took place at the Fermi Lab was Quarks. Thereafter numerous particles have been discovered in experiments which are conducted in 4.5 Miles long accelerator.

In one of the experiment concerning string theory, two protons were made to collide with each other. No observations were made when the collision took place sideways kind. But when the collision took place head on then a particle called as Graviton was formed. The identification of such a particle is that it is not visible in the results but decreases the mass of the two protons. This graviton is the most important and vital particle to explain the string theory.

But there were lot of problems with the String theory in the initial phase. There were in total 5 views of the same theory proposed by various scientists across the globe. But soon it was discovered that they all were the same but were looking different because the conditions surrounding them were different. Hence it was given the name lately as the M - theory. No one knows why the name M was given.

After this the theory gets too complicated and even today it has not been able to explain the match between quantum and relativistic mechanics.

The Elegant Universe

The title of the post as it suggests is all about trying to answer the fundamental question concerning the creation of universe and certain other things for which even the most advanced of sciences have no answers. But after seeing the program "The Elegant Universe" on Discovery Channel I feel we are very close to perhaps understanding the most intriguing question: How come the Universe came into existence.

From the child hood one thing which has been haunting me till date is this universe. How come this universe came into existence and why does life exist only on earth and no other planet was so fortunate to have life on its surface. Of course I have not been able to do any justice to my inquisitiveness over a period of time because of prior engagements but one program on Discovery has actually given a new thought and a new insight to my thought process.

I usually do not watch discovery. Very rarely once in a while when I get bored out of watching each and every channel of the umpteen numbers which our cable operator provides, I do surf Discovery. But this time while I was watching KBC in the break the promotional campaign for this series appeared and I decided come what may I am going to watch this series. I do not know how many of us have watched it but perhaps it was one of the fascinating programs with absolutely superb effects and picturisation which made all the difference. It was aired on Discovery from 2200 hours to 2300 hours on 26th, 27th and 28th of August. The title of the series was "The Elegant Universe".

Now I will go back about 10 years down the line way back in my 10th standard in school. That was the time when I was first introduced to the topic of Atomic Structure. Atomic Structure deals as the title suggests with the structure of atom, composition of matter, electrons, protons, discoveries like mass of electron etc. It starts with the famous Sir Ernest Rutherford Alpha Scattering Experiment and ends with the conflict between Quantum Theory and General Theory of Relativity.

General Theory of Relativity as all of us was proposed by the genius Albert Einstein who is said to have used his brain to the maximum possible extent among all the human beings on earth. The extent to which he used his brain was about 11 %! The General Theory of Relativity gives an explanation as to how come the strong force which is Gravitational force between earth and the sun comes into existence. It postulates that the sun creates around it a very calm and quiet surface something like a mesh and and the gravitational pull which exists within this mesh actually makes earth revolve around the sun. But this theory does not say anything about the other three fundamental forces which exist in nature. The Weak force, the electromagnetic force and the Nuclear force. Enter Quantum theory.

Quantum Theory considers the electron having a dual character. It says that the electron possesses both wave as well as particle nature. This was very well supported by the Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, The Debroglie Law, The Pauli's Exclusion Principle and the most famous of all the Max Planck's Quantum Equation. So according to the quantum theory it’s impossible to distinguish between wave and particle. Quantum theory was able to explain very well the weak force, the electro magnetic force and the nuclear force but it could not explain the very fundamental force of nature – The Gravitational Force. There lies the major problem.

The General theory of relativity can explain the fundamental force of gravity but cannot explain the forces which exist at the atomic level whereas the quantum theory can explain the forces at the atomic and sub atomic level but cannot explain the gravitational pull. It is said that Einstein spent last 30 years of his life in trying to figure out how can general theory of relativity explain the sub atomic forces.

So in short we can say that, Relativistic quantum field theory has worked very well to describe the observed behaviors and properties of elementary particles. But the theory itself only works well when gravity is so weak that it can be neglected. Particle theory only works when we pretend gravity doesn't exist.
General theory of relativity has yielded a wealth of insight into the Universe, the orbits of planets, the evolution of stars and galaxies, the Big Bang and recently observed black holes and gravitational lenses. However, the theory itself only works when we pretend that the Universe is purely classical and that quantum mechanics is not needed in our description of Nature.

