11 posts
All that thinking about Joel Mokyr and his prescription to support society’s intellectual elite in order to ensure technological progress took me back to a talk Gita Chadha delivered in 2020, and to a…
In science, paradoxes often appear when familiar rules are pushed into unfamiliar territory. One of them is Parrondo’s paradox, a curious mathematical result showing that when two losing strategies ar…
Do the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads lack the "baggage of biography" – to borrow Amit Chaudhuri's words – because we don't know who the authors, outside of the mythology, are or –…
The Life of Science team uploaded the video of their webinar on July 10, about the construct of the genius in science, on YouTube on July 14. Please watch it if you haven't already. I had also blo…
Recently, someone shared the cover of a soon to be released book, entitled The Physics of Climate Change, authored by Lawrence M. Krauss and expressed excitement about the book's impending publica…
The physicist, thinker and writer Freeman Dyson passed away on February 28, 2020, at the age of 96. I wrote his obituary for The Wire Science; excerpt: The 1965 Nobel Prize for the development of [qu…
I have a mid-October deadline for an essay so obviously when I started reading up on the topic this morning, I ended up on a different part of the web – where I found this: a piece by a journalist tal…
Do physicists whitewash the legacy of Enrico Fermi the same way they do Richard Feynman? Feynman disguised his sexism as pranks and jokes, and writers have spent thousands of pages offering his virtu…
One of the more fascinating bits of high-energy physics is the branch of physics called quantum chromodynamics (QCD). Don’t let the big name throw you off: it deals with a bunch of elementary particle…
(Update: Includes Gopal Gandhi's reply.) Gopalkrishna Gandhi's lead in The Hindu, 'An open letter to Narendra Modi', was a wonderful read - as if from the Keeper of the Nation's C…
When matter and anti-matter meet, they annihilate each other in a "flash" of energy. Usually, this release of energy is in the form of high-energy photons, or gamma rays, which are then dete…