White-opia
John Horgan asked 15 people – scientists, social psychologists, philosophers – one question, in a seemingly clever effort to mark the end of 2018: Unless you are too stoned or enlightened to care, yo…
VM
1664 posts
A question for Modi
1 min read
On December 18, Manmohan Singh took a jibe at Narendra Modi for not holding any press conferences in his term as PM. To get in on the action, 15 people at The Wire (including myself) pitched 15 questi…
Nobel Prizes and traditionalism
1 min read
James English had a wonderful piece in Public Books recently, discussing how the Nobel Prize for literature: 1. Is a prize that has always struggled to be meaningful, given how its laureates are sho…
Why physical networks aren’t like their on-paper counterparts
5 min read
At first glance, this tweets appears to state something obvious: https://twitter.com/nature/status/1071217062930980870 Of course the three-dimensional arrangement of links and nodes, and the space t…
On cosmology's scicomm disaster
5 min read
Jamie Farnes, a theoretical physicist at Oxford University, recently had a paper published that claimed the effects of dark matter and dark energy could be explained by replacing them with a fluid-lik…
Using light to cool sound
4 min read
Laser light has been used to cool atoms down to near absolute zero. The technique is simple, if versatile. (And includes some history involving a little-known Indian physicist.) Laser light is shined…
New binary black-hole mergers
2 min read
Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote a post about how quickly the discovery of black-hole mergers through gravitational waves was becoming run o' the mill. All of the gravitational wave detection a…
Mongolian folk rock
2 min read
An online culture zine called Phantom Sway just discovered Mongolian folk rock and can't stop raving about it (I found the article because 3 Quarks Daily picked up on it). What the superficial rev…
Of socks in black-holes and wasted stone tablets
5 min read
Dennis Overbye, one of the New York Times's star science writers (the other being Carl Zimmer), had a curious piece up November 19 about why "we should leave some mysteries alone" and wh…
The trouble with activism as expertise
2 min read
There are two broad problems I've seen so far with writers/journalists quoting activists in science, health and environment stories as experts. (This post deals entirely with the Indian context.)…
Understanding the proton's mass – and then the universe's
5 min read
You are taught in school that protons and neutrons are particles. However, unless you get into physics research later in life, the likeliest way you are going to find out that they are technically qua…
Engineering a way out of global warming
3 min read
After its licentious article about Earth having a second moon, I thought National Geographic had published another subpar piece when I saw this headline: Small Nuclear War Could Reverse Global Warmin…