So, quantum computers! These are what we need to talk about right now. Classical computers — the ones you see around — however fast and strong you think they are, have some fundamental limitations . They process information using binary bits. The value of each classical bit at any point of time is either 0 or 1 — hence binary.
Scrambled Eggs, Quantum Computers, and Black Holes: Part Two
If you know what scrambled eggs are, you already have some intuition for what scrambling of information is all about. Preparing scrambled eggs requires you to stir, beat and mix eggs together while heating up the pan. And loosely speaking, this is what happens to any object that falls into a black hole. The object (and with it, the information it contains) is broken into many, many fragments that get scattered all over.
Scrambled Eggs, Quantum Computers, and Black Holes
Your Sunday morning breakfast of scrambled eggs with baked beans never makes you think of black holes. Well, to begin with, you may not be a fan of scrambled eggs. And then, there is a good chance that you don’t think about black holes, anyway — over breakfast or otherwise. In any case, now that you are here, you wouldn’t mind me talking about them a bit, would you? I guess not. So, here we go.
Marmalade Skies: How the Urban Skyglow is Killing Amateur Astronomy
While this may not exactly be true globally, at least in an Indian context the urban skyglow has pushed the amateur astronomy scene to a state of almost complete irrelevance.
Celebrating the Cosmos
Standing under the night sky, humans for long have been staring at the stars; thinking and questioning about the vast expanse of universe that surrounds them. This curiosity, innate to all of us, has been the driving force behind the evolution of human knowledge.
Goodbye, Sir Vidia
I was probably fourteen, when rummaging through the bookshelf at home, I chanced upon a white Penguin paperback by a certain V. S. Naipaul. If it weren’t for its rather amusing name and a funny-looking cover, I would have kept A House for Mr Biswas back on the shelf. Biswas is regarded as Sir Vidia Naipaul’s first work to have achieved worldwide acclaim, and so it was for me — the first of Naipaul’s works that I read.
ICTS at Ten!
Entering the second decade of its existence, the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (ICTS-TIFR) is organising a three-day-long celebratory scientific gathering ICTS at Ten starting today. The speakers include some of the most illustrious researchers from the fields of astrophysics and cosmology, string theory and quantum gravity, mathematics,…
Chaos and Creation in the Bard’s Backyard
The nice thing about chaos is that it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to think of a system that will display some sort of chaos. The not-so-nice thing about chaos is that it makes it very, very difficult to study such systems.
Why I Loved Fluid Dynamics as a Kid (and Still Do)
Like many other Physics undergraduate/graduate students, my first introduction to Prof. Julia Yeomans was as the author of the brilliantly written textbook Statistical Mechanics of Phase Transitions. Prof. Yeomans is a theoretical physicist at the University of Oxford who does some pretty cool stuff involving bacterial swimmers and water drops on hydrophobic surfaces among many other things.
Adieu, Maryam…
To Maryam Mirzakhani, one of the finest mathematicians of our times, who passed away yesterday.
Elementary Penguins 