Physics
I first read Maulik Parikh's pieces in the Outlook magazine and enjoyed them tremendously. I still read him in this same magazine.
His latest one too is a delight. Sample this ,
Consider the coin toss at the beginning of a match. You might think there's a 50 per cent chance that the coin will land heads up. But that's not truly a matter of chance. If you were to carefully observe the way in which you flicked the coin with your thumb, if you were to account for the size and weight and shape of the coin, you would be able to predict—correctly, with 100 per cent accuracy—just how the coin would land. The seeming randomness of the coin toss comes about merely as a result of our ignorance of the precise details of the toss. Similarly, when we say there's a 30 per cent likelihood of rain, the indefiniteness of that forecast only reflects our incomplete data on the weather. Randomness, like guessing on an exam where you don't know the answer, stems from a lack of knowledge. As the great mathematician Laplace put it, if we knew everything about the present, "nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before [our] eyes".
Read the complete piece here.
Cool !!
His latest one too is a delight. Sample this ,
Consider the coin toss at the beginning of a match. You might think there's a 50 per cent chance that the coin will land heads up. But that's not truly a matter of chance. If you were to carefully observe the way in which you flicked the coin with your thumb, if you were to account for the size and weight and shape of the coin, you would be able to predict—correctly, with 100 per cent accuracy—just how the coin would land. The seeming randomness of the coin toss comes about merely as a result of our ignorance of the precise details of the toss. Similarly, when we say there's a 30 per cent likelihood of rain, the indefiniteness of that forecast only reflects our incomplete data on the weather. Randomness, like guessing on an exam where you don't know the answer, stems from a lack of knowledge. As the great mathematician Laplace put it, if we knew everything about the present, "nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before [our] eyes".
Read the complete piece here.
Cool !!
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