As things stand, Iran has amassed both the technical knowhow and the materials required to make a nuclear weapon. Second, the Israelis and the Americans have failed to deprive Iran of these resources in their latest salvo. In fact the airstrikes against Iran from June 13 cast Tehran as the victim of foreign aggression and increased the premium on its option to withdraw from the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) without significant international censure.
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While Tehran’s refusal to cooperate with the IAEA is suggestive, it hasn’t explicitly articulated that it will pursue nuclear weapons. … But the presence of large quantities of HEU in the stockpile is intriguing. From a purely technical standpoint, the HEU can still be diverted for non-military applications…
… such as R&D for naval applications and downconversion to less enriched reactor fuel. But these are niche use cases. In fact while it’s possible to downconvert a stockpile of uranium enriched to 60% to that enriched to 19.75%, 5% or 3% without using centrifuges, it’s also possible to do this by mixing uranium enriched to 20% with natural or depleted feedstock.
If anything, the highly enriched uranium stockpile [which Iran went to some lengths to protect from American bombing], the technical knowhow in the country, the absence of a nuclear warhead per se, and the sympathy created by the bombing allow Tehran a perfect bargaining chip: to simultaneously be in a state of pre-breakout readiness while being able to claim in earnest that it is interested in nuclear energy for peace.
Featured image: An example of zellij tilework in the Al Attarine Madrasa in Fes, Morocco (2012), with complex geometric patterns on the lower walls and a band of calligraphy above. Caption and credit: just_a_cheeseburger (CC BY)
‘Quasi’ means almost. It’s an unfair name for quasicrystals. These crystals exist in their own right. Their name comes from the internal arrangement of their atoms. A crystal is made up of a repeating group of some atoms arranged in a fixed way. The smallest arrangement that repeats to make up the whole crystal is called the unit cell. In diamond, a convenient unit cell is four carbon atoms bonded to each other in a tetrahedral (pyramid-like) arrangement. Millions of copies of this unit cell together make up a diamond crystal. The unit cell of sodium chloride has a cubical shape: the chloride ions (Cl–) occupy the corners and face centres while the sodium ions (Na+) occupy the middle of the edges and centre of the cube. As this cube repeats itself, you get table salt.
The structure of all crystals thus follows two simple rules: have a unit cell and repeat it. Thus the internal structure of crystals is periodic. For example if a unit cell is 5 nanometres wide, it stands to reason you’ll see the same arrangement of atoms after every 5 nm. And because it’s the same unit cell in all directions and they don’t have any gaps between them, the unit cells fill the space available. It’s thus an exercise in tiling. For example, you can cover a floor of any shape completely with square or triangular tiles (you’ll just need to trim those at the edges). But you can’t do this with pentagonal tiles. If you do, the tiles will have gaps between them that other pentagonal tiles can’t fill.
Quasicrystals buck this pattern in a simple way: their unit cells are like pentagonal tiles. They repeat themselves but the resulting tiling isn’t periodic. There are no gaps in the crystal either because instead of each unit cell just like the one on its left or right, the tiles sometimes slot themselves in by rotating by an angle. Thus rather than the crystal structure following a grid-like pattern, the unit cells seem to be ordered along curves. As a result, even though the structure may have an ordered set of atoms, it’s impossible to find a unit cell that by repeating itself in a straight line gives rise to the overall crystal. In technical parlance, the crystal is said to lack translational symmetry.
Such structures are called quasicrystals. They’re obviously not crystalline, because they lack a periodic arrangement of atoms. They aren’t amorphous either, like the haphazardly arranged atoms of glass. Quasicrystals are somewhere in between: their atoms are arranged in a fixed way, with different combinations of pentagonal, octagonal, and other tile shapes that are disallowed in regular crystals, and with the substance lacking a unit cell. Instead the tiles twist and turn within the structure to form mosaic patterns like the ones featured in Islamic architecture (see image at the top).
In the 1970s, Roger Penrose discovered a particularly striking quasicrystal pattern, since called the Penrose Tiling, composed of two ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ rhombi (depicted here in green and blue, respectively). Credit: Public domain
The discovery of quasicrystals in the early 1980s was a revolutionary moment in the history of science. It shook up what chemists believed a crystal should look like and what rules the unit cell ought to follow. The first quasicrystals that scientists studied were made in the lab, in particular aluminium-manganese alloys, and there was a sense that these unusual crystals didn’t occur in nature. That changed in the 1990s and 2000s when expeditions to Siberia uncovered natural quasicrystals in meteorites that had smashed into the earth millions of years ago. But even this discovery kept one particular question about quasicrystals alive: why do they exist? Both Al-Mn alloys and the minerals in meteorites form in high temperatures and extreme pressures. The question of their existence, more than just because they can, is a question about whether the atoms involved are forced to adopt a quasicrystal rather than a crystal structure. In other words, it asks if the atoms would rather adopt a crystal structure but don’t because their external conditions force them not to.
This post benefited from feedback from Adhip Agarwala.
Often a good way to understand the effects of extreme conditions on a substance is using the tools of thermodynamics — the science of the conditions in which heat moves from place to another. And in thermodynamics, the existential question can be framed like this, to quote from a June paper in Nature Physics: “Are quasicrystals enthalpy-stabilised or entropy-stabilised?” Enthalpy-stabilised means the atoms of a quasicrystal are arranged in a way where they collectively have the lowest energy possible for that group. It means the atoms aren’t arranged in a less-than-ideal way forced by their external conditions but because the quasicrystal structure in fact is better than a crystal structure. It answers “why do quasicrystals exist?” with “because they want to, not just because they can”. Entropy-stabilised goes the other way. That is: at 0 K (-273.15º C), the atoms would rather come together as a crystal because a crystal structure has lower energy at absolute zero. But as the temperature increases, the energy in the crystal builds up and forces the atoms to adjust where they’re sitting so that they can accommodate new forces. At some higher temperature, the structure becomes entropy-stabilised. That is, there’s enough disorder in the structure — like sound passing through the grid of atoms and atoms momentarily shifting their positions — that allows it to hold the ‘excess’ energy but at the same time deviate from the orderliness of a crystal structure. Entropy stabilisation answers “why do quasicrystals exist?” with “because they’re forced to, not because they want to”.
