Editorial

The study of the evolution of the scientists since the seventeenth century to the present day can be quite interesting and it may perhaps hold the key for improving our system During the early days, a stint in the army, then becoming c physicist or chemist or going over to biology was very common in Europe. Thanks to the encouragement given by Napoleon, to scientists and mathematicians, they could join the army as officers and continue the work. This also encouraged the scientists to become politicians later, just as our engineers and doctors go for IAS and IFS. However, in our system, administrators cannot go back as scientists. In the nineteenth century, the trend changed. Those with high motivation joined universities and institutes of technology and got on - the-job training. All the same, changing the field was equally common, in the west. In the twentieth century, every professional has more...

When students all over the world feel that certain subjects in science are dry, there is a drastic need to change our outlook. Even medicines are sugar coated now. Bitter medicines could be stronger, but no child will take it. Apart from sugar coating the lectures, we have to perform a more serious operation to remove the "anaesthetic of familiarity" as Faraday put it. We had been insisting in our sister journal that "our long association with physics makes us insensitive to the contradictions" - "we are tempted to take things for granted". One has to go to roots to remove the apparent contradictions. When we teach, we expect a pre knowledge from the students. We assume that more than stories of scientists, one should concentrate on "doing problems" the whole period, to do justice. This is not what successful teachers were practising. Motivation, seeking inspiration by studying the lives more...

Polonium kills fast. Tobacco kills slowly. The two combine in Tobacco making it a worse poison. It has been found that in Tobacco  210Po is present in significant levels. It has been observed that the uranium daughter products are selectively absorbed by the tobacco plant where they decay into radioactive polonium. High phosphate fertilizers 'worsen' the situation as uranium tends to associate with phosphates, This is the second important observation. Containment of radioactive wastes is a very important problem and perhaps to contain nature's poison, another poison con be experimented. Conversion of uranium to phosphates and nitrates and using them as fertilizers for tobacco plantations and many other tested weeds In protected areas and destroying these plants by burning them to the ashes/ might dilute their effect and make them amenable to disposal in safe areas- One can also study the possibility of biological degradation of the secondary plant wastes. more...

Chemistry was earlier a descriptive science. The fact that most of the studies in chemistry had not the rigor of mathematics was the reason that chemistry was developed by the great experimentalists. However, in the beginning of quantum mechanics, a chemical physicist, Robert S. Mulliken, who was a brilliant spectroscopist started developing the orbital theory, atomic orbitals and then  molecular orbitals to describe the bonding and calculating the energies from the spectra of molecules and won his Nobel Prize in chemistry. Herzberg was a Canadian physical chemist, for twenty years, he was head of the physics division of National Research Council in Ottawa which he made into a world-renowned spectroscopie laboratory, studied free radicals and Lamb shift in hydrogen like atoms with highly ionized atoms. He got his Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1971. Coulson had made enormous contribution to molecular orbital theory. Being a mathematician, he built theoretical chemistry, more...

Many students who read political science do not feel that it is abnormal to take interest in planes and cars, discussing the horse power of the engine, the pick up speed and the shortest time needed to stop and so on. Ask them the axle length, they will tell you. Yet, the some person will not be interested in knowing the structure of benzene, what is molecular weight or for that matter, even physics in general. They are interested in relativity and nuclear physics. What is the basic reason why this is so? I cannot appreciate beautiful Chinese poetry or even Burmese for that matter. The reason is simple. I don't know the language and I can't read even their script. Is it because of the formulae and diagrams that chemistry and physics look forbidding? One has to make some pedagogic experiments to find out how can the maximum content more...

Without passport or visa, you can work in El Dorado right here, in India. According to a serious study conducted by Cll, Textile Industry in Tamil Nadu alone will be worth Rs. Two Hundred Thousand Crores by 2015 and 100 lakh new jobs will be created. Coimbatore was already known as the Manchester of India. Tamil Nadu is also very famous for handlooms and many centres of power looms for the manufacture of export quality garments. But the labour intensive handlooms and power looms are passes, because of the cost factor. Now to meet the international challenge, one has to accept the latest computer technologies right from spinning, weaving, printing and colour-mixing which is already adopted by the leading silk industrial houses. Textile engineers specializing in every sector for the manufacture of computer aided machineries for spinning, weaving, dyeing and printing, chemical engineers specializing in the manufacture of fast dyes more...

From Bongalore to Delhi, students ore agitated. The apparent reason is reservation of seats in higher education. It will be naive to suppose that the real things at stake ore a few more seats. It is the discrimination that is annoying. When Martin Luther King held his long march to the Capitol, the stakes were not the right to take tea in hotels with the whites. It was against discrimination of all sorts. If today we call ourselves Indians, it is thanks to our freedom fighters and visionaries such as Gandhiji, Nehru and Sardar Patel. It was not an accident that we have in our preamble to our constitution - Liberty, Equality and Fraternity in that order. There can be no equality without liberty and no fraternity without equality. Reservation of gold medals is not the way to encourage developing countries in Olympiad. One does not accept charity. Medals are more...

It is a common observation that year after year, although the students score better in chemistry when compared to physics, the number of students who take up chemistry in colleges are much less. Inorganic chemistry, organic and physical chemistry are rated in ascending order for the difficulty of the subjects even by students who take up premedical groups. Why then is a subject difficult? In physics, even in a topic like Newton's laws of motion, the possibilities of making problems combining various topics can be very large. However in physical chemistry, the questions are straight forward. It is the difficulty of calculations, even without the twists and turns as it is given in physics, that makes physical chemistry tough. The basic problem is the handicap of not having taken mathematics as a subject. An introductory common co'-"se in calculus, statistics, etc., that is, mathematics for science students, as applied to more...

The first time we entered a real chemistry laboratory, the processor told us - "feel it, touch it, see the-colour, smell it and taste it if I allow you to do so". It was quite interesting of course during practicals when a thin white precipitate was obtained, we were told that it is only turbidity due to impurities. We were later confused that a similar thing was a precipitate of low concentration. Now an analytical chemistry laboratory looks different. Spectroscopic analysis - optical, ultraviolet, infrared, X- rays, X-ray diffraction, nuclear magnetic resonance and electron spectroscopy rule the roost. One can call this a chemistry laboratory or a physics laboratory depending on who is the chief of the division. The father and son Bragg made the study of diffraction and X-ray spectroscopy, Pauling, Herzberg and Mulliken have been equally handling chemistry and physics. While physicists will do well to know more more...

Chemistry and Physics have a number of common topics. It is bound to be so because often professors like Mulliken and Pauling had been simultaneously professors of Physics and Chemistry. X-ray diffraction and X-ray spectrometry are in the Physics departments in some places and in Chemistry in other places. This is true of many other branches of spectroscopy. However, while teaching physics in XII class, it is the final chapters which are dealing with dual nature of radiation and matter (ch. 12) going to atom models and losers (ch. 13), nuclear physics (ch. 14), semiconductors, electronics (ch. 15) and communications (ch. 16), in N.C.E.R.T books. In Chemistry, unit 3 of class XI starts with atomic structure, unit 4 with periodic table, electronic configuration, s, p, d, f blocks included. The first chapter of class XII book starts with a brief introduction to Bohr atom model, the de Broglie waves; a more...