Bernhard Riemann
A fascinating observation by Cixin Liu in an interview in Public Books, to John Plotz and translated by Pu Wang (numbers added): … technology precedes science. (1) Way before the rise of modern science, there were so many technologies, so many technological innovations. But today technology is deeply embedded in the
anastomosis
This post was originally published on October 6, 2012. I recently rediscovered it and decided to republish it with a few updates. Geometric symmetry in nature is often a sign of unperturbedness, as if nothing has interfered with a natural process and that its effects at each step are simply
capitalism
Reading a Nature report titled ‘Step aside CERN: There’s a cheaper way to break open physics‘ (January 10, 2018) brought to mind something G. Rajasekaran, former head of the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai, told me once: that the future – as the Nature report also touts – belongs to tabletop
black holes
I watched The Cloverfield Paradox last night, the horror film that Paramount pictures had dumped with Netflix and which was then released by Netflix on February 4. It’s a dumb production: unlike H.R. Giger’s existential, visceral horrors that I so admire, The Cloverfield Paradox is all about
Electromagnetism
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 particles that have a property called colour charge. And one of these particles creates a mess
Ben Allanach
It has come under scrutiny at various times by multiple prominent physicists and thinkers, but it’s not hard to see why, when the idea of ‘grand unification’ first set out, it seemed plausible to so many. The first time it was seriously considered was about four decades ago, shortly
750 GeV particle
Four years of the Higgs boson Missed this didn’t I. On July 4, 2012, physicists at CERN announced that the Large Hadron Collider had found a Higgs-boson-like particle. Though the confirmation would only come in January 2013 (that it was the Higgs boson and not any other particle), July
accelerating expansion of our universe
Two things before we begin: 1. The first subsection of this post assumes that humankind has colonised some distant extrasolar planet(s) within the observable universe, and that humanity won’t be wiped out in 5 billion years. 2. Both subsections assume a pessimistic outlook, and neither projections they dwell
ATLAS detector
On December 15 last year, scientists working with the Large Hadron Collider experiment announced that they had found slight whispers of a possible new fundamental particle, and got the entire particle physics community excited. There was good reason: should such a particle’s existence become verified, it would provide physicists
ASTROSAT
A lot of the physics of 2015 was about how the ways in which we study the natural world had been improved or were improving. * Hubble turned 25 * Half of the JWST’s mirrors got ready (with no more delays announced ahead of its 2018 launch) * The Udaipur Solar Observatory
ATLAS
Looks intimidating, doesn’t it? It’s also very interesting because it contains an important result acquired at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) this year, a result that could disappoint many physicists. The LHC reopened earlier this year after receiving multiple performance-boosting upgrades over the 18 months before. In its
accelerating gradient
During a lecture in 2012, G. Rajasekaran, professor emeritus at the Institute for Mathematical Sciences, Chennai, said that the future of high-energy physics lay with engineers being able to design smaller particle accelerators. The theories of particle physics have for long been exploring energy levels that we might never be
