ScienceGuy

Evolution of the Universe Around 13.7 Billion years ago, Universe started with the big bang. The laws of physics break at this point, the singularity, and the current physics do not know what there was, what produced the bang or anything before that. But soon after the bang, as a matter of fact, until first 10 -32  to 10 -33 seconds, the universe expanded rapidly, by approximately a factor of 10 26 . The physicists do have a theory, the popular one developed by Alan Guth and his colleagues, about this inflationary period, and so we do know what happened at this time scale in the universe. As per their theory, the universe was set into bang due to a conjectured quantum field called the inflaton. But interestingly, the inflationary period came to an end and after this inflationary period, the universe continued to expand due to dark energy called the Hubble expansion.   When the inflation ended, the universe existed in a plasma state owing to the large temperatures. The temperature was

Soon after the big bang, followed by inflationary epoch, the universe was in a hot plasmonic state containing a mixture of radiation and baryons. The universe being in this fluid state made it possible for the pressure waves to travel. So, the universe had baryons and environment to support acoustic oscillations. In the CMB, we observe the anisotropies (the hot and blue spots). These temperature fluctuations are believed to be tracing the density fluctuations in the early universe. Therefore, there were fluctuations in the density across the universe after the inflationary period. These high-density regions are a mix of dark matter, baryons, photons etc (the plasma). The presence of a higher density of baryons then would attract nearby baryons through gravitational attraction. The dark matter would do the same. Therefore, the matter and radiation would collapse towards the anisotropy peaks, the centre.  However, as baryons collapse, it interacts with the photons. Two counteracting forc

Occasional paintings - done by water colours

What is Dark matter and Why need it? Our Milky Way is a spiralling Galaxy containing 100-400 billion stars, with a stellar disk diameter of approximately 150,000-200,000 light-years and depth of 2000 light-years. There are primary 4 spirals coming out from the centre, with other minor arms. Our sun is around 25,000-28,000 light-years away from the Galactic centre in the inner edge of Orion-Cygnus arm. The Galactic centre is known as Sagittarius A*, a supermassive black-hole. Our sun revolves about the Galactic centre taking around 240 million years to complete one revolution (a galactic year). Like our sun, all the stars and gases in our galaxy revolve around the galactic centre. Interestingly, however, contradicting to the intuition and Kepler’s laws, most objects revolve at approximately the same speed of 220 km/s irrespective of the distance from the galactic centre. Thus, it seems to follow a rigid-body rotation and not the differential rotation as is observed with-in our own sol

In the paper, the author's then went ahead to examine the extent to which various regimes constraint policy space for member nations. They studied four US agreements  1. North American, Dominican Republic-Central American, US-Chile, US-Singapore 2. EU Agreements (EU-Chile, EU-Mexico, EU-Tunisia  EU-South Africa) 3.  South-South agreements, that is,  agreements between developing countries  (Southern cone Common Market-MERCOSUR, Andean community - CAN, China-Chile, South Asian FTA)  and compared with WTO trade disciplines. They studied the four-trade related areas, that is,  1. Goods 2. Services 3. Investment 4. Intellectual property They studied the various developmental policy instruments available. These instruments are basically the expansion of the one's discussed above, which are used by the government to deal with different kinds of market failures in the economy. To re-iterate, the instruments discussed firstly are: Tariff sequencing, Tax export incentives, Quantitative

Revolution is a drastic change of some sort within a short span of time. In Latin, it means ‘ a turn-around’. There are different types of revolutions, with some involving change in habits, attitudes or beliefs while others involving a change in the way people make a living. These changes could be brough through violence or without it.  Read about the history of major revolutions:  Glorious Revolution, American Revolution, French Revolution, Russian Revolution, Chinese Revolution Click here  to read References: Manorama Tell Me Why, 27, Revolutions

Development is a long-run process of transforming the economy from concentrated primary product-based economy to diversified set of assets based on knowledge. This has been achieved in the developed nations through the process of investing in human, physical and natural capital in manufacturing and services while stripping inefficient sectors, rent-seeking etc. As the nation develops, the sectoral production and employment concentration also diversify as well.  Traditional trade theories are limited in saying about long-run growth for developing countries. This is because they assume static technological change and no market failures, which are unrealistic in developing countries context. Therefore, in an ideal world, as our theories suggest free trade would be beneficial on aggregate and even if it creates some losers, the winners can compensate them to benefit as a whole. Static comparative advantage (CA) is problematic because it might be the case that a country has CA in the indust