Mohit Malhan’s Blog

This one took a little bit long time to come out, but never late then ever. I went up to the Cinemark theater in Plano last week to watch “Angels and Demons” which is about 2hr 20min file casting Tom Hanks. ‎ - This file is a 2009 American film adaptation of Dan Brown’s novel by the same name. It is the sequel to The Da Vinci Code!

This movie provoked my though process which was in line with the Galileo Galilei theory of science.

This post is all about discussing the conflict between Galileo with the Catholic Church (also known as the Roman Catholic Church) over his support of Copernican astronomy, is often considered a defining moment in the history of the relationship between religion and science.

Before Galileo invented the telescope and came out with his theories which stated sun to be the center of universe, people belived in the Ptolemaic theory of geocentrism that the earth was the center of the universe and that all heavenly bodies revolved around the earth.

This was the fact that was been accepted as it came out from the Roman Catholic Church. Further, this fact was supported by arguments such as Incarnation the Son of God had descended to the earth and become man, earth was supposed to be the center around which all other celestial bodies moved.

Heliocentrism, the theory that the earth revolved around the sun, contradicted both geocentrism and the prevailing theological support of the theory.

There are many questions which came up to my mind and which drenched in the pool of thoughts, Was this really a conflict between the religions and science?

What were Galileo Galilei’s conflicts with the Roman Catholic Church?

While unfolding the answers it was evident that It was not a simple conflict between science and religion, as usually portrayed. Rather it was a conflict between Copernican science and Aristotelian science which had become Church tradition. Galileo expressed his scientific views supporting Copernicus as well as his biblical views in a 1615 letter to the Grand Duchess of Tuscany which became the basis of his first Church trial and censure. A major work published in 1632 resulted in Galileo’s conviction on suspicion of heresy and a lifetime house arrest. The Galileo affair provides important lessons and applications to the Church and to science today.

Aristotle believed the universe is finite and spherical with a stationary earth at its center. Enclosing the whole universe is the sphere of the Prime Motion turned by the First Unmoved Mover. Inside that were transparent

from Red Vision

Until 1610, when Galileo built his first telescope at age 46, he focused mainly on physics, not astronomy. He soon made discoveries which shook the foundations of the Aristotelian cosmos. He saw mountains, valleys and other features indicating change on the moon. He observed the motion of four of Jupiter’s moons, now referred to as the Galilean moons. No longer could scientists say that heavenly bodies revolve exclusively around the earth.

This was very certain that The Roman Catholic hierarchy and their Aristotlean-Ptolemaic advisors were never ready to belive his advice. The Roman Curia promptly banned and confiscated Galileo’s monumental work; and it became the basis for his second trial, censure, and lifetime house arrest by the Holy Office of the Inquisition in 1633. The Roman Catholic Church convicted him of breaking his agreement of 1616 and of teaching the Copernican theory as a truth and not a hypothesis. They suspected him of holding heretical opinions condemned by the Church, which they ordered him to abjure. Seven of the ten Cardinals presiding signed his condemnation.

Today, Science views Galileo’s conflict with Church hierarchy as a great triumph of science over religion. Today Science is king, Nature is the Creator, and God (if He exists) is irrelevant. Galileo would not have viewed it thus, for his faith in the truth of God’s Word remained strong. He recognized that God is King and Creator, not Nature!

So just in case if you had patience to go over through this whole piece of article, reward yourself by watching the must watch movie!

Again, I haven’t yet been through over the bible nor have many roman catholic friends, but this is something that I was able to understand by my research since last couple of weeks ever since I watch that movies. So lot of material mentioned her comes from various papers of authors around on nets, pool of other bloggers, and certainly the wiki encyclopedia.

I am going to discuss my personal views about the Auschwitz Concentration Camp through this post.  It was during May 2009, when I was traveling to Poland along with my team from UTD, I got an opportunity to travel one of the World Heritage Site, The Auschwitz Birkenau. As student back in Gujarat,  I always used to memorize each and every thing that used to come in social studies, may it be history, economics, civics etc…and I am sure every one of us have been through the history of both World Wars at one or the other stage.

Auschwitz Concentration Camp was a concentration camp that was been set up in Poland after Germany invaded Poland in September 1939.

Hitler always thought that Jews were the one because of whom Germany was defeated in the First World War, and he took all the Jews to be one of the principal adversaries of Germany.

Auschwitz was a death camp which has witnessed death of 3 million people in it most of them where Jews. Most victims were killed in Auschwitz gas chambers; other deaths were caused by systematic starvation, forced labor, lack of disease control, individual executions, and purported “medical experiments”.

It is very important to understand the construction of this concentration camp to realize how horrifying it might have been to be inside the camp. Please refer the following link for an audio-video description for the construction of the camp. (Auschwitz)

After invading Poland, Germany had set up several concentration camps to slaughter the Jews and Auschwitz was the biggest of them.

All the Jews (referred as shipment) were been transported to the camp from all around the country by the death gate termed as “gate to hell”

Picture on right displays the view from inside the camp.  Jews were been transported inside the camp through this tracks.

