In 1900 the American writer of children's books, Lyman Baum wrote his famous book, 'Wonderful Wizard of Oz'. Another of Baum's characters was a servant called the 'Long Eared Hearer' who could hear sounds thousands of miles away. In 1960, the American astronomer Frank Drake started a project of using a powerful radio telescope to search for radio signals from the Galaxy in hope of picking up signals from intelligent inhabitants of distant planets. A long time admirer of Lyman Baum and his works, Drake decided to name his project Ozma and his telescope the Long Eared Hearer. This term is behind the term the 'Ozma Problem' suggested by Gardner.
 
 
Suppose that we exchange radio messages with inhabitants of some distant planet. Our signals are certain coded pulses, that is, sequences of pulses of various intensities. Using the universal laws of mathematical logic as well as the laws of physics which apply to the entire Universe, we can arm ourselves with patience and achieve a measure of understanding with extra terrestrials. 
 
 
leftright      left right
Fig. 1     Fig. 2
 
Now, what the hell was that all about? Here's where you go deeper into the rabbit hole!

What if we were to convey visual images in the form of plane (two dimensional) figures. Suppose we were to send a coded description of the simple figure shown in Fig.1. To begin with, we ask our extra terrestrial correspondent to prepare a rectangle divided into twenty square units - four lines with three units per line. By scanning the figure from top to bottom, left to right in accordance to numbering of units. Now, we ask the distant correspondent to copy our operations on his rectangle: to scan the units line-by-line left-to-right and colour them according to the sequence of pulses transmitted.
 
 
And here emerges a fundamental problem : our correspondent has no understanding as to what we mean by left- and right handedness, and so he does not understand what is meant by "to scan a line from left to right". If hits upon the right direction of scanning, he will clearly end up with a gap in the left side, not in the right one. It is unknown in what direction the extraterrestrial will actually scan his rectangle, and so it is unknown which ( Fig.1 or Fig.2) he obtained.
 
 
To be sure, to explain our concept of handedness it would be more convenient to transmit some kind of object that possesses reflection assymmetry, for instance, a right screw. This is however, absolutely impossible as we can only make use of radio communication. He might be asked to look at some assymmetric. He might be asked to look at some assymmetric constellation in the skies. Bur constellations do not look the same when observed from the earth and when observed from some distant planet.
 
 
There is thus no assymmetric object, no assymmetric object, no assymmetric structure which we could examine together with our correspondent from space. And so the question presents itself : under these circimstances, is there any way of getting across to the planet our concept of left and right? It is this that is known as the Ozma problem. It is one of the most challenging and exciting problems of the communication theory. This was conceived long before humanity began speculating abut contacts with extra-terrestrial civilizations.
 
 
The above article was taken from 'This Amazingly Symmetrical world' written by L.Tarasov. One hell of an eyeopener, this book ! Whats given over here is just the tip of the Ice Berg ! You have to check it out yourself. Hmm.., I've got some more interesting stuff with me which I will be typing out very soon. If it weren't for my college, extra classes et all to fill up my schedule in a day, this site would have been maintained on a daily basis! damn! things never work the way you want them to, do they? Anyway, if you've got some comments or basically feedback to give us regarding our site, contents, design, etc. Please send them to definereality@hotmail.com.