Scicomm
Featured image: All matter around us is made of elementary particles, the building blocks of matter. These particles occur in two basic types called quarks and leptons. Each group consists of six particles, which are related in pairs, or ‘generations’. The muon is a type of lepton, denoted by the
Scicomm
A particle collider is a machine that energises two beams of subatomic particles and smashes them head on. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Europe is the world's largest and most famous particle collider. It accelerates (with the effect of energising) two beams of protons to nearly the
Scicomm
In his latest newsletter, Bruce Schneier springboarded off of articles in Washington Post and The Atlantic to write: There’s a balance between the cost of the thing, and the cost to destroy the thing, and that balance is changing dramatically. This isn’t new, of course. Here’s an
Analysis
Engineering as a methodology … contains a fundamentally materialist kernel, even if its present incarnation as a bourgeois science drives engineers to think and behave otherwise. — Nick Chavez, Engineers, Materialism, and the Communist Method After school, I studied mechanical engineering against my will. Most engineering students at the time did, and
Op-eds
There's a concept in quantum mechanics, and also in parts of classical mechanics, called the Berry phase. Say you're walking around a mountain. You start off along a path and follow it all the way until you're back to the point where you started.
Scicomm
Every once in a while, I dive into a topic in science for no reason other than that I find it interesting. This is how I learnt about Titan, laser-cooling, and random walks. This post is about the fourth topic in this series: solitons. A soliton is a stable wave
Analysis
There was an intriguing outpouring of concern worldwide when Sunita Williams and Barry Wilmore returned to Earth after 280-something days in space. People were particularly concerned about Williams's health and how she was doing, as if Wilmore hadn't been there with her living through the same
Scicomm
While I have many issues with how the Nobel Prizes are put together as an institution, the scientific achievements they have revealed have been some of the funnest concepts I’ve discovered in science, including the clever ways in which scientists revealed them. If I had to rank them on
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Finally some external validation. After months of insisting Sunita Williams and Barry Wilmore aren't "stuck" or "stranded" in the International Space Station, after Boeing Starliner's first crewed flight test went awry, the two astronauts have themselves repudiated the use of such words
Scicomm
I have access to the premium version of ChatGPT, and every day I ask it a few questions about concepts in physics that I’d like to know more about. Yesterday, for example, I learnt the difference between quenching and annealing and later about the Weierstrass function, which it was
Scicomm
Place a pot of water on the stove and light the fire. Once the temperature in the pot reaches 100º C or so, the water will boil to vapour. This is an example of a phase transition that occurs every day in our houses. Yet scientists have difficulty predicting whether
Life notes
The Hindu has a new print product out called ‘Surf & Dive’ (S&D), whose first edition the editor Suresh Nambath and Shashi Tharoor launched at the group’s ‘Lit for Life’ event in Chennai on January 18. We’ve been working on this for quite some time and