Our egos would be offended if told that we are simple, easily manipulated creatures. Despite what cinema would have us believe, the reality is, it would take little work to break any human. (It also does not take much to induce an average person do the nasty job ( Read more... )

I read the following book yesterday:
Games Indians Play: Why we are the way we are, by V. Raghunathan. It was interesting and I recommend it to Indians and non-Indians alike ( Read more... )

Introduction

Here, we consider the case of a charged particle moving in an electro-magnetic (EM) field.

We have already done all the conceptual heavy-lifting with our previous post, and so the maths here, should be mostly review for you. In any case we will do a quick, but complete derivation here. Why? Because playing with this stuff is fun ( Read more... )

Introduction

A “gauge” is some description of a physical system. Typically, there could be an infinite number of gauges, all of them describing the same system.

Because we could work with any one of them and it would not affect the Physics of a system, we choose the simplest ones and play with them in order to figure out hidden properties of the ( Read more... )

 
Introduction

Last time, we formulated an abstract way of looking at the world, through the Principle of Least Action.
But, apart from unifying all of Physics under one equation, it was not clear what the benefit of such
an abstraction was. Tonight we get to see this, by studying an amazing result called Noether's theorem.

Noether's ( Read more... )

The BBC has been criticized for not calling the perpetrators of the Bombay massacre as ``terrorists''.

I think the criticism might have a point, but for the following reasons:

• The BBC has been consistent with it's policy of refusing to use the T-word. They refused to use it during 9/11. Similarly, they edited out the word during their coverage of ( Read more... )

Abstract

All laws of Physics can be re-written into a common form - The Principle of Least Action. This is exemplified in the Euler-Lagrange differential equation. Here, we talk about said principle and present a derivation for the equation.
( 0. Preface )

For some reason, a combo of reading about the successful launch of Chandrayaan (Hurray, India!), & aveerah's entry, suddenly caused me to remember the following:

This is a beautiful incident regarding Wittgenstein (BTW, I'd love to know who your favorite philosopher is? He's mine! :)), that Richard Dawkins mentioned in one of his talks. I think some of ( Read more... )

Graduate Students are an unusual bunch. Nobody enjoys feeling dumb, but it's an especially sensitive problem in academia ( Read more... )

( Read more... )