TacitKnowledge

 Shri Jagdeep Dhankhar has been chosen as the NDA candidate for the post of vice-president of India. This is a welcome piece of news but, at the same time, it is a sad day for the people of West Bengal. For the past several years Shri Dhankhad has valiantly stood for the voice of democracy and rule of law in what can truly be termed a rogue state in the way the ruling dispensation has been conducting the affairs of this state, practicing a brand of depraved politics that has very few parallels in history. For this he has been persecuted, humiliated and insulted to an unprecedented degree from every single level of the ruling hierarchy. But in the midst all this, Shri Dhankhad has stood like a colossus showing a most restrained temperament, mature political sense, and great commitment to the common people of the state. He will be remembered by ordinary folk of this state for having been the lion-hearted guardian of theirs that they found in him. 

The familiar Doppler shift formula assumes that the source and the observer are in uniform motion. However, it is not difficult to generalize to the case of the source and the observer being in arbitrarily specified motion. The present article is adapted from a chapter of my book 'Basic Physics: Principles and Concepts'. Click here to read 

In this essay we take a close look at how the pervasive complexity of nature shapes our conception of reality and our scientific theories. In particular, we examine how scientific realism can be consistent with incommensurability of successively emerging theories and how the expectation of an all-embracing 'ultimate' theory of nature need not be a necessary ingredient of scientific realism. Click to read

Science is commonly assumed to be the last word in logic and objectivity. In reality, there is a pervasive role of Inductive Inference in the construction of scientific theories, where cognitive factors entrenched in the human psyche assume relevance.  These include a wide spectrum of beliefs that the human mind makes use of in navigating through an unknown and uncertain world. At the end of the day, the sciences emerge  as an interpretation of reality......   Click to read

  Click to read

Despite the remarkable success of quantum theory that erected a new edifice emerging from classical physics, there has been no corresponding restructuring of the point of view constituting classical philosophy. However, the classical view of reality is incompatible with quantum theory and its strange findings --- ones that call for a more nuanced and complex view of what we call reality. The so-called Copenhagen interpretation seems to have failed on this count. Click here to read   

The foundations of quantum statistical mechanics are examined on the basis of Berry's conjecture, random matrix theory (RMT), and the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH). Click to read