Suppose you have only one hour to learn physics in your life, what would you like to know? What if you have one day, or one week, a month or one year? Students normally take interest in physics for academic reasons, beyond that they consider it as non-consequential  and even painful. For plenty of reasons, one should learn physics from and for our daily life. Knowing some basic principles come handy in everyday matters. This project aims to develop lessons using relevant examples around us that can make learning the subject possible by doing some useful exercises. Additionally, a modern physicist sometime may be more removed from the ways of pioneers of the subject like Galileo thought on the problems they faced. The format here promotes discovery-oriented thinking. The lessons will be online presentation in modules of 4 hour each. Once designed, the course will be delivered to IT students in India with help of local instructors.

If you had held some grievances about your physics education, but later found an interesting way to understand some basic principles, this is an opportunity for you to share them. I would like to hear from you.

"So I have often made the hypothesis that ultimately physics will not require a mathematical statement, that in the end the machinery will be revealed, and the laws will turn out to be simple, like the chequer board with all its apparent complexities."    -Richard Feynman.

On the surface, theoretical physics and computer science appear very distinct and unrelated. At the quantum level, the interactions among fundamental particles are hard to understand and sometimes bizarre. On the other hand the basic microscopic interactions among bits in a computer processor are extraordinarily simple and straightforward. On a human level, physics - governed by symmetries and conservation principles - is wonderfully well behaved and amenable to mathematical analysis. The same cannot be said for a Microsoft OS. We explore ways to redefine the fundamental operations of theoretical computation, making it consistent with aspects of theoretical physics, so that models of computation can benefit from conservation laws and symmetries. This involves looking at digital logic and cellular automata that are designed to operate with strong conservation laws.

This Spring semester, we are offering a course "The physics of theoretical computation". It is cross-credited in CS(15-508) and Physics(33-608) for 9 units. Registrations is open now, so hurry, take the plunge! Check out the poster below, if more intrigue is needed. 

"The Matrix" themed poster, I did for the course.

Some places, interesting people, after moving to Pittsburgh.