We are back in India again, travelling to Delhi, Aligarh, Kanpur and Kashmir. We will meet good friends and colleagues, interact with students, to talk thermodynamics and Earth system science in seminars, at nice places worth seeing, and in a week-long short course in Kashmir. And we’ll enjoy the company and the good food.
Our starting point is Delhi, where we visit Prof. Somnath Baidya Roy and his group at IIT Delhi.
Sarosh and I arrived Monday morning on an overnight flight from Frankfurt. We first get transport to the INSA guest house in central Delhi. Weather is quite pleasant, air pollution is relatively low, the sky is fairly blue, and temperatures are moderate. After we arrive, we briefly rest in the rooms, catching up with some sleep we did not get on the plane, have lunch in the guest house, and join up with Tejasvi, who arrived from Mumbai.
Later in the afternoon Sarosh and I head out. We take the metro a few stops to the north to visit the Jama Masjid mosque, the largest in India. It is a busy place, with a mix of muslims, tourists, families and everyone else visiting. We walk through the streets, trying to visit the red fort as well, but unfortunately it is closed today. Later in the evening we have wonderful food and good discussions in Karim’s, a famous restaurant in the old town that even got mentioned in Time magazine with traditional moghul food.
Tuesday started for me with a stimulating discussion over breakfast on science denialism with another guest, who stayed at the guesthouse for a policy meeting. I mentioned some of the fake science (or science denialism) on global warming, COVID, and renewable energy being promoted by Germany’s right extreme populists and asked him whether he would expect this to happen in India as well. He said it would never happen in India – something I thought as well about Germany a few years ago and now know better. So let’s see. We agreed that it may depend on whether science is perceived as something from which people benefit, or whether it acts to restrict people, yet is necessary in the grander theme of things, like some of the necessary changes and modernizations we need to do to counteract global warming. Well, certainly something to continue thinking about, and to be prepared to know how to react to fake science.
The rest of the morning Sarosh, Tejasvi and I spent discussing thermodynamics and the hydrological cycle in a sofa corner in front of our rooms. The iPad served well to scribble down some equations and to clarify which processes perform work, which dissipate and produce entropy. It was very productive and stimulating, and certainly something we will follow up later, may be writing it down as a paper sometime.
For lunch we took a cab to go to the IIT campus in the south of Delhi and ate in the canteen. Around 2pm we were picked up and went to Somnath’s office. Somnath and I know each other for quite a number of years – we initially met at an EGU meeting more than 10 years ago. Since then, he joined as an editor of the journal Earth System Dynamics, then as a Chief Editor, so we are in regular exchange with each other.
We then met with some of the students of the department. After a round of introductions, we quickly went into entropy, thermodynamics, hydrologic cycling, maximum entropy production, but also into global change and science denialism. The students had, interestingly, quite a different view, saying they can very well imagine it, e.g. in the case of global warming deniers. Time passed quickly, and it was time for the seminar.
In the seminar I focused on the limits of wind energy and its consequences (see PDF below – references included on last slide). I tried a new motivation, using two examples of the fake science that the right-extreme populists promote and that we as scientists need strong answers for to counter such fakes. These answers should be based on solid, fundamental physics yet also be easy enough to be widely understandable. I do not think that highly resolved numerical simulation models or machine learning on big data serves us well here. Yet, our work on thermodynamics and basic physics may be simple and transparent enough to be suitable for the job. The insights we gain from our approach is fully compatible with the results gained from much more complex approaches, yet one can do the estimates with pen and paper. This may seem old fashioned, yet at the same time it demonstrates that we captured the relevant physical constraints and it may just be right to answer the current challenges we face.
Also present in the seminar was a colleague from biochemistry, Sunil Nath, who works on thermodynamics, disequilibrium etc. as well, yet at a cellular level. We had a very stimulating exchange, and I look forward to future exchanges.
We closed the day with a very nice dinner with Somnath and some of the students in a nearby restaurant. We continued our discussions over wonderful food and drinks, finished with a group picture and a ride back to the guest house.
Wednesday started early as we aim to take the 6:10 train from the New Delhi train station. All went well, and as I write this, we are on our way to Aligarh, our next stop where we will visit Aligarh Muslim University.
Earthsystem.org 