The lensing of waves is helping us look deeper into space Arthur Eddington was growing anxious. It was nearly 2 pm on 29 May 1919. The British astronomer was standing on a plateau overlooking the Atlantic Ocean in the west African island of Príncipe. A rare solar eclipse, not seen in 500 years, […]
Tag: Physics
Vikram Sarabhai’s years at IISc
2019 is the birth centenary of Vikram Sarabhai, the founder of India’s space programme, who was born in Ahmedabad on 12 August 1919. Sarabhai, pursuing his studies at Cambridge when WWII broke out, returned to India to work with CV Raman at IISc, where he also met Homi J Bhabha. In these excerpts from her […]
KP Sinha, ‘a vortex of ideas’
KP Sinha, a versatile physicist whose association with IISc stretches back almost fifty years, will turn 90 in July 2019 KP Sinha is an unusual man. Getting one PhD is hard work, but he chose to do two. And rare though it is for theoretical physicists to work in more than one field, Sinha mastered […]
Graphene and Its Superlative Properties
Amogh Kinikar, who did his Master’s in Physics at IISc, on why graphene is a fascinating material In 2012, I found myself in the Department of Physics at IISc, holding a five-and-a-half feet tall, extremely top-heavy object called a dip stick. It was a long narrow vacuum chamber that could be inserted into vessels containing […]