In materials science, the go-to tool to judge whether a crystal structure is energetically favourable is density functional theory (DFT). It estimates the total energy of a solid and from there scientists can compare competing phases and decide which one is most stable. If four atoms will have less energy arranged as a cuboid than as a pyramid at a certain temperature and pressure, then the cuboidal phase is said to be more favoured. The problem is DFT can’t be directly applied to quasicrystals because the technique assumes that a given mineral has a periodic internal structure. Quasicrystals are aperiodic. But because scientists are already comfortable with using DFT, they have tried to surmount this problem by considering a superunit cell that’s made up of a large number of atoms or by assuming that a quasicrystal’s structure, while being aperiodic in three dimensions, could be periodic in say four dimensions. But the resulting estimates of the solid’s energy have not been very good.
In the new Nature Physics paper, scientists from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, have reported a way around the no-unit-cell problem to apply DFT to estimate the energy of two quasicrystals. And they found that these quasicrystals are enthalpy-stabilised. The finding answer is a chemistry breakthrough because it raises the possibility of performing DFT in crystals without translational symmetry. Further, by showing that two real quasicrystals are enthalpy-stabilised, chemists may be forced to rethink why almost every other inorganic material does adopt a repeating structure. Crystals are no longer at the centre of the orderliness universe.
An electron diffraction pattern of an icosahedral holmium-magnesium-zinc quasicrystal reveals the arrangement of its atoms. Credit: Jgmoxness (CC BY-SA)
The team started by studying the internal structure of two quasicrystals using X-rays, then ‘scooped’ out five random parts for further analysis. Each of these scoops had 24 to 740 atoms. Second, the team used a modified version of DFT called DFT-FE. The computational cost of running DFT scales increases according to the cube of the number of atoms being studied. If studying four atoms with DFT requires X amount of computing power, 24 atoms would require 8,000 times X and 740 atoms would require 400 million times X. Instead the computational cost of DFT-FE scales as the square of the number of atoms, which makes a big difference. Continuing from the previous example, 24 atoms would require 400 times X and 740 atoms would require half a million times X. But the lower computational cost of DFT-FE is still considerable. The researchers’ solution was to use GPUs — the processors originally developed to run complicated video games and today used to run artificial intelligence (AI) apps like ChatGPT.
The team was able to calculate that the resulting energy estimates for a quasicrystal was off by no more than 0.3 milli-electron-volt (meV) per atom, considered acceptable. They also applied their technique to a known crystal, ScZn6, and confirmed that its estimate of the energy matched the known value (5-9 meV per atom). They were ready to go now.
When they applied DFT-FE to scandium-zinc and ytterbium-cadmium quasicrystals, they found clear evidence that they were enthalpy-stabilised. Each atom in the scandium-zinc quasicrystal had 23 meV less energy than if it had been part of a crystal structure. Similarly atoms in the ytterbium-cadmium quasicrystal had roughly 7 meV less each. The verdict was obvious: translational symmetry is not required for the most stable form of an inorganic solid.
A single grain of a scandium-zinc quasicrystal has 12 pentagonal faces. Credit: Yamada et al. (2016). IUCrJ
The researchers also explored why the ytterbium-cadmium quasicrystal is so much easier to make than the scandium-zinc quasicrystal. In fact the former was the world’s first two-element quasicrystal to be discovered, 25 years ago this year. The team broke down the total energy as the energy in the bulk plus energy on the surface, and found that the scandium-zinc quasicrystal has high surface energy.
This is important because in thermodynamics, energy is like cost. If you’re hungry and go to a department store, you buy the pack of biscuits that you can afford rather than wait until you have enough money to buy the most expensive one. Similarly, when there’s a hot mass of scandium-zinc as a liquid and scientists are slowly cooling it, the atoms will form the first solid phase they can access rather than wait until they have accumulated enough surface energy to access the quasicrystal phase. And the first phase they can access will be crystalline. On the other hand scientists discovered the ytterbium-cadmium quasicrystal so quickly because it has a modest amount of energy across its surface and thus when cooled from liquid to solid, the first solid phase the atoms can access is also the quasicrystal phase.
This is an important discovery: the researchers found that a phase diagram alone can’t be used to say which phase will actually form. Understanding the surface-energy barrier is also important, and could pave the way to a practical roadmap for scientists trying to grow crystals for specific applications.
The big question now is: what special bonding or electronic effects allow atoms to have order without periodicity? After Israeli scientist Dan Shechtman discovered quasicrystals in 1982, he didn’t publish his findings until two years later, after including some authors on his submission to improve its chances with a journal, because he thought he wouldn’t be taken seriously. This wasn’t a silly concern: Linus Pauling, one of the greatest chemists in the history of subject, dismissed Shechtman’s work and called him a “quasi-scientist”. The blowback was so sharp and swift because chemists like Pauling, who had helped establish the science of crystal structures, were certain there was a way crystals could look and a way they couldn’t — and quasicrystals didn’t have the right look. But now, the new study has found that quasicrystals look perfect. Perhaps it’s crystals that need to explain themselves…
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 speed of light and has them collide. When they do, energy is released in the same way the collision of two cars releases sound, heat, and kinetic energy. The existing kinetic energy of the beams is redistributed into the mass and kinetic energy of new particles. By studying this process, physicists can learn a lot about their properties.
For example, this is how they made one of the headline discoveries of the 21st century: the Higgs boson particle in 2012. Proving the particle exists allowed physicists to confirm that their theory about how subatomic particles get mass is right. That theory is in turn related to many properties of our universe, including its size, the formation of galaxies, and the inner lives of all the universe’s stars, including our sun. For first proposing that theory in 1964 (together with four others), Peter Higgs and François Englert were awarded the physics Nobel Prize in 2013.
