Every July 4, I have occasion to remember two things: the discovery of the Higgs boson, and my first published byline for an article about the discovery of the Higgs boson. I have no trouble believing it’s been eight years since we discovered this particle, using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and its ATLAS and …
Tag archives: Quantum mechanics
The molecule that was also a wave
According to the principles of quantum mechanics, you’re a wave – just like light is both a particle and a wave. It’s just that your wavelength is so small that your wave nature doesn’t matter, and you’re treated like a particle. The larger an object is, the smaller its wavelength, and vice versa. We’re confused …
Scientists make video of molecule rotating
A research group in Germany has captured images of what a rotating molecule looks like. This is a significant feat because it is very difficult to observe individual atoms and molecules, which are very small as well as very fragile. Scientists often have to employ ingenious techniques that can probe their small scale but without …
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Jayant Narlikar’s pseudo-defence of Darwin
Jayant Narlikar, the noted astrophysicist and emeritus professor at the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Pune, recently wrote an op-ed in The Hindu titled ‘Science should have the last word’. There’s probably a tinge of sanctimoniousness there, echoing the belief many scientists I’ve met have that science will answer everything, often blithely oblivious to …
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All the science in ‘The Cloverfield Paradox’
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 things going bump in the dark. But what …
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The science in Netflix’s ‘Spectral’
It’s fun to think about the implications of a film’s antagonists being modelled after a phenomenon I’ve often read/written about but never thought about that way.
Relativity’s kin, the Bose-Einstein condensate, is 90 now
The BEC was Einstein’s last major prediction and it took a revolution in quantum optics to be realised.
The intricacies of being sold on string theory
If you are seeking an appreciation for the techniques of string theory, then Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe could be an optional supplement. If, on the other hand, you want to explore the epistemological backdrop against which string theory proclaimed its aesthetic vigor, then the book is a must-read. As the title implies, it discusses the …
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Bohr and the breakaway from classical mechanics
One hundred years ago, Niels Bohr developed the Bohr model of the atom, where electrons go around a nucleus at the center like planets in the Solar System. The model and its implications brought a lot of clarity to the field of physics at a time when physicists didn’t know what was inside an atom, …
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Bohr and the breakaway from classical mechanics
One hundred years ago, Niels Bohr developed the Bohr model of the atom, where electrons go around a nucleus at the centre like planets in the Solar System. The model and its implications brought a lot of clarity to the field of physics at a time when physicists didn’t know what was inside an atom, …
Continue reading “Bohr and the breakaway from classical mechanics”