Crowd-sourcing a fantasy fiction tale
What if thousands of writers, economists, philosophers, scientists, teachers, industrialists and other many other people from other professions besides were able to pool their intellectual and creativ…
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767 posts
How hard is it to violate Pauli's exclusion principle?
A well-designed auditorium always has all its seats positioned on an inclined plane. Otherwise it wouldn't be well-designed, would it? Anyway, this arrangement solves an important problem: It lets…
Where does the Higgs boson come from?
When the Chelyabinsk meteor – dubbed Chebarkul – entered Earth’s atmosphere at around 17 km/s, it started to heat up due to friction. After a point, cracks already present on the chunk of rock weighin…
Higgs boson closer than ever
The article, as written by me, appeared in The Hindu on March 7, 2013. -- Ever since CERN announced that it had spotted a Higgs boson-like particle on July 4, 2012, their flagship Large Hadron Colli…
Ironing out an X-ray wrinkle
A version of this post, as written by me, originally appeared in The Copernican science blog on March 1, 2013. -- One of the techniques to look for and measure the properties of a black hole is to s…
For once, a case against the DAE.
I met with physicist M.V. Ramana on February 18, 2013, for an interview after his talk on nuclear energy in India at the Madras Institute of Development Studies. He is currently appointed jointly with…
EUCLID/ESA: A cosmic vision looking into the darkness
I spoke to Dr. Giuseppe Racca and Dr. Rene Laureijs, both of the ESA, regarding the EUCLID mission, which will be the world's first space-telescope launched to study dark energy and dark matter. F…
A different kind of experiment at CERN
This article, as written by me, appeared in The Hindu on January 24, 2012. -- At the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland, experiments are conducted by many scientists who d…
Aaron Swartz is dead.
This article, as written by me and a friend, appeared in The Hindu on January 16, 2013. -- In July, 2011, Aaron Swartz was indicted by the district of Massachusetts for allegedly stealing more than…
LHC to re-awaken in 2015 with doubled energy, luminosity
This article, as written by me, appeared in The Hindu on January 10, 2012. -- After a successful three-year run that saw the discovery of a Higgs-boson-like particle in early 2012, the Large Hadron…
There's something wrong with this universe.
I’ve gone on about natural philosophy, the philosophy of representation, science history, and the importance of interdisciplinary perspectives when studying modern science. There’s something that unif…
The case of the red-haired kids
This blog post first appeared, as written by me, on The Copernican science blog on December 30, 2012. -- Seriously, shame on me for not noticing the release of a product named Correlate until Decemb…