This said, the properties of the Higgs boson, which physicists have since examined in more detail, have raised more questions about the universe. Two examples include the mysterious nature of dark matter and why neutrinos have mass even though the theory that explains all subatomic particles says they shouldn’t.
While scientists have built and are operating clever experiments to test different explanations for these anomalous entities, they are also discussing the possibility of building more powerful colliders. The LHC has been able to access a collision energy of up to 13.6 TeV, or about 14,000-times the energy of a proton at rest. Scientists are currently deliberating proposals for colliders that can do better.
The machines in these proposals have taken three forms: a linear electron-positron collider, a circular electron-positron collider, and a circular proton-proton collider. Each of these machines will cost several billion dollars to build and will require many countries to fund and manage them. So scientists have to be able to justify which collider they’d like to build and then convince governments to pay.
The most common argument has been that participating in such sophisticated experiments will also lead to spin-off benefits that will give countries the edge in other spheres, including in medical diagnostics and materials of the future. Increasingly, the question of scientific leadership has also become relevant: India is looking for some of it en route to its goal to become an economically developed country by mid-century; the US is trying to not lose it to China; China is working to take more of it from the US; and so on.
The point is that there is more at stake here than ‘simple’ problems in physics, although these questions are weighty in their own right.
The problem currently is that all three types of machines — a linear/circular electron-positron collider or a circular proton-proton collider — are beset by important disadvantages of their own, and different scientists have focused on them (in addition to their price tags) as they try to decide the way forward.
A circular proton-proton collider like the LHC but bigger can scale a collision energy of 100 TeV. However, it will need to deal with the fact that protons are composite particles, i.e. they’re made up of smaller particles. When they collide head on, only a small fraction of energy is used to ‘make’ new particles; the rest is exchanged between the constituent particles.
Both electrons and positrons are elementary particles on the other hand and generate ‘clean’ collision data. But when an electron (or a positron) is circulated in a magnetic field through the collider while it’s being accelerated, its small mass means it releases much of the energy it acquires as light. Thus circular electron accelerators consume a lot of energy to achieve their results.
When a charged particle like an electron is made to accelerate on a curve while it’s moving near the speed of light, it will emit radiation called synchrotron light. The lower the particle’s mass, the more synchrotron light it will emit. Credit: R. Bartolini (CC BY)
A linear collider doesn’t have this problem since the particles are accelerated in a straight line, but because they can’t go round and round to accelerate more and more, the machine needs to be really long. In some designs they are a few tens of kilometres long: finding a suitably large patch of land is difficult, and maintaining the integrity of the beam across that distance more so. And because each group of particles collides only once and is dumped, the collider must produce, accelerate, and dispose of fresh ultra-intense particle beams at a high frequency, increasing its wall-plug power demand.
In this scenario, some scientists are also mulling a new type of collider that hasn’t been built before — one for muons. Unlike protons and like electrons, muons are elementary particles and thus lead to clean collisions. A muon is also about 200-times heavier than an electron, so it loses more than a billion-times less energy as light when it’s being accelerated in a circle.
Thus, as scientist Diktys Stratakis of Fermilab in the US wrote, “A muon collider ring with a circumference of 10 km could have the same potential as a 100 km proton collider ring, if proven to be feasible.”
But of course it’s not a silver bullet. Perhaps the single biggest issue is that muons are much less stable than protons or electrons. Each muon has a lifetime of about 2.2 microseconds at rest. So producing a sufficiently dense bunch of muons is difficult. The collider must also be able to create large, powerful magnetic fields fast enough before the muons decay. And when muons do decay, they emit electrons or positrons that the machine’s various components must be shielded from. So building a muon collider entails a lot of innovation first.
A team of scientists in Japan recently reported in Physical Review Letters that they had taken a crucial step forward: they were able to cool (de-energise) a bunch of muons, then accelerate them for the first time using a device called a radiofrequency cavity. This is significant because this end-to-end feat has never been demonstrated before and as such represents the first major problem to solve when building a muon collider.
The scientists — from Canada, China, and Japan — performed their feat at the Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex (J-PARC) in Tokai. They achieved it in six steps.
1. A beam of 0.003 TeV protons strikes a graphite target and produces ‘hot’ muons.
2. A slender aluminium foil in front of the target slows them down a little.
3. The muons are further slowed by an 8-mm thick silicon dioxide aerogel disc. As a muon slows nearly to a halt, it bonds with an electron in the aerogel to create a muonium atom: a positively charged muon plus a negatively charged electron.
4. An ultraviolet laser knocks off the electrons to free very low energy muons — about as much energy they’d have at room temperature.
5. Electrostatic lenses and steering plates impart a small amount of energy to the muons and focus them, like getting people at a venue to gather in a single room.
6. The muons are subjected to electric fields alternating at 324 MHz inside a 3-m-long tube, accelerating them. (This is the radiofrequency stage.)
The feat is the first ever demonstration that started with muons jiggling around at a room-temperature level of energy (around 25 meV) and ended with muons moving in a common direction with about 100 keV of energy — an energy boost by a factor of 4 million.
Top view of the experimental setup. The surface muon beam is stopped inside a SiO2 aerogel target. The muonium atoms emitted from the target are ionised by a laser to produce ultra-slow muons. The laser travels horizontally and at a 2 mm distance from the target and is reflected by a mirror. The ultra-slow muons are transported by the lens at 5.7 keV and accelerated to 100 keV by a radiofrequency cavity (RFQ). Muons passing through a diagnostic line are detected by a microchannel plate (MCP). Credit: Phys. Rev. Lett. 134, 245001
While 100 keV is still seven orders of magnitude away from 2 TeV, the Japan team’s feat is remarkable because it ‘solves’ the very first and possibly hardest challenge presented by a muon collider: catching ‘live’ muons before they ‘die’. The team’s setup stopped fast-moving muons, cooled them to 25 meV, stripped the electrons, and injected them into a radiofrequency cavity in 2.28 microseconds, i.e. within the muons’ lifetime. In a manner of speaking, if a 2-TeV muon collider is a skyscraper, the study lays the foundation.