String theory is believed to close this gap. Now what string theory is all about is one of the major questions which the program answered in a very nice manner. We talk about atoms. Inside atoms we have electrons revolving around the nucleus which consists of protons and neutrons. Beyond this we have not really gone. But we know numerous tiny particles like gravitons, bosons etc which exist in the atom. Now if we look inside electrons, the string theory proposes that there are strings like structures which are the most fundamental elementary particles which constitute the matter.

This is an example which was shown in the Discovery channel and which clearly explains the principle of string theory. Think of a guitar string that has been tuned by stretching the string under tension across the guitar. Depending on how the string is plucked and how much tension is in the string, different musical notes will be created by the string. These musical notes could be said to be excitation modes of that guitar string under tension.
In a similar manner, in string theory, the elementary particles we observe in particle accelerators could be thought of as the "musical notes" or excitation modes of elementary strings. In string theory, as in guitar playing, the string must be stretched under tension in order to become excited. However, the strings in string theory are floating in space-time; they aren't tied down to a guitar. Nonetheless, they have tension. The string tension in string theory is denoted by the quantity 1/ (2 p a'), where a' is pronounced "alpha prime” and is equal to the square of the string length scale.

If we imagine the size of atom as the size of this Solar System, then perhaps the size of the string would be a Tree on our planet!!!!!!!!!!!!! This makes impossible for the physicists to see it in reality. Post to be continued.
The title of the post as it suggests is all about trying to answer the fundamental question concerning the creation of universe and certain other things for which even the most advanced of sciences have no answers. But after seeing the program "The Elegant Universe" on Discovery Channel I feel we are very close to perhaps understanding the most intriguing question: How come the Universe came into existence.

From the child hood one thing which has been haunting me till date is this universe. How come this universe came into existence and why does life exist only on earth and no other planet was so fortunate to have life on its surface. Of course I have not been able to do any justice to my inquisitiveness over a period of time because of prior engagements but one program on Discovery has actually given a new thought and a new insight to my thought process.

I usually do not watch discovery. Very rarely once in a while when I get bored out of watching each and every channel of the umpteen numbers which our cable operator provides, I do surf Discovery. But this time while I was watching KBC in the break the promotional campaign for this series appeared and I decided come what may I am going to watch this series. I do not know how many of us have watched it but perhaps it was one of the fascinating programs with absolutely superb effects and picturisation which made all the difference. It was aired on Discovery from 2200 hours to 2300 hours on 26th, 27th and 28th of August. The title of the series was "The Elegant Universe".

Now I will go back about 10 years down the line way back in my 10th standard in school. That was the time when I was first introduced to the topic of Atomic Structure. Atomic Structure deals as the title suggests with the structure of atom, composition of matter, electrons, protons, discoveries like mass of electron etc. It starts with the famous Sir Ernest Rutherford Alpha Scattering Experiment and ends with the conflict between Quantum Theory and General Theory of Relativity.

General Theory of Relativity as all of us was proposed by the genius Albert Einstein who is said to have used his brain to the maximum possible extent among all the human beings on earth. The extent to which he used his brain was about 11 %! The General Theory of Relativity gives an explanation as to how come the strong force which is Gravitational force between earth and the sun comes into existence. It postulates that the sun creates around it a very calm and quiet surface something like a mesh and and the gravitational pull which exists within this mesh actually makes earth revolve around the sun. But this theory does not say anything about the other three fundamental forces which exist in nature. The Weak force, the electromagnetic force and the Nuclear force. Enter Quantum theory.

Quantum Theory considers the electron having a dual character. It says that the electron possesses both wave as well as particle nature. This was very well supported by the Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, The Debroglie Law, The Pauli's Exclusion Principle and the most famous of all the Max Planck's Quantum Equation. So according to the quantum theory it’s impossible to distinguish between wave and particle. Quantum theory was able to explain very well the weak force, the electro magnetic force and the nuclear force but it could not explain the very fundamental force of nature – The Gravitational Force. There lies the major problem.

