# Slightly Acidic
> Science, culture, and complexity
Public Ghost content for AI and LLM tooling. Use `/llms-full.txt` for consolidated page and post context.
Append `.md` to any post or page URL to get the content in Markdown (for example, `/example-post.md`).

## Pages
- [About](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/about-2.md) - I’m Vasudevan Mukunth. I write here about science, scicomm and scepticism from an Indian PoV, and occasionally about Tamil cinema and politics and journalism in India. I’m also interested in high-energy and condensed matter physics, research misconduct and fraud, open access publishing, the interse…
- [Archives](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/archives.md) - By date By topic
- [Axioms](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/axioms.md) - Writing is to write for oneself. Marguerite Duras, Motherhood Makes You Obscene The best places for writing are those that fade from consciousness as the landscapes of the imagination take over. Linda Jaivin, Caught Mapping To banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to para…
- [Definitions](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/definitions.md) - Writing I have been writing as a matter of habit since 2003, when I started my first diary. I continued the habit through three years of school after that, six years of college and seven years of work – and it still goes on. However, why I write has changed. When I started my first blog in 2008, fo…

## Posts
- [Semiconductor nationalism](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2026/09/03/semiconductor-nationalism.md) - There’s a passage in an interview of former RBI governor Raghuram Rajan, published by Frontline on September 1, that many people seem to have misunderstood, especially on Twitter, where — perhaps unsurprisingly — it has been reduced to “India shouldn’t make chips because it can smuggle them in inst…
- [The bridge AI-writing builds](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2026/08/29/the-bridge-ai-writing-builds.md) - From 'Why not normalise use of AI in writing?', by Amit Kumar, assistant professor in the Institute for Development and Communication, Chandigarh, in The Hindu, August 29, 2026: Whose authority is being protected by that resistance and challenged, if AI writing gets the green signal? With a good re…
- [A seasonal despondency in journalism](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2026/08/29/a-seasonal-despondency-in-journalism.md) - My friend Dhiya has been writing and publishing one blog post every week for the last 87 weeks in a series she simply calls ‘dilettante’. The eighty-fifth edition focused on an issue I am currently engaged deeply with at work: as a journalist trying to make their team’s work digital-first and as a…
- [The mathematician and the oracle](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2026/08/26/the-mathematician-and-the-oracle.md) - On August 24, Levent Alpöge (@__alpoge__) posted on X.com that they had solved a maths problem with Claude’s help in a way that was contrary to a human proof of it, albeit a reputedly unsatisfactory one. Let us set aside the validity of the new proof. In one reply to the post, @CircumjovialLLC aske…
- [AI shouldn’t distract journalism into a new trap](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2026/08/21/ai-shouldnt-distract-journalism-into-a-new-trap.md) - The following is a review of Journalism in the Age of AI: From Acceleration to Reimagination by Seth C. Lewis, Rodrigo Zamith, and Tomás Dodds, available here. The authors write, and I agree, that journalism has spent 25 years on a “hamster wheel” of technologies — web, then social media, then mobi…
- [What does science in India feel like?](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2026/08/02/what-does-science-in-india-feel-like.md) - Indian society has inhabited at least three distinct structures of feeling in relation to science since independence — and they are not as continuous as one might expect.
- [The Meta Ray-Ban glasses and Indian law](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2026/07/30/the-meta-ray-ban-glasses-and-indian-law.md) - 1. India is not likely to find success by regulating hardware because (i) such regulations will be hard to enforce in practice and in principle, (ii) the regulatory regime could set up a new license raj, and (iii) the regulations will age very poorly when similar technological capabilities come to…
- [Office hours](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2026/07/25/office-hours.md) - Dear Chief Justice Surya Kant: I commend you for your discovery this week that time is finite. On Wednesday, when a petitioner confronted you with video evidence of police brutality on July 20 against the students protesting peacefully in and around Jantar Mantar over exam paper leaks and a dire la…
- [Why launch costs dropped but may not keep dropping](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2026/07/22/why-launch-costs-dropped-but-may-not-keep-dropping.md) - In a study published in PNAS Nexus on July 14, two researchers affiliated with institutes in France, Italy, and the UK analysed more than 4,400 launches in 16 geographical entities and with 330 rocket configurations to find that every time the cumulative payload sent to orbit has doubled since 1960…
- [A thought for emergence](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2026/07/14/a-thought-for-emergence.md) - The physicist Carlo Rovelli makes a strong case in this essay that consciousness is “of the same nature” as everything else in the universe, but in the course of doing that, he often writes as if the alternatives to dualism — the view that the body and the mind are irreducibly separate — don’t incl…
- [How Indonesian cos. coopted the state’s win](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2026/07/14/how-indonesian-cos-coopted-the-states-win.md) - From ‘Zero-deforestation commitments in Indonesia’s palm oil sector achieve high compliance but no additionality’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, July 13, 2026: … we evaluate the compliance and additionality of zero-deforestation commitments (ZDCs) in the Indonesian palm oil secto…
- [What Hannibal's crossing cost](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2026/07/10/what-hannibals-crossing-cost.md) - That thermodynamics has so very many applications is as fascinating as what it so often illuminates. Its tools and methods can be brought to bear on everything from celestial bodies and industrial machines to cellular biology and human endurance. The simple reason is that energy is the fundamental…