The J-PARC team was also able to cut the transverse emittance — a measure of how the beam spreads — by 200-times horizontally and 400-times vertically relative to the raw muon beam at the beginning. This two-order-of-magnitude reduction is paramount for the lightly energised muon beam to enter the next, more powerful accelerators.
“Although the beam produced by the J-PARC team is of good quality (in terms of having low emittance), its energy and intensity are not yet high enough for the experiments that researchers eventually hope to make. Nevertheless, the demonstration of the potential to re-accelerate cold muons is an exciting step forward,” Chris Rogers, a scientist with the ISIS Neutron and Muon Source at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the UK, wrote in Physics.
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 letter µ. Credit: CERN.
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 article from last year about the cost of drones versus the cost of top-of-the-line fighter jets. If $35K in drones (117 drones times an estimated $300 per drone) can destroy $7B in Russian bombers and other long-range aircraft, why would anyone build more of those planes? And we can have this discussion about ships, or tanks, or pretty much every other military vehicle. And then we can add in drone-coordinating technologies like swarming.
Fighter jets, ships, tanks, … and information. It’s common knowledge in journalism that if it takes X amount of time to come up with misinformation and Y amount of time to debunk it, Y will always be greater than X. In other words, misinformation takes less time (and likely effort) to produce than legitimate information. Network modelling exercises have also found repeatedly that false information travels faster. Taken together, the cost asymmetry experts are beginning to perceive between a fighter jet and the means to destroy it has been around for a long time vis-à-vis information, and in fact the only reason the ‘information side’ hasn’t lost the war, such as it is, is that there exists in the population a certain (but admittedly diminishing) level of awareness that it’s possible to manipulate people into echo chambers as well as to look past the chamber wall to find a whole different reality.
Generative AI has of course added considerably to this problem but as a tool it isn’t limited to producing noisy or bad information — that propensity comes from the humans in the loop. I think if we’re to keep our heads above the water, it’s important for journalists to recruit gen AI to the task of rebutting misinformation then and there rather than wait for journalists to manually pieces articles together. Articles of the latter variety are capable of important change when done right but they take time. When a former ISRO chairman says Sanskrit is a language suited for computer science, a coherent and complete rebuttal that’s also clearly written will need at least two or three hours to come together. At least. This process can be accelerated by a journalist in the loop cobbling a rebuttal together with, say, ChatGPT o3 (the “advanced reasoning” model), making sure the sources are legitimate and reputable, and finally checking the text (or visual) for inappropriate language — all in minutes.
There are legitimate apprehensions about journalists using AI. For me, personally, using AI-generated text is a moral offence against the act of a person communicating with their community, with human and public interest at heart. There are injustices embedded in the training and operationalisation of generative AI models that no one, journalists or otherwise, should help perpetuate and that everyone should help address and resolve. At the same time, however, the corpus of annotated data that animates these models represents a substantial amount of human-made knowledge that we should be able to draw on — especially without having to be mediated by profit-minded technology companies — to negotiate a precarious information landscape ready to prey on an iota of ignorance. Open-source bespoke models in particular could a long way by being free to use and having their information sources (e.g. “just thehindu.com”) restricted by default.
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.
After school, I studied mechanical engineering against my will. Most engineering students at the time did, and probably still do. Almost every Indian family not in the top 1% of the top 1% (it’s still a large number given the population) of society by wealth would like to get there. And to this day studying to be an engineer or a doctor seems like the safest bet to ensure families get onto and/or stay on that path.
My family was the same way in 2006. I insisted I wanted to study English literature but my folks were having none of it. When push came to shove, I yielded and said I’d study mechanical engineering only because my father had, too, 24 years earlier. The next four years turned out to be terrible. While it might seem straightforward enough from the outside, having to endure four years of something one is not at all interested in, especially when one is keenly aware that four years amounts to fully one-fifth of one’s life by that point, is corrosive to the spirit. It certainly made my future seem quite bleak to me, more so since I’d internalised my stream of poor grades to mean I was unfit to make it in this world.
Fortunately (such as it was), my folks relented in my third year and faced me with the freedom to decide what I’d do after engineering college. Thus I picked journalism, figuring I could combine my fondness for writing with the prospect of making some money, at least more than a career in English literature in India might have yielded. It remains among the best decisions I’ve ever made — but as it would later turn out, thanks in no small part to my background as a trained engineer.
A recurring motif I’ve observed in journalism as it is practised is that people who enter it with skills from a completely different field almost always have an advantage right away (while those who came in after having studied only journalism don’t). There are many ways to classify the activities and rituals of journalism and one is in terms of generalists and beat-experts. (I’m using ‘expertise’ here to mean the “temporary expertise” as Bora Zivkovic defined it.) I for example am a beat-expert: I focus on science, environment, and space journalism. I regularly commission articles from freelancers, among whom there are generalists and beat-experts as well. The generalists here will be comfortable covering a variety of topics (often as long the subject matter in each case isn’t too involved) whereas the beat-experts might be restricted to, say, RNA viruses, radio astronomy, solar power economics or number theory. Even at the newsroom level, there are generalist reporters who can hammer out news reports with all the right details in the right order and beat reporters who are better equipped to dive deep into specific topics.
Notably, however, beat-experts are generally valued more. There are a few reasons why. Beat-experts can if required competently put together a copy on a completely different beat; depending on the beat, they can be hard to come by; and — this is perhaps most important — by virtue of understanding a topic more deeply than others, they can communicate ideas and developments therein much better. It’s even better if through one’s work as a journalist one is able to bring together the “two cultures” à la CP Snow, that is to draw on insights and wisdom from both science and the humanities to inform the way one covers different subjects. Then one’s value will soar (assuming there are also editors or employers that are able to discern that value).