The General theory of relativity can explain the fundamental force of gravity but cannot explain the forces which exist at the atomic level whereas the quantum theory can explain the forces at the atomic and sub atomic level but cannot explain the gravitational pull. It is said that Einstein spent last 30 years of his life in trying to figure out how can general theory of relativity explain the sub atomic forces.

So in short we can say that, Relativistic quantum field theory has worked very well to describe the observed behaviors and properties of elementary particles. But the theory itself only works well when gravity is so weak that it can be neglected. Particle theory only works when we pretend gravity doesn't exist.
General theory of relativity has yielded a wealth of insight into the Universe, the orbits of planets, the evolution of stars and galaxies, the Big Bang and recently observed black holes and gravitational lenses. However, the theory itself only works when we pretend that the Universe is purely classical and that quantum mechanics is not needed in our description of Nature.

String theory is believed to close this gap. Now what string theory is all about is one of the major questions which the program answered in a very nice manner. We talk about atoms. Inside atoms we have electrons revolving around the nucleus which consists of protons and neutrons. Beyond this we have not really gone. But we know numerous tiny particles like gravitons, bosons etc which exist in the atom. Now if we look inside electrons, the string theory proposes that there are strings like structures which are the most fundamental elementary particles which constitute the matter.

This is an example which was shown in the Discovery channel and which clearly explains the principle of string theory. Think of a guitar string that has been tuned by stretching the string under tension across the guitar. Depending on how the string is plucked and how much tension is in the string, different musical notes will be created by the string. These musical notes could be said to be excitation modes of that guitar string under tension.
In a similar manner, in string theory, the elementary particles we observe in particle accelerators could be thought of as the "musical notes" or excitation modes of elementary strings. In string theory, as in guitar playing, the string must be stretched under tension in order to become excited. However, the strings in string theory are floating in space-time; they aren't tied down to a guitar. Nonetheless, they have tension. The string tension in string theory is denoted by the quantity 1/ (2 p a'), where a' is pronounced "alpha prime” and is equal to the square of the string length scale.

If we imagine the size of atom as the size of this Solar System, then perhaps the size of the string would be a Tree on our planet!!!!!!!!!!!!! This makes impossible for the physicists to see it in reality. Post to be continued.

Life - A Roller Coaster Ride II

If the post looks like a sequel to the post which appeared before yes you are right it is a sequel but believe me its not going to be totally in relation to that.

I ended that post on a pretty much pessimistic note which actually speaks of the state of affairs I was in some time back. Well I believe that uncertainty in life can come because of two sources. It can be either because of a situation you are in or it can be caused because of a human intervention. For me most of the time uncertainty came into picture because of the situations I was in but there is a lot of connection between the two also. Well usually uncertainty can be created by a person itself in a particular situation but even situation can change so much that they can create uncertainty in the behavior of a person.

I never trust people easily. It takes a lot of time before I get friendly with people and trust them. This you may know very well If you know me. But people may try to be too friendly with you and possibly you may fall in trap sometimes. But nevertheless I have been quite lucky not to fall in such traps since I think I can judge people very well. But I never thought I can also go wrong. I did finally.

The posts raises many a questions than giving answers. Perhaps its what the destiny wanted. Addiction is definitely a bad thing but not liking. But when liking turns into something more serious then it definitely becomes a close cousin of addiction. Simplicity, prettyness, wholesomeness, innocence all can really take one for a ride if one does not tickle his brain at the right time. Trust is something which is fundamental to any relationship and once that goes everything goes for a toss.

Somethings are predetermined in life. Certain other things we determine for ourselves by our deeds. There is another set of things which perhaps are decided by others for us and which actually create lot of difference in our lives which may be good or bad. We never know. But if it is good we feel happy, if it is bad we really cannot say anything to anyone and accept them as something like destiny.

I sometimes think what the hell I have done bad on this earth that I should suffer whereas others should enjoy. It is said that if people face challenges everyday it is going to follow up with a quiet peaceful and pleasant incarnation where nothing outstanding happens at all. Now whether that happens or not we really do not know.

It is said that challenges are designed at a soul level to give rise to a change in individual. Change then opens the door to the opportunity for transformation and transformation is our main purpose of life whether it is from a child to a parent or from ignorance to understanding.

