In October 2022 the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics to three scientists, Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser and Anton Zeilinger, for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum … Read More
Author Archives: Madhusudan Narayanan
Chitradurga Fort: The Woman Who Held It Alone With a Pestle
High above the windswept plains of Karnataka, where boulders rest like forgotten gods and the sky meets stone in a quiet embrace, Chitradurga Fort rises, unyielding, untamed, and utterly unforgettable. It has seven concentric walls of fortification. Nineteen gateways. Thirty-eight … Read More
Kanada’s Atomic Theory: The Ancient Indian Philosopher Who Discovered the Atom 2600 Years Before John Dalton
John Dalton is credited with discovering atomic theory in 1808. He was 2600 years late. In approximately 600 BCE, in a small town near what is now Dwaraka in Gujarat, a philosopher named Kanada sat down, wrote the Vaisheshika Sutras … Read More
Indus Valley Script: The 4000-Year-Old Mystery That Is Beginning to Crack
There is a seal in the collection of the National Museum in Delhi. It is approximately four centimetres square. It is made of steatite, a soft grey stone. It was carved somewhere in the Indus Valley between 2600 and 1900 … Read More
Madhava: The Kerala Mathematician Who Invented Calculus 200 Years Before Newton
In 1666 Isaac Newton invented calculus. This is what most of the world was taught and what most of the world still believes. There is a problem with this version of events. A mathematician in Kerala had already done it. … Read More
Wheat vs Rice: How Two Grains Quietly Shaped Two Indias
There is a question almost nobody asks about India, and it is more interesting than it first sounds. Why does Punjab celebrate its new year in April with bonfires and a festival built around cut wheat, while Tamil Nadu celebrates … Read More
Chanakya’s 40 Ways to Steal: Ancient India’s Fraud Detection Manual
In the year 1905, a young Sanskrit scholar named Rudrapatna Shamasastry was working through a heap of palm leaf manuscripts in the newly opened Mysore Oriental Library, cataloguing them one by one for the Maharaja’s collection. The manuscripts had arrived … Read More
One Day Chennai Tour, How to Spend Your Layover Before or After a Cruise
If you have just one day in Chennai, the question is not whether there is enough to see, it is how to choose wisely. This city sits at the meeting point of two thousand years of temple building, colonial trade, … Read More
Panini: The World’s First Programmer Wrote Code in Sanskrit, 2500 Years Before Computers Existed
In 1959 a computer scientist named John Backus invented a notation for describing the grammar of programming languages. It is called Backus Naur Form, and it is one of the foundational tools of modern computer science. Every programming language you … Read More
The Building in Kolkata That Produced Six Bengali Scientists Who Changed the World
There is a building on College Street in Kolkata. It was built in 1875. Its architecture is the confident Victorian Gothic of a colonial institution that expected to last. Tall windows. High ceilings. A sweeping central staircase. A Baker Laboratory … Read More