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Notes on the NIF nuclear fusion breakthrough
My explainer/analysis of the US nuclear fusion breakthrough was published today. Some stuff didn’t make it to the final draft for space and tone constraints; I’m publishing that below. 1. While most US government officials present at the announcement of the NIF’s results, including the president’s science advisor Arati Prabhakar (and with the exception of energy […]
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Skyward light, wayward light
This is welcome news: … even if it’s curious that three of the four officially stated reasons for designating this ‘dark sky reserve’ aren’t directly related to the telescopes, and that telescopes had to come up in the area for the local government, the Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA) and whoever else to acknowledge that […]
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Science’s humankind shield
“Science benefits all of humanity,” they say.
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The strange beauty of Planck units
What does it mean to say that the speed of light is 1? We know the speed of light in the vacuum of space to be 299,792,458 m/s – or about 300,000 km/s. It’s a quantity of speed that’s very hard to visualise with the human brain. In fact, it’s so fast as to practically be instantaneous […]
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Getting rid of the GRE
An investigation by Science has found that, today, just 3% of “PhD programs in eight disciplines at 50 top-ranked US universities” require applicants’ GRE scores, “compared with 84% four years ago”. This is good news about a test whose purpose I could never understand: first as a student who had to take it to apply to journalism programmes, […]
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A ‘quantum consciousness’ absurdity at IIT Mandi
As you go downward, inward, smaller and smaller, you get more vast conscious experience. This is the idea in Indian knowledge systems. At the bottom of it, or the very base of it, at the source, is Brahman. My point is that this is actually very consistent with what we’re learning about how consciousness may […]
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The curious case of the blue coloured ice cream
From an unusual ice cream colour to quantum mechanics to ecology to semiconductors to gastroporn.