A sign over the entrance to the camp read ARBEIT MACHT FREI, which means “work makes one free.” In actuality, the opposite was true. Labor became another form of genocide that the Nazis called “extermination through work.”

Each day was a struggle for survival under unbearable conditions. Prisoners were housed in primitive barracks that had no windows and were not insulated from the heat or cold. There was no bathroom, only a bucket. Each barrack held about 36 wooden bunkbeds, and inmates were squeezed in five or six across on the wooden plank. As many as 500 inmates lodged in a single barrack.

Inmates were always hungry. Food consisted of watery soup made with rotten vegetables and meat, a few ounces of bread, a bit of margarine, tea, or a bitter drink resembling coffee. Diarrhea was common. People weakened by dehydration and hunger fell easy victim to the contagious diseases that spread through the camp.

Victims who were spared immediate death by being selected for labor were systematically stripped of their individual identities. They had their hair shaved off and a registration number tattooed on their left forearm. Men were forced to wear ragged, striped pants and jackets, and women wore work dresses. Both were issued ill-fitting work shoes, sometimes clogs. They had no change of clothing and slept in the same clothes they worked in.

At Auschwitz children were often killed upon arrival. Children born in the camp were generally killed on the spot. Near the end of the war, in order to cut expenses and save gas, cost-accountant considerations led to an order to place living children directly into the ovens or throw them into open burning pits.

Women were not been spared either, they were been subjected to the various biological experiements been conducted over them by the German group of doctors. In December 1942, Professor Carl Clauberg came to the death camp Auschwitz and started his medical experimental activities. He injected chemical substances into wombs during his experiments. Thousands of Jewish and Gypsy women were subjected to this treatment. They were sterilized by the injections, producing horrible pain, inflamed ovaries, bursting spasms in the stomach, and bleeding. The injections seriously damaged the ovaries of the victims, which were then removed and sent to Berlin.

The photo on the left displays the group toilets “latrines” that prisoners used.

Escape from Auschwitz was almost impossible. Electrically charged barbed-wire fences surrounded both the concentration camp and the killing center. Guards, equipped with machine guns and automatic rifles, stood in the many watchtowers. The lives of the prisoners were completely controlled by their guards, who on a whim could inflict cruel punishment on them. Prisoners were also mistreated by fellow inmates who were chosen to supervise the others in return for special favors by the guards.

About 700 prisoners attempted to escape from the Auschwitz camps during the years of their operation, of which about 300 were successful. A common punishment for escape attempts was death by starvation; the families of successful escapees were sometimes arrested and interned in Auschwitz and prominently displayed to deter others. If someone did manage to escape, the SS would pick ten random people from the prisoner’s block and starve them to death.

Internet Footnotes:

About Nazism:  www.nazism.net

Online Encyclopedia: Wiki

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

The images that are been uploaded are copyrighted by Creative Commons Attribution Share License.

Having flying around places it seem I have more number of air miles rather than road miles

On all my flights there are some very unique experiences that I am come across, I never thought that I will be able to bring it down to blog, but today it seems I have to.

The number of contacts that you go ahead and make out on these flights lasts until you onboard the aircraft. Once you are out, you get involved in your own social ecosystem and you then hardly remember who was next to you.

There is a very interesting fact that I have observed here. The reason we begin to talk to the stranger right next to you is justified because of several reasons.

1. You are not allowed to use the phone on jets when you fly. Phone acts as on of the primary source of connecting you to your social network, so once you are in and you switch off the phone, you are disconnected with the group that you belong to.

2. You don’t have internet to use by, which again acts the primary source that connects you to your social network.

When I say social network here, I explicitly mean every individual that you have an acquaintance with. May it be someone from your professional network or may it be someone from your personal network.

The bottom line is you are disconnected.

Human mind follows Darwin’s third law. Given the situation it will try to adapt to the surrounding environment as soon as it can. Talking to stranger on jet is one of the best examples.

I have talking to zillions of people when I travel around, a senior engineer from Boeing, directors of startups, consultants, professors from diversified background. I have been frank with so many of them that we did even shared drinks with him paying for me or me paying for him. But once I went off the board, I hardly recalled his name. What I remember now is that they were gem of the person. YEs I have also come across jerks, obese guys and what not!

Obese, when I write this, it tickles my mind to note down something very unique that firmly believe you should take care of. I remember once when I was flying to Chicago there was a 300 Pound guy sitting next to me, I was in economy class and that person took almost half of my seat making it uncomfortable for me even to breath. That might the worst experience that I might ever have had, to my left was the engine which was throttling gas at what more than 1000000RPM and to my right was this guy! Yikes! Squeezed!

Today a guy with same physique is sitting on my back sit pushing his leg every now and then making it extremely difficult to get comfortable! Wonder Airlines should charge them extra for being overweight, when then charge you extra for every additional pound that you chip in your check in baggage’s,  they should charge this people more or at least make them opt for the business class travels.

Ciao,,,,will catch you all again from my way to Frankfurt from Dallas!!