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
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
Elementary arrangements
Arnab Bhattacharya (TIFR, Mumbai)
3:00 pm to 4:00 pm Sunday, 20 October 2019
Jawaharlal Nehru Planetarium, Bengaluru
The periodic table is perhaps the most recognizable icon of chemistry, hanging in almost every science classroom, reminding us of our desire, from the earliest times, to find patterns and organize the building blocks that make up the world around us. As we celebrate the “International Year of the...more
Thinking ecologically about Indian cities
Harini Nagendra (Professor of Sustainability, Azim Premji University, Bengaluru)
4:00 pm to 5:00 pm Sunday, 22 September 2019
J. N. Planetarium, Sri T. Chowdaiah Road, High Grounds, Bangalore
India's cities are on a breakneck path to growth. Cities are engines of prosperity and promise, but also concentrations of pollution, stress, and disease. Episodes of flood, drought, heat waves, and smog tell us why we must begin to think ecologically about our urban future in Indian cities...more
The Culture of Science
Jayant Narlikar (Emeritus Professor, IUCAA, Pune)
4:00 pm to 5:00 pm Sunday, 18 August 2019
J. N. Planetarium, Sri T. Chowdaiah Road, High Grounds, Bangalore
This talk will begin with a discussion of what is implied by the culture of science. It will be shown how the evolution of science from early primitive form to its present complex structure took place and how on occasions the culture of science was compromised. In the present days, fundamental...more
A mathematical adventure in immunology
Carmen Molina-Paris (School of Mathematics, University of Leeds, UK)
4:00 pm to 5:00 pm Sunday, 07 July 2019
J. N. Planetarium, Sri T. Chowdaiah Road, High Grounds, Bangalore
Our immune system is an extraordinary collection of molecules and cells, which together protect us from pathogens and infectious diseases, such as smallpox, dengue or Ebola viruses. An essential step to decipher the governing rules of our immune system is to understand how its molecules and cells...more

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