A lot has transpired since April 8 when
Dr. Ram found a way to support Madhavan Venkatesh in his creative
endeavours. Over the weeks, Madhavan has amply justified the hopes and
aspirations of his friends, colleagues and fellow researchers at CFRCE.
Vasudev Shyam on the other hand obtained his visa to London and set sail
on the voyage to the Timeless.
Put simply, Vasudev is presently in
London in the company of some of the very finest minds in the field of
Loop Quantum Gravity and Shape Dynamics. He is on a 15-day research
retreat at "College Farm," Prof. Julian Barbour's Timeless "Leibniz Institute for Theoretical Physics."
The aim to the group is to discuss key problems in Shape Dynamics and
Bianchi Cosmologies. Younger colleagues at CFRCE await the wealth of
riches that Vasudev is bound to bring back after giving abundantly to
the group of his own store of learning.
Meanwhile, Madhavan has
been having bouts of intense creativity. He has formulated and proved
theorems on Loop Groups and Algebras, a special type of Lie Groups and
Lie Algebras that have become well know in 2-Dimensional Quantum Field
Theory and Mathematical Physics.
Madhavan seems to have got
interested in Loop Groups due to two reasons. The first, while he was
studying the Cambridge Monograph on Mathematical Physics by Fuchs and
Schweigert, "Lie Groups, Lie Algebras and Representations for Physicists," and the second being his interest in the Loop Space formulation of Quantum General Relativity.
But
no one was prepared for the surprise or perhaps shock that Madhavan
sprung on them. He submitted a paper to the arXiv entitled, "An Algebraic Topological Construct of Classical Loop Gravity and the prospect of Higher Dimensions." We
have it from Dr. Ram himself that it is a top-notch paper of a very
high order and of cutting edge quality. He spoke about it over and over
at CFRCE. More remarkable he said was the fact that Madhavan had smashed
his way through insurmountable obstacles. He wondered whether a lesser
person would have survived what Madhavan has had to. But Madhavan has
and has come out of the ordeal stronger and purer, alchemized. And to
let the cat fully out of the bag, this paper is the first of 3 new
papers he has already written and is finalizing for publication!
The
reason why Madhavan has perhaps survived is perhaps mostly due to his
intense faith in himself apart from the support he found from his family
and others who really cared for his creativity. One wonders how many
young minds would have the gift of that kind of faith. Surrounded by the
default negative environment that has a 99 can'ts as opposed to one
"can," it is not hard to see the absence of faith in oneself.
