India's Delhi-only air pollution problem

3 min read
Analysis Scicomm CSIR National Environmental Engineering Research Institute CSIR NEERI decibels Deepavali Diwali festival of lights green firecrackers Heinz Nixdorf Recall human loudness noise pollution Noise Pollution (Regulation and Control) Rules 2000 sound pollution

I woke up this morning to a PTI report telling me Delhi's air quality had fallen to 'very poor' on Deepavali, the Hindu ostensible festival of lights, with many people defying the Supreme…

The calculus of creative discipline

5 min read
Culture Op-eds classical mechanics creative discipline critical points Dan Shechtman differential calculus EPR paradox fantasy fiction Imre Lakatos JK Rowling Karl Popper literary criticism M John Harrison Malazan Book of the Fallen mathematical analysis nerdism Niels Bohr Paul Feyerabend Philosophy of Science quasicrystals replication crisis smooth functions Steven Erikson Thomas Kuhn Viriconium world-building

Every moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing over world-building. World-building is dull. World-building literalises the urge to invent. World-building gives an unnece…

Why are the Nobel Prizes still relevant?

6 min read
Culture Op-eds Science Abhijit Banerjee Albert Einstein Appa Rao Podile Booker Prize Brian Keating Caltech Chien-Shiung Wu CV Raman Esther Duflo Fermilab Göran Hansson gender-based discrimination Hindutva Hugo Award impact factor Isaac Asimov John B Goodenough late capitalism Lise Meitner Margaret Atwood nationalism Nature journal Nobel laureates Nobel Prize prestige bias Prime Minister Narendra Modi sexism The Big Bang Theory Vera Rubin

Note: A condensed version of this post has been published in The Wire. Around this time last week, the world had nine new Nobel Prize winners in the sciences (physics, chemistry and medicine), all bu…

A revolutionary exoplanet

4 min read
Scicomm 51 Pegasi b brown dwarf CRIRES Didier Queloz Doppler spectroscopy ELODIE spectrograph exoplanets Grand Tack Model hot Jupiters Ignas Snellen James Peebles main sequence stars Michel Mayor NASA Kepler telescope Nice Model Nobel Prize for physics orbital velocity pegasean planets Physics Nobel Prize planetary migration Proxima Centauri radial velocity roaster planets Very Large Telescope Wolf 1061

In 1992, Aleksander Wolszczan and Dale Frail became the first astronomers to publicly announce that they had discovered the first planets outside the Solar System, orbiting the dense core of a dead st…