SynTalk

Are younger systems faster? Do elephants mate slowly? Is a plastic ruler always ageing? Is only glass glassy? Why are processes slow or fast, & how do they speed up or slow down? Do all systems have an internal clock? Is water fast because it acts like a large correlated spring? Is there such a thing as fully-dissolved? Are certain social systems stable because they remain ‘useful’? How does fashion change fast? Is slowness a sign of highly connected groups? ‘How’ does inter-caste marriage happen? Is the past more important only for systems that are undergoing change? Do external disruptions lead to a revival in interest in the past? What is the opposite of revolution? What changes predictably – science or technology? How do languages die? Does protein misfolding tell us about its past? Are the biasing forces blind? Is friction a memory function? Is swapping like catalyzing? Is speed synonymous with forgetting? How do the ‘same’ human beings exist in different states? Could an umbrella theory uncover secrets of all slow dynamics? Will we remain addicted to speed? &, what will not change much in the long run? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from physical chemistry (Prof. Biman Bagchi, IISc, Bangalore), literary theory (Prof. Sachin Ketkar, The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, Vadodara), & glass physics (Prof. Jorge Kurchan, École Normale Supérieure (ENS), Paris). Listen in...

Was the Earth ever flat? Do we live in a ‘flattish’ Universe? What did we first notice in the starry sky; & was anything fixed? How did the notion of the atom come to be? Have you heard accounts of maps/globes that do not exist anymore? Was the ‘World’ once – just – Asia, Europe and Africa? Do maps always orient us spiritually within the larger (ever-changing) Cosmos? Is the Universe static? Are maps a theory? What comes first – theory or observation? How can we map something we don’t see or is largely empty? Is all Dark Matter of one kind, & how do we know that it exists? Are all stars of one kind? Could stars be cubes? Is it easy to add a newly discovered continent to an existing map? Why did the idea of Antarctica come to be? What did we first establish to be ‘real’ – the atom or the Americas? What is the shape of the Universe, & is every point on it unique? Are we bounded in time (& Space?)? Is mapping (always) observer dependent? Can everything be understood in terms of pictures? Would maps (even if sometimes incorrect) continue to offer new possibilities? &, will we keep going beyond what we already know? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from quantum mechanics (Prof. Partha Ghose, ex-S. N. Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences, Kolkata), astronomy (Prof. Ajit. K. Kembhavi, IUCAA, Pune), & comparative literature (Dr. Ayesha Ramachandran, Yale University, Connecticut). Listen in...

What paints the scene for you? Do you often get carried away? How do we recall the mutable past? Is all implicitness context, time, politics, language, and subject dependent? Is our freest choice also controlled by culture? What makes something visible, sayable, perceivable, or (even) intuitive? Can the visual be more implicit than the textual? Is sound most implicit? Is our implicit explicit for ‘God’? Is architecture, being both symbolic and real, the language of the given? Is architecture mythical? How does the built form (say, the stage) reflect the natural world or the cosmology? Are airports non-places? How do the givens change (either dramatically or slightly)? How might tea be advertised? Does modernity reference only itself? Do you sell things off you do not use? Why can’t a performance be fully reproduced or archived or described? Do each one of us have our own implicit? Do we always create more implicit? Can Reason make everything explicit? Will we keep pursuing the promise of presence as we attempt to ‘leap’ forward? What do we want to be? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from performance studies (Dr. Trina Nileena Banerjee, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC), Kolkata), semiotics & linguistics (Dr. Seema Khanwalkar, CEPT University, Ahmedabad), & art history / architecture (Dr. Venugopal Maddipati, Ambedkar University, New Delhi). Listen in...