So perhaps this is an experience for me to transform my life. But to what ? The question remains unanswered.

EDS in Talks to buy CITIGROUP Stake in Polaris

One of the very recent news. EDS is in talk with CITIGROUP to buy there 43.2 % stake in POLARIS for a value of about 787 crore. This is second exit of CITIGROUP in continuation of the exit from I Flex which they did in the early last week.

More news on this will be known only in a few days time. If this materialies EDS will grow in India by an inorganic route and will stand neck to neck with IBM and Accenture which have very big presence in the Indian Market.

More on this later when news gets confirmed.

Life - A Roller Coaster Ride

If one has to experience life one has to undergo its turns and twists. A life which is monotonous in nature with absolutely no changes happening whether in personal or in professional front is not really living life. In my office on the first day in Hyderabad we had an opportunity to interact with one person by name CGK. Actually people call him by this name but his real name is quite long. He was supposed to talk about sales process and related things in the organization but he ended up talking about life, emotions, expressions and how should one live life and so many other things also. Well to an extent he was like a refreshing one in the crowd of people who always had interaction with us only for knowing our profiles and interest. This person actually gave lot of other insights to me.

We always believe that there should not be any problems in our life, no worries, no tensions and no hiccups. We do our best to avoid problems when met with. But sometimes the things move in altogether different fashion. I believe in one statement which I quote from one of the short stories which I read in 10th standard : " The Unexpected Always Happen and Expect only the Unexpected if you believe that you should be in any shock". This sentence has become more or less part of my life. With the kind of events happening around me I strongly feel that I may end more in problems than having their solutions. The problems are so entangled with each other that by the time I feel happy that something is in place the other thing goes out of place.

To be continued.

One Exciting Week

As the post says the week gone by was perhaps one of the most exciting week's in the recent past. Seeing the kind of events which happened in the week gone by one can definitely remember this week for the days to come.

The week began with what can be termed as the acquisition of the year, Oracle acquiring I Flex solutions by purchasing close to 42 % of the stake of CITIGROUP in I flex. More on it is provided in the post below. The next in the list was again a very big buy out which did not create many a ripples in the Indian market but definitely in the west when Adidas acquired rival firm Reebok for 3.8 billion USD giving NIKE tough competition in the USA market. It was also the week when one of the mega merger in the Indian Pharmaceutical industry was called off. The merger between Matrix Laboratories and Strides Acrolabs was called off due to valuation problems. Ideally the merger between the two companies would have created an entity which would have been sixth biggest in the country in the area of Pharmaceutics. Reliance life Insureance acquired AMP Sanmar Insurance company. The torrential rains in Mumbai took the entire life out of the city putting the people into the worst of problems possible. Ofcourse the various data centers in Mumbai of various banks also got effected and this impacted the ATMs all over the country. Thanks to the DRS everything started working properly within a short while.

In the Bombay floods ONGC suffered huge losses when the bombay high oil well of the company went into fire and caused serious losses amounting to close to $ 500 m. The demerger of Reliance group of companies also took place which created 4 new companies on the name of Reliance.

So this week according to me was one of the most exciting weeks wherin lot of things in the Corporate India happened. Let's hope the action continues.

Adidas Buys out Reebok

Well before I could relax for a while digesting as to what happened yesterday there is yet another path breaking news involving perhaps the most established names in the sporting gear industry. Yes you guessed them right. In the arena are now the two major sporting brands whose accessories we wear day in and day out.Adidas and Reebok.

At about 9:15 CDT Adidas announced that its going to buy Reebok for about $ 3.8 billion giving the company about 20 % of the US market and the potential to become a very strong competitor to Nike, which is the current market leader with a little over 30 % market share in this market.

Under the terms of the deal, Adidas-Salomon AG will pay $59 per share for all of Reebok International Ltd.'s outstanding stock, a premium of 34 percent to Tuesday's closing price, as disclosed by the Adidas Chairman and CEO Herbert Hainer. Shares of Reebok rose $12.79, or 29 percent, to $56.74 in early New York Stock Exchange trading after the news. Adidas shares rose 6 percent to 156.93 euros ($193.11) in Frankfurt trading.

