Tag Archives: Richard Feynman
Lighting the way with Parrondo’s paradox
In science, paradoxes often appear when familiar rules are pushed into unfamiliar territory. One of them is Parrondo’s paradox, a curious mathematical result showing that when two losing strategies are combined, they can produce a winning outcome. This might sound … Continue reading
Posted in Analysis, Scicomm
Tagged Brownian motion, Brownian ratchet, cancerous tumours, chemotherapy, Feynman-Smoluchowski ratchet, game theory, kinesin, low-dose metronomic, maximum tolerated dose, myosin, Parrondo's paradox, randomness, Richard Feynman
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An Upanishadic lesson for modern science?
Do the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads lack the “baggage of biography” – to borrow Amit Chaudhuri’s words – because we don’t know who the authors, outside of the mythology, are or – as Chaudhuri writes in a new essay … Continue reading
Posted in Analysis, Culture, Science
Tagged Amit Chaudhuri, Bhagavad Gita, causality, creation, creator, disinterestedness, Eastern Philosophy, genius, genius construct, Gita Chadha, Immanuel Kant, impersonality, Isa Upanishad, Kena Upanishad, Lawrence M Krauss, modern science, New Critical, Philosophy of Science, power, Richard Feynman, scientific genius, The Life of Science, TS Eliot, Upanishads, Western philosophy
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To read or not a bad man’s book
The Life of Science team uploaded the video of their webinar on July 10, about the construct of the genius in science, on YouTube on July 14. Please watch it if you haven’t already. I had also blogged about it. … Continue reading
Posted in Culture, Science
Tagged #MeToo, Enrico Fermi, genius, Geoffrey Marcy, Georges Lemaître, Gita Chadha, Jeffrey Epstein, Lawrence Krauss, Richard Feynman, scientific genius, The Life of Science
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Redeeming art v. redeeming science
Recently, someone shared the cover of a soon to be released book, entitled The Physics of Climate Change, authored by Lawrence M. Krauss and expressed excitement about the book’s impending publication and the prospect of their reading it. I instinctively … Continue reading
Posted in Analysis, Culture, Science
Tagged diversity, Enrico Feri, Erik Shapiro, Geoffrey Marcy, Georges Lemaître, Jeffrey Epstein, Lawrence Krauss, passing the trash, Richard Feynman, separate art from artist, separate scholar from scholarship, sexual harassment, social anthropology
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Freeman Dyson’s PhD
The physicist, thinker and writer Freeman Dyson passed away on February 28, 2020, at the age of 96. I wrote his obituary for The Wire Science; excerpt: The 1965 Nobel Prize for the development of [quantum electrodynamics] excluded Dyson. … … Continue reading
Posted in Op-eds, Science
Tagged Cornell University, doctorate, Freeman Dyson, Institute for Advanced Study, Julian Schwinger, Nobel Prize, PhD, privilege, quantum electrodynamics, Richard Feynman, scientific publishing, scientific research, Shin'ichiro Tomonaga, Vannevar Bush
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Two sides of the road and the gutter next to it
I have a mid-October deadline for an essay so obviously when I started reading up on the topic this morning, I ended up on a different part of the web – where I found this: a piece by a journalist … Continue reading
Posted in Culture, Op-eds
Tagged bias, Bob Woodward, Donald Trump, ignorance, Jay Rosen, Kary Mullis, Nobel Prizes, objectivity, Omar Kelly, Poynter, Richard Feynman, Surjit Bhalla, Swarajya Mag, The New York Times, victim-blaming, victimisation, view from nowhere, women in STEM
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Unseating Feynman, and Fermi
Do physicists whitewash the legacy of Enrico Fermi the same way they do Richard Feynman? Feynman disguised his sexism as pranks and jokes, and writers have spent thousands of pages offering his virtues as a great physicist and teacher as … Continue reading
Posted in Op-eds, Science
Tagged Enrico Fermi, feminism, Leo Szilard, nuclear weapons, Richard Feynman, science and society, sexism, Szilard petition
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Chromodynamics: Gluons are just gonzo
One of the more fascinating bits of high-energy physics is the branch of physics called quantum chromodynamics (QCD). Don’t let the big name throw you off: it deals with a bunch of elementary particles that have a property called colour … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Electromagnetism, gluons, Hunter S. Thompson, Large Hadron Collider, particle physics, quantum chromodynamics, quarks, Richard Feynman, strong nuclear force
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Dude, where’s my comma?
(Update: Includes Gopal Gandhi’s reply.) Gopalkrishna Gandhi’s lead in The Hindu, ‘An open letter to Narendra Modi‘, was a wonderful read – as if from the Keeper of the Nation’s Conscience to the Executor of the Republic’s Will. I’m not interested … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged commas, Gopalkrishna Gandhi, Richard Feynman, simple language, writing
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Ramblings on partons
When matter and anti-matter meet, they annihilate each other in a “flash” of energy. Usually, this release of energy is in the form of high-energy photons, or gamma rays, which are then detected, analysed, and interpreted to understand more of … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Bjorken scaling, Drell-Yan process, Large Hadron Collider, parton, Richard Feynman
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