In the last week alone, in fact, my regret over having spent four years studying the physics and mathematics underlying engineering has been significantly mitigated by the particular events in the news. Air India flight AI171 crashed shortly after take-off in Ahmedabad, killing 241 of the 242 people onboard and concluding as one of India’s worst air disasters. To quote from my piece in The Hindu, “The engine design is an important reason for 787-8 aircraft’s higher fuel-efficiency per seat… The other factors contributing to this feature include the use of carbon composite structures of lower weight and low-drag aerodynamics. [Thus] a 787-8 aircraft burnt around 20% less fuel than earlier twinjet models of a similar size. This allowed the aircraft to undertake nonstop flights between cities with lower passenger traffic than that required to fill Boeing 777 or Boeing 747 aircraft.” Depending on what investigators find from the black box, there’s a nontrivial chance one of these three components was part of the cascade of problems leading up to the crash, and may in turn reveal the processual failures that preceded it.
The Axiom-4 commercial mission to the International Space Station was delayed for a fourth time before SpaceX called it off altogether following a gas leak onboard the rocket. The engineering factor here is less obvious, especially as it relates to a curious statement ISRO issued on June 13: that ISRO had recommended to SpaceX that the latter — the company that actually built the rocket for the mission and has flown it hundreds of times before — “carry out in-situ repairs or replacement and conduct a low-temperature leak test to validate system performance and integrity, before proceeding with launch clearance”. ISRO may not be lying but why, given how rockets are tested and certified for flight, would SpaceX care for ISRO’s opinion on the way forward here?
Last: Israel launched what it called a “preliminary” attack against Iran in order to dissuade it from pursuing its nuclear weapons programme. The attack followed a day after the International Atomic Energy Agency resolved that Iran had failed to comply with the terms of a 1974 agreement that, among other things, demanded the country be accountable at all times about the use of enriched uranium for civilian v. military applications. Now, I’ve been interested in nuclear news from around the world since a brief interaction with MV Ramana more than a decade ago, but my background in engineering — which I was now forced to dust off and retrieve from the recesses of my mind — certainly helped lubricate my comprehension of uranium enrichment. And that in turn revealed like little else could how rapidly Iran was advancing towards possessing nuclear warheads, how and why the IAEA safeguards are limited (and why Iran’s willing participation in inspectors’ surveillance is so important), and ultimately why Israel is so nervous.
Broadly, having a degree in X field and getting into Y field confronts you more often than otherwise with situations where you’re forced to learn on the fly, using your own mental models but often with models you’ve acquired learning something entirely different. In my case at least, this switch allowed me to think about certain ideas in ways that others weren’t. English literature followed by journalism could have had the same effect, although I only know that in hindsight. Just like I was forced to adapt engineering thinking to social issues and vice versa, English literature, which is after all a literary window into history, certain geographies, certain peoples, and the writers, readers, philosophers, and politicians among them, could allow one to compare/contrast whatever is happening today around us with what we know did in the past — an exercise I’ve always found to be illuminating.
(Edit: my friend Chitralekha Manohar helped me see that I also presumed a certain willingness to learn in order for an X-to-Y switch to manifest all its benefits. Chitralekha is a professional editor who runs The Clean Copy in Bengaluru. As she put it: “What I mean to say is, it’s very easy for an English literature student to find science writing by a scientist to be boring. But I really like it. And it might have something to do with a personal project to understand language and communication at a level more than is necessary to get the degree. It’s the recurring question of why some of us are like this…”.)
Engineering offers yet another lens through which to observe the world as long the observer doesn’t lose sight of everything else, especially the social, political, economic, etc. aspects. This is hardly new information but perhaps the corollary is: all these other lenses through which to observe the world may also offer an incomplete picture if they overlook what engineering is uniquely equipped to reveal. Of course I presume here a particular kind of engineering education: learning the basics of physics, chemistry, and mathematics followed by specialised training in the principles and techniques of the specific ‘branch’, i.e. mechanical, chemical, biotechnological, electrical, software, etc.
In fact, I grudgingly admit that even though I barely cleared all these papers, the residues of lessons on calculus, metrology, vector algebra, fuzzy logic, and so on have sufficed to maintain a picture in my mind of how the world works and, importantly, how it can’t, won’t or shouldn’t — although defining these three boundaries also demands political awareness and a sense of social justice. Thus for example one becomes able to spot pseudoscience but also understands that sometimes it needs to be treated with compassion if for no other reason than that it was born of the failure of science to meet particular human needs.
More broadly, materialism has historically exerted a sizeable influence on human societies, their institutions, and their aspirations, and continues to do so. As a result, to go back to the engineer and communist Chavez, “the social relations tying global industry together are obscured underneath an engineering methodology”. Even for its contemporary identity as a “bourgeois science”, then, the engineer’s enterprise is arguably necessary if we’re to retool human industry.
Closer home, I think I’m finally not resenting those four years.
NASA/SpaceX/Axiom will make their next attempt to launch the Axiom-4 mission to the International Space Station on June 11. Axiom Space’s tagline for the mission is “Realizing the Return”, alluding to three of the mission’s four crew members, including India’s Shubhanshu Shukla, will be taking their respective countries back to orbit after at least four decades (figuratively speaking).
Shukla of course has a greater mission to look forward to beyond Axiom-4: ISRO had purchased Shukla’s seat on the flight for a princely Rs 548 crore reportedly to expose him to the operational aspects of a human spaceflight mission ahead of Gaganyaan’s first crewed flight in 2027. So obviously there’s been a lot of hoopla over the Axiom-4 launch in India on TV channels and social media platforms.
