Is it dead? Is it alive? Surely it has to be either, right? Consider a cat in a box – let’s call him Meownstein. Along with him inside the box, there is a radioactive sample (which can decay to produce radiation) and a poison vial with a radiation sensor. If the sample decays, the […]
Designing an electric future A quiet hum is redefining mobility. More than a century ago, the rhythm of modern travel was measured by hoofbeats – the rhythmic sound of iron shoes on cobbled streets. Then came the gas-chugging Internal Combustion (IC) engines, whose roars marked a revolution of speed and power. Now, mankind stands […]
Tracing the history of the earliest neural network The year was 1958 when the United States Navy unveiled what they called a thinking machine – a perceptron. It was an IBM 704 equipped to “react” to and learn from its inputs. The giant computer simulator was the brainchild of Frank Rosenblatt, a scientist […]
Suhas Mahesh is a man of many talents. He is a material physicist working on building self-driving labs using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to accelerate materials discovery. A Rhodes Scholar currently working with Schmidt Sciences in New York, he also nurses a love for languages, particularly ancient ones like Sanskrit and Prakrit. He has published a […]
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 […]
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. […]
A brief history of IISc hostels To the south-west of the IISc Main Building, a stone’s throw away stands a rather squat piece of architecture. The ground floor construction is of grey-brown rock, cut and piled in rectangles of various sizes. The first floor is painted with what must have been a shade of […]
The scientist for social development One morning in the early 1940s, 12-year-old Amulya Reddy received a letter from his uncle and hero, CGK Reddy, a marine engineer and political activist. The letter, written on a rough piece of paper, had arrived from the Madras jail where CGK was imprisoned for his anti-British activities. In […]
How its understanding has changed through the years The year was 1919. May was approaching and so was graduation season at the University of California, Berkeley in the USA. A young undergraduate student was in deep distress. One of his professors, William Bray, had assigned a paper to be submitted before the end of […]
