Becoming Glass

The alluring mystery of an amorphous solid   Glass is everywhere. You scroll over it on your phone, you drink from it, it’s in the spectacles perched on your nose and in the windows of your house. But how does it form? To picture that, imagine molten glass. As a liquid, it can flow; its […]

The Scientist and The Artist

How creative pursuits open up new vistas for scientific exploration   On a sunny day in the 1600s, in the picturesque town of Lombardy, Italy, an artist was busy at work in a hospital. This might sound strange, but it was a perfectly ordinary occurrence in the life of Leonardo da Vinci. The fifty-something-year-old was […]

‘You need special crazy people … to do science’

Yuri Kivshar is among the foremost authorities in metamaterials as well as nonlinear physics and nonlinear photonics, having made several pioneering contributions to these fields. The award-winning scientist is also a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, Optica, the American Physical Society, the International Society for Optics and Photonics, and the Institute of Physics. […]

Guests come first

A day in the life of Geetha Ramaswamy   A drizzle coats the pathway as Geetha walks steadily towards IISc’s Main Guest House (MGH). Today, she had commuted from her home in Benson Town to IISc by auto rickshaw. The previous evening’s downpour had left her scooter marooned on campus. She quickens her pace to […]