Category Archives: Scicomm
Using AI to fight misinformation
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. … Continue reading
Posted in Scicomm
Tagged artificial intelligence, Bruce Schneier, ChatGPT o3, disinformation, fake news, journalism, open source, science journalism
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Four years
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 … Continue reading
Posted in Analysis, Life notes, Scicomm, Science
Tagged Air India, Axiom Space, Axiom-4, bourgeois science, CP Snow, engineering, engineering education, flight crash, Indian Space Research Organisation, International Atomic Energy Agency, Israel-Iran conflict, materialism, MV Ramana, Nick Chavez, nuclear weapons, science journalism, SpaceX, temporary expertise, two cultures
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The Berry phase of Kancha Gachibowli
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 … Continue reading
Posted in Op-eds, Scicomm
Tagged adiabatic process, afforestation, Berry phase, BR Gavai, deforestation, entropy, environment, ferromagnetism, Kancha Gachibowli, magnetic hysteresis, Supreme Court of India, Telangana
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Chasing solitons
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 … Continue reading
Posted in Scicomm, Science
Tagged Akhmediev breather, Bose-Einstein condensate, breather soliton, David Tong, Draupner wave, Erwin Schrodinger, fluid dynamics, Froude number, guitar string, Howell Peregrine, John Scott Russell, Kelvin wake, Korteweg-de Vries equation, Kuznetsov-Ma breather, nonlinearity, partial differential equations, Peregrine soliton, sine-Gordon breather, solitons, wave of translation
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Majorana 1, science journalism, and other things
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 … Continue reading
Posted in Scicomm
Tagged Alexei Kitaev, Ben Feringa, Cassandra Willyard, curiosity, curiosity-driven research, David Thouless, Duncan Haldane, Fraser Stoddart, Jean-Pierre Sauvage, John Kosterlitz, Majorana 1, Majorana fermions, Microsoft, National Science Day, Nobel Prizes, quantum computing, science journalism, The Hindu, topological order
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Learning with ChatGPT
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 … Continue reading
Posted in Scicomm
Tagged annealing, artificial intelligence, autonomous learning, bipolar junction transistors, ChatGPT, OpenAI, quenching, Weierstrass function
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Neural network supercharges model’s ability to predict phase transitions
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 … Continue reading
Posted in Scicomm
Tagged bulk modulus, classical density functional theory, density functional theory, fluid dynamics, free energy functional, interparticle interactions, Lennard-Jones system, Monte Carlo simulation, phase transition
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New pages for science from The Hindu
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 … Continue reading
Posted in Life notes, Scicomm
Tagged science journalism, Surf & Dive, The Hindu
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