Which way does antimatter swing?
In our universe, matter is king: it makes up everything. Its constituents are incredibly tiny particles - smaller than even the protons and neutrons they constitute - and they work together with natur…
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The pain is gone.
Reading some pages of fiction touched off old memories that I'd forgotten existed, bringing back to life words and, with them, sensations. Words were between words, ideas between ideas, color unde…
Where's all the antimatter? New CERN results show the way.
If you look outside your window at the clouds, the stars, the planets, all that you will see is made of matter. However, when the universe was born, there were equal amounts of matter and antimatter.…
The wayward and cowardly introspector
No water and power at home today, so I wish you a horrible Tamil New Year's Day, too. With nothing much to do - and the sun beating down upon Chennai at an unwavering 33° C that, in the company of…
The creative process must not be transcendental.
During a conversation with an emotionally intense and literarily prolific friend earlier this evening, the friend said many of the greatest poets had led doomed lives; doomed in the sense that they…
On the shoulders of the Higgs
On July 4, 2012, when CERN announced that a particle that looked a lot like the Higgs boson had been spotted, the excitement was palpable. A multibillion-dollar search for an immensely tiny particle h…
Tragedy, over and over.
This book review, as written by me, appeared in The Hindu Literary Review on April 6, 2013. -- Chernobyl is in the past. Well, it’s definitely easy to look at it that way when you think of what you&…
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One recommendation from this article on how to attract and retain more women in science is to implement an anonymous job-application process. It's evidently not an ideal solution - unlike other op…
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I'm not really sure how the internet works in space. I'm sure in whatsoever way it does, it's a pretty big deal because it signals the ubiquity of human technology in a place where few hum…
Returning to WordPress... fourth time round.
My blog got me my job. After all, it did make a cameo appearance during my interview, drawing an "Impressive!" from the Editor of the newspaper sitting opposite me. Ever since that episode i…
Some more questions concerning Herschel...
The Herschel Space Observatory, a.k.a. Herschel, was the largest space telescope at the time of its launch and still is. With a collecting area twice as large as the Hubble Space Telescope’s, and oper…
Big science, bigger nationalism.
Nature India ran a feature on March 21 about three Indian astrophysicists who had contributed to the European Space Agency's Planck mission that studied the universe's CMBR, etc. I was wary ev…