Featured on this blog earlier for its powerful narration of the life and science of India’s celebrated scientist triad Bose-Raman-Saha, The Quantum Indians has now won India’s National Film Award as the best educational film of 2013. Read more
Why’s the ‘boson’ of Higg’s boson written in lower case? Why hasn’t the Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose, after whom the celebrated particle is half named, not been awarded the Nobel Prize yet [1, 2, 3, 4]? Why isn’t India, despite her traditional strength in particle physics, not an associate member of the mother of all particle physics labs CERN? Read more
Watching the live webcast from CERN and the press conference thereafter, I could only sigh: Wish I were there today to witness history being made in particle physics. The rest of the day went in reading my colleague Geoff Brumfiel’s live blog from CERN and his witty analysis of the discovery of Higgs boson and, of course, the umpteen serious and funny takes on Twitter. Read more
The Higgs fever caught on with the media, social networking sites and physicists across the world this week. A dear friend Archana Sharma, staff physicist at CERN, was bubbling with obvious excitement. Will they, won’t they announce the big thing? And then the couched announcement of having sighted glimpses of Higgs boson sent the internet viral. She wrote a piece for Nature India soon after the announcement which emphasised that scientists still need more data to say “Eureka”. Read more