Our next stop is Aligarh Muslim University – the home and Alma Mater of Sarosh, who just completed his PhD in my group. We visit the campus, talk thermodynamics, meet faculty and Sarosh’s family.
We arrive rather early at Aligarh Junction train station – after all, we left from New Delhi train station shortly after 6am. We are greeted at the station by Sarosh’s father, Prof. Alam, a civil engineer working on water resources at Aligarh Muslim University. He drops me off at the Guest House No. 2, where we first have breakfast.
We then go on a campus tour, visiting one of the colleges and the main mosque. It has the same name as the mosque we visited in Delhi – after all, Jama Masjid simply means main mosque. Apart from this mosque, there are several tiny mosques spread across campus between buildings, reminding me of little chapels that one can find in Bavaria, Austria or Italy. We visit the main library, the civil engineering department, and meet some close colleagues of Sarosh’s father.
After having lunch back at the guest house (wonderful, as always, and plenty of it), Sarosh and Tejasvi stop by. We sit down on the sofa and chairs in my giant guest room and discuss some of the preparations for the workshop next week. We have quite a long and stimulating discussion on why the radiative temperature represents the temperature at which a given flux of radiation is at maximum entropy. We also develop a simple example to illustrate this – this took us longer as one may think, as our initial try failed to show the increase to a maximum in entropy. But in the end, we sorted it out. It looks like a good exercise, so I plan to include this in the lecture next week.
After all this thinking we go on another campus tour. We walk to the main entrance gate, through the college, visit the mosque again, and look at the sports grounds where Sarosh played skater hockey. When we return to the guest house, it has gotten dark and it is time to go to Sarosh’s home for dinner, where we had plenty of really delicious, homemade food with his family.
The next morning I start the day running on campus to the sports ground with the running track. I am not alone – a group from the athletic department is active as well. I find it really nice and refreshing to run in the morning when the air is crisp and the sun just starts rising. A great time to sort through ideas and prepare for talks to come.
In the morning we go to the college of engineering and technology. We meet the principal of the college and the dean, drinking tea together. I learn that drinking tea is done rather frequently on campus. After all, muslims don’t go out for a beer or a spritz (of course), rather they meet over tea.
Then, it is time for the seminar. In the talk, I give an overview of our work on thermodynamics (“Powering the planet” – see PDF below), and why it is so central to understand how the planet works, quite literally. Even though the technical parts were not so great (I could not figure out how to adjust the frequency of the VGA output signal of my laptop…), the contents were, I think, very well received. We had a lively discussion afterwards, continued in the principle’s office over – yes – another tea. We talked about renewable energy, potential impacts, and practical aspects. For instance, that the university saved 25% of their electricity bill by having installed photovoltaics.
But then, the time comes up to say good bye, leave Sarosh’s father and the university, and go to town for lunch. From there, it is only a small step to the train station to catch our train to Kanpur, our next stop to visit IIT Kanpur for a workshop on sustainable cities.
Earthsystem.org 