Sid-Thinks

E instein loathed the very idea of quantum mechanics.  He famously stated ' God does not play dice! ' (More on that a bit later.)   Quantum weirdness spooked; he could not accept its implications since some of them conflicted with his theory of general relativity.  I don't blame him, since more than a century later, the brightest minds are still trying to reconcile relativity and quantum mechanics , despite both being verifiably true! The notion of unifying the two theories is called  ' Theory of Everything ', and the  first person to prove it  will likely get multiple Nobels. What exactly is stopping the aforementioned reconciliation, one may ask.  I would be damned if I knew it; as Richard Feynman quoted:  If you think you understand  quantum mechanics , you don't understand  quantum mechanics - Richard Feynman   So what's the problem?  Well, it's complicated and I will attempt to

I had the opportunity to attend a LIGO conference at Pune university in 2018 along with a ThoughtWorks team working on Engineering for Research ( E4R - PDF alert) .  LIGO or the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory is a super awesome, science fiction like (but really existing & operational) instrument that detects Gravitational waves (GWs, not to be confused with Gravity Waves ).  Think of LIGO like a telescope for Gravitational waves, and because GWs are so different than the light waves that optical telescopes can detect, LIGO itself does not even closely resemble a telescope.  Crash course on Gravitational Waves The ' empty ' space between planets, stars, galaxies or between two atoms that we perceive as void is actually a 3D malleable membrane.  The interaction of this membrane with mass (Higg's particles) causes it to warp, and just like throwing a stone in still water, creates ripples.  Especially, a jiggling heavy mass (black hole

Modern humans have always been thirsty for knowledge since their dawn some thousand years ago.  Earliest humans looked around and tried to figure out how stuff worked.  They were successful to an extent.  They could control fire, which enabled them to eat literally anything.  Cave paintings show how they perceived nature.  They explained whatever they could, what they could not was attributed to divinity.  (It's still a trait) Fast forward: the dark ages.  Nothing in human history has proven so impeding to knowledge as the dark ages.  Just to give an example, Islamic world was one of the most advanced societies around the 8 th century AD.  They discovered a number of celestial bodies and hence most of them have Arabic names.  They established complex mathematical theorems.  The Arabic numerals are the ones we use (base 10).  What happened afterwards?  Why did the rational progress stop?  Why was science scorned upon later?  The answer is in one guy.  Some religious leader declar