Number of words: 618 What did Earth look like 3.2 billion years ago? New evidence suggests the planet was covered by a vast ocean and had no continents at all. Continents appeared later, as plate tectonics thrust enormous, rocky land masses upward to breach the sea surfaces, scientists recently reported. They found clues about this … Read more
Number of words: 1,405 In April 1831, a bunch of Calcutta’s notables, bhadralok in local parlance, all managing committee members of Hindu College (later, Presidency College and now, Presidency University), met. They had to decide the fate of a young professor in the educational institution they ran—a young man who was part-Portuguese, part-English, and part-Indian. … Read more
Number of words: 83 Before the seventeenth century, the goals of science were wisdom, understanding the natural order, and living in harmony with it. In the seventeenth century this attitude, which could call as an ecological attitude, changed into its opposite. Ever since Bacon the goal of science and technology has been knowledge that can … Read more
Number of words: 146 Some day, then, a point will be reached where the only unexplained features of this network of theories will be the elements of the scientific framework. Beyond that point, the theory will no longer be able to express its results in words, or in rational concepts, and will thus go beyond … Read more
Number of words: 253 To free the human mind from words and explanations is one of the main aims of Eastern mysticism. Both Buddhists and Taoists speak of a ‘network of words’, or a ‘net of concepts’, thus extending the idea of the interconnected web to the realm of the intellect. As long as we … Read more
Number of words: 155 For the modern physicists, then, Shiva’s dance is the dance of subatomic matter. As in Hindu mythology, it is a continual dance of creation and destruction involving the whole cosmos; the basis of all existence and of all natural phenomena. Hundreds of years ago, Indian artists created visual images of dancing … Read more
Number of words: 531 Relativity theory has made the structure of electrodynamics much more elegant by unifying the concepts of both charges and currents and electric and magnetic fields. Since all motion is relative, every charge can also appear as a current-in a frame of reference where it moves with respect to the observer -and … Read more
Number of words: 531 The creation and destruction of material particles is one of the most impressive consequences of the equivalence of mass and energy. In the collision processes of high-energy physics, mass is no longer conserved. The colliding particles can be destroyed and their masses may be transformed partly into the masses, and partly … Read more
Number of words: 455 When we study the universe as a whole, with its millions of galaxies, we have reached the largest scale of space and time; and again, at that cosmic level, we discover that the universe is not static-it is expanding! This has been one of the most important discoveries in modern astronomy. … Read more
Number of words: 278 The intimate link between space and time was well known in astronomy, in a different context, long before relativity theory. Astronomers and astrophysicists deal with extremely large distances, and here again the fact that light needs some time to travel from the observed object to the observer is important. Because of … Read more
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