Do you consume Garcinia? What does it mean to (not) own land or the forests? Do farms and forests lie on a continuum? Can forests themselves be farmed? Does wildlife conservation impact people for whom forests are a source of livelihood? Do we eat what some animals would not eat? Do you primarily eat (volatile) fresh produce? How are agricultural markets different from, and similar to, other markets? Is the Market an alien imposition atop the subsistence ‘economy’? Why are farmers often price takers? Where does market power emanate from, & what leads to interlocking and/or intermediation? Does ‘exchange’ capture more value than production? How is rice different from wheat? Have agrarian worlds always been rich exchange environments? Can agriculture generate sufficient surplus to support empires (or families)? Are small-farm farmers always more productive? Why isn’t there economies of scale in production? What makes agriculture so, so, complex? Are farmers becoming workers? Does Nature need to be protected from agriculture? Should seeds be preserved in seed banks, or plates, or Half-Earth? Are all consumers a member of the agrarian community? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from anthropology (Dr. Mekhala Krishnamurthy, Ashoka University, Delhi (NCR)), ecology (Dr. Nitin D. Rai, ATREE, Bangalore), & economics (Dr. Vamsi Vakulabharanam, UMass, Amherst). Listen in...

How far are you? ‘What’ is a place? Are they a moment of ‘realized’ relationships? Are (say) air pollution, hospitals, hydraulic systems, temperature, diseases, real estate prices, and species distributed similarly spatially? Does it take a lot of work to make a place? What does it mean for places to be similar? Have we always been placed the same way? Why aren’t there tigers in Sri Lanka? Are habitats and species always strongly correlated? Might India be closer to Madagascar than Africa in some respects? Can geological history be inferred from phylogeny? Can noise have a spatial structure? Is all data spatiotemporal, & does proximity (often) strongly imply relatedness? Are real estate prices continuous? Are context and history key to understanding spatiality? Are interactions and relations primary, & location or identity secondary? Do cities emerge to manage (or control?) exchanges at scale? When are places hybrids? Why do Gaussian processes work for multidimensional interpolation? Can we understand spatial dependences better? Would there be fewer places in the future? Would places remain tied to the notion of permanence, and the ‘pretence’ continue? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from anthropology (Dr. Nikhil Anand, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia), statistics (Prof. Sudipto Banerjee, UCLA, Los Angeles), & biogeography (Dr. K. Praveen Karanth, IISc, Bangalore). Listen in...

Do you forget names and words? Are you going to get Alzheimer’s soon? Is any experience fundamentally conditioned by time? What cannot be anticipated? Can murmurs function like (unprocessed?) signs? Why are multi-parameter signals very difficult to ‘observe’ ahead of time? Is knowing all the initial conditions the primary source of difficulty? How are social systems different? Can beauty be ‘a’ number? Are nucleation events always stochastic? Does growth of protein aggregates ‘fit’ the equations more easily in a test tube than in the human body? Is change of phase akin to change of model equations? Do magnets, markets, fluids, or (even) society display some signals (say, susceptibility or compressibility) before a transition? Is it possible for a laser pulse to exit before it has entered? Does the stimulus to transform always come from the outside? Are all misfolded proteins similar the way all chairs are similar? Does recognizing new patterns need languages (& neologisms), & what happens when forms dissolve? Are repetitions (always) copies? How can we be ‘otherwise’? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from statistical physics & econophysics (Prof. Bikas K. Chakrabarti, Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics (SINP), Kolkata), philosophy (Prof. Leonard Lawlor, The Pennsylvania State University, Pennsylvania), & biophysics (Prof. Sudipta Maiti, TIFR, Mumbai). Listen in...

What’s your kill count? Do cats and dogs play to win? Do you like running and racing? Does play express freedom while pushing at the boundaries of reality, materials, & rules? Does normal life lend solidity to games, even though they may be interrupted by reality? Are literature and games both forms of cultural simulation? Would a Martian visiting Earth be able to distinguish work from play? Why can games only be enacted (& not narrated) in real time by the player? Must players be aware of their effects on each other for a situation to be a game? How does nature make its moves? Are the rules of a game arbitrary though not irrational? Can legal moves be illogical and/or unethical? How ‘large’ games can be, & must they be conclusive? Can several mathematical proofs be thought of as (systemic and/or narrative) turn-based games? Are all perfect information games winnable? How are games with imperfect or incomplete information different? Can anything be learnt via play? Why doesn’t game-play develop as fast as the simulation of spaces? Could games be used for ‘serious’ purposes in the future? Would leisure stay free? Or, might games cease to be play even as we bet everything on it? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from literature (Prof. Supriya Chaudhuri, Jadavpur University, Kolkata), logic (Dr. Sujata Ghosh, ISI, Chennai), & game design (Dhruv Jani, Studio Oleomingus, Vapi). Listen in...

