Author: Maithili Dhule

An aspiring writer, an avid reader, an amateur artist, and an intellectual thinker, are some of the terms I can use to describe myself. "Love, Laugh, Live, and Pray," is my motto. I am an engineering student, currently studying Electronics and Telecommunication. On a more personal level, I enjoy reading and writing about topics ranging from technological advances, to even philosophy and life.

Stand on the edge of Mount Vesuvius, about to erupt, in the ancient city of Pompeii. Look at Earth while walking on the barren plains of the Moon. Watch your heart beating in real time. Call it scientific trickery, or even magic, Virtual Reality spins a different meaning to what it means to experience life. From its use in gaming to movies, education or even healthcare, defence and military, the possibilities are endless. VR lets us go places and do things that we’ve only dreamt of! And yet, one of the frontrunners in shaping this industry is largely unheard of.…

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In this age that is obsessed with Smartphones and cameras, or, more prominently, cameras of Smartphones, one just can’t seem to stop clicking pictures. Back in the year 2000, when photography was gaining momentum, Kodak announced that the world had captured a whooping 80 billion photos! That was the first time that such a record was set. According to Mylio, it is estimated that the number is going to rise to 1.2 trillion, at end of 2017! That’s more than the number of people that there are on this planet. (That figure is projected to be around 7.5 billion by…

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A grand illusionist has recently come into the picture, making an attempt to defy the laws of physics as we know it.  This mystical figure is seen in the guise of an energy beam shooting out from the centre of black hole of the galaxy – the Messier 87 (M87).  The magic trick of the century – a jet of plasma moving at a speed almost five times the speed of the light! At least that’s what the Hubble Telescope’s measurements point to. What and where is it? The M87 is not exactly your next door neighbour. In fact, according to…

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An omelette turning back into an egg; cold water in a glass being separated into ice cubes and warm water; chopped up wood coming back together to form the trunk of the tree from which it was cut. As common sense dictates, it is impossible for these processes to occur. That is, you cannot convert a disordered state of things into ordered ones. The magic word here is entropy, or the state of things. There is even a law for it – the second law of Thermodynamics. According to it, the entropy of any irreversible process can never decrease. It…

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What exactly is an electron? A textbook definition will tell you that it is a negatively charged subatomic particle which revolves around the nucleus of an atom in fixed orbits. But if we can’t directly observe one, how can we say with for sure that it even exists? In fact, thanks to Heisenberg, we can’t even pinpoint its exact location. We need to rely on probability to do just that. Can an electron be at two places at once? Imagine this – what if all the electrons in the Universe are, in fact, just one particle that is perpetually travelling forward and backwards…

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We measure time with the help of clocks and calendars – which are artificial constructs we’ve put up. But how do we know time exists? How can we say for sure that time is passing by? Say, it did actually exist. When did the Universe’s clocks start ticking? It is generally accepted that the concept of time came into existence after the Big Bang. But who put the batteries in that clock? Time has continued to confound physicists and philosophers for centures. Oxford defines time as an indefinite, continued, progress of existence and events in the past, present and future, regarded as the…

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We live on a small blue planet, which is but a speck in the vast expanse of our universe. We call it home and it spins at a startling rate of 465 m/s, or 1674 km/hr. Why don’t we feel it? Primarily due to the immense size of Earth, and due to the fact that we are moving along with it, at the same speed. Thus, inertia. So what would happen if the Earth stopped spinning? Consider travelling in a car along the highway, going at a constant velocity. We feel as though we aren’t moving at all because we…

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Can light be lethal? When you think of light, apart from the whole association with optics, the scientifically minded are likely to think of it as a “source of energy”. And while light is of course, as essential to life as anything else, a focused beam of light could turn out to be lethal. We’re talking about laser of course. To understand how light can be turned into a weapon, consider an incandescent light bulb, and a flashlight. A light bulb sends out light waves consisting of peaks and troughs in all directions. Different frequencies of waves combine together to give white light.…

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