- [Walk through chaos](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2026/07/06/walk-through-chaos.md) - Daily writing promptIs a little chaos actually good for us? View all responses I'm just going to invert that question a little and ask: Is a little order good for us? I'm doing this because the question "Is a little chaos good for us?" assumes that chaos can be pippetted into our lives in "little"…
- [Gyroscopes](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2026/07/04/gyroscopes.md) - As silly as it sounds, as a student of mechanical engineering, I am partial to technologies that make use of mechanical forces. Today they are harder to come by because the solutions to the problems they solved were replaced by electronic components from the mid-20th century on. Today, newer techno…
- [Orphan blocks on bitcoin network waste 16 GW](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2026/06/30/orphan-blocks-on-bitcoin-network-waste-16-gw.md) - A new PNAS Nexus paper has shed light on a major source of hidden energy waste on the bitcoin network. Here, miners compete to solve a complex mathematical puzzle. The miner that solves a puzzle first is rewarded by the network with a block: new bitcoins plus transaction fees. An accidental fork oc…
- [Down with Vader, down with the empire](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2026/06/28/down-with-vader-down-with-the-empire.md) - Daily writing promptEmperor Palpatine has announced open elections for a new Emperor — and he’s nominated Darth Vader. You get to nominate one challenger. View all responses Even against his long career of deception, Sheev Palpatine announcing an open election for the seat of galactic emperor sound…
- [Enjoying 'Friends' again](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2026/06/20/enjoying-friends-again.md) - Daily writing promptWhat’s a book, movie, or TV show that you wish you could experience again for the first time? View all responses This has to be the TV show Friends. I feel like I know too much these days. The show hasn't aged well. Its attitudes towards fatness, sexual relations, science, and m…
- [Against the idea of building loyal subscribers](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2026/06/07/against-the-idea-of-building-loyal-subscribers.md) - Daily writing promptHow do you build loyal subscribers? View all responses I've always found that a somewhat strange thing to aim for. I understand there are several thousand people worldwide working to build a loyal subscriber base ("building loyal subscribers" makes one sound like Dr. Frankenstei…
- [Writing with WordPress Write](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2026/06/06/writing-with-wordpress-write.md) - I'm writing this post on Write, the new text composer/editor on WordPress.com. According to the official blog post, Write is a response to last year's Creators survey, where "'simplify the editor' was the single most-requested improvement from the people already publishing on WordPress.com". The to…
- [State and crime](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2026/05/31/a-new-state-government-and-a-shocking-crime.md) - From 'The Sulur horror story of child sexual assault and murder', The Hindu, May 31, 2026: Mr. Vijay, who sent Director-General of Police Sandeep Rai Rathore and Additional DGP (Law and Order) Maheshwar Dayal to Coimbatore after the crime, said the murder had caused immense pain and shock. … Leader…
- [People, place, animal, disease](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2026/05/25/people-place-animal-disease.md) - Is it a coincidence that more 'complicated' pathogens to vaccinate against and more poverty/poorer countries share a geographic area?
- [Find the dictionary](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2026/05/21/find-the-dictionary.md) - From 'Measure for measure: On India’s courts and criticism', The Hindu, May 21, 2026: In the Ali Khan Mahmudabad matter, the Court granted him relief from coercive action but also imposed a gag order. Then, in a display of willingness to discipline the norms of public conduct rather than determine…
- [Why analysis matters](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2026/05/17/why-analysis-matters.md) - I am a journalist… I think. I have been a desk guy most of my professional life (14+ years). In this time, I have commissioned and published hundreds of pieces, from news reports to investigative features, from explainers to commentary. However, I myself am more of an essayist — and even then an es…
- [When is land more valuable — when it hosts a datacentre or a farm?](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2026/05/14/when-is-land-more-valuable-when-it-hosts-a-datacentre-or-a-farm.md) - Excerpt from 'Data center land use issues are fake', by Andy Masley, May 2, 2026: And then, in the middle of all this, a farmer in Loudoun County sells a few acres of mediocre hay field to a hyperscaler for ten times its agricultural value, and the response is that we’re running out of farmland. Th…
- [‘Hidden’ voting preferences](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2026/05/12/hidden-voting-preferences.md) - On May 4, former Tamil film actor C. Joseph Vijay and his Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK) emerged in the Tamil Nadu Assembly elections as the single largest party. The magnitude of the victory was widely unexpected, and dislodged the Dravidian duopoly in the State since 1959. While the reasons for t…
- [A political direction in life](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2026/05/02/a-political-direction-in-life.md) - Note to readers: Root Privileges is now Slightly Acidic. Daily writing promptWhat gives you direction in life? View all responses I'm a political creature. I didn't think that I'd be one but I am. I believe this is a response to India's present historical moment. Since the Bharatiya Janata Party (B…
- [Let's discuss, with conditions](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2026/04/27/lets-discuss-with-conditions.md) - Writing prompt: What topics do you like to discuss? I like to discuss everything under the Sun. However, I’m also wary of people who waste time talking about something in a way that couldn’t possibly lead to a useful insight or a changed mind but are in fact discussing in order to discuss — or of c…
