This is part of its efforts to popularize science to the general public and students who are pursuing science as their career. TNSF attempt to focus on students on higher science as everyone knows that learning of science at college within the curriculum is not enough to acquire holistic knowledge of science at the appropriate time. Hence, to fill the gap between what students are acquiring through the curriculum and what it is required, TNSF is planning its activities on higher science to students who are pursuing higher education.
About the Lecture We begin with a brief overview of the vast range of parameters in the physical universe, and the tiny window of this range that is directly accessible to our bare senses. This makes it necessary to develop tools and general principles that help us understand phenomena outside our accessible range (the so-called world of middle dimensions). Prominent among these principles is the notion of scale-free or scale-invariant physical laws (also known as power laws) that abound in nature. We take an excursion through examples drawn from a multitude of disciplines such as physiology, thermodynamics, chemical physics, polymers, meteorology and electromagnetism, among others. We conclude with brief remarks on the generality of the phenomenon of scale invariance
Introduction
V. Balakrishnan
Theoretical physicist, Professor Emeritus,Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai
Scaling in the Natural Sciences and Beyond
Q & A
Dr. V. Balakrishnan is an Indian theoretical physicist who has worked in a number of fields and areas, including particle physics, many-body theory, the mechanical behaviour of solids, dynamical systems, stochastic process, and quantum dynamics. He is an accomplished researcher who has made important contributions to the theory of anelasticity, continuous-time random walks, and recurrences in dynamical systems. He received his Ph.D. from Brandeis University. He was with TIFR, IGCAR and IIT-M. He was elected as a fellow of Indian Academy of Sciences in 1985. He authored a couple of books