Tag: India

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)

Conversation with Chaitanya Athale

Chaitanya is a professor of biology at IISER Pune and works on quantifying biology at the cellular scale. His lab focuses on cytoskeleton and cell shape research and explores synthetic biological roots to address a variety of questions at the cellular scale.

In this freewheeling conversation, we talked about quantitative biology in his lab, reading, the German language, his recent comic-themed book, and a bit on philosophy of biology as we explored his intellectual journey. Also, don’t miss the 3D model he shows to explain his research.

References with links:

‘Chaitanya Athale – IISER Pune’. Accessed 3 January 2026. https://www.iiserpune.ac.in/research/department/biology/people/faculty/regular-faculty/chaitanya-athale/6.

‘Dr. Chaitanya Athale – Lab – Cytoskeleton and Cell Shape Research – Synthetic Biology’. Accessed 3 January 2026. https://sites.iiserpune.ac.in/~cathale/.

‘‪Chaitanya Athale – ‪Google Scholar’. Accessed 3 January 2026. https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=Volq2gEAAAAJ&hl=en.

Chaitanya Athale | LinkedIn’. Accessed 3 January 2026. https://www.linkedin.com/in/chaitanyaa/?originalSubdomain=in.

Arias, Alfonso Martinez. The Master Builder: How the New Science of the Cell Is Rewriting the Story of Life. Basic Books, 2023.

 ‘Athale Lab: CyCelS 💉💉💉💉🚲🤿⛵ (@AthaleLab) / X’. 9 January 2025. https://x.com/athalelab.

How to Build Atomic LEGOs?

In ~8min, I try to explain how and why to build atomic Legos and their potential applications.

The video is for non-experts.

Reference for further reading:

Geim, A. K., and I. V. Grigorieva. ‘Van Der Waals Heterostructures’. Nature 499, no. 7459 (2013): 419–25. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature12385.

Teaching & Meaning

What adds meaning to my academic work?

Perhaps, an anonymous feedback on your teaching is one of them….

“very well taught course at a well defined pace. The interesting way various different aspects and fields in Optics was introduced was fascinating, made us so very keen on knowing more! The mind maps at the beginning of every topic, the indexes professor made was a great way to keep the bigger picture in mind and helped us glide through it. The assignment was also a great way to make us go through materials without feeling it it be imposing, rather finding it more interesting! Thank you so much Sir for this amazing course, the enthusiastic way in which you taught, all the great conversations you engaged in with us, and opened our eyes to explore so much more in this field! thank you!!“

I had a diverse class (BS-Physics majors, MS Quantum Tech, iPhD) with 110+ students, and I am glad a lot of students enjoyed the course this time.
I am a bit overwhelmed by the positive feedback I received on my teaching methods. For sure, I learnt about the subject as much as they did.

And as I always say: there is more to learn…for all of us..

Human interaction zindabad :-)

Physics Ideas for Entrepreneurs

Starting a new (ad)venture

A YouTube channel dedicated to discussing physics ideas for entrepreneurs

I bring ideas from an ocean of physics and present them to anyone interested in using them for business and entrepreneurship. These are not physics lectures, but discussions on ideas with a perspective of economic utility.

As with all my ventures, it is open source.

Join me in this journey, and please share and subscribe

The first video is out:

Raman essay and Open-Access

I see that the essay I wrote on CV Raman and made open access (thanks to Resonance, which published it) has been used by several educators on YouTube, including some in Indian languages. Also, the Google AI overview shows the published essay as the main reference for a search related to Raman’s science communication (see slideshow below).

I am glad to see that making one’s writing open to all has positive effects. Open-access, not just for readers, but also for authors, is beneficial. Especially in India, paywalls for science are a detriment.

My worry is that open-access publishing has been mainly driven by commercial publishers that extract huge funds from the publishing authors. This defeats the purpose of open science, especially when the research of an author is publicly funded. Added to that, Indian researchers and writers cannot afford to pay huge sums for publishing articles and books.

The publication landscape (including journals and books) across the world needs an introspection. Open-access model is effective only when the readers and authors have access to that model. Otherwise, the model becomes a paywall for authors.

Quantum Optics – teaching in Jan 2026

More than 22 years ago, I started my journey as a research student in theoretical physics – Quantum Electrodynamics (QED) + Radiative Transfer (MSc summer project at the Indian Institute of Astrophysics), and my special paper in the MSc final semester was QED. Later in my PhD, I branched into experiments on light scattering (Raman, Mie & Rayleigh).

Over the years, QED and quantum optics have always been at the back of my mind while studying, researching and teaching.

Come January, I will be teaching a course on Quantum Optics to MS(Quantum Tech), MS-PhDs, and 4th-year physics UGs

I designed the first course on this topic at IISER Pune about a decade ago with the able inputs from Prof. Rajaram Nityananda, and I have taught the course a few times. Now, after a few years, I will teach it again.

With the emergence of quantum sci & tech, there is a new impetus and excitement on this topic.

Having said that, the foundations of the topic remain the same, and Quantum Optics has a wonderful history and philosophy associated with it…and where better to start than Dirac’s classic (see below).

Look out for ‘quantum blogs’ in 2026…

Betty Archdale – 1939 cricket picture – Kannada magazine

This may be a rare pic:

In 1939, a Kannada magazine – Swadeshabhimani – reported on growing interest in women’s cricket.

Pictured is a shot by Betty Archdale, the then women’s cricket captain in England (according to the caption in the picture).

A copy of the magazine can be found here:

https://archive.org/details/karnataka-state-archives-RGVlcGFrMTA0MjYz-RGVlcGFrMQ/page/n23/mode/2up