VISMAYA: History & Philosophy of Physics

Tag: History

  • Astronomy in Africa: Who is studying it?

    Africa and Africans have had rich knowledge about astronomy. The authors of a recent paper on arXiv explore some interesting issues of where that knowledge comes from and who is exploring it.

    The abstract reads:

    Africa has deep and diverse traditions of astronomical knowledge, ranging from archaeological astronomy, pharaonic stellar timekeeping, and manuscript astronomy in Timbuktu and the Sahel, to ecological seasonal astronomy in southern Africa and calendrical computation in the Ethiopian tradition. These multiple epistemic traditions form part of a long intellectual history that precedes and intersects with contemporary astronomy on the continent. In the context of this long-standing intellectual heritage, an important question arises regarding the contemporary circulation of African astronomical knowledge within the global scientific system. This study therefore examines where African astronomical knowledge is produced, validated, and circulated in modern scholarly communication. Using bibliometric data from the Web of Science Core Collection, our analysis investigates publication and citation patterns in the research area Astronomy and Astrophysics between 2000 and 2025, with particular attention to the publication venues of African scholars. The findings highlight a critical paradox: while African researchers are active contributors to global astronomical discovery, the intellectual capital generated through this work is largely stored, validated, and circulated through publication systems located outside the continent. This pattern reflects broader asymmetries within global scholarly communication, where dominant publishing infrastructures shape visibility, citation impact, and authority. By applying a decolonial lens to metrics such as citation impact and ownership, the paper calls for a critical reassessment of the academic practices that sustain epistemic coloniality. It concludes that achieving scientific equity requires a strategic shift in publication choices to build and fortify a sovereign African knowledge archive.

    There are some impressive snapshots of old manuscripts. An example is shown below:

    There are many more interesting points in the manuscript. Check it out.

    Reference to the paper:

    Koch, Rhea, and Amare Abebe. ‘From Timbuktu to SKA: Who Owns the Astronomy Knowledge Africa Produces?’ arXiv:2608.21119. Preprint, arXiv, 21 August 2026. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.21119.

  • The Controversial Schrödinger

    12th of August is Erwin Schrödinger’s birthday…. Although he has been one of the pioneers of quantum mechanics (of the cat fame) and has contributed deeply to the subject matter, in recent years, he has become (in)famous for his non-academic life. For sure, he had a controversial personal life and has been deservedly criticized for that.

    Only recently, there has been some new archival information (see this) that throws more light on this and gives some benefit of the doubt.

    An important lesson: Great science alone does not guarantee good human qualities in a scientist.

    ps:

    To paraphrase and expand on something I wrote recently –

    We continue to celebrate science by a person because science is not only of that person, but of humanity….

    A person learns from others, transforms it and passes it on.

    The human mind is both a conduit and a seed of an idea. Lest we forget the soil, sunshine, water and air.

  • Schrödinger & Poetry

    Recently, I came across an arXiv upload that discussed poetry written by Schrödinger.

    Below is a flavor of Schrödinger’s poetry reproduced from the arXiv article:

    “The brooding sun rests softly on the lake

    And barely marks its shallow breathing

    As gentle waves rock up and down

    In heavy glare of midday heat.

    ….”

    One of the surprising things I learned is that Schrödinger was interested in becoming a poet but later turned to physics and mathematics to ensure financial security: “Thus, in a 1931 interview by the English journalist and science writer John W. N. Sullivan he said: “I took up mathematics and physics quite early … But I must not give the impression that science alone interested me. As a matter of fact, my early desire was to be a poet. But I speedily realised that poetry was not a paying business. Science, on the other hand, offered me a career”” (Kragh, 2026, p. 2)

    Schrodinger had a deep interest in cultural studies and wrote a lot about them, as the author points out: “Apart from being a brilliant physicist, Schrödinger was also a humanist scholar, a polymath who engaged in cultural studies relating to music, theatre, philosophy, history, philology, and literature [Gronau and Gronau 2021]. Science and Humanism and Nature and the Greeks, both books written while he stayed in Dublin, bear witness to his broad cultural interests.” (Kragh, 2026, p. 1)

    It is also intriguing to see a few other physicists try their hand at poetry, as in this case with Felix Bloch:

    “Erwin with his psi can do

    Calculations quite a few.

