Playing with electrons

Is our earth a cosmic aberration? It’s a no-brainer. The fantasy about extra-terrestrials – little green men- coming from faraway planets and befriending us or mostly attacking us, has been in vogue for quite a while now. The number of Hollywood movies including blockbusters and flops alike dealing with this topic has been increasing phenomenally in the last few years, may be decades. The use of computer graphics interface or CGI has been able to make a more appealing or ‘realistic’ portrayal of catastrophic damage inflicted by nefarious aliens on earth. To the common man on earth, this kind of existence of an advanced extra-terrestrial civilization on an unknown planet is something he is not worried about, and of course, for him, it is difficult to ponder over 'what it really means’. Its existence ends at the movie theater; it no longer exists beyond the realm of science-fiction. Some scientists – we can call them astronomers, or may be ‘atrobiologists’ – seriously th...

[ As is always in any blog, the opinions expressed here are the blogger's (my!) personal opinions, and need not be correct .] Renowned scientist CNR Rao once rightfully commented that 'India missed the semiconductor revolution'. What does it mean ? And why is it worth writing about at all ? Well, India - as of now- does near state-of-the-art research in several key areas of science and technology including biosciences/biochemistry, mechanical engineering, metallurgy, drug/pharmacy sciences, mathematics & physics and not to speak of computer sciences. To my knowledge, in these areas, India stands almost at par with top institutes in the world in terms of cutting-edge research. For example, places like NCBS and TIFR carry out seminal work in several key areas of biosciences; JNCASR has top-class computational experts in material sciences; the erstwhile grad students at IIT-Kanpur came out with the path-breaking AKS algorithm (computer sciences) which shook place...