Are you unique, even though you are of a certain type? What kind of a tree is the tree of life? Are all organisms, languages, and substances in the world distinct? 'Can' languages be genetically interpreted? How do we know if we have an origin common with (say) bacteria? Are types always fuzzy, and tokens always particular? Do types exist, & are they like classes? Does our craving for understanding lead us to structures, or does the World 'have' a structure? Are all languages tokens of a meta-language? Is Japanese (language) an isolate and therefore both a type and a token? Are all facts structural facts? Can there be tokens that do not belong to any type? How do new types come to be? What is language itself a type of? Is the Chomskyian Universal Grammar evolving? Did (inner) language precede speech? Is our thinking overlapping, and speech ordered? Do animals think? What is inherited? Can it be said, for a certain function (or a disease), how many types we are? Would we all have precision medicine available for each one of us in the near future? &, from the standpoint of eternity is there only one type – sub specie aeternitatis…? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from linguistics (Dr. Tanmoy Bhattacharya, University of Delhi, New Delhi), genomics (Dr. Rakesh Mishra, CSIR-CCMB, Hyderabad), & philosophy (Prof. Priyambada Sarkar, University of Calcutta, Kolkata). Listen in...

Which side of the separatrix are you? Does self-interaction make systems chaotic? Have you ever experienced turbulence? Do you have an intuition for chaotic behaviour in various realms? Is chaos always fecund? However, can chaos also be ‘produced’? Is noise the same as chaos? Can very simple systems be chaotic? Can solids, circuits, and solar systems be chaotic? How do laminar (periodic) systems transition to aperiodic chaos, & vice versa, when (say) flow happens inside a pipe? Did chaos come first, & is everything thereafter a result of its coming together with Gaia and Eros? Is it possible for the future to determine the present (or the past) – is this provable (bit.ly/2xCZdPF)? Can events be a part of a process, & what causes it? Is history chaotic? Do chaotic systems’ sensitive dependence to initial conditions prove that the World is non deterministic? Are all deterministic systems necessarily predictable? Can a very ‘small’ cause lead to a very ‘large’ effect? However, do some things just happen spontaneously? Does weather in one part depend on the rest of the world? Can we create large scale robust chaos? &, what is the long term future of our understanding of chaos? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from electrical engineering (Prof. Soumitro Banerjee, IISER, Kolkata), fluid dynamics (Prof. Rama Govindrajan, ICTS-TIFR, Bangalore), & philosophy (Dr. Arun Iyer, IIT Bombay, Mumbai). Listen in...

Do we die ‘because’ we stop breathing? Is it possible to say how ‘a’ cancer is caused? Do causes exist? Are they (always) universal, uniform, & a priori? Are all phenomena eventually multi-causal and probabilistic? Might cause be a feature of the mind? Is the ‘concept’ of cause essential? What explains changes in the world? What role do (say) our senses, culture, technology, institutions, & chance play? Why do grasshoppers jump randomly once in a while? Can randomness also have causes? Is the effect invalid without the (correct) cause? Does technology (the ‘how’) often precede science (the ‘why’)? Is understanding of causality, however, both beneficial and satisfying? Can certain pockets of genome or organisms be more mutation prone? Do hotspots of innovation emerge in a similar fashion? What is the ultimate cause of risk taking? Might heightened resilience lead to lesser disruption? Why do certain honey bees go to certain flowers? Are ultimate causes eventually evolutionary? Was the world always as it is today? Can we live without ultimate causes? Must we keep looking for causality even in a playful world? &, what is it that ultimately survives everything else…? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from innovation studies (Prof. Anil K. Gupta, IIM Ahmedabad, Ahmedabad), philosophy (Prof. T. S. Rukmani, Concordia University, Montreal), & biology (Prof. L. S. Shashidhara, IISER, Pune). Listen in...