767 posts
Dan Shechtman won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 2011. This led to an explosion of interest on the subject of QCs and Shechtman’s travails in getting the theory validated. Numerous publications, fr…
The doctrine of incommensurability arises out of the conflict between two paradigms and the faltering of communications between the two adherent factions. According to Kuhn, scientists are seldom inc…
Did science journalists find QCs anomalous? Did they report the crisis period as it happened or as an isolated incident? Whether they did or did not will be indicative of Kuhn’s influence on science j…
Dan Shechtman’s discovery of quasi-crystals, henceforth abbreviated as QCs, in 1982 was a landmark achievement that invoked a paradigm-shift in the field of physical chemistry. However, at the time,…
That the switch from newspapers to digital handheld devices - for the purpose of sourcing all my news - is limited only by my comfort-level with technology is telling of some shortcoming of the print…
Access to multiple sources of news over the internet increases aspirations corresponding to news consumption: readers don’t have to restrict themselves anymore to news that we or they think will be us…
Paul Broca announced in 1861 that the region of the brain now named after him was the "seat of speech". Through a seminal study, researchers Nancy Kanwisher and Evelina Fedorenko from MIT an…
My article on this interview and Dr. Soundararajan's opinions appeared in The Hindu's EducationPlus supplement on October 22, 2012 titled "It's a mixed bag". -- Dr. Kannan Soun…
Some points generated during a discussion with a friend: 1. The Nobel Prizes used to be definitive of the orientation of scientific research in the past; however, staying on top of all recognition n…
Across six decades, the European Union has stressed repeatedly on the importance of democracy and human rights. In the process, it set up a system that offered great humanitarian, and therefore popula…
Just saw this news-tweet by the Hindustan Times: https://twitter.com/htTweets/status/255577025732030464 Clicking on the link and opening the news-report, I see that it was a team of scientists led b…
Symmetry in nature is a sign of unperturbedness. It means nothing has interfered with a natural process, and that its effects at each step are simply scaled-up or scaled-down versions of each other. F…