Of course, the energy levels aren’t anywhere near what they were for Chandrayaan-3 and that’s good. In fact I’m also curious why there’s any energy vis-a-vis Shukla’s flight at all, at least beyond the nationalist circles. Axiom-4 is all NASA, Axiom, and SpaceX. Following Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s state visit to the US in early 2023, the White House issued a statement in which it said the two countries would strengthen “cooperation on human spaceflight, including establishing exchanges that will include advanced training for an Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO)/Department of Space astronaut at NASA Johnson Space Center”.
This astronaut turned out to be Shukla, and he will be joined by Prashant Nair — another of the four astronaut-candidates — as one of the two back-up crew members on Axiom-4. However, I don’t understand why this required Prime Minister Modi to meet US President Joe Biden. ISRO could have set Shukla and Nair up with the same opportunity by directly engaging with NASA, the way its Human Space Flight Centre did with Russia’s Glavcosmos in 2019 itself. More importantly, it’s not clear how Shukla’s participation in the Axiom-4 mission entails “cooperation on human spaceflight” between the US and India, which many commentators in India have been billing it as.
India has done nothing here other than purchase the seat on Axiom Space’s flight and fly Shukla and Nair over. In the same vein neither ISRO nor the overarching Department of Space, which is overseeing Gaganyaan’s development, have said what exactly Shukla (and Nair) stand to learn from Axiom-4, i.e. the justification for spending Rs 548 crore of the people’s money and how this particular mission was judged to be the best way to acquire the skills and knowledge Shukla (and Nair) reputedly will.
I’ve been following spaceflight news as a journalist as well as have held managerial jobs for a long time now to understand that Axiom-4 represents the sort of opportunity where one is very likely to learn something if one becomes involved and that Axiom-4 offers something to learn at all because of the articles I’ve read and lectures I’ve heard about why NASA and Roscosmos human spaceflight protocols are the way they are.
However, what exactly is it that the two astronaut-candidates will learn that isn’t post facto (so that there is a rationale for the Rs 548 crore), why was it deemed important for them to have to learn that (and who deemed it so), how will they apply it to Gaganyaan, and how exactly does the Axiom-4 mission represent India-US “cooperation”?
India’s space establishment hasn’t provided the answers, and worse yet seems to be under the impression that they’re not necessary to provide. The public narrative at this time is focused on Shukla and how his time has come. I sincerely hope the money represented more than a simple purchase, and I’m disappointed that it’s come down to hope to make sense of ISRO’s and the Department of Space’s decisions.
Ride-hailing platform Rapido is under fresh scrutiny from [Bengaluru] users for introducing a charge that penalises passengers if their ride is delayed by traffic. Several commuters in Bengaluru have flagged this new fee levied after 10 minutes of delay due to traffic as unfair and exploitative, especially when traffic congestion is beyond a passenger’s control.
…
Pavithra Rao, a resident of Hebbal, was travelling by auto from Shanthinagara to Palace Guttahalli on Monday when she was hit with an additional fee for being stuck in traffic. “While I don’t have a problem with fair compensation for drivers, charging customers for traffic seems like extortion. I had already selected a Rs 40 tip for my ride as it was peak hour. Traffic is not in my control, and I do not agree with paying extra for it,” she told The Hindu.
Rapido operates by levying from auto drivers a fee of up to Rs 29 per ride, with the precise rate varying by city. Similarly, Uber announced in February this year that it was shifting from being a commission-based to a subscription-based service for auto drivers à la Rapido, although it hasn’t said how much the daily fee is.
Imagine a scenario in which neither platform existed. In life before around 2015, which was such a time, auto drivers charged different amounts to the same people to travel the same route depending on whether they figured a person was a long-time resident of the city. They also charged (non-linearly) more if it was raining, too late in the day, the destination was in a population-wise less-dense area, and, of course, how much traffic there was.
Since the advent of apps like Rapido and Uber — and more so since they adopted a subscription-based model that gave auto drivers more agency as well as commuters the option to walk away from unaffordable rides without a penalty — many of the uncertainties inherent to pricing have vanished.
I regularly take autos to and from work, especially on hot or particularly wet days. Given the specifics of when I leave and the prevalence of one-way routes in each direction, it costs me X rupees to go, 1.2X rupees to return just before peak traffic time, and 1.4X during the peak, all on average. But every single time I’ve had to hail an auto directly (just before peak time), the driver has asked for at least 2.1X rupees. I’m certain thousands of other commuters have had the same experience.
Rapido, Uber, etc. are also constantly responding to location-specific demand. While this means surge pricing at times of higher demand, it has also meant lower base rates when demand is much lower than usual. In April-May in 2023, 2024, and 2025, for example, Rapido set a base cost of 0.75X for my house-to-work route at noon, when it’s been blazing hot outdoors. (I still pay X.)
If only because the apps limit the number of variables in determining the fare, and that this limitation has always only had the effect of lowering the cost of travel, most commuters in cities have an incentive to use them. Axiomatically, if a critical mass of commuters uses them, auto drivers have a strong incentive to use them as well. Note that the uncertainty is lower for auto drivers too (in the subscription-based service scenario): they’re spared the stress of haggling with every commuter and know the app has controlled the price for the length of the route to a precisely marked destination.
(There are many unscrupulous auto drivers out there and there are many unscrupulous commuters as well. I’ve heard from more than a few drivers so far stories of commuters skipping out on UPI payments at the end of trips, hailing autos but not cancelling when their plans change, expecting drivers to drop them off half a kilometre or more from the indicated destination for no extra fee, threatening to lodge complaints after paying less than the predetermined fare, using abusive language, and so on.)
This post benefited from feedback from Srividya Tadepalli.
Even though Rapido has come under the scanner for suggesting commuters ‘bid’ for autos at the time of hailing them via the app by adding extra amounts to the base cost, knowing that the base cost is X has allowed both auto drivers and me — and I imagine other commuters — to develop a shared sense of proportionality. Negotiations from that point are much easier to conduct: an addition of up to 0.4X may be okay for a base cost of X (in non-extenuating circumstances) but expecting an extra of X itself, if a driver is particularly unscrupulous, is grounds for a cuss word.
