I did my Ph.D. at Cornell University with Philip Argyres on supersymmetric gauge theories and string theories. So, for the outsider, what exactly is string theory ? Very briefly, it appears to be the most promising framework to address quantum mechanics (physics at short distances) and Einstein's general relativity (physics at long distances), under one rubric. In addition to tying together revolutionary ideas in physics in remarkably neat ways, the theory also appears to have a rather intricate mathematical structure, a lot of which still remains to be unravelled. There's far too much to elaborate on, so let me simply direct the outsider to The Official String Theory website. where more on string theory can be found. See also, e.g. Brian Greene's "The Elegant Universe" (and sequel), a recent well-written nontechnical book that among other things also outlines some of the major discoveries over the last several years, that have reshaped what we mean by string theory.
Cornell is a rather lovely campus in gorgeous Ithaca, and with the diverse population there, it was a fun place to be for gradschool, despite being a collegetown much much smaller than say a city of the scale of Bombay.
...and I did my undergraduate study at IIT Bombay in Mumbai, India..IIT was a wonderful fun place to grow up in and get much more than a classroom education..among the many memories that linger, the coffee shack is a particularly fond one..this is something like the IITian equivalent of Collegetown Bagels at Cornell.
I grew up in Bombay, a city that has a lot of character, I think. Here are images and suchlike of the Bombay of our yesterdays. Also of use for information is e.g. Mumbai on the Net.
And here are a few links to the masters of the art...
The Webmuseum, Escher, World Gallery, UK.
And here's a log of a road trip that me and a bunch of friends of mine from IIT underwent over the turn of the millenium.. written, well, in a not entirely down-to-earth fashion, maybe....
Here's a picture gallery -- pics of this road trip, Hans Bethe at Cornell, and ....
Pics of TIFR and the Arabian Sea, a family trip to Kerala in Aug 2004 ....
Here's an account of a Ganpati Visarjan trip of myself and some friends in Sep 2004.
The International String Theory Workshop, Khajuraho, was held in Dec '04 -- triplog linked (pics included).
Hindi Movie Songs -- contains links to lyrics of a whole bunch of stuf, including ghazals, semiclassicalish movie songs and so on.
Indian Music in general -- which ranges from classical music to ghazals (light classical, usually based on Urdu poetry) to Hindi fim songs and several others. There are several audio files here. Comprehensive..
A nice introduction to the rudiments of (north) Indian classical music can be found (among other places) here. Here are some other rather nice Carnatic music sites, which contain lyrics, audio files, explanations and so on..
