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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.
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Why this ASTROSAT instrument could be a game-changer for high-energy astrophysics
Between them, NASA's Swift and NuSTAR telescopes have a blindspot that the CZTI instrument can efficiently bridge
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A new dawn for particle accelerators in the wake
A discussion of what updates in experimental particle physics are allowing accelerators to get smaller
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Is the universe as we know it stable?
The anthropic principle has been a cornerstone of fundamental physics, being used by some physicists to console themselves about why the universe is the way it is: tightly sandwiched between two dangerous states. If the laws and equations that define it had slipped during its formation just one way or
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An app for dissent in the 21st century
“Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being.” These words belong to the French philosopher Albert Camus, from his essay The Rebel (1951). The persistence of that appeal is rooted in our ease of access to it – as the holders of
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Research funding in India
After Vidya Krishnan of The Hindu broke the news of the 'Dehradun Declaration', which imposed a startling funding restriction on the Centres for Scientific and Industrial Research, multiple perspectives on the issue came to light for me. One was about the tensions between funding curiosity-driven research and funding
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Vanilla entertainment
One of the first, and most important in hindsight, bits of advice I got from the journalist Siddharth Varadarajan was about how to choose what to write: "Write what you'd like to read" (Dan Fagin would later add the important "why now" dimension). As
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Cybersecurity, a horse with no name
Excerpt: Cybersecurity sounds like it could be that horse, in the form of IT infrastructure to effectively defend against the desert of cyber-weaponry, except we've probably only just seen a foal. When software is weaponised and used in cyber-attacks, we’re confronted with a threat we’ve not
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Geoff Marcy
About a week go, NASA announced the 20th anniversary of the discovery of the first exoplanet, and all I could do was think of the amazing Geoff Marcy. When it comes to exoplanet astronomy and the hunt for these objects, Marcy is THE guy (The Atlantic compared his contributions to
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Awards week
I went into this year's Nobel Prize Announcements Week a little confused about why I was excited. For me the prizes have always highlighted the recipients' work, and that's likelier than not a field of study I've probably never heard of (with the
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Physics Nobel rewards neutrino work, but has sting in the tail for India
As neutrino astronomy comes of age, the Nobel Foundation has decided to award Takaaki Kajita and Arthur B. McDonald with the physics prize for 2015 for their discovery of neutrino oscillations – a property which indicates that the fundamental particle has mass. Takaaki Kajita is affiliated with the Super-Kamiokande neutrino detector
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How an ancient Chinese text fought malaria and won a Nobel, while India lags behind
On October 5, Youyou Tu became only the 12th woman in history to be awarded the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine. She shared one half of the prize with William Campbell and Satoshi Omura, the discoverers of the drug called ivermectin used to fight against filarial diseases and river