Kaapi with Kuriosity is a monthly public lecture series organised by the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences (ICTS-TIFR), in collaboration with the Jawaharlal Nehru Planetarium and other educational institutions in Bengaluru.

The aim of the talks in this series is to stimulate the curiosity of the public towards the myriad aspects of science. The setting for these talks will be informal with a lot of scope for open discussions. The scientific background assumed will not be beyond the school level. As such, they are easily accessible to school/college students, families and working professionals interested in science.

Contact: outreach @ icts . res . in

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Past Talks
Michael Berry (University of Bristol, UK)
4:00 pm to 6:00 pm Sunday, 10 June 2018
Jawaharlal Nehru Planetarium, Bengaluru
Connections between physics and technological invention and aspects of human life that seem far from science are both unexpected and unexpectedly common. And rather than flowing one way - from physics to gadgets - the connections form an intricate web, linking all aspects of human culture, in...more
Joseph Samuel (Raman Research Institute, Bangalore)
4:00 pm to 6:00 pm Sunday, 27 May 2018
Jawaharlal Nehru Planetarium, Bengaluru
This talk will describe the ways in which the idea of a black hole has affected the conceptual foundations of theoretical physics. The talk will be pitched at an elementary level and is addressed mainly to members of the general public and school students. No equations will be used, except for the...more
Zorana Zeravcic (ESPCI Paris, France)
4:00 pm to 6:00 pm Sunday, 22 April 2018
Jawaharlal Nehru Planetarium, Bengaluru
Living organisms have amazing capabilities: they move and react, eat and digest, reproduce and heal, sense and communicate, and also evolve. All of these characteristics emerge from interactions within a rather small set of molecular building blocks such as water and sugars. In this talk we will...more
Shannon Olsson (National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), TIFR)
4:00 pm to 6:00 pm Sunday, 25 March 2018
J. N. Planetarium, Sri T. Chowdaiah Road, High Grounds, Bangalore
One of the most fundamental questions in our pursuit to understand our living world is how new species come to be, creating the vast biodiversity that exists on our planet. Here, I will tell the story of how scientists across continents and disciplines have tracked this question over 150 years for...more
Urbasi Sinha (Quantum Information and Computing (QuIC) laboratory at Raman Research Institute, Bengaluru)
4:00 pm to 6:00 pm Sunday, 25 February 2018
J. N. Planetarium, Sri T. Chowdaiah Road, High Grounds, Bangalore
Quantum mechanics is a cornerstone of modern physics. Just as the 19th century was called the Machine Age and the 20th century the Information Age, the 21st century promises to go down in history as the Quantum Age. In this talk, I will discuss key properties of quantum systems called Quantum...more
Ramesh Narayan (Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor of the Natural Sciences at Harvard University and Senior Astronomer at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory)
4:00 pm to 6:00 pm Sunday, 21 January 2018
J. N. Planetarium, Sri T. Chowdaiah Road, High Grounds, Bangalore
A black hole is an object which is so compact, and whose gravitational pull is so strong, that nothing -- not even light – can escape from its interior. The concept of a black hole is very bizarre and one feels that something in physics ought to prevent the formation of such objects. But this is...more
Harmit Malik (Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle, USA)
4:00 pm to 6:00 pm Sunday, 10 December 2017
J. N.Planetarium, Sri T. Chowdaiah Road, High Grounds, Bangalore
"Paleovirology” is the study of ancient extinct viruses (called “paleoviruses”) and the effects that these agents have had on the evolution of their hosts. I will focus on studies that have employed computational and genetic techniques to identify such ancient viruses, or their evolutionary...more
Mahan Mj (Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai)
4:00 pm to 6:00 pm Sunday, 26 November 2017
J. N. Planetarium, Sri T. Chowdaiah Road, High Grounds, Bangalore
Almost all shapes that we see around in space are examples of surfaces. We shall describe a method dating back to the 19th century of understanding these. Time-permitting, we shall describe more sophisticated geometric structures on surfaces. Event page Contact Us : outreach @ icts . res . inmore
Roddam Narasimha (Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Bangalore)
4:00 pm to 6:00 pm Sunday, 08 October 2017
J. N.Planetarium, Sri T. Chowdaiah Road, High Grounds, Bangalore
Among the many vociferous and emotional debates that India is currently going through on various deeply-civilizational questions (nation, religion, freedom etc.), there is also a rather specialized one on the value (or otherwise) of ancient to pre-colonial Indic science and technology as well. This...more
Hugo Touchette (National Institute for Theoretical Physics, Stellenbosch)
4:00 pm to 6:00 pm Sunday, 17 September 2017
Jawaharlal Nehru Planetarium, Bengaluru
Networks and graphs are all around us, even if we don't notice much: the roads, the electricity grid, the airline routes, the taxis in Bengaluru, even your group of real and Facebook friends - they're all networks involving, if you bring it down to the basics, some nodes and links between these...more

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