- [A song on my mind](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2026/04/19/a-song-on-my-mind.md) - Daily writing promptJot down the first thing that comes to your mind. View all responses I've got an earworm this morning and it's been unbudged. It's the song 'Neeye unakku endrum' from the 1962 Tamil film Bale Pandiya. The film is highly okay, at best, notwithstanding many of the social norms of…
- [Memoirs, Substack, and psychology](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2026/04/10/memoirs-substack-and-psychology.md) - The English poet Blake Morrison had a thought-provoking essay in The Guardian titled '‘Enough of this me me me’: Blake Morrison on memoir in the age of oversharing' on April 4. He traced the evolution of memoir from a self-congratulatory genre for the accomplished to today's more "confessionalist"…
- [On the BBC, talking about Gaganyaan and inspiration](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2026/03/31/on-the-bbc-talking-about-gaganyaan-and-inspiration.md) - The BBC has produced a documentary podcast titled ‘Hope and fear: India’s space revolution’. Its host, Alok Jha of The Economist, interviewed me late last year as part of it, to provide a media perspective of the Indian space programme, in particular Gaganyaan, access to ISRO scientists, the role o…
- [Lord of the Rings Day](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2026/03/25/lord-of-the-rings-day-6.md) - A happy Lord of the Rings Day to you. This year I almost didn’t write this post because I don’t have anything to say about The Lord of the Rings itself. Chiefly, I have tired of the antics of men. It’s not about some good men and some bad men. For instance we’ve got some really bad men, buffoons re…
- [Climate change and the coastline paradox](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2026/03/19/climate-change-and-the-coastline-paradox.md) - A friend recently told me about a tool called climate.you that shows "temperature change, over land and sea", at all points on the earth's surface in a bid "to show how warming is already affecting people everywhere". You can enter the name of your city or town and find out how the local conditions…
- [I, Head-bumper](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2026/03/19/i-head-bumper.md) - Daily writing promptWhat is one word that describes you? View all responses Tall. I'm tall for India, around 6'3''. My height has recently been on my mind. India is not a good place for tall people. The public infrastructure is geared towards shorter people — the average Indian adult male and femal…
- [Spotting fakes by looking at them](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2026/03/18/spotting-fakes-by-looking-at-them.md) - On March 10, the Supreme Court said a balance has to be struck between warding against misinformation online and protecting citizens’ right to free speech. The context was the Centre’s attempts to defend the 2023 IT Rules: when the comedian Kunal Kamra asked who would decide if online content is “f…
- [The little things](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2026/03/14/the-little-things-2.md) - Tungsten diboride (WB2) is extraordinarily stiff and resistant to deformation and scientists have long suspected it could be a superhard material, meaning it scores at least 40 gigapascal (GPa) on a hardness test. This is important because diamond, the hardest natural material on Earth, scores 70-1…
- [The pleasures of rewatching](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2026/03/13/the-pleasures-of-rewatching.md) - Daily writing promptWhat movies or TV series have you watched more than 5 times? View all responses I'm afraid the answer is F.R.I.E.N.D.S. My sister and I watched it growing up, then rewatched it, the re-rewatched it, and now then have it playing in the background as I work. I have some problems w…
- [On mathematics and reputation](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2026/03/11/on-mathematics-and-reputation.md) - From ‘Formalizing the stability of the two Higgs doublet model potential into Lean: identifying an error in the literature’, uploaded to arXiv on March 9, 2026: Firstly, we believe this to be the first time a non-trivial error in a research level physics paper has been identified through the proces…
- [Measuring science stories](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2026/03/10/measuring-science-stories.md) - Google News picks up on science stories that many outlets are covering. Its reasoning is that the more outlets publish a particular story, the more reader interest the story has. However, the flaw here is that news outlets don’t evaluate all kinds of science developments on an equal footing nor do…
- [Review: ‘Decolonial Keywords’ (2026)](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2026/02/28/review-decolonialising-keywords-2026.md) - Everyone who knows me knows that my intellectual coordinates are defined by scientific ideas, even when they’re about sociology or the humanities. This is why I found a new book, Decolonial Keywords: South Asian Thoughts and Attitudes, edited by anthropologists Renny Thomas and Sasanka Perera, so c…
- [Would a quantum battery charge faster than a classical one?](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2026/02/18/would-a-quantum-battery-charge-faster-than-a-classical-one.md) - A quantum battery is a system that stores energy and whose working parts are quantum systems, such as atoms, ions, spins, superconducting circuits or quantum dots, so the processes of storing and extracting energy are governed by quantum mechanics. Imagine you have a row of toy boxes. Each box can…
- [Epstein or otherwise, Silicon Valley’s techno-elite know what they’re doing](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2026/02/16/tech-bros-are-fully-aware-of-what-theyre-doing.md) - The science writer Philip Ball has described “nerd tunnel vision” as the rationalisation scientists who maintained ties with Jeffrey Epstein after his 2008 conviction for soliciting underage sex offered, hinting at something more calculated than just oversight. “Nerd tunnel vision is a defining fea…
- [A laser worthy of a nuclear clock](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2026/02/14/a-laser-worthy-of-a-nuclear-clock.md) - The nucleus of the thorium-229 isotope has a special property: it has an excited state that's incredibly close in energy to its ground state. The existence of such an isomer is remarkable because when nuclei normally get excited, they need enormous amounts of energy — hundreds of thousands or even…