As the CEO puts it "Its a once in a while opportunity of combinining two mega companies and make them still stronger." I do not remember such mergers in the past and last mega merger which I remember was one of AOL and Time Warner which was over valued at over $ 360 billion. Even in IT industry we have not seen such big time mergers except for the take over of PwC global consulting by IBM.

Reebok's board has approved the offer price and shareholders are also expected to follow the same.

The deal brings together two impressive stables of athletes and entertainment endorsers. English soccer star David Beckham and rap artist Missy Elliott are under contract to Adidas. Reebok sells a line of shoes branded with rapper 50 Cent's G Unit logo and is endorsed by such NBA stars as Allen Iverson and Yao Ming. It also gives Adidas, which has outfitted soccer stars for years, access to Reebok's licenses to clothe players in the National Football League and National Basketball Association and sell the gear to fans.

One of the analyst said this "Adidas, in conjunction with Reebok, has the potential to say, 'We want better terms or conditions or we'll take our business elsewhere',"

The best part is the Reebok will continue to operate in its own name. We know this is extremely crucial for such companies since its their brand which sells the most.

Let's hope this brings in more better products and services for the customers and ofcourse stiffer competition for Nike too.

ORACLE Acquires I-Flex Solutions

This post is coming immedietely after I got the above news from souveer who generally does not calls up but he did it that too on a very odd time of 7:30 pm.

At about 8:00 AM EST (6:30 PM IST), Oracle made the announcement saying that they have acquired the 42 % stake of CITIGROUP in Iflex for about $ 565 m. The deal will be worth $ 909 m if additionally Oracle is able to acquire 20 % from the market. The 20 % acquisition s going to be an open offer to the share holders of I Flex at about Rs. 882.62. This is mostly as the President of Oracle says is going to be a regulatory requirement rather than company's interest. It has more to do with the accounting norms and will help in combining the balance sheets of two companies faster. Oracle has said that I-Flex will continue with the existing partners like IBM and other technology vendors. Citigroup one of the major customers of I Flex will continue to be its customer for the next 5 years and there will not be any change in this. From I flex point of view this is a real good opportunity to tap the US markets since Oracle runs on close to 5000 banks worldwide and 9 out of 10 top tier banks run Oracle in US. Also since 90 % of the implementations for I Flex involve Oracle as the back end there are no integration issues either which is one of the most common problem after a company takes over another. Oracle has said that the acquisition will get completed by the end of 2005 and I-flex will continue to trade on NSE and BSE. Charles Phillips President, Oracle Worldwide will join the I Flex board. Some of the reasons sighted by Oracle on acquisition of I Flex are:

• Global footprint for I Flex presence in 114 countries
• Wide Customer base
• Consistently ranked number 1 by International Banking Systems
• A very strong Product base
• Help Oracle make a stronger footprint in the Banking Industry

Well all these reasons look very good and a deal which can give the customer a more improvised banking solution in terms of robustness, enabling the banks to serve their customers better and faster. But on the hindsight this is a signal of an era of M&A activity in the arena of IT industry which has not been happening at a much larger scale now. Well Oracle acquisiton of I Flex is definitely to make a foot print into India but it has more to do with the way large IT giants like Accenture, IBM, CSC or others are looking for small product companies to acquire.

