Complexity and meaningfulness
Science writer Graham Farmelo interviewed Edward Witten, the mathematical physicist extraordinaire, in the summer of 2018. The full interview is available to listen here (27 minutes) and, thanks to Sa…
Science
363 posts
Fantasy and pseudoscience in Rajinikanth's '2.0'
Rajinikanth's film 2.0, which released last year, was recently uploaded on Amazon Prime and I finally watched it in its entirety. It is a dumpster-fire of masculinity, sexism and misogyny, which i…
Welcome to the ergosphere
A black hole's gravitational influence is a twisted – and twisting – thing, with many parts to it. We all know about the event horizon because of its wondrous ability to capture 'even light…
The black hole image's question of kind
In my latest op-ed for The Wire, where I defended the criticisms of some people who called the EHT's black hole picture too blurry, there are two lines that aren't entirely true. This post att…
To creativity, and conviction
The physicist David Thouless passed away earlier this month. I confess I didn't know much about him or his work until he won a part of the Nobel Prize for physics in 2016. After that, I read up ab…
India tests ASAT weapon
In a live address to the nation, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that India had successfully tested an anti-satellite (ASAT) missile against a live satellite in low-Earth orbit. Though he didn…
T.V. Ramakrishnan's pseudoscience
In November 2018, T.V. Ramakrishnan reviewed a book called Modern Atomism, edited by J. Pasupathy and published in 2017, for Current Science. To the uninitiated, TVR is a condensed matter physicist of…
What went boom in Balakot?
Did the Indian Air Force strike the various structures at the madrasa in Balakot with lethality sufficient to have caused “heavy casualties”, as foreign secretary Vijay Gokhale told reporters on Febru…
What will Ashok Khemka find next?
Ashok Khemka, the senior IAS officer famous for having exposed numerous instances of government corruption, perhaps most prominently the DLF land-grab scam, has been transferred again. This time, he h…
Lightning strikes and sex
No, not that sex. Biological sex. In the past eight years, an astounding 80 percent of those killed by lightning strikes have been men. This astonishing statistic is from an article in Bustle, from…
Significance of China's moon mission
I wrote the following analysis for chinaindiadialogue.com and China Pictorial. A big thank you to Mithila Phadke for the opportunity and for working on the text to make it sharper and more readable.…
Six concerns over India's plan to join Coalition S
On February 12, K. VijayRaghavan, the principal scientific advisor to the Government of India, announced that India would join a global consortium of countries that is attempting to standardise the wa…