- [A bad Sprite ad](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2026/02/11/a-bad-sprite-ad.md) - One of the advertisements during the ongoing T20 cricket World Cup on Star Sports India has been for Sprite, the carbonated beverage from the Coca-Cola Company. In the ad, it's a hot day, two people are irritated by the heat and humidity, and they beat it by taking a swig of chilled lime-flavoured…
- [The Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2026/02/11/the-birch-and-swinnerton-dyer-conjecture.md) - On Monday night, I kid you not, I dreamt of the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture. It was only by name, a fleeting mention in a heated conversation I was having with a friend. I'm not sure who spoke it or why. When I woke up, I looked it up, and found that it's one of the Millennium Prize proble…
- [Developing Tamil Nadu](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2026/02/03/developing-tamil-nadu.md) - “If the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) comes to power, it will ruin the developed State of Tamil Nadu” — Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M.K. Stalin said this in his address to a local conference organised by the Indian Union Muslim League in Kumbakonam on January 28. While Stalin’s claim relies on a…
- [From the Heisenberg cut to the Copenhagen interpretation](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2026/01/31/from-the-heisenberg-cut-to-the-copenhagen-interpretation.md) - The following post was motivated by this exchange (on X.com), which prompted me to write out my understanding of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics and the part the Heisenberg cut plays in it. I haven’t gone into the variants of the interpretation that Maria Violaris brings up; I on…
- [That humans quest for cosmic dawn](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2026/01/24/that-humans-quest-for-cosmic-dawn.md) - From 'Cosmic dawn: the search for the primordial hydrogen signal', Physics World, November 18, 2025: The EDGES instrument is a dipole antenna, which resembles a ping-pong table with a gap in the middle. It is mounted on a large metal groundsheet, which is about 30 × 30 m. Its ground-breaking observ…
- [To be Indian is to set records](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2026/01/23/to-be-indian-is-to-set-records.md) - For all the ways in which the Indian people are divided these days, they're seemingly united in their desire to set records. On January 22, a tinkerer named Sohan Rai, a.k.a. “Zikiguy”, said on Instagram that he and his team “are planning to do India’s highest ever flag hoist in near space for this…
- [Normalising deviance](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2026/01/17/normalising-deviance.md) - A.k.a. the importance of public scrutiny
- [String theory and reconciliations](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2026/01/15/string-theory-and-reconciliations.md) - According to particle physics, the fundamental building blocks of the universe are point-like particles, essentially small dots of energy with no dimension. String theory posits that these dots are actually minuscule vibrating loops of energy. A violin string vibrating at different frequencies prod…
- [Out there: using a moon to spot dark matter](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2026/01/11/out-there-using-a-moon-to-spot-dark-matter.md) - The search for dark matter, the invisible ‘glue’ that holds galaxies together, has long focused solely on subatomic particles and this could be a mistake if a new study Physical Review D is to be believed. Its sole author, William DeRocco, a postdoctoral scholar at the Maryland Centre for Fundament…
- [Savouring playtime](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2026/01/02/savouring-playtime.md) - Daily writing promptDo you play in your daily life? What says “playtime” to you? View all responses I work in an office with many lovely and smart people and I find engaging them in conversation is playtime. It's a social activity, almost always enlivening, and I (and hopefully we all) get to feel…
- [My political views](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2025/12/27/my-political-views.md) - Daily writing promptHow have your political views changed over time? View all responses When I first had any views at all, I think I was in the second year of my engineering studies, in 2007, and decided I was a right-winger. Of course I understood very little of what that meant at the time, but I…
- [Heat capacity](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2025/12/26/heat-capacity.md) - Someone asked me recently to name the thing I've been most grateful for in 2025. After giving it some thought, I realised it had to be the heat capacity of water. And not just for 2025. Tea is my warm beverage of choice, and my favourite version is with Tata tea leaves, lots of water, an ampoule of…
- [Joel Mokyr, Gita Chadha, Lawrence Krauss, Joseph Vijay](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2025/12/15/joel-mokyr-gita-chadha-lawrence-krauss-joseph-vijay.md) - All that thinking about Joel Mokyr and his prescription to support society’s intellectual elite in order to ensure technological progress took me back to a talk Gita Chadha delivered in 2020, and to a dilemma I’d had at the time involving Lawrence Krauss. Chadha’s proposed resolution to it could in…
- [Mokyr hearts Nobel Prizes](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2025/12/14/mokyr-hearts-nobel-prizes.md) - I don’t like Joel Mokyr’s history of progress and have written about that before. I also have a longer analysis and explanation of my issues coming soon in The Hindu. On December 8 I got more occasion to critique his thinking over his Nobel lecture in Stockholm, after receiving the prize that appli…
- [Tracking down energetic cosmic rays](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2025/12/13/tracking-down-energetic-cosmic-rays.md) - Once in a while, nature runs experiments that no human lab can match. Ultra-high-energy cosmic rays are a good example. Cosmic rays are fast, high energy particles from space that strike Earth’s atmosphere with energies far beyond what even the most powerful particle accelerators can routinely crea…
- [Acting and speaking](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2025/12/12/acting-and-speaking.md) - Daily writing promptHave you ever performed on stage or given a speech? View all responses I performed several times on stage in school, up to when I was 11 years old. I studies for around four years at a school in Tumkur where drama was part of the curriculum. Every year we'd have a playwright com…
