Scicomm
Say your house on the ground-floor is ankle deep in water – a common sight in most Indian cities during the monsoons. So you grab a pail and start throwing the water out in a four-step process: 1. You dip the empty pail into the water and fill it
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In a report published on June 14, 2018, NITI Aayog, a policy think-tank established by the Government of India, claimed that 21 Indian cities would run out of their supply of groundwater by 2020. The report, especially this statistic, went on to be widely cited as a figure representing
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It’s a strangely unsettling experience to read about research on an affliction that one has, to understand how scientists are obtaining insights into it using a variety of techniques that allow them to look past the walls of the human and into their mind, so to speak, with the
Scicomm
Yesterday, I learnt the answer is 'yes'. Gravitational waves can be gravitationally lensed. It seems obvious once you think about it, but not something that strikes you (assuming you're not a physicist) right away. When physicists solve problems relating to the spacetime continuum, they imagine it
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Posters for a new TV show called M.O.M. – The Women Behind Mission Mangal, produced by Ekta Kapoor and distributed by AltBalaji, look strange. One poster shows four women, presumably the show's protagonists, flanking a large rocket in the centre that appears to be a Russian Soyuz
Scicomm
Last week, Sophia Gad-Nasr, an astroparticle physicist and PhD student at University of California, Irvine, tweeted this question: https://twitter.com/Astropartigirl/status/1135533079852773376 To which I replied: https://twitter.com/1amnerd/status/1135534980971417600 Once you start thinking about it, this is a really mind-boggling thing. A part
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Simplicity is a deceptively simple thing. Recently, a scientist who was trying to explain something in general relativity to me did so in the following way: One simple way to understand … is as follows. Imagine that one sets up spherical polar coordinates, so that space is described by r, theta,
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I have an undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering but I've always struggled with thermodynamics. To the uninitiated, this means most of the knowledge specific to mechanical engineering over other branches remains out of my reach. I would struggle even with the simpler concepts, and perhaps one of the
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In 1907, a New Zealander named Ernest Rutherford moved from McGill University in Canada to the University of Manchester. There, he conducted a series of experiments where he fired alpha particles1at different materials. When he found that the beams deviated by about 2º when fired through air, he figured that
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You probably haven't heard of the Chladni effect but you've likely seen it in action. Sprinkle some grains of sand on a thin metal plate and play a violin bow across it, and you'll notice that the grains bounce around for a bit before
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This post was originally published on October 6, 2012. I recently rediscovered it and decided to republish it with a few updates. Geometric symmetry in nature is often a sign of unperturbedness, as if nothing has interfered with a natural process and that its effects at each step are simply
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The debate about whether it is fair for scientists to expect science journalists to let them proofread articles in which they are quoted before going to print has reared its head once more, at least on Twitter, following one round of exchanges last year. The central animus is the same: