Visited India after the longest gap (~2.5 years).

Three observations from the milieu I grew up around (Gujarat): 1a. India is beyond advanced now as a cashless society! From street vendors to shops in the mall, everyone, everywhere is using Google Pay (or something similar).

A sugarcane juice vendor on the Dandi beach gave me a look when the QR code scan failed as I didn't have it set up!

Thread about my school PT teacher and 1952 Helsinki #Olympics GOLD Medalist in Field Hockey for Team India - Chandrasekhar Dubey

This is the post-Chak De story Dubey sir was synonymous with "games" in our school for quite literally decades! Thousands of students got serious drive for any form of sport. Skating, badminton, volley ball, hockey - He taught it all!

He wasn't the "maths teacher needs extra class so give them sports" types.

It’s the National Science Day! Celebrated each year in 🇮🇳, it’s remarkable that the date is set (rightly so) to the discovery of Raman Effect and not birth/death of its founder Sir C V Raman.

Raman was the first non-white Nobel laureate in Physics (& all of sciences). C V Raman’s professional life touched on every know element of how a ‘modern scientist’ navigates in the research field — restricted by institution hierarchy, funding, peer perceptions.

I can’t think of any other scientist who will make for a more interesting series/film!

BREAKING -

Ladies and Gentlemen - We have made the first confirmed detection of intermediate mass black holes with LIGO and Virgo detectors.

An honor of a lifetime to be given a leading role in this historic discovery. #GW190521 With about 142 times the mass of our Sun and signal from half-way across the universe, this new discovery breaks all many cosmic records!

Image: Deborah Ferguson / MAYA Collaboration

Almost all recent breakthroughs in fundamental physics & astronomy are paid by taxpayers. Salaries, R&D, maintenance.

So communicating research to citizens, integrating it with education should be as crucial a yardstick as publishing in journals & conferences.

Alas... There is just no system in almost any top-ranked institutes to ensure students & young researchers are trained+encouraged to communicate their work to broader society.

NSF grants have an entire section on Broader Impacts. So stop treating outreach as volunteering work.

Starting a recurring thread on BLACK HOLES. From history to our modern understanding and, in between, any bizarre facts about it. 1. The idea of "dark stars" - from where light cannot escape - became obvious since we figured in the late 1600s that the speed of light is indeed finite. Here is a quote by philosopher-scientist John Michell from 1784.

(Source: Wikipedia)

1. Modest attempt to summarize PhD thesis in 10 tweets. It presented a theoretical, observational & astrophysical perspective on black holes 2. Thesis had 3 parts (10 Ch.): #NumericalRelativity (Einstein on supercomputers), blackhole search in #LIGO & #GravitationalWave universe👇🏻