- [So you use AI to write…](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2025/12/06/so-you-use-ai-to-write.md) - You're probably using AI to write. Both ChatGPT and Google AI Studio prefer to construct their sentences in specific and characteristic ways and anyone who’s been a commissioning editor for at least a few years will find the signs of its influence hard to miss, even if you personally think it’s und…
- [AI slop clears peer-review](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2025/12/06/ai-slop-clears-peer-review.md) - Here's an image from a paper that was published by Nature Scientific Reports on November 19 and retracted on December 5: This paper made it through peer review at the journal. Let that sink in for a moment. Perhaps the reviewers wanted to stick it to the editors. Then again how the image made its w…
- [Worlds between theory and experiment](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2025/12/06/worlds-between-theory-and-experiment.md) - Once Isaac Newton showed that a single gravitational law plus his rules of dynamics could reproduce the orbits of planets that Johannes Kepler had predicted, explain tides on Earth, and predict that a comet that had passed by once would return again, physicists considered Newtonian mechanics and gr…
- [Robbing NISAR to pay ISRO](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2025/12/02/robbing-nisar-to-pay-isro.md) - A.K. Anil Kumar, the director of ISRO's Telemetry, Tracking, and Command Network (a.k.a. ISTRAC), has reportedly made some seriously misleading comments as part of his convocation address at a Maharishi University in Lucknow.* Kumar's speech begins at the 1:38:10 mark in this video (hat-tip to Prad…
- [Part light, part matter](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2025/11/28/light-it-up.md) - Consider a bunch of molecules that have been trapped between two mirrors facing each other very closely. In this 'box' the light can't move around freely; it can only exist in certain fixed patterns, somewhat like sound inside a finely tuned musical instrument. Even when all light has been removed…
- [New labour codes](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2025/11/22/new-labour-codes.md) - On November 21, the Union government said the four consolidated labour codes on wages, industrial relations, social security, and occupational safety and health had been brought into force, replacing 29 national labour laws, five years after Parliament had signed off on them and four years beyond t…
- [The House](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2025/11/14/the-house.md) - Daily writing promptIf you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be? View all responses I had a dream once, that I was sitting, resting in a cosy alcove of walls empanelled with wood, with wooden chairs and tables with comfortable cushions, smoke from an incense stick hanging heavy in th…
- ['First state to disburse highest compensation'](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2025/11/11/first-state-to-disburse-highest-compensation.md) - The following jacket advertisement (which is expensive) appeared in The Hindu (and perhaps other newspapers as well; I didn't check) yesterday: Something seemed off about the messaging here when I looked at it yesterday morning, and it clicked into place today: the poster’s claims focus on relief r…
- [A little ignorance can be a good thing](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2025/11/09/a-little-ignorance-can-be-a-good-thing.md) - Picture a city where most drivers use the same navigation app. At 9 am, the app says one side street is the quickest shortcut to get from area A to area B. Thousands of commuters accept this option and drive through that street, and soon it becomes jammed with traffic. As a result, the route that w…
- [Why do we trust scientists?](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2025/11/09/why-do-we-trust-scientists.md) - Individuals can’t master the mathematics of cryptography or the molecular biology of vaccines, yet they still trust these fields of science and the suggestions of their exponents to make decisions.
- [Is the war against science?](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2025/11/02/is-the-war-against-science.md) - From ‘7 basic science discoveries that changed the world’, Nature, October 29, 2025: Basic research is easily mocked because it can seem impractical, but, in fact, it is a major driver of economic growth. “The return on investment in basic research — the return to society — is very high, typically…
- [The 'impact' of climate writing](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2025/10/31/the-impact-of-climate-writing.md) - The problem begins simply enough. A journalist finds a word that seems to fit almost everything. It might be "crisis", "pivot" or the ever-convenient "impact". It's concise, authoritative, and headline-friendly. It appears once, then again, and soon it begins to dominate the page. Before long, an e…
- [Gentle yet final](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2025/10/21/gentle-yet-final.md) - A strange thing: a whale has washed up on a beach near Visakhapatnam. Not just any whale but a fully grown baleen, a hundred feet long and weighing about 40 tonnes (although I’m not clear how they were able to weigh it so quickly). Once recalled, it’s not easy to forget a tale like The Melancholy o…
- [Quasicrystal, heal thyself](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2025/10/21/quasicrystal-heal-thyself.md) - Scientists have uncovered a remarkable self-healing property in a strange class of materials known as quasicrystals, revealing their ability to grow into a perfect, single structure even when faced with obstacles. The discovery challenges a long-held understanding of crystal formation and opens the…
- [On Jane Goodall](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2025/10/18/on-jane-goodall.md) - Jane Goodall was a celebrated figure in conservation. Her work with chimpanzees in the Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania redefined primatology. However, more than a few publications as well as conservation experts writing on social media platforms have since her passing on October 1 called att…
- [The 'religious' function of science](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2025/10/18/the-religious-function-of-science.md) - We often understand science primarily in terms of its tangible successes, looking to it for advances in medicine, for the foundations of technologies, and for the tools with which to predict and manage our environment. This perspective views science as a potent problem-solving enterprise. In his ch…