Another way to look at it would be if we looked at the strategy of Oracle recently. Oracle if we see has been acquiring number of companies in each of the emerging areas like Retail, RTE Data Management, Identity Management, ERP. In the arena of Retail they acquired two firms Retek and Profit Logic which is helping them in transforming and developing the retail solutions for the burgeoning retail industry. In the RTE Data Management, which is going to be the next stage of ERP following SOA, they acquired TimesTen which is a market leader in this service. If people who are reading this blog are from my TAPMI class remember way back in the 3rd term of MIS class I had given a presentation on Real Time Enterprise. Well that's going to become a reality soon. I am happy about it since I said that its a forward looking business strategy and will take some time till Service Oriented Architecture picks up. Next in the list of acquisition which Oracle did recently is Oblix. Oblix is one of the leading service providers ofIdentity Management Solutions. If you are not aware of what a IMS is please forgive me and since its tough to explain that here. So what does all this suggest to us. It clearly suggests that Oracle is moving out of its Database company image to an all rounder image of a end to end computing provider. By acquiring such companies Oracle clearly wants to position itself as the leader in each of the vertical they are operating into. Moreover the database business of Oracle has been facing lot of pressure of competitors like DB2 from IBM and MySQL from open source. The major threat in this case is the second one which is a open source product and is catching up at an amazing speed among various customers in the small and mid size segments. So for Oracle to stick up with Database industry may not be wise and hence they ventured into ERP. Thereafter it was no looking back for Oracle. They did the messy acquisition of PeopleSoft which we had seen in the December 2004. With PeopleSoft they also got JD Edwards. So its all the three ERP rolled into one. Also adding to the technology front this acquisition will help build next generation banking solution based on Oracle's latest Fusion Architecture which will be based on open systems as per the analyst report. Continuing the similar trend if we look at the offering of the Oracle for the financial industry it includes largely either enterprise wide applications like Customer Analytics and Management solution or compliance based solution or Enterprise Infrastructure and Management Solutions which include applications like BPM, Portal, Database etc. But what it needed was a solution which is industry exclusive like a Core Banking Solution for Retail Banking Industry, Treasury, Corporate Banking and Investment Banking. So here comes the biggest gap which is filled by I Flex in totality since Flexcube together with Reveleus and others cover end to end solutions for the banking industry. Hence this completed Oracle's offering for the banking and financial services industry.

What all this means to the IT Industry on a whole. It means that we are now moving onto a era wherein we do not expect the small players to sustain for long time competing with big players. Its only the beginning but we have to see to what extent companies like Oracle, IBM etc will succeed in this mission. Also product based companies in India are too few in number to name a few are Polaris, I Flex, Infosys etc. But again the revenues from product for these companies do not even constitute 20-30 % of total revenues exception is ofcourse Flexcube which contributes close to 56 % of the revenues for I Flex. Hence to what extent will acquiring such small companies will be helpful for these bigwigs is really a question not yet answered.

Well what is the opinion of Polaris on this acquisition will be known later only because CITIGROUP also wanted to exit from Polaris where it holds close to 42 %. But the catch in this case is that CITGROUP cannot exit from the company without the formal consent of Arun Jain. So we have to wait and watch what would CITIGROUP do next. Well the news has already hit the stock market and even inspite of bad first quarter results I flex share price zoomed by about 45 rupees to close at 897 which is more than the price offered by Oracle. Now how does one solve this mystery. Remember CRISIL price shooting up when S&P made an open offer to buy CRISIL.

Its been 2.5 hours of blogging. But I still feel writing more and more about it because this is one merger which is going to change the shape of the industry in which I am working. Let's see what is in store of me.

GODSPEED.

KBC - 3 Days to Go

It will be a delight to watch Amitabh Bachchan once again on the television. Yes KBC is going to come back on STAR PLUS. In my previous post I had mentioned the way Star Plus kicked the campaign of KBC 2 in a very emotional manner. There is actually lot of difference between the two versions of the show in terms of its marketing and promotion. This time the show is being promoted as the one where one gets “UMEED SE DUGNA”. In the promotions star plus has picked up some very different kind of people from various jobs who just had hope in them to succeed one day and this makes them to get to the hot seat. The campaigns are also targeted on the other shows like the “Fame Gurukul” on SONY and other shows like the hit one “The Indian Idol”. But more importantly it’s the power, of Amitabh Bachchan which keeps the show kicking and I definitely believe that he will do much better this time. If any one of you are watching the Star Plus channel by any chance, it’s the same strategy which the channel adopted on 3rd of july 2000, when KBC came first on the television. On 3rd July 2000 also Star plus came out with 3-4 new programs that changed star plus, the television industry and the characters in those program itself. This time also the same strategy is being worked out by launching some good programs on the weekends from Friday to Sunday because on these days as per my observation none of the channels carry good programs. So grabbing this opportunity looks very ideal. I am eagerly waiting for the KBC to start for and want to try my luck once again. Because “Umeed Par hi to Duniya Kayam hai”