Category: physics

My Response to Kaplan

Recently, anthropic co-founder Jared Kaplan, who has a background in physics, made the following comment, which was circulated on X. Below is the excerpt:

Below is my response:

A Remarkable Human Being = Remarkable Attribute(s) + Human Being

The first term in the RHS can be replaced by AI, but not the second term, for the following reasons.

  1. Machines, including AI, can surely change the way humans think, work and live, but it will be difficult to match human connection. A machine can enhance human life, but can it inspire a human life?
  2. People inspire people. Ask a child or any adult who inspires them. It will generally be a fellow human being. Machines add value, but human beings represent a valuable life. We utilize the former, and get inspired by the latter. It is this inspiration that propels people forward to do things that may further turn out to be remarkable. This contribution is not easily quantified, but it is hard to gauge a human life without inspiration.
  3. People like Ed Witten, Ashoke Sen and Terry Tao add value to humanity not only through their work and ideas, but their lives show that human beings can think and do something remarkable. It assures human beings that, individually, our species can do something good.
    Human beings derive meaning by interacting with fellow human beings and are inspired by the interaction. They also get inspired and draw meaning by studying people from the past. A human’s search for meaning and purpose is always in the background of other human beings. We are 8 billion plus, and it is hard to ignore each other.

It will be very unusual to find a serious student of theoretical physics who says I am inspired to live by ‘ChatGPT’.

Probably a young Kaplan, too, was inspired by a fellow human being! So, my question to Mr. Kaplan.
Who inspired you to do physics?

26 Jan – Indian Republic Day…and a few more

Happy Republic Day to all my fellow Indians !

26th Jan is also an important day in the history of physics/engineering –

 Oliver Hutchinson — subject of the earliest photograph of a television image, early 1926. National Media Museum (for image on right). Image from: The International Journal for the History of Engineering & Technology 84 (2): 227–47.

26th Jan 1926 – J.L. Baird “demonstrated television at his premises in Frith Street, London, to about forty people including members of the Royal Institution…..The Times was the only newspaper invited, and its reporter published the story on 28 January”. This exactly a 100 years today !

26th Jan 1939 – Niels Bohr publicly announced nuclear fission, specifically the splitting of the uranium atom.

26th Jan 1954 – Morris Tanenbaum et al. at Bell Laboratories showed a working silicon transistor.

References for further reading:

McLean, Donald F. 2014. “The Achievement of Television: The Quality and Features of John Logie Baird’s System in 1926.” The International Journal for the History of Engineering & Technology 84 (2): 227–47. https://doi.org/10.1179/1758120614Z.00000000048.

“Niels Bohr Announces the Discovery of Fission – Nuclear Museum.” n.d. Https://Ahf.Nuclearmuseum.Org/. Accessed January 26, 2026. https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/niels-bohr-announces-discovery-fission/.

“The Lost History of the Transistor.” 2004. IEEE Spectrum 41 (5): 44–49. https://doi.org/10.1109/MSPEC.2004.1296014.

Wikipedia. 2025. “History of the transistor.” December 22. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=History_of_the_transistor&oldid=1328866801.

C V Raman and long term thinking

A small sampling of Raman’s publication. These papers are related to light scattering and form the foundation on which he made his famous discovery. Raman wrote more than 400 research papers in his lifetime (apart from monographs, lectures and public talks). Writing such a series of papers on a particular topic can be observed throughout his career.

A note to young scholars: intellectual monuments are built this way: thought after thought, day after day, paper after paper. Never underestimate what can be achieved with consistent, honest effort.

Brillouin on Sommerfeld

“Everybody wondered (and still wonders) why the Stockholm committee systematically ignored Sommerfeld’s pioneer work in modern physics. Such an omission is actually impossible to understand.”

Leon Brillouin, in the foreword of his book WAVE PROPAGATION AND GROUP VELOCITY (1959)

Brillouin further mentions the teachers who taught him, and rates Sommerfeld among the best:

“I had the great privilege of attending, as a student, lectures given by some prominent physicists, such as H. A. Lorentz, H. Poincaré, and P. Langevin. But I was especially impressed by Sommerfeld’s mastery as a teacher.“

Saha and Bose translate Einstein

In physics, the general theory of relativity is one of the most remarkable achievements. It has turned out to be one of the most profound theories in the history of physics. In 1916, Albert Einstein proposed this theory, and it was confirmed in 1919.

Right after this confirmation, around 1920, two Indian gentlemen named Satyendranath Bose and Meghnad Saha translated Einstein’s German work into English. What you are seeing as an image is the remarkable book Principles of Relativity, containing the original papers by Einstein and Minkowski. This translation was done by M.N. Saha and S. N. Bose, who were then at the University College of Science, Calcutta University. It was published in 1920 by the University of Calcutta.

The book also contains a historical introduction by Mahalanobis, the celebrated statistician, although he was originally trained as a physicist himself. This historical introduction is itself quite remarkable.

If you look at the table of contents of this book, you will find the following:

  1. A historical introduction.
  2. The Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies, which is an important paper and is necessary for understanding what follows.
  3. A short biographical note on Albert Einstein was written by Saha.
  4. The Principle of Relativity, mainly the Minkowski papers, translated by Saha, along with an appendix.
  5. The General Principles of Relativity, Einstein’s epoch-making 1916 paper, translated by S. N. Bose, followed by notes by these gentlemen.

The historical introduction discusses the evolution of ideas that led to the fruition of the general theory of relativity. This turned out to be one of the most important expositions of the general theory of relativity, soon after the emergence of the theory and its subsequent confirmation by Eddington through his famous solar eclipse expedition. This is a remarkable document, and it is available on the Internet Archive.

Raman in a marriage reception

C.V. Raman was obsessed with science, and he was actively thinking about research problems even on odd occasions when he was supposed to be socializing. Nagendra Nath, in 1971, recounts1:

In November 1969, he and Lady Lokasundari Raman were graciously pleased to attend the marriage reception of my daughter. Professor drew me aside outside the reception hall and told me for nearly half-an-hour that his latest problem was to give a proper theory of earthquakes. The present theories were based on models which were highly deficient as they did not properly take into account the shape of the earth and the wave nature of the disturbance.

Nearly half an hour !!
Imagine the condition of Nagendra Nath :-)

  1. Nath, N. S. Nagendra. ‘My Professor’. Current Science 40, no. 9 (1971): 234–35. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24074207.
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Hedi Born’s picture

This is Hedi Born (wife of Max Born) sending a picture with a note to Lokasundari Ammal (CV Raman’s wife) in 1937.

Max Born and his family spent some time at IISc, Bangalore, in 1935-36.

Amazing to see how communication channels have changed, but the human urge to communicate remains the same..

picture source: (Venkataraman, G.; Journey into Light: Life and Science of C.V. Raman. Indian Academy of Sciences, 1989. p. 364)