- [A bad Nobel for Mokyr](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2025/10/14/a-bad-nobel-for-mokyr.md) - The American-Israeli economic historian Joel Mokyr has been awarded one half of the 2025 special Nobel Prize for economics "for having identified the prerequisites for sustained growth through technological progress". Now, by rewarding particular achievements over others, the Nobel Prizes are in ge…
- [Using disorder to reveal hidden objects](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2025/10/12/using-disorder-to-reveal-hidden-objects.md) - When light, sound or any kind of wave travels through a complex medium like fog, murky water, or biological tissue, it scatters in many directions. Each particle or irregularity in the medium changes the path of the waves, scrambling them and blurring the resulting image. This is why doctors strugg…
- [Remembering 'The Melancholy of Resistance'](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2025/10/09/remembering-the-melancholy-of-resistance.md) - Congratulations, László Krasznahorkai, for winning the Nobel Prize for literature. I still remember reading his The Melancholy of Resistance (1989). It was a mostly unnerving, somewhat frightening experience because I read it at a time of great uncertainty in my own life. In The Melancholy, chaos l…
- [What does a quantum Bayes’s rule look like?](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2025/10/04/what-does-a-quantum-bayess-rule-look-like.md) - Bayes's rule is one of the most fundamental principles in probability and statistics. It allows us to update our beliefs in the face of new evidence. In its simplest form, the rule tells us how to revise the probability of a hypothesis once new data becomes available. A standard way to teach it inv…
- [Using 10,000 atoms and 1 to probe the Bohr-Einstein debate](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2025/10/01/using-10000-atoms-and-1-to-probe-the-bohr-einstein-debate.md) - The double-slit experiment has often been described as the most beautiful demonstration in physics. In one striking image, it shows the strange dual character of matter and light. When particles such as electrons or photons are sent through two narrow slits, the resulting pattern on a screen behind…
- [Curiosity as a public good](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2025/09/20/curiosity-as-a-public-good.md) - India has won 22 Ig Nobel prizes to date. These awards, given annually at Harvard University by the magazine Annals of Improbable Research, honour studies that "first make people laugh, and then make them think" — a description that can suggest the prizes are little more than jokes whereas the rese…
- [Dispelling Maxwell's demon](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2025/09/19/dispelling-maxwells-demon.md) - Maxwell’s demon is one of the most famous thought experiments in the history of physics, a puzzle first posed in the 1860s that continues to shape scientific debates to this day. I’ve struggled to make sense of it for years. Last week I had some time and decided to hunker down and figure it out, an…
- [Behold, liquid carbon](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2025/09/16/behold-liquid-carbon.md) - Carbon is famous for its many solid forms. It's the soot in air pollution, the graphite in pencil leads, and the glittering diamond in expensive jewellery. It's also the carbon nanotubes in biosensors and fullerenes in organic solar cells. However, despite its ability to exist in various shapes as…
- [CSIR touts dubious 'Ayurveda' product for diabetes](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2025/09/14/csir-touts-dubious-ayurveda-product-for-diabetes.md) - At 6 am on September 13, the CSIR handle on X.com published the following post about an "anti-diabetic medicine" called either "Daiba 250" or "Diabe 250", developed at the CSIR-Indian Institute of Integrative Medicine (IIIM): Its "key features", according to the CSIR, are that it created more than…
- [A cricket beyond politics](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2025/09/13/a-cricket-beyond-politics.md) - On September 11, the Supreme Court was asked to urgently hear a petition that sought to cancel the Asia Cup T20 match between India and Pakistan scheduled for September 14 in the UAE. The petition, filed by four law students, claimed that playing the match so soon after the Pahalgam terror attack a…
- [Is the Higgs boson doing its job?](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2025/09/12/is-the-higgs-boson-doing-its-job.md) - At the heart of particle physics lies the Standard Model, a theory that has stood for nearly half a century as the best description of the subatomic realm. It tells us what particles exist, how they interact, and why the universe is stable at the smallest scales. The Standard Model has correctly pr…
- [A danger of GST 2.0](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2025/09/10/a-danger-of-gst-2-0.md) - Since Union finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman's announcement last week that India's Goods and Services Tax (GST) rates will be rationalised anew from September 22, I've been seeing a flood of pieces all in praise — and why not? The GST regime has been somewhat controversial since its launch becau…
- [A tribute to rubidium](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2025/09/09/a-tribute-to-rubidium.md) - And to Paul Feyerabend
- [Lighting the way with Parrondo’s paradox](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2025/09/07/lighting-the-way-with-parrondos-paradox.md) - In science, paradoxes often appear when familiar rules are pushed into unfamiliar territory. One of them is Parrondo’s paradox, a curious mathematical result showing that when two losing strategies are combined, they can produce a winning outcome. This might sound like trickery but the paradox has…
- [Challenging the neutrino signal anomaly](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2025/09/06/challenging-the-neutrino-signal-anomaly.md) - A gentle reminder before we begin: you're allowed to be interested in particle physics. 😉 Neutrinos are among the most mysterious particles in physics. They are extremely light, electrically neutral, and interact so weakly with matter that trillions of them pass through your body each second witho…
