Artwork by Akshita Arora
From conversation on:
Feb 19, 2022
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Our everyday lives are lined by collective behaviour of all kinds of things, particles, and beings. Have you wondered if it is possible to formulate physical ideas that can lead us to understanding these fascinating behaviours that seem to appear out of sheer randomness — imagine the flocking of birds, movements of schools of fish, aggregation of bacteria, self-arrangement of bio-polymers— the highly non-trivial out of equilibrium systems that are driven by supply of energy, essentially the living or non-living systems? The study of such systems is now popularly termed as active matter, and our guest for this episode, Prof. Sriram Ramaswamy, is known to have made seminal contributions to the field amounting to giving birth to and shaping the field of active matter, and laying the foundations of the hydrodynamical approach for studying these systems. Prof. Ramaswamy, Fellow of the Royal Society, is currently a Professor at the Centre for Condensed Matter Physics at IISc Bangalore. His research addresses the quintessential questions of the physical world wherein the quantum mechanical descriptions do not enter the scene and the classical pictures rule over the complexities, using the powerful principles of the symmetry and conservation laws, under the broad regimes of condensed matter physics. In our discussion with Prof. Ramaswamy, we delved headlong into discovering more about the vast horizons and excitements in the field of active matter— Prof. Ramaswamy makes a call to all the bright young minds, to take a curious look at what wonderful ideas are in store to make sense of the physical world, and the apparent randomness in the absurdity of life.
I would say the first excitement was realising the difference between worrying about the momentum and worrying about the fluid!
ABOUT THE GUEST
Prof. Sriram Ramaswamy Professor, Centre for Condensed Matter Physics, IISc, Bangalore
Prof. Ramaswamy spent his formative years in Delhi, and obtained his Bachelors in Physics from the University of Maryland. He pursued his PhD work at the University of Chicago, and then joined at the Pennsylvania state university as a post doctoral fellow. He is currently a Professor of Physics at the Center for Condensed Matter Theory in the Department of Physics at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. Prof. Ramaswamy has been accredited for the pioneering work in the field of mechanics and statistics of active matter, which has given birth and shaped this entire field of physics of extremely these interesting systems. His research focuses on studying and understanding a widely multidisciplinary scope of systems ranging from ecological, biological, astronomical, and beyond, through the essential lens of fundamental physics, and the powerful ideas of symmetry and conservation principles.