Category Archives: Science
Sharks don’t do math
From ’Sharks hunt via Lévy flights’, Physics World, June 11, 2010: They were menacing enough before, but how would you feel if you knew sharks were employing advanced mathematical concepts in their hunt for the kill? Well, this is the … Continue reading
Posted in Scicomm, Science
Tagged animal foraging, Brownian motion, Gaussian distribution, Lévy flight, probability distribution function, random walk, sharks, Wiener process
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Enfeebling the Indian space programme
There’s no denying that there currently prevails a public culture in India that equates criticism, even well-reasoned, with pooh-poohing. It’s especially pronounced in certain geographies where the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) enjoys majority support as well as vis-à-vis institutions that … Continue reading
Posted in Analysis, Science
Tagged Axiom Space, Axiom-4, Bharatiya Janata Party, Board of Control for Cricket in India, Chandrayaan 2, Covaxin, Department of Space, Election Commission of India, Falcon 9, HUNOR, Indian Space Research Organisation, K Sivan, NASA, political capture, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, S Somanath, Shubhanshu Shukla, SpaceX, V Narayanan, VG Somani, Vikram lander
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Technical foundation for a muon collider laid at J-PARC
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 … Continue reading
Posted in Scicomm, Science
Tagged electron-positron collider, ionisation laser, J-PARC, Large Hadron Collider, linear collider, muon collider, muons, proton-proton collider, radiofrequency cavity, radiofrequency quadrupole, synchrotron radiation, thermal energy, transverse emittance
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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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India’s next man in space
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 … Continue reading
On the BDS movements against Russia and Israel
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 … Continue reading
Posted in Analysis, Op-eds, Science
Tagged Alan Paton, Anna Netrebko, anti-war protest, authoritarianism, BDS Movement, Benjamin Netanyahu, civil society, David Shulman, Gaza, Gidi Weitz, Israel, Joe Slovo, Nadine Gordimer, palestine, public opinion, Radzyner School of Law, russia, Tel Aviv University, Vladimir Putin
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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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“Who are we?”
From ‘‘The physics community has never split like this’: row erupts over plans for new Large Hadron Collider’, The Guardian, March 29, 2025: However, if the FCC were given the go-ahead, it could lock up funds for decades and end … Continue reading
Posted in Analysis, Science
Tagged CERN, Future Circular Collider, Large Hadron Collider, Nirmalya Kajuri, particle physics, Sabine Hossenfelder, The Guardian
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