- [GST 2.0 + WordPress.com](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2025/09/04/gst-2-0-wordpress-com.md) - Union finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced sweeping changes to the GST rates on September 3. However, I think the rate for software services (HSN 99831) will remain unchanged at 18%. This is a bummer because every time I renew my WordPress.com site or purchase software over the internet in…
- [What does it mean to interpret quantum physics?](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2025/09/03/what-does-it-mean-to-interpret-quantum-physics.md) - The United Nations has designated 2025 the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology. Many physics magazines and journals have taken the opportunity to publish more articles on quantum physics than they usually do, and that has meant quantum physics research has often been on my mind. Ni…
- [A transistor for heat](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2025/08/25/a-transistor-for-heat.md) - Quantum technologies and the prospect of advanced, next-generation electronic devices have been maturing at an increasingly rapid pace. Both research groups and governments around the world are investing more attention in this domain. India for example mooted its National Quantum Mission in 2023 wi…
- [The Hyperion dispute and chaos in space](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2025/08/24/the-hyperion-dispute-and-chaos-in-space.md) - When reading around for my piece yesterday on the wavefunctions of quantum mechanics, I stumbled across an old and fascinating debate about Saturn’s moon Hyperion. The question of how the smooth, classical world around us emerges from the rules of quantum mechanics has haunted physicists for a cent…
- [The guiding light of KD45](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2025/08/24/the-guiding-light-of-kd45.md) - On the subject of belief, I’m instinctively drawn to logical systems that demand consistency, closure, and introspection. And the KD45 system among them exerts a special pull. It consists of the following axioms: * K (closure): If you believe an implication and you believe the antecedent, then you…
- [What on earth is a wavefunction?](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2025/08/23/what-on-earth-is-a-wavefunction.md) - If you drop a pebble into a pond, ripples spread outward in gentle circles. We all know this sight, and it feels natural to call them waves. Now imagine being told that everything — from an electron to an atom to a speck of dust — can also behave like a wave, even though they are made of matter and…
- [On the PixxelSpace constellation](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2025/08/22/on-the-pixxelspace-constellation.md) - The announcement that a consortium led by PixxelSpace India will design, build, and operate a constellation of 12 earth-observation satellites marks a sharp shift in how India approaches large space projects. The Indian National Space Promotion and Authorisation Centre (IN-SPACe) awarded the projec…
- [The Zomato ad and India's hustle since 1947](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2025/08/16/zomato-ad-india-hustle-1947.md) - In contemporary India, corporate branding has often aligned itself with nationalist sentiment, adopting imagery such as the tricolour, Sanskrit slogans or references to ancient achievements to evoke cultural pride. Marketing narratives frequently frame consumption as a patriotic act, linking the ch…
- [A new kind of quantum engine with ultracold atoms](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2025/08/07/a-new-kind-of-quantum-engine-with-ultracold-atoms.md) - In conventional ‘macroscopic’ engines like the ones that guzzle fossil fuels to power cars and motorcycles, the fuels are set ablaze to release heat, which is converted to mechanical energy and transferred to the vehicle’s moving parts. In order to perform these functions over and over in a continu…
- [Trade rift today, cryogenic tech yesterday](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2025/08/07/trade-rift-today-cryogenic-tech-yesterday.md) - US President Donald Trump recently imposed substantial tariffs on Indian goods, explicitly in response to India’s continued purchase of Russian oil during the ongoing Ukraine conflict. These penalties, reaching an unprecedented cumulative rate of 50% on targeted Indian exports, have been described…
- [What keeps the red queen running?](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2025/08/06/what-keeps-the-red-queen-running.md) - AI-generated definition based on 'Quantitative and analytical tools to analyze the spatiotemporal population dynamics of microbial consortia’, Current Opinion in Biotechnology, August 2022: The Red Queen hypothesis refers to the idea that a constant rate of extinction persists in a community, indep…
- [A limit of 'show, don't tell'](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2025/08/03/a-limit-of-show-dont-tell.md) - The virtue of ‘show, don't tell’ in writing, including in journalism, lies in its power to create a more vivid, immersive, and emotionally engaging reading experience. Instead of simply providing information or summarising events, the technique encourages writers to use evocative imagery, action, d…
- [Time for proof is now, Mr. Gandhi](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2025/08/02/time-for-proof-is-now-rahul-gandhi.md) - Rahul Gandhi is free to voice himself but on the question of the Election Commission “stealing votes”, as he has been claiming to the press, he needs to offer the proof he claims he has right away. By repeatedly claiming the Commission has been “stealing votes” for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP),…
- [A microscope that catches the slightest hints of heat](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2025/08/02/a-microscope-that-catches-the-feeblest-hints-of-heat.md) - A superconducting transition-edge sensor (TES) is a device well-known for its extreme sensitivity to photons, the particles of light — so much so that they can count photons one by one. They also have very little noise, which makes their readings quite reliable. TESs are often used in single-photon…
- [Frugality is a toxic chalice](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2025/07/28/frugality-is-a-toxic-chalice.md) - From 'Earth Imaging Satellite NISAR Exposes NASA's Weaknesses, ISRO's Strengths', NDTV, July 26, 2025: At the end of the day, the US scientists have swallowed their pride and are sheepishly going to watch the launch of a satellite where they have invested nearly $1.15 billion. It is this exorbitant…
