VISMAYA: History & Philosophy of Physics

  • Unified view of Physics: a discussion

  • Rayleigh – criticize and resurrect..

    Classic and Classical.. Rayleigh..

    Criticism and resurrection, Rayleigh style..

    I propose to point out what I conceive to be the error which vitiates his reasoning, and afterwards to show that, after all, his theory is substantially correct.

    Reference: Note on the explanation of Coronas, as given in Verdet’s Legons d Optique Physique, and other works; London Math. Soc. Proc. 11. pp. 267—269, 1871

  • A bird’s-eye view of physics research

    Most of the research in physics starts with a question or multiple questions. These questions can have motivation either in curiosity or in utility, and the source of questions can be an observation or a concept that has already been studied. Once the question gets clear, one will have to choose a method to address it. In physics (and generally in science), the process of answering this question takes a three-fold approach. They are:
    – theory
    – computation
    – experiments
    There is no specific order for the three processes defined, and many times, all three can overlap with each other. They also feed each other and can form the basis for critical analysis and cross verification. These three processes combine to give an answer. This answer, a majority of times, is a tentative one. It will be a special case of the question defined. This means the tentative answers can further lead to more questions, and the whole process recycles.
    What I have defined here is not only applicable to physics, but also to a majority of intellectual pursuits in natural sciences. Of course, this is one framework of thinking, and there can be other ways to define research in physics.

  • Conversation with Ashutosh Jogalekar

    Ashutosh Jogalekar is a scientist, science writer, and historian of science based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He develops agentic AI frameworks for science at Microsoft and is a Scientist in Residence at the Oppenheimer Project, where he studies emerging technology risks. Trained as a chemist, his interests span artificial intelligence, biotechnology, drug discovery, the history and philosophy of science, and U.S. history. He is also the author of the long-running Curious Wavefunction blog and has written for Nature, Scientific American, Fast Company, and the Lindau Meeting of Nobel Laureates.

    In this episode, we discuss his work, writings, various interests and his friendship and interaction with Freeman Dyson and many others.

    References:

    The Curious Wavefunction. n.d. Accessed 11 July 2026. http://wavefunction.fieldofscience.com/.

    X (Formerly Twitter). ‘Ash Jogalekar (@curiouswavefn) / X’. 9 July 2026. https://x.com/curiouswavefn.

    ‘Ash Jogalekar | LinkedIn’. Accessed 11 July 2026. https://www.linkedin.com/in/ash-jogalekar-0649934/.

    Jogalekar, Ash. ‘The Curious Wavefunction | Ash Jogalekar | Substack’. 15 June 2026. https://medchemash.substack.com/.

    ‘Ash Jogalekar’. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, n.d. Accessed 11 July 2026. https://thebulletin.org/biography/ash-jogalekar/.

    ‘Ashutosh Jogalekar – 3 Quarks Daily’. Accessed 11 July 2026. https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/author/ashutoshjogalekar.

    ‘‪Ashutosh Jogalekar‬ – ‪Google Scholar‬’. Accessed 11 July 2026. https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=voMehLQAAAAJ&hl=en.

    Scientific American. ‘Stories by Ashutosh Jogalekar’. Accessed 11 July 2026. https://www.scientificamerican.com/author/ashutosh-jogalekar/.

  • What if….videos came before writing?

    Hypothetical questions:

    1. If the video format had evolved before writing, would humans still have invented writing?
    2. Even if they invented writing after video, would they still use it as the main medium of information transmission?
    3. How would LLMs have evolved in a video-dominated transmission?

  • Criticism – just a science thing..

    Conclusion of a review paper:

    Reference:

    Beyer, Robert T. ‘Radiation Pressure—the History of a Mislabeled Tensor’. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 63, no. 4 (1978): 1025–30. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.381833.

  • The 5 Maxwellians

    One of the underappreciated facts is the amount of work that people did to bring Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism to the form that we use today. Among many enthusiastic researchers, five names often come into the picture, and they are Poynting, Heaviside, Fitzgerald, Lodge, and Hertz. Without their contribution, we would have been seeing a very different form of Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory and the equations named after Maxwell. As Loudon and Baxter describe: “The main influence on all of the activity in electromagnetic theory during the later years of the nineteenth century came from Maxwell’s famous treatise (Maxwell 1873). Poynting was a member of the group of young physicists led by Heaviside, Fitzgerald, Lodge and Hertz who developed Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory in the years following his death in 1879. They transformed his 1873 presentation into the formalism recognizable today as Maxwell’s equations.” (Loudon and Baxter, 2012, p. 1826)

    Interestingly, all five Maxwellians were not only interested in electromagnetic field theory but also applied it to a variety of practical problems. Poynting wrote an elaborate paper in which he describes the transfer of energy and momentum of electromagnetic waves titled “On the Transfer of Energy in the Electromagnetic Field” (Poynting, 1884, p. 343), and connected them to a series of interesting observations in electromagnetism. Among the seven applications Poynting discussed in his paper, the last one was on the theory of electromagnetic waves, and it is there that he computed the maximum value of the velocity of light. More on this in a future blog.

    References:

    Loudon, R., and C. Baxter. ‘Contributions of John Henry Poynting to the Understanding of Radiation Pressure’. Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 468, no. 2143 (2012): 1825–38. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspa.2011.0573.

    Poynting, J. H. ‘XV. On the Transfer of Energy in the Electromagnetic Field’. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, no. 175 (December 1884): 343–61. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstl.1884.0016.

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  • Bohr’s handwriting

    Niels Bohr had an interesting handwriting, and below is a gist as described by Pais1

    1. Pais, Abraham. 1991. Niels Bohr’s Times: In Physics, Philosophy, and Polity. Oxford Univ Pr. p. 10.
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  • 4 of the many ways to think…

    Thinking comes in various ways:
    – Reading
    – Talking
    – Writing
    – Doing

    Obviously, reading gives you a lot of input in all forms and fosters ideas. When it comes to talking, one of the most effective ways to think is to understand your thoughts by externalizing them through your speech. This speech-based interaction can also be done with others. It adds crucial feedback in the form of listening to what others have to say about your thoughts. Writing is effective when you want to think slowly and deeply. It is also a powerful way to symbolize your thoughts and can add mathematical and diagrammatic aspects to your thinking. Finally, doing gives feedback via observation and physical interaction. By building things, we immediately see how our thoughts get realized, and that feedback can further lead to new thoughts.

    Inherent to all these four ways of thinking is questioning. In each of these four ways of thinking, asking questions drives your thoughts. Of course, there may be other forms of thinking, but generally, it connects to the four things written above.

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  • Unified subject map of physics – 130 years

    An interesting paper on arxiv today, which charts the “disciplinary evolution of 130 years of physics”

    Nguyen, Khoa, Pragyan Pandey, Sophie Li, and Eric Y. Ma. ‘A Unified Subject Map for 130 Years of Physics’. arXiv:2606.14043. Preprint, arXiv, 12 June 2026. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.14043.