PSL 92 - Scaling in the Natural Sciences and Beyond

About the Speaker:

Dr. Balakrishnan V. is an Indian theoretical physicist who has worked in a number of fields and areas, including particle physics, many-body theory, the mechanical behaviour of solids, dynamical systems, stochastic process, and quantum dynamics. He is an accomplished researcher who has made important contributions to the theory of anelasticity, continuous-time random walks, and recurrences in dynamical systems. He received his Ph.D. from Brandeis University. He was with TIFR, IGCAR and IIT-M. He was elected as a fellow of Indian Academy of Sciences in 1985. He authored a couple of books

About the Lecture:

We begin with a brief overview of the vast range of parameters in the physical universe, and the tiny window of this range that is directly accessible to our bare senses. This makes it necessary to develop tools and general principles that help us understand phenomena outside our accessible range (the so-called world of middle dimensions). Prominent among these principles is the notion of scale-free or scale-invariant physical laws (also known as power laws) that abound in nature. We take an excursion through examples drawn from a multitude of disciplines such as physiology, thermodynamics, chemical physics, polymers, meteorology, and electromagnetism, among others. We conclude with brief remarks on the generality of the phenomenon of scale invariance.