Ayushphy Cosmological

One of the coolest things I heard from Shiraz Minwalla about how he actually learned to think like a theoretical physicist: In college, he felt completely lost when he started general relativity. "I remember going to my professor and asking him, I read that the distance between Andromeda Galaxy and our galaxy is whatever, two million light years. What does it mean? What does it mean given gendered relativity is so uncertain? What does it mean? And I felt really unsure. And then I started reading Landau Lifshitz The last part of Classical Theory of Fields is on general relativity. It was just so great." Much more in the full episode.

Full episode: youtu.be/k9JTP_Y12xA?si…

India’s fast breeder reactor was supposed to arrive decades ago. Even Vikram Sarabhai wrote that reactors like this should be operational by the 1980s. 45 years later, the first one is finally online. But according to theoretical physicist Suvrat Raju, the bigger question is: after all the delay and cost, will it meaningfully change India’s energy future at all? That’s the uncomfortable part of the conversation we rarely have.

@nssdatta 👀👀

ON DUTY 👀

Suvrat Raju on how the Minister of Science secretly alters India’s highest science awards: "The committee's recommendations had been altered by the Minister of Science and Technology. What is more, the Minister didn't even have enough respect to tell the committee that they were going to modify the decision." The government had promised transparency and convened a final selection committee of top scientists to pick the winners. But the committee wasn't actually making the final decisions. "They didn't even bother to have the decency to tell the committee that look, your decisions are going to be changed and it's actually the minister who's going to make the decision." Because it was done in secret, members of the committee were accidentally congratulating candidates whose names had been dropped. "That is why it was a big shock even to members of the committee."

@imharshitpathak Sir🙏

bro, single handedly raising the bars !!!!!! keep up the great work @ayushphy bhaiya. ❤️❤️

@42_gravity 🙏

Suvrat is a really good person to talk to. This candid podcast really asks some tough Qs other than physics. good job @ayushphy youtu.be/k9JTP_Y12xA?si…

Episode with Prof Suvrat Raju is out now. We discussed: - Political interference in scientific institutions - Why LLMs still can’t generate new concepts - AI and theoretical physics - The academic publishing cartel - India’s nuclear program - Science, power, and truth Really enjoyed this conversation. Learned a lot while recording it.

If this doesn’t give you goosebumps you’re not a physicist

Happy Birthday, Dr. Feynman.

@AtharvDubey206 🔥

Over the past 2 months I built some cool stuff. 1. I made myself a smart watch, based on a Esp 32 C6 it can theoritically also be used to launch several types of DOS attacks. I tried doing some (in a controlled enviorment) so far no success still trying

Full episode: youtu.be/UFT1R4JZCMM?si…

One of the coolest things I heard from Shiraz Minwalla about how he actually learned to think like a theoretical physicist: In college, he felt completely lost when he started general relativity. "I remember going to my professor and asking him, I read that the distance between Andromeda Galaxy and our galaxy is whatever, two million light years. What does it mean? What does it mean given gendered relativity is so uncertain? What does it mean? And I felt really unsure. And then I started reading Landau Lifshitz The last part of Classical Theory of Fields is on general relativity. It was just so great." Much more in the full episode.

Would you give up on string theory?

@gareebscientist Nice vid GS

I visited OLA's Cell factory, saw how the cell is made and interview/converse their Factory manufacturing lead, cell R&D lead and COO with tech questions .... the conversation was pretty interesting to say the least. You can make your own opinion. I was impressed. Link below.

Professor Shiraz Minwalla on what string theory actually is and why physicists didn't just wait for better experiments: "You give up. You say, let's wait 1,000 years, then we'll have more experiment. And that may be a rational thing to do. But that's not how humans are." So instead toy models. Find any consistent quantum theory of gravity you can construct. And consistency turns out to be a brutal filter: "We take all the spectrum of particles in string theory, keep all the other masses fixed, change the mass of one. Just doing that would make the theory become nonsense." "String theory is an attempt to find any consistent quantum mechanical theory that reduces to gravity at long distance." And along the way AdS/CFT, black hole entropy, and something nobody expected: "Who would have thought that the best way to do a calculation in hydrodynamics would actually be to do a calculation in gravity? But it's true."

Full episode: youtu.be/UFT1R4JZCMM?si…

If the Standard Model is this successful, maybe there’s nothing new? Shiraz argues that’s clearly not the case. Dark matter isn't just a placeholder in an equation; we can actually map it out and see it clump. And while you can model dark energy phenomenologically, trying to derive that number from a quantum theory is "extremely unnatural."

A case for depth + breadth

String theory PhDs at one of India's best institutes know almost nothing about particle physics or condensed matter. Prof. Shiraz Minwalla on the one thing he'd change about graduate school in India 👇