Sunday, October 29, 2006

Popular articles by yours truly

Due to popular demand (popular defined as one request
more than none), I am posting links to my articles aimed
at popularizing science through publications in
Resonance, Journal of Science Education
and in
Current Science, which among other things is
something like a forum to discuss science policy
in the country.

The first attempt was a 2 part article co-authored with 3
summer students, J. Meeraa, Seema Sharma and Bharti Sharma,
and Ritesh K. Singh who at that time was a beginning
student in our department. This was on 'discrete symmetries'
in particle physics, which also explained in some length the
ideas of particle physics. The two parts are here and here.

The next was a report on the stunning results from
the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, which was published in
both Current Science and Resonance, authored with Ritesh.
Since they are identical, I link the article to the Current
Science version
with certain minor errors pointed in this
erratum.

Then came an article on the 2002 Nobel Prize award to
neutrino pioneers Davis and Koshiba of which I am
sole author.

After a long break the enterprise was revived
in 2005 when a summer student Ekta Makhija wanted to
know what pentaquarks were all about. To answer this
question, I commissioned her, myself and K. Shivaraj to answer
the question. This very tough exercise led to 2 articles
in Resonance and Current Science on the subject.
Note that they are very different, and here is the
link for the Current Science article and
the Resonance article .


This year, along with 2 summer students Chitra Gautham
and Aquila Mavalankar, and Shivaraj and Alka Upadhyay
we started out to explain to the world at large what the
current status of some neutrino experiments were. We
later approached my friend S. Uma Sankar at IIT Bombay
to join us in this enterprise, which has led to a rather
impressive (even if I may say so myself) publication in
Current Science on the subject. The link is given
here.

I guess this does not really fit here, but anyway, I will
put it down. I gave a set of lectures
on Grand Unification at an international school in Kathmandu in 1997,
and it is featured at the reviews section on the Official
Superstring Theory Web-site
right here.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Anant,
I stumbled on to your blog. Well some of us at IITM do write pedagogical articles. We keep a list, updated sporadically, that has links to these articles. Here is the URL:

http://www.physics.iitm.ac.in/~labs/dynamical/pedagogy/

Anant said...

Suresh: Thanks for the pointer.