Scicomm
The United Nations has designated 2025 the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology. Many physics magazines and journals have taken the opportunity to publish more articles on quantum physics than they usually do, and that has meant quantum physics research has often been on my mind. Nirmalya Kajuri, an
Scicomm
I believe my blog’s subscribers did not receive email notifications of some recent posts. If you’re interested, I’ve listed the links to the last eight posts at the bottom of this edition. When reading around for my piece yesterday on the wavefunctions of quantum mechanics, I stumbled
Scicomm
Physics often involves hidden surprises in how matter behaves at the smallest scales. A fundamental property in physics is angular momentum, which describes how things spin or rotate, from planets all the way down to particles. Angular momentum is involved in many important effects like magnetism and quantum states that
Scicomm
Imagine you’ve put together a torchlight. You know exactly how each part of the device works. You know exactly how they’re all connected togetger. Yet when you put in fresh batteries and turn it on, the light flickers. You take the torchlight apart, check each component piece by
Op-eds
Right now, Shubhanshu Shukla is on his way back to Earth from the International Space Station. Am I proud he’s been the first Indian up there? I don’t know. It’s not clear. The whole thing seemed to be stage-managed. Shukla didn’t say anything surprising, nothing that
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From ’Sharks hunt via Lévy flights’, Physics World, June 11, 2010: They were menacing enough before, but how would you feel if you knew sharks were employing advanced mathematical concepts in their hunt for the kill? Well, this is the case, according to new research, which has tracked the movement
Analysis
There's no denying that there currently prevails a public culture in India that equates criticism, even well-reasoned, with pooh-poohing. It's especially pronounced in certain geographies where the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) enjoys majority support as well as vis-à-vis institutions that the subscribers of Hindu politics consider
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A particle collider is a machine that energises two beams of subatomic particles and smashes them head on. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Europe is the world's largest and most famous particle collider. It accelerates (with the effect of energising) two beams of protons to nearly the
Analysis
Engineering as a methodology … contains a fundamentally materialist kernel, even if its present incarnation as a bourgeois science drives engineers to think and behave otherwise. — Nick Chavez, Engineers, Materialism, and the Communist Method After school, I studied mechanical engineering against my will. Most engineering students at the time did, and
Op-eds
NASA/SpaceX/Axiom will make their next attempt to launch the Axiom-4 mission to the International Space Station on June 11. Axiom Space's tagline for the mission is "Realizing the Return", alluding to three of the mission's four crew members, including India's
Analysis
Russia began its full scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. On March 8, a poll conducted by independent survey organisations in Russia among a randomly selected cohort of 1,640 people reported around 46% supported the war, 13% supported it somewhat, 23% opposed it, and the rest were undecided
Scicomm
Every once in a while, I dive into a topic in science for no reason other than that I find it interesting. This is how I learnt about Titan, laser-cooling, and random walks. This post is about the fourth topic in this series: solitons. A soliton is a stable wave