IAGRG30 – India’s Biennial Gravity Meetup I was recently in BITS Hyderabad 1 attending the 30th meeting of the Indian Association for General Relativity and Gravitation (IAGRG30). I was pleasantly surprised that my abstract [1] was selected for a talk and that too for the very first talk on the first day of the “Quantum… Continue reading IAGRG30 – Kepler, Maldacena, Ashtekar and all that …
Sometime ago Jonathan Oppenheim, one of the brightest minds [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9] in the frontiers of quantum information and quantum foundations, posted a very interesting article [10] on arXiv. As is the custom these days, he announced the paper in a series of tweets, starting with: A post-quantum theory… Continue reading Comment on "A Post-Quantum Theory of Classical Gravity"
While reading up on anti-deSitter spaces in [1], I encountered the following quote attributed to Gauss by the author: “I have sometimes in jest expressed the wish that Euclidean geometry is not true. For then we would have an absolute a priori unit of measurement.” This is not just an empty wish. If quantum gravity… Continue reading Cosmological Curvature and the Planck Scale
The 23th DAE-BRNS High Energy Physics Symposium was held at IIT Madras from Dec 10 – Dec 14. It was an interesting event. I met lots of very smart people. My abstract based on my paper [1] had been selected for a talk in the “Formal Theory” parallel session on Dec 11. Interestingly the talk… Continue reading DAE-HEP 2018 – Preons, Fermions and All That
There are two nice reference management apps out there with desktop and web versions: Mendeley and Zotero. Zotero is apparently the original open source version from which the developers of Mendeley decided to develop a more commercial version, which was eventually taken over by Elsevier. Mendeley is the more polished, functional and useful software. So… Continue reading Zotero vs Mendeley
In Memoriam I never had the good fortune of meeting or personally knowing Shoucheng Zhang. Nevertheless he has had a profound influence on my academic career. As the world learned sometime last week, Zhang passed away suddenly on December 1 “after fighting a battle with depression” 1. He was one of the world’s greatest theoretical… Continue reading Shoucheng Zhang, 1963-2018
The thermodynamic concept of temperature is defined by the following equation: $$ T = \frac{\partial E}{\partial S} $$ where $ E $ is the energy of the system and $ S $ is the entropy. Now usually when the energy of a system increases or decreases it’s disorder, and hence it’s entropy, also increases or… Continue reading Negative Temperatures
Other 1 than all the other very good theoretical reasons for wanting a theory of quantum gravity, there are some very good practical reasons for wanting such a theory. Ultimately the fate of scientists, theorists and experimentalists alike, rests in the hands of the general public and its elected or appointed political representatives. Why, after… Continue reading Social Relevance of Quantum Gravity
Objects in the rearview mirror may be closer than they seem. This statutory warning is familiar to anyone who has ever ridden in a passenger vehicle. Its intent is to warn the driver and the passengers to be careful while backing up in case the car collides with something which is closer than it actually seems in… Continue reading The Planck Scale May Be Closer Than It Appears
Homogenous Functions A homogenous function of order $n$ satisfies: $$ f(\lambda x_1, \lambda x_2, \ldots, \lambda x_m) =\lambda^n f(x_1, x_2, \ldots, x_m) $$ For e.g. $$ f(x,y) = \sqrt{x} y^2 $$ is homogenous of order $n = 3/2$ . However: $$ f(x,y) = \sqrt x y^2 + x^2 y^2 $$ is not a homogenous function… Continue reading Euler's Homogenous Function Theorem