Further, both commuters’ and drivers’ willingness to use the apps means both parties avail a mechanism — albeit one provided by a third and private party — that sanctions them for misbehaviour. Drivers can rate commuters and vice versa. (Thus I don’t board autos with a rating lower than 4.6 stars.) Commuters can raise complaints with the app, although how each app platform chooses to deal with them isn’t fully clear.
In this scenario, Rapido has come under a second scanner for levying a traffic penalty from commuters. I think it’s fair to the extent that drivers are paying with an opportunity cost — the amount of time spent in traffic — for (i) a commuter’s decision to travel by auto with foreknowledge of traffic en route; (ii) commuters’ (collective) decision to use a particular app; (iii) the app’s decision to recommend a particular route, which is crucial when the passengers’ sense of safety is concerned; (iv) and whose pricing model is beyond both the commuters’ and the drivers’ control. Improving access to autos also means there will be more autos on the road, after all.
But I also agree that it’s unfair to the extent that commuters are expected to pay for the city’s urban planning choices and poor roads and the state government’s under-provision of public transport options and its decision to license so many motor vehicles.
In fact, the crux of the problem is what that extra ‘bid’ at the time of hailing a ride stands for. In my (considerable) experience taking autos in Chennai, drivers almost always ask or expect a few tens of rupees extra because they know a given route is traffic-heavy. Adding the extra cost at the time of hailing the app and later paying for being stuck in traffic is tantamount to commuters double-paying the ‘traffic tax’.
If the additional cost over the base fare is re-justified as a traffic tax to begin with, Rapido won’t have to revive that old source of uncertainty: how much the fare for a trip will ultimately be. The commuter and the driver will both go back to knowing the total eventual fare at the outset. This said, if the extra cost is explicitly related to the tax, and if the overarching goal is to help drivers opt for more rational fares for their rides, Rapido may also reconsider how it is determined rather than allowing it to be arbitrary. Even now, per The Hindu: “The app offers the first 10 minutes of delay during the ride without charge, but thereafter charges Rs 0.50 per minute up to Rs 30, according to the users.”
(If the point really is to rationalise prices, Rapido will also need to explain how it determines the base rate, considering the ‘deficit’ — depending on the drivers’ expectations — is left to commuters to meet.)
In fact, commuters presume more often than not that the government’s responsibility is to lower prices for them — whereas it’s really to rationalise prices for both commuters and drivers. And when the prices are abruptly and after a long time rationalised for drivers as well, the net effect on commuters’ expenses may resemble extortion.
But it’s not extortion: in fact the prices haven’t increased, at least according to the base rates on Rapido and Ola (and gave the impression of having dropped on Uber before February 2025). Between 2014 — when I was taking autos to make many of the same trips I am these days — and 2025, the fare for the X-valued route has remained X. Yet in this time petrol has become more expensive, access to loans more difficult, the cost of living higher, the competition greater, and the roads more congested. Commuters are typically loath to consider the true value of a ride for themselves, which can be higher, and fixate instead on the value for the driver, which they expect as if by default to be lower.
The bigger problem here is the city and the state being okay with chasing a particular slice of commuters towards privately operated ride-hailing apps whose pricing mechanisms are overall unclear and whose services are not infrequently undermined by their own profit motives. But at a more local scale, and especially if the administration doesn’t mediate the disputes between drivers and the apps, its attitude only risks pitting commuters against drivers.
Even if the original sin — i.e. the easy-going relationships between a city or state government and the operators of ride-hailing apps — is greater than some commuters or drivers, it’s also cynical and unfair on both the governments’ and the commuters’ part to allow the culture of commuters underpaying drivers, who have even less power, to persist just so commuters can afford their auto rides. If the government has taken its hand off the wheel, is it so surprising or bad that Rapido is helping drivers opt for more rational fares instead?
Russia began its full scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. On March 8, a poll conducted by independent survey organisations in Russia among a randomly selected cohort of 1,640 people reported around 46% supported the war, 13% supported it somewhat, 23% opposed it, and the rest were undecided or didn’t answer. But also by March 9, the Vladimir Putin government detained more than 13,000 anti-war protestors, with police brutally assaulting many of them and even persecuting some of their children.
In October 2023, Israel began its ongoing reprisal against Hamas by launching what quickly became the deadliest conflict in the history of Palestine. The Hindu reported on April 9 that surveys in Israel have found fewer than half of all Israelis support the Benjamin Netanyahu government’s military actions.
Both Russia’s and Israel’s wars have been asymmetric, protracted, and met with accusations of human-rights violations. They also highlight an issue with the instruments available for other countries to pressure them into drawing down.
Following Russia’s invasion, more than 4,000 scientists and science journalists in the country addressed a letter to Putin asking him to reconsider:
“Having unleashed the war, Russia has doomed itself to international isolation. … This means that we … will no longer be able to do our job in a normal way because conducting scientific research is unthinkable without cooperation and trust with colleagues from other countries. The isolation of Russia from the world means cultural and technological degradation of our country with a complete lack of positive prospects.”
Countries that don’t clearly and routinely demarcate their military and civilian enterprises — especially in research as well as in inchoate ‘sunrise’ sectors like spaceflight — are more liable to experience the consequences of their military aggression across both domains. Thus, Tel Aviv University has been criticised for helping develop defence technologies deployed by the IDF in Palestine and the Radzyner School of Law for helping develop legal justifications for Israel’s military excesses, so their international reputation is lower than that typically reserved for academic centres.
In another example, misplaced suspicions of an absence of demarcation prompted the US to impose an embargo on ISRO under the Missile Technology Control Regime in the 1980s when the organisation received a tranche of cryogenic engines from the Soviet Union. The action was perceived to be meritless and radicalised public opinion so much so that, as former ISRO chairman UR Rao wrote, “even voluntary organisations, private individuals and newspapers started expressing their outrage.”
