Posing the Question It is well known that in physics research (and probably other areas as well, but I am not qualified to talk about...

This is a big and debated question, what with rising costs of education in several countries (parents often ask me about the ROI* for...

Theoretical physics consists of building mathematical models of physical systems. All such models are approximate to varying degrees,...

I am teaching Modern Physics this semester, a course I have taught three times before. The fun of re-teaching is many-sided: I get to...

I started this blog on Jan 17, 2023. The present post is a stocktaking of what this blog is and is not. What this blog is Not i) It is...

This post is about a choice people in physics often have to make: whether to pick theory or experiment for a career. Some comments based...

This post is a review of My Tale of Four Cities, the autobiography of the astrophysicist Jayant Narlikar. Narlikar was known, among other...

Over 13 years of professorial practice I have unfortunately received too many emails (including, but not limited to, from students and...

Happy New Year to all readers! This post takes the new year opportunity to celebrate the birth anniversary of the physicist S. N. Bose....

This blog is dedicated to a question a lot of undergraduates applying to graduate school in physics ask me before they have obtained any...

This post was inspired by discussions with my colleague Dr. Vivek Narayanan, following my last post on giving physics talks. Below, I...

This blog is about how to give a physics talk, designed as a resource for my students and postdocs (typically 10-20 minute talks), though...

This post was triggered by a recent paper on the arxiv, which suggested that aliens could be located by detecting the Hawking radiation...

I have covered the 2023 Physics Nobel earlier on this blog. Several platforms since then have pointed out the omission of Paul Corkum...

This is a post along the lines of my interest in animal behavior. I have been fascinated by octopuses (octopi is not the correct plural)...

Today's post is about the neutrino, the lightest particle with mass in the universe [the photon (which makes up light) and gluons (which...

In the recent weeks I have been reading up on Nikola Tesla, including some biographies [1,2] that had been lying around on my shelf, and...

In much of science - and certainly in theoretical physics - one can work by oneself. I have had some experience along this line, having...

Reading more recent authors writing on biology and medicine, like Siddhartha Mukherjee, Atul Gawande and Paul Kalanithi, I found one of...

Talking to some of my colleagues who work there, I recently became curious about the continent of Antarctica. This post is divided into...