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Let's discuss, with conditions
Writing prompt: What topics do you like to discuss? I like to discuss everything under the Sun. However, I’m also wary of people who waste time talking about something in a way that couldn’t possibly lead to a useful insight or a changed mind but are in fact
A song on my mind
Writing prompt: Jot down the first thing that comes to your mind. I’ve got an earworm this morning and it’s been unbudged. It’s the song ‘Neeye unakku endrum’ from the 1962 Tamil film Bale Pandiya. The film is highly okay, at best, notwithstanding many of the social
Memoirs, Substack, and psychology
The English poet Blake Morrison had a thought-provoking essay in The Guardian titled '‘Enough of this me me me’: Blake Morrison on memoir in the age of oversharing' on April 4. He traced the evolution of memoir from a self-congratulatory genre for the accomplished to today's
On the BBC, talking about Gaganyaan and inspiration
The BBC has produced a documentary podcast titled ‘Hope and fear: India’s space revolution’. Its host, Alok Jha of The Economist, interviewed me late last year as part of it, to provide a media perspective of the Indian space programme, in particular Gaganyaan, access to ISRO scientists, the role
Lord of the Rings Day
A happy Lord of the Rings Day to you. This year I almost didn’t write this post because I don’t have anything to say about The Lord of the Rings itself. Chiefly, I have tired of the antics of men. It’s not about some good men and
Climate change and the coastline paradox
A friend recently told me about a tool called climate.you that shows "temperature change, over land and sea", at all points on the earth's surface in a bid "to show how warming is already affecting people everywhere". You can enter the name of
I, Head-bumper
Daily writing promptWhat is one word that describes you? View all responses Tall. I'm tall for India, around 6'3''. My height has recently been on my mind. India is not a good place for tall people. The public infrastructure is geared towards shorter people
Spotting fakes by looking at them
On March 10, the Supreme Court said a balance has to be struck between warding against misinformation online and protecting citizens’ right to free speech. The context was the Centre’s attempts to defend the 2023 IT Rules: when the comedian Kunal Kamra asked who would decide if online content
The little things
Tungsten diboride (WB2) is extraordinarily stiff and resistant to deformation and scientists have long suspected it could be a superhard material, meaning it scores at least 40 gigapascal (GPa) on a hardness test. This is important because diamond, the hardest natural material on Earth, scores 70-100 GPa but because it
The pleasures of rewatching
Daily writing promptWhat movies or TV series have you watched more than 5 times? View all responses I'm afraid the answer is F.R.I.E.N.D.S. My sister and I watched it growing up, then rewatched it, the re-rewatched it, and now then have it
On mathematics and reputation
From ‘Formalizing the stability of the two Higgs doublet model potential into Lean: identifying an error in the literature’, uploaded to arXiv on March 9, 2026: Firstly, we believe this to be the first time a non-trivial error in a research level physics paper has been identified through the process
Analysis
Measuring science stories
Google News picks up on science stories that many outlets are covering. Its reasoning is that the more outlets publish a particular story, the more reader interest the story has. However, the flaw here is that news outlets don’t evaluate all kinds of science developments on an equal footing
Analysis
Review: ‘Decolonial Keywords’ (2026)
Everyone who knows me knows that my intellectual coordinates are defined by scientific ideas, even when they’re about sociology or the humanities. This is why I found a new book, Decolonial Keywords: South Asian Thoughts and Attitudes, edited by anthropologists Renny Thomas and Sasanka Perera, so compelling. The book
Scicomm
Would a quantum battery charge faster than a classical one?
A quantum battery is a system that stores energy and whose working parts are quantum systems, such as atoms, ions, spins, superconducting circuits or quantum dots, so the processes of storing and extracting energy are governed by quantum mechanics. Imagine you have a row of toy boxes. Each box can
Analysis
Epstein or otherwise, Silicon Valley’s techno-elite know what they’re doing
The science writer Philip Ball has described “nerd tunnel vision” as the rationalisation scientists who maintained ties with Jeffrey Epstein after his 2008 conviction for soliciting underage sex offered, hinting at something more calculated than just oversight. “Nerd tunnel vision is a defining feature of much of the Edge discourse,
Scicomm
A laser worthy of a nuclear clock
The nucleus of the thorium-229 isotope has a special property: it has an excited state that's incredibly close in energy to its ground state. The existence of such an isomer is remarkable because when nuclei normally get excited, they need enormous amounts of energy — hundreds of thousands or
Culture
A bad Sprite ad
One of the advertisements during the ongoing T20 cricket World Cup on Star Sports India has been for Sprite, the carbonated beverage from the Coca-Cola Company. In the ad, it's a hot day, two people are irritated by the heat and humidity, and they beat it by taking
Scicomm
The Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture
On Monday night, I kid you not, I dreamt of the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture. It was only by name, a fleeting mention in a heated conversation I was having with a friend. I'm not sure who spoke it or why. When I woke up, I looked it
Op-eds
Developing Tamil Nadu
“If the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) comes to power, it will ruin the developed State of Tamil Nadu” — Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M.K. Stalin said this in his address to a local conference organised by the Indian Union Muslim League in Kumbakonam on January 28. While Stalin’s claim
Culture
From the Heisenberg cut to the Copenhagen interpretation
The following post was motivated by this exchange (on X.com), which prompted me to write out my understanding of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics and the part the Heisenberg cut plays in it. I haven’t gone into the variants of the interpretation that Maria Violaris brings up;
Analysis
That humans quest for cosmic dawn
From 'Cosmic dawn: the search for the primordial hydrogen signal', Physics World, November 18, 2025: The EDGES instrument is a dipole antenna, which resembles a ping-pong table with a gap in the middle. It is mounted on a large metal groundsheet, which is about 30 × 30 m. Its
Analysis
To be Indian is to set records
For all the ways in which the Indian people are divided these days, they're seemingly united in their desire to set records. On January 22, a tinkerer named Sohan Rai, a.k.a. “Zikiguy”, said on Instagram that he and his team “are planning to do India’s
Analysis
Normalising deviance
A.k.a. the importance of public scrutiny