For the first time in Pakistan, three Nobel Laureates got together to meet young Pakistani students and professionals for 5 days (27th-31st March) in Islamabad and Lahore. 

I was requested to render my services as a volunteer to escort the professors and their wives and show them around along with some other people. That means i get three days off from college. I certainly didn't think twice about it

The whole conference is arranged by HEC, MoST & PAEC. Initially 5, 6 laureates agreed to  come but then Pakistan was declared as one of the 10 most dangerous countries to travel (others include Iraq, Afghanistan and many African countries) so most of them changed their minds. The ones who finally agreed to come include Prof. Charles Townes and Prof. Giaever (USA) and Prof. Hooft (Netherlands).  Good enough! 

So today was the first day of the conference and it was quite interesting. The Prime Minister inaugrated it and we were not allowed to take anything inside, not even my water bottle! The professors were not expecting this but we managed to convince them that this is how it works in Pakistan   The PM's speech was quite impressive though. He said he has lived and worked in 10 different countries and noticed that people are the same everywhere. Its the availability of the opportunities which makes all the difference. I think i like him

Prof. Giaver's lecture was quite amusing. He was born in Norway and studied to become a mechanical engineer. In Norway the worse your grades are, the higher your GPA is. So his GPA was quite bad (4.0) in his country. But when he applied for admission in the USA, he got admitted in one of the best universities as they thought he was a genius who scored 4.0 He was basically a mechanical engineer and then he switched to Physics and these days he is working in Biophysics (comparing behavior of normal mammalian and cancer cells on electrodes). I think he can be an inspiration for me

But the most interesting lectures was on blackholes by Prof. Hooft. (yes i wanted to be an astrophysicist once but then i wanted to become so many other things as well) He made it sound so simple. There is a shell of particles with this force of attraction between them so it starts to shrink. And then it croses this imaginary, theoretical line. Once inside this magical line, the particles can't escape. And the shell keeps on shrinking till it all merges on one point. That is where all the laws of physics fail and we don't understand what is happening at that point! This is the simple part. The rest was a bit too complicated for me, the quantum coherence and the superstring theory. If you reverse the whole thing, it becomes a white hole! An astronaut crossing the horizon of the black hole will feel himself going through it but for an observer he'd still be standing at the horizon. So for a different definition of time, we have to use a different definition of particle (I didn't understand the line but it sounds nice ) I have always found black holes to be one of the most beautiful mysteries of nature… 

And finally we had panel discussions on energy requirements in Pakistan, education and policy making and finally social v/s physical sciences. Prof. Ata-ur-Rehman made a very eloquent speech about how many PhD students they are going to produce in the next few years. I don't really agree with him so finally i got my chance to confront him. We are offering so many postgraduate scholarships to students in local Pakistani universities. As far as medicine is concerned, we all know its not worth it. So I feel it is going to create more frustration when after a few years these young professionals will realize that they don't stand a chance in front of foreign-qualified professionals. They ignored my question for good half an hour and finally Prof. Ata admitted what our universities have to offer is below average and that they are thinking of sending those people abroad for post-doctoral courses. I'm not really satisfied. This is not going to make any difference to the quality of education we have here in our universities. The issue is not to create more PhDs, it is the lack of science culture in our educational institutes. 

I remember my visit to Jawahar Lal Nehru Univeristy, New Delhi last year in November. I got to talk to many students and you can feel the difference. Our educational system stresses less on creativity and more on getting good scores. Our students' attitudes are very disappointing as well. Most of them are not bothered about social, political and scientific issues concerning the world today. Those who can think are too busy criticizing everything because that's the easiest way out. We have to learn how to be critical and find solutions rather than keep on talking about the problems! Whereas the Indian students i got to talk to were brimming with knowledge and intellect. Things were different when we were students… we were young, idealistic, revolutionary, progressive, unselfish. I wonder where did it all go wrong…

I think i talk more about politics and physics than medicine My head hurts now and there are two more days to go……