Thursday, April 28, 2016

49th Annual Summer School Day 3: (27-04-2016) Talk By: Dr. Sriraghavan Topic: Lighter Side of Light



Since we are attending this science summer camp, I think it would not be wise if we have not yet made a discovery of our own. Well, the first two days of this camp were really inspiring and gave us a little to think and scratch our heads about and bring out the “curious” side which was hidden deep within ourselves. And today our group made an important observation about this camp, which is we found a link between this camp and the godfather movies, which is it just keeps getting better and better!!
 
Today we were introduced to an amazing resource person, Sri. Sriraghavan, founder and director of Brain Stars. Today it was his session and took the topic “THE LIGHTIER SIDE OF LIGHT” for this lecture today. It was an awesome lecture in which we experienced the joy of learning through experiments and explanations. It was like a class where science makes the magic and we couldn’t just believe it but in the end it was all  science. ‘Light is not something we can see, it is something that we can experience'. This was said by him when he asked us what is light and can anybody draw a diagram of light.

 The topic was very simple today, but later on we found the complications practically. He showed us the bridge connecting the basic and complex levels of an idea through his jaw dropping experiments, which were simple but yet fascinating.  He first put the question of what are the important features of light and as we went on giving him answers, he stooped us when we came to the topic of the wave particle dual nature of light. You could say he is a very unorthodox teacher as he helps us to get to the mind boggling questions and then ask us to find the answers!! Then we learnt about the history of scientists who tried to understand the property of light and thanks to a series of scientists like Faraday,Maxwell and Einstein, we know something about light. He explained how Maxwell proved mathematically that light is an electro-magnetic wave by explaining the process of electromagnetic flux and how Kepler found the speed of light.

 Then came the highlight of the session, which was the simple and mind blowing experiments!!  The whole session went on with astonishment. He first started with the filter paper experiment  and then went on to show us color shadows. Then came many other such experiments and the most important of them all was diffraction. He showed wonderfully how light  can literally be cut. He sacrificed a strand of a female student’s hair and unfortunately his!! He used to involve us students in his demonstrations and if we had something to say to his questions, he used never leave us without asking why. We also got to see a sophisticated laser holder!! 

We could learn so much today. Absolutely Sri. Sriraghavan is fantastic where he encouraged us to explore and he “Ignited our Minds”, boosted our imaginations and motivated us to think innovative as it is said by Dr. Abdul Kalam “Imagination leads to creativity, creativity gives you knowledge and knowledge makes you great”. At the end of the session he left us with few questions and activities to try at home and also suggested us to read a book “9 colors of the rainbow”. Nearly all the members of our group tried this experiments. The session was so interesting we were left mesmerized. 

Then Dr.Y.C.Kamala showed a movie related to the discovery and advancement of technology of the world of telescopes it was really interesting to watch the brilliance behind these magnificent instruments.. This has become a golden moment of our lives, a memorable one indeed and eagerly waiting for the coming up programs all the credit should go to The Bangalore Science Forum for creating such a golden opportunity for the students. For igniting the minds to think innovative, it’s like slowly handing over our future to and making us build our future by ourselves. I think the name of this summer camp should have been “Igniting Minds”. Is a life time experience coming here a golden time indeed. 


Report by: Vishwas Shankar            


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