    But one thing has not been seen:

    Just what does psi really mean?” (Kragh, 2026, p. 2)

    The article also has a discussion on Schrödinger’s Galilean dialogue, which has inclinations towards the development of ideas in physics.

    Do read the reference below for more:

    Kragh, Helge. ‘Erwin Schroedinger: His Poetry and Fragment of a Galilean Dialogue’. arXiv:2607.29497. Preprint, arXiv, 31 July 2026. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.29497.

  • 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

  • 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/.

  • 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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  • 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.

  • Scientific Lifestyle is Satyagraha

    In Sanskrit, the word Satyagraha (सत्याग्रह) is made of two parts: ‘Satya’ (सत्या) means truth. ‘Āgraha‘ (आग्रह) means insistence. In this blog, my aim is to connect the scientific thought process to the concept of Satyagraha.

    At the beginning of this year, I posted a doodle on three ways to make India more scientific. It drew quite a bit of attention across various platforms, including the one you are reading this message on.

    In that doodle, I mentioned three points on how to inculcate a scientific viewpoint among us:

    1. Speaking about science in our mother tongue. This means using our household language as a medium for scientific discussion.
    2. Encouraging people to ask questions. It goes without saying that the bedrock of our exploration is curiosity, and the primary prerequisite for curiosity is asking questions and trying to figure out the answers.
    3. Projecting scientific thinking as a lifestyle.

    It is the third point that is central to our discussion. So, what do we mean by projecting scientific thinking as a lifestyle? It means we should be able to incorporate scientific thought processes into our everyday lives. For example, utilizing simple mathematical and statistical thinking to understand the affairs of the world. Adopting it as a lifestyle also means making it a part of ourselves, such that it becomes an automatic way of looking at the world. This means it should become second nature for us to use a scientific viewpoint when observing our external world, especially when we have to make decisions. We have to actively seek scientific information and try to understand how it connects to our lives. The source of scientific information becomes important, and we should critically evaluate the source before we adopt it into our lives.

    This also brings us to the point of how to utilize scientific thinking without compromising our humility and compassion. Just because we are equipped with scientific thinking, it does not mean that we should be condescending. This is where patience, humility and compassion have a role to play. The ability to understand others’ viewpoints and then respond scientifically is one of the most important aspects of our scientific education. Even when we criticize someone’s viewpoint, our critique will hold value only if we try to refute it from a scientific perspective. Many complex issues do not have straightforward solutions. This does not mean that there is no solution at all, but to arrive at a solution, we need to understand the problem in detail. This understanding is essentially how we develop an appreciation for somebody else’s viewpoint. We should be patient enough to hear others’ perspectives and then evaluate them with as much information as is available. This is a gradually learned process.

    Another hallmark of scientific thinking is the willingness to change our viewpoints in light of new data that proves our old data wrong. This ability to self-correct is probably one of the greatest strengths of scientific thinking, and it is this trait that we must cultivate in our lives.

    What is important for fostering scientific thinking is knowing how to utilize it in our everyday lives and trying to explore what the actual truth is. Indian philosophical roots have a word for the pursuit and/or insistence of truth. It is called Satyagraha. Although people in India associate Satyagraha with the anti-colonial movement, its deeper philosophical meaning connects well to the pursuit of science and scientific thinking. Like all tools and thought processes, it is vital for us to ensure scientific thinking is utilized in the proper context and in a humane way. Rational thought from an Indian philosophy has a lesson for us: pursue the truth with intent. Science, after all, is Satyagraha (सत्याग्रह).

    audio-visual form:

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