What does science in India feel like?
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.
Root Privileges
Science, culture, and complexity
Latest posts
The Meta Ray-Ban glasses and Indian law
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 earbuds, contact lenses, etc. along… Continue reading The Meta Ray-Ban glasses and Indian law
Office hours
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 lack of good jobs in… Continue reading Office hours
Why launch costs dropped but may not keep dropping
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, the average cost of sending… Continue reading Why launch costs dropped but may not keep dropping
A thought for emergence
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 include… Continue reading A thought for emergence
How Indonesian cos. coopted the state’s win
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 sector, a major driver of tropical deforestation. We compiled a detailed dataset that integrates…
What Hannibal’s crossing cost
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 currency of the physical world: no physical process can… Continue reading What Hannibal’s crossing…
Walk through chaos
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” quantities, that at all other times things are completely predictable. I learnt from… Continue reading Walk through chaos
Gyroscopes
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 technologies based on quantum physics are… Continue reading Gyroscopes
Orphan blocks on bitcoin network waste 16 GW
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 occurs when two… Continue reading Orphan blocks on bitcoin network waste 16 GW