Viswanathan K's Thoughts

I’ve always wondered how Newton figured that the force acting on the moon is the same as the one that caused, I don’t know, the apple to fall on his head. Remember, back then, the Greek view of the universe prevailed: one set of laws on earth, another set for the heavens. So how did Newton hit upon a common law for entire universe? Carlo Rovelli answered that question in his page-turning history of physics, Reality is not What it Seems . He talks of Galileo who dropped a lot of objects and realized that their speed increases (during the early part of their fall). But he then noticed that the rate at which the speed of the falling object increases is constant: “Its value is approximately 9.8 meters per second.” Decades later, Newton imagined the earth having multiple moons, like Jupiter (something that Galileo had discovered). Newton assumed that one of those extra (and tiny) moons orbiting earth just above the mountain peaks. Newton wonders at what speed it would travel? ...

As part of the way to make kids comfortable with speaking in front of an audience, my daughter’s school has these periodic sessions where every kid has to speak for about a minute to the entire class holding a placard on the topic. Recently, the topic was any mathematician of their choice. Huh? -          How does a kid in 2 nd standard know about any mathematician (or “mathematic” as my daughter calls it)?! The only mathematician I know who did anything that a kid could understand was Gauss… as a kid, he found a smart way to add all the numbers from 1 to 100, an assignment his teacher had given. -          And what can one draw on a placard about a mathematician? Equations? Given the placard problem, I picked Alan Turing as the guy she could talk about. Come to think of it, all the points she used for her talk were about his work around computing, not maths! 1)     ...

On Christmas day, Neil deGrasse Tyson, the popular astrophysicist, tweeted birthday wishes to Isaac Newton: “On this day long ago, a child was born who, by age 30, would transform the world. Happy Birthday Isaac Newton b. Dec 25, 1642” It became his most popular tweet…and also the most contested one. Big surprise! The objections were on two grounds: 1)       The obvious set who felt he was taking a shot at baby Jesus; 2)      Ancient calendars are so misaligned with present day ones that the dates wouldn’t match at all. Tyson responded to the backlash. The short version (aka another tweet): “Imagine a world in which we are all enlightened by objective truths rather than offended by them.” The longer version of his response came on, where else, Facebook ! I loved this line from his response: “If a person actually wanted to express anti-Christian sentiment, my guess is that alerting people of Isaac Newton’s birthday woul...

Sir Isaac Newton, he of the falling apple fame (and oh yeah, gravity too), is supposed to have said these famous lines as a sign of humility: “If I have seen farther it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” Mario Livio pointed out in his book, Is God a Mathematician? , that those lines may just have been Newton’s way of saying that he owed absolutely nothing to one of his rivals, Robert Hooke, since Hooke was quite short! Then there’s Nick Selby, an upperclassman at Georgia Tech who told incoming freshmen during a memorable welcome speech recently (it’s gone viral on YouTube): “Our mission as students is NOT to follow in the footsteps of the astronauts, Nobel Prize Laureates, and president who graduated before us, but to EXCEED their footsteps, CRUSH the shoulders of the giants upon whom we stand!” Continuing in the Obama vein of “Yes, we can”, Selby thundered: “If you want to change the world, you're at Georgia Tech, you can do that! If you want to build th...