Tillway Talk

Remembering one of India's greatest scientists, Homi Bhabha, on his birth anniversary: Homi Jehangir Bhabha (30 October 1909 – 24 January 1966) was an Indian nuclear physicist, and the  founding director and professor of physics at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR).  Colloquially known as "father of the Indian nuclear programme", Bhabha was also the founding director of the Atomic Energy Establishment, Trombay (AEET) which is now named the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre in his honour.  Awards: Bhabha was awarded the Adams Prize (1942) and Padma Bhushan (1954). He was nominated five times consecutively for the Nobel Prize in Physics between 1951 and 1956, by French Mathematician Jacques Hadamard. However, the Prize eluded him. Early life: Homi Jehangir Bhabha was born into a prominent wealthy Parsi family, through which he was related to businessmen Dinshaw Maneckji Petit, and Dorabji Tata. He received his early studies at Bombay's Cathedral and John Con...

Isaac Asimov once said, "There is a rumor in America that there are two intelligent races on earth: Humans and Hungarians”. “The Martians of Budapest”, sometimes simply “The Martians” is a colloquial term used to describe a group of prominent Hungarian physicists and mathematicians who emigrated to the United States following the Great Purge of 1933. The term refers to — what appeared, from the perspective of Americans —to be a group of men with superhuman intellects, arriving from an obscure country and  speaking an incomprehensible foreign language.   Scientists typically thought to belong to the group include refugees from the University of Göttingen, early associates of the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) and members of The Manhattan Project, including: John von Neumann, Paul Erdős, Eugene Wigner, Leó Szilárd, Edward Teller,  Theodore von Kármán, Paul Halmos, George Polya, John Kemeny and John Hersányi. John von Neumann (1903–1957):  The polymath genius g...

The US presidential election will be held on Tuesday, November 3. Current forecasts by almost  all psephologists  say that Joe Biden is favored to win the election, with virtually no chance for the incumbent Donald Trump. With  the election less than 10 days away, here's a look at some presidential elections that went down to the wire:  The 2016 US campaign between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton can be considered to be among the ten closest in  in the country’s history with Trump losing the popular vote by 3 million but winning the electoral college 304-227. Here are the other 9 other presidential races that came down to the slimmest of margins: 9. Benjamin Harrison over Grover Cleveland (1888) Electoral college vote: 233 to 168 It was the third of five U.S. presidential elections (and second within 12 years) in which the winner did not win the majority of the national popular vote. 8. George W. Bush over John Kerry (2004) Electoral college: 286 to 251 George ...

  Today, 21st October, is the 215th anniversary of the battle of Trafalgar, which was fought in 1805. It was a naval engagement fought by the British Royal Navy against the combined fleets of the French and Spanish Navies during the Napoleonic Wars.   Napoleon had a plan for his 'Grande Armée'  to invade England. The French and Spanish fleets under French Admiral Villeneuve sailed from the port of Cádiz in the south of Spain on 18 October 1805. They encountered the British fleet under Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson along the southwest coast of Spain, off Cape Trafalgar.   27 British ships of the line fought 33 French and Spanish ships. The greater experience and training of the Royal Navy overcame greater numbers. In the five hours of heavy fighting, the Franco-Spanish fleet lost 19 ships while the British lost none. But Nelson himself was shot by a French sniper, and died shor...

Born on October 19, 1910 in Lahore, British India, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, an astrophysicist, was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize for Physics for his mathematical theory of black holes. He was nephew of C.V. Raman. He spent the greater part of his professional life in the United States, and became a US citizen in 1953.  His mathematical treatment of stellar evolution yielded many of the current theoretical models of the later evolutionary stages of massive stars and black holes.  His most celebrated work concerns the radiation of energy from stars, particularly white dwarf stars, which are the dying fragments of stars.  The Chandrasekhar limit is named after him. He showed that the mass of a white dwarf could not exceed 1.44 times that of the Sun – the Chandrasekhar limit.  Chandrasekhar studied at Presidency College, Madras  and the University of Cambridge. He worked as a professor at the University of Chicago for several decades. He d...

Dr APJ Abdul Kalam was born on 15th October 1931. Today is his 89th birth anniversary. He served as president of India from 2002 to 2007. He was one of India's most outstanding scientists, being trained in physics and aerospace engineering. Kalam started his career by designing a small helicopter for the Indian Army. Kalam worked in the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) where he was the project director of India’s first indigenous Satellite Launch Vehicle (SLV-III) which successfully deployed the Rohini satellite in near earth’s orbit in July 1980. He was also an administrator at the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO). Kalam was intimately involved in India's civilian space programme and military missile development efforts. He thus came to be known as the Missile Man of India for his work on the development of ballistic missile and launch vehicle technology. Kalam was an avid author, and has written many books, such as Wings of Fire, Ignited M...