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
Report by: Vishwas Shankar
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