Science
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 Sabine Hossenfelder, to read here. I simply wanted to remark on one very small portion of it, where Farmelo says of
Culture
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 is not surprising after Petta was what it was. 2.0 also goes one step further
Science
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' within its envelope, keeping everything within trapped in absolute darkness for as long as
Op-eds
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 attempts to clarify its underlying science as well as to defend it
Science
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 about his work and had my mind blown, mostly motivated
Science
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 explicitly mention a date, he implied in his 15-minute announcement that the test was conducted today, March 27.
Science
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 considerable repute and currently works at the Indian Institute of Science. He won the S.S. Bhatnagar
Science
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 February 26? Sections of the Indian media and of course BJP politicians believe it did and have even put a
Op-eds
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 had voiced concerns over the Haryana government’s plans to ‘develop’ the Aravalli hills through what it called ‘consolidation projects’. That
Life notes
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 2014 – but it quickly stops being astonishing. It seems lightning preferred men because they were more
Science
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. Beyond the Far Side China has always publicly advocated for the peaceful use of outer space.
Science
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 way their scientists publish their papers, such that the papers are freely available to the public. The consortium is grounded