Kaapi with Kuriosity


Kaapi with Kuriosity is a monthly public lecture series organised by the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences (ICTS-TIFR), in collaboration with the Jawaharlal Nehru Planetarium and other educational institutions in Bengaluru.

The aim of the talks in this series is to stimulate the curiosity of the public towards the myriad aspects of science. The setting for these talks will be informal with a lot of scope for open discussions. The scientific background assumed will not be beyond the school level. As such, they are easily accessible to school/college students, families and working professionals interested in science.

Contact: outreach @ icts . res . in

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Past Talks
Can forests in India influence rainfall?(ONLINE)
Jagadish Krishnaswamy (Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment, Bengaluru)
4:00 pm to 5:30 pm Sunday, 22 November 2020
Livestream via the ICTS YouTube channel
There is a long history of the discourse on how forests cause rainfall. It was then replaced with the paradigm that forests are found in rainy areas and are not the cause of the rain itself. It was felt that forests were net consumers of water due to evapotranspiration. In recent decades scientific...more
Cosmic Whisper from Binary Black Holes (ONLINE)
Archana Pai (Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay)
4:00 pm to 5:30 pm Sunday, 18 October 2020
Livestream via the ICTS YouTube channel
The era of gravitational wave astronomy has begun with the spectacular observation of gravitational waves by two LIGO detectors in the year 2015. By now, the interferometric gravitational wave detector network with LIGO and Virgo detectors have observed a dozen black hole binary merger events. With...more
Agents of Change: The Role of Catalysts in the Modern World (ONLINE)
Shobhana Narasimhan (Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Bengaluru)
4:00 pm to 5:30 pm Saturday, 26 September 2020
Livestream via the ICTS YouTube channel
What was the most important scientific discovery of the 20 th century? Of course, there are several candidates! However, many people think it was the discovery by Haber and Bosch that iron could be used as a catalyst to make ammonia out of nitrogen and hydrogen. Have you wondered why we do not...more
A Life of Resonance with Quantum Matter: P.W. Anderson (1923-2020)
Ganapathy Baskaran (Professor Emeritus, The Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai, Distinguished Professor, Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai, and Distinguished Visiting Research Chair, Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada)
4:00 pm to 5:30 pm Sunday, 23 August 2020
Livestream via the ICTS YouTube channel
Quantum matter refers to a piece of rusted iron, a grain of sand or a drop of water etc. By thinking deeply about these earthly materials and combining valuable clues from experimental results, P.W. Anderson, a theoretical physicist and a quantum mechanic par excellence helped discover some secrets...more
Soft and squishy materials and how to think about them (ONLINE)
Gautam Menon (Ashoka University and IMSc)
4:00 pm to 5:30 pm Sunday, 19 July 2020
Livestream via the ICTS YouTube channel
The materials we see around us can be hard (a metal spoon) or soft (a well-made idli or your earlobe). Many materials fall in-between extremes of hardness and softness. Other types of materials (honey, water) flow. Some materials flow easily while others flow very, very slowly. I'd like to describe...more
Automating Mathematics? (ONLINE)
Siddhartha Gadgil (Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore)
4:00 pm to 5:30 pm Sunday, 17 May 2020
Livestream via the ICTS YouTube channel
Starting with just the rules of chess, it took four hours of playing against itself for AlphaZero, a computer program, to become the strongest chess player on the planet, playing with a "dynamic, open style" and preferring moves that are "risky and aggressive". With a couple of days of self-play,...more
Global Warming in an Unequal World --The Economics and Politics of Climate Action
T. Jayaraman (M. S. Swaminathan Research Foundation, Chennai)
4:00 pm to 5:00 pm Sunday, 09 February 2020
Jawaharlal Nehru Planetarium, Bengaluru
In this talk we elaborate why the real challenge of global warming lies in the economic and political dimensions of the global collective action that is required to meet this challenge. We will begin with a brief review of different approaches and attitudes to climate action. We will also explain...more
Of spooky actions and other quantum conundrums
Smitha Vishveshwara (Professor of Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign , USA)
4:00 pm to 5:30 pm Sunday, 12 January 2020
Jawaharlal Nehru Planetarium, Bengaluru
The quantum revolution, birthed at the beginning of the last century, cast our understanding of our world and universe in a completely new light. It introduced strange, counter intuitive ideas – matter can behave like waves, a magnet can point in multiple directions at once, and two atoms can get...more
150 years of entropy
William Bialek (Princeton University)
4:00 pm to 5:00 pm Saturday, 21 December 2019
Jawaharlal Nehru Planetarium, Bengaluru
Over time, the threads of our clothes unravel, and once unraveled they do not spontaneously weave back together again. This tendency for things to decay and disorder is universal. In the mid-nineteenth century, it was realized that this tendency places fundamental limits on the things we can build...more
Will tigers survive the 21st century?
Uma Ramakrishnan (NCBS, Bengaluru)
4:00 pm to 5:00 pm Sunday, 10 November 2019
Jawaharlal Nehru Planetarium, Bengaluru
Tigers are charismatic, fascinating but also highly endangered. The government of India is investing great efforts to recover tiger populations, but has tiger recovery got anything to do with science? In this talk, I will discuss our work on the genetics of tiger populations, and how use tiger DNA...more

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