Using disorder to reveal hidden objects
When light, sound or any kind of wave travels through a complex medium like fog, murky water, or biological tissue, it scatters in many directions. Each particle or irregularity in the medium changes…
When light, sound or any kind of wave travels through a complex medium like fog, murky water, or biological tissue, it scatters in many directions. Each particle or irregularity in the medium changes…
Congratulations, László Krasznahorkai, for winning the Nobel Prize for literature. I still remember reading his The Melancholy of Resistance (1989). It was a mostly unnerving, somewhat frightening ex…
Bayes's rule is one of the most fundamental principles in probability and statistics. It allows us to update our beliefs in the face of new evidence. In its simplest form, the rule tells us how to…
The double-slit experiment has often been described as the most beautiful demonstration in physics. In one striking image, it shows the strange dual character of matter and light. When particles such…
India has won 22 Ig Nobel prizes to date. These awards, given annually at Harvard University by the magazine Annals of Improbable Research, honour studies that "first make people laugh, and then…
Maxwell’s demon is one of the most famous thought experiments in the history of physics, a puzzle first posed in the 1860s that continues to shape scientific debates to this day. I’ve struggled to mak…
Carbon is famous for its many solid forms. It's the soot in air pollution, the graphite in pencil leads, and the glittering diamond in expensive jewellery. It's also the carbon nanotubes in bi…
At 6 am on September 13, the CSIR handle on X.com published the following post about an "anti-diabetic medicine" called either "Daiba 250" or "Diabe 250", developed at th…
On September 11, the Supreme Court was asked to urgently hear a petition that sought to cancel the Asia Cup T20 match between India and Pakistan scheduled for September 14 in the UAE. The petition, fi…
At the heart of particle physics lies the Standard Model, a theory that has stood for nearly half a century as the best description of the subatomic realm. It tells us what particles exist, how they i…
Since Union finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman's announcement last week that India's Goods and Services Tax (GST) rates will be rationalised anew from September 22, I've been seeing a fl…
And to Paul Feyerabend…