- [Physicists test if they can load antimatter on a truck](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2025/07/24/physicists-test-if-they-can-load-antimatter-on-a-truck.md) - Physicists in Europe have reported that it’s possible to transport charged particles on a truck for four hours without disturbing them in any way. This seemingly run-of-the-mill announcement, reported in Nature on May 14, actually contains within its details the possibility of “a new era of precisi…
- [Quasiparticles do the twist](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2025/07/19/quasiparticles-do-the-twist.md) - Physics often involves hidden surprises in how matter behaves at the smallest scales. A fundamental property in physics is angular momentum, which describes how things spin or rotate, from planets all the way down to particles. Angular momentum is involved in many important effects like magnetism a…
- [Sniffing out the mystery chemistry of superheavy atoms](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2025/07/19/sniffing-out-the-mystery-chemistry-of-superheavy-atoms.md) - Remember the periodic table from your high school classroom? The table orders elements by how the valence electrons in their atoms are arranged. However, quantum physics calculations predict that in elements with atomic number greater than 103, the electrons are arranged in new, unusual ways. This…
- [A laser to make light of many shapes](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2025/07/17/a-laser-to-make-light-of-many-shapes.md) - Lasers can produce a slender beam of light of just one wavelength. For this simple feature, they are everywhere in modern technology, from the internet to medical devices and even in entertainment as holograms. However, traditional lasers have some limitations. For example, to use them in particula…
- [Found: clue to crack the antimatter mystery](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2025/07/17/found-clue-to-crack-the-antimatter-mystery.md) - Imagine you’ve put together a torchlight. You know exactly how each part of the device works. You know exactly how they’re all connected togetger. Yet when you put in fresh batteries and turn it on, the light flickers. You take the torchlight apart, check each component piece by piece. It’s all goo…
- [Watch the celebrations, on mute](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2025/07/15/watch-the-celebrations-on-mute.md) - Right now, Shubhanshu Shukla is on his way back to Earth from the International Space Station. Am I proud he’s been the first Indian up there? I don’t know. It’s not clear. The whole thing seemed to be stage-managed. Shukla didn’t say anything surprising, nothing that popped. In fact he said exactl…
- [A blog questions challenge](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2025/07/14/a-blog-questions-challenge.md) - I hadn’t checked my notifications on X.com in a while. When I did yesterday, I found Pradx had tagged me in a blog post called “a challenge of blog questions” in March. The point is to answer a short list of questions about my blogging history, then tag other bloggers to carry the enterprise forwar…
- [Sharks don't do math](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2025/07/13/sharks-dont-do-math.md) - From ’Sharks hunt via Lévy flights’, Physics World, June 11, 2010: They were menacing enough before, but how would you feel if you knew sharks were employing advanced mathematical concepts in their hunt for the kill? Well, this is the case, according to new research, which has tracked the movement…
- [The hidden heatwave](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2025/07/13/the-hidden-heatwave.md) - A heatwave is like the COVID-19 virus. During the pandemic, the virus infected and killed many people. When vaccines became available, the mortality rate dropped even though the virus continued to spread. But vaccines weren’t the only way to keep people from dying. The COVID-19 virus killed more pe…
- [Quantum clock breaks entropy barrier](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2025/07/12/quantum-clock-breaks-entropy-barrier.md) - In physics, the second law of thermodynamics says that a closed system tends to become more disordered over time. This disorder is captured in an entity called entropy. Many devices, especially clocks, are affected by this law because they need to tick regularly to measure time. But every tick crea…
- [A new beast: antiferromagnetic quasicrystals](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2025/07/11/a-new-beast-among-us-antiferromagnetic-quasicrystals.md) - Scientists have made a new material that is both a quasicrystal and antiferromagnetic — a combination never seen before. Quasicrystals are a special kind of solid. Unlike normal crystals, whose atoms are arranged in repeating patterns, quasicrystals have patterns that never exactly repeat but which…
- [Tracking the Meissner effect under pressure](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2025/07/05/tracking-the-meissner-effect-under-pressure.md) - In the last two or three years, groups of scientists from around the world have made several claims that they had discovered a room-temperature superconductor. Many of these claims concerned high-pressure superconductors — materials that superconduct electricity at room temperature but only if they…
- [Enfeebling the Indian space programme](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2025/07/03/the-enfeeblement-of-the-indian-space-programme.md) - There's no denying that there currently prevails a public culture in India that equates criticism, even well-reasoned, with pooh-poohing. It's especially pronounced in certain geographies where the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) enjoys majority support as well as vis-à-vis institutions that the subsc…
- [Iran's nuclear options](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2025/06/28/irans-nuclear-options.md) - From 'What is next for Iran’s nuclear programme?', The Hindu, June 28, 2025: As things stand, Iran has amassed both the technical knowhow and the materials required to make a nuclear weapon. Second, the Israelis and the Americans have failed to deprive Iran of these resources in their latest salvo.…
- [Why do quasicrystals exist?](https://www.slightlyacidic.com/2025/06/26/why-do-quasicrystals-exist.md) - Featured image: An example of zellij tilework in the Al Attarine Madrasa in Fes, Morocco (2012), with complex geometric patterns on the lower walls and a band of calligraphy above. Caption and credit: just_a_cheeseburger (CC BY) 'Quasi' means almost. It's an unfair name for quasicrystals. These cry…

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