The incident is recognised as an early impetus for Indian self-sufficiency in space technologies. While it’s behind us, industry leaders and policymakers have liked to cite the incident as an example of what India risks as long as it isn’t self-sufficient. Just as well, similar sanctions by foreign governments against the civilian populations of Israel or Russia could sow public resentment and this may either weaken domestic opposition to war — or it could lead to democratic dissent that forces the government to withdraw from the conflict.
But Putin is an absolutist in all but name and has responded to opposition to his foreign policies by curtailing civil rights and using physical violence. In Israel, as journalist Gidi Weitz has written, “It will soon be five years since the 11-0 court decision that allowed Netanyahu to be prime minister despite his criminal trial — and Netanyahu is closer than ever to overpowering the state that put him on trial.” If a state is no longer swayed by public opinion, no matter how overwhelming, and in fact threatens debilitating violence against dissidents, is it worth reconsidering what sanctioning non-combatants can be expected to achieve?
In mid-April I tried to argue that the answer is ‘yes’. But I’ve since changed my mind to ‘no’. The text that follows is my attempt to argue the ‘yes’, concluding with an explanation of what changed.
Shortly after Russia’s invasion, some science journals stopped accepting papers authored or co-authored by Russian scholars. One editor of a journal that instituted a temporary ban had said:
“Let me insist, the decision is not directed to Russian scientists … but to Russian institutions, which support (and are funded by) the Russian government. Besides, the Russian Academy of Science has not given any official message in support of the innocent victims nor against the violation of international law by the Russian government.”
The vast majority of scientific research in the world is funded by governments. Is this sufficient reason to censor research institutions in the event one of them goes to war?
The European Broadcasting Union said “the inclusion of a Russian entry in [Eurovision] would bring the competition into disrepute.” The Royal Opera House in London cancelled the summer season of the Bolshoi Ballet while all the major Hollywood studios suspended the release of their films in Russian cinemas. The European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) suspended Russia’s ‘observer’ status and said it would cooperate with international sanctions against the country.
Similarly, Jhumpa Lahiri, Arundhati Roy, and many other authors have pledged to boycott Israeli cultural institutions while many scientists and social scientists have called for their peers to desist from collaborating with their counterparts in Israeli research institutes. Maldives said Israelis are banned from visiting the archipelago.
Israel has resisted almost all forms of intervention available to foreign states to tame its hand even as its aggression in West Asia scaled deplorable new heights (with considerable support from the US, of course). As a result, in 2005, Palestinian civil society organisations called upon their counterparts worldwide “to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel,” i.e. to declare their stance against institutions believed to be complicit in state violence and force a reckoning on their part, and to render reputational and/or economic damage to the state and force it to change policy.
Yet the question of defining complicity under an autocratic regime remains, as does the risk of further alienating these organisations’ natural allies within the country — e.g. pro-Palestine students and activists who already lack political power — and stinting academic collaboration.
Russia’s and Israel’s leaders are obviously aware of the contributions of various human enterprises, including culture, sports, and research, to the construction and maintenance of national identity and pride. As scholarly publishing commentator Joseph Esposito asked in 2022, “What is the meaning of academic freedom when the academy is itself put to work for the benefit of an imperial power…?” Yet it is an important detail because what a de facto total war response to these two unilateral aggressors achieves is unclear.
What changed?
As I wrote the post, I spoke to a bunch of people to understand the value of the boycott, divest, sanction (BDS) movement. Two of them made arguments I couldn’t ignore.
One, my friend R, said they couldn’t “dissociate the ethics from the value of these institutions”. They were right in a sense. In my foregoing arguments I was concerned about how BDS would affect the people that Netanyahu and Putin didn’t give two hoots about anyway but R indicated that it had to be that those people also had to speak up against Israel’s and Russia’s actions in Palestine and Ukraine. They couldn’t be in favour of their aggressor-governments’ actions and also enjoy the benefit of doubts as to their safety.
Another friend, S, who is also I think better informed in this matter, advocated for what they called “smart sanctions”, which helped me understand R’s conditionality argument better. Here’s what they said in full, shared with their permission:
We need smart sanctions. I am against fools who target, say, an Anna Netrebko or a David Shulman. In any case during apartheid, nobody boycotted Alan Paton, Joe Slovo or Nadine Gordimer. BDS will work — which is why Trump and Germany will make it a crime to advocate it. Starmer, too. Israel is petrified of it. But it has to be smart. One can’t say “oh, let’s boycott Amazon.”
Let’s boycott all direct Israeli products and institutions and apologists of genocide but not Israelis who oppose the genocide. Shulman’s and Netrebko’s cases are black and white. No one should sign agreements or MoUs with Israeli universities, but Shulman should not be boycotted even if he teaches at Bar Ilan or Hebrew University. I would not accept a speaking invite at an Israeli university today. But if Haaretz or +972 magazine run a seminar I would attend.
Let’s take a grey case. X isn’t vocally anti-genocide but not pro either. Is boycotting X okay? I would do some research before I decide. Of course the media can’t do the boycotting. The media can say ‘we will not run defences of genocide or racism’. But if the Israeli ambassador agrees to give an interview then the media would have to really put him through his paces, Karan Thapar-style.
“How would you decide in X’s case if they’re noncommittal down the middle?,” I asked.
I will probably avoid having anything to do with them.
“The Hindu recently did a data story on an independent survey in Israel finding around 60% of people were against its war in Palestine,” I said. “This government isn’t swayed by public opinion and those who oppose/disagree are met with police violence. My misgivings about BDS arose in this context.”
Yes, so smart boycotting is needed. BDS as a blunt instrument is pointless. Let’s use an analogy: the world should find a way to boycott Hindutva — but obviously not Hindus!
Featured image: At a protest against Israel’s Gaza blockade and an attack on a humanitarian flotilla in Melbourne, June 5, 2010. Credit: Takver/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA.
