For all their flaws, the science Nobel Prizes – at the time they’re announced, in the first week of October every year – provide a good opportunity to learn about some obscure part of the scientific endeavour with far-reaching consequences for humankind. This year, for example, we learnt about attosecond physics,
A few days ago, a physicist (and PhD holder) named Thomas Hartsfield published a strange article in Big Think about why building a $100-billion particle physics machine like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a bad idea. The article was so replete with errors things that even I – a not-physicist
In the face of complaints about how so few women have been awarded this year’s Swarnajayanti Fellowships in India, some scientists pushed back asking which of the male laureates who had been selected should have been left out instead. This is a version of the merit argument commonly applied
Big Science
Nature India ran a feature on March 21 about three Indian astrophysicists who had contributed to the European Space Agency’s Planck mission that studied the universe’s CMBR, etc. I was wary even before I started to read it. Why? Because of that first farce in July, 2012, that’
