Nov 13, 2013 3:15 PM

Welcome to Empirical Zeal's New Home!

Today, our newest science blog launches! Visit Empirical Zeal for tales about how math and physics are woven into everyday life.

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Hi there. And welcome to Empirical Zeal's shiny new home on the Wired Science blogging network. I'm really excited to start blogging here, next to so many writers whose work I admire and continue to learn from. If you know me from my previous home, thanks so much for staying with me! If you're new here, take a moment to browse through the posts below to get a flavor of what this blog is about.

A little about me. I'm a physics geek and a nature lover. I grew up in India, and spent the last 10 years as a student in the US – first at Swarthmore College, and then at Rutgers University, from where I graduated this summer with a Ph.D. in physics. The winding road to my Ph.D. took me from studying quarks and gluons to researching genomes and evolution. Along the way, and with the guidance of many wonderful friends and mentors, I was also bitten by the teaching and the writing bug. Currently, I'm working to bring science and engineering to a wider audience, at Princeton University's Council on Science and Technology.

What is Empirical Zeal about? I cover topics from across the sciences, with a focus on the math and physics behind everyday life, and the places where physics meets biology. I think that science is most interesting when we break down the walls between different disciplines, and when we apply it to real-world situations. And so in my writing I try to connect the dots between different subjects, to surprise and to explain, to dig up the interesting ideas that lie beneath the mundane, and to take you on a journey from saying "hmm.." or "woah!" to saying "aha!".

To give you a better sense of the sorts of topics I'll be exploring, here are a few recent things I've worked on. I'm really happy with how they turned out.

Here's a – video explainer on 3 lazy ways to time travel, and 3 less lazy ways to do so. This was a very fun collaboration with Henry Reich, the talented creator (and disembodied hand) behind the popular YouTube physics channel Minute Physics.

And here's a recent post I wrote at Nautilus. It's an explainer on a mathematical concept known as the Fourier Transform.

Here's how it starts:

Nine years ago, I was sitting in a college math physics course and my professor spelt out an idea that kind of blew my mind. I think it isn’t a stretch to say that this is one of the most widely applicable mathematical discoveries, with applications ranging from optics to quantum physics, radio astronomy, MP3 and JPEG compression, X-ray crystallography, voice recognition, and PET or MRI scans. This mathematical tool—named the Fourier transform, after 18th-century French physicist and mathematician Joseph Fourier—was even used by James Watson and Francis Crick to decode the double helix structure of DNA from the X-ray patterns produced by Rosalind Franklin. [...]
You probably use a descendant of Fourier’s idea every day, whether you’re playing an MP3, viewing an image on the web, asking Siri a question, or tuning in to a radio station. [...]
So what was Fourier’s discovery, and why is it useful?