Introduction to NEETHI

Ever since I started as a student of science, I have been deeply influenced by the fundamental concepts of it, and have realized that no matter how sophisticated my research turns out to be, it finally bogs down to be a massive knot of basic concepts which has to be disentangled. My gurus Prof. Srinivasan and Prof. Ranganath (both at RRI) always emphasized the importance of ‘keeping in touch’ with the fundamentals of science because at every phase of a researcher’s life they play a priceless role. With this advice in the hindsight, I begin NEETHI, in which I shall frequently share with you an interesting concept/law in science, which may be either new or old. Inhere; I shall not discriminate between physics, maths, chemistry or biology, as I believe that they are all different colours of the same scientific rainbow. 

I hope this blogsite will serve as a good platform for us to share scientific knowledge, and stay in touch with our fundamentals...so below blog is a simple example..

Colour of a shadow

Ever wondered what is the colour of a shadow in sunlight ? At first we may think either black or grey as the answer, but that is NOT TRUE! There was a recent article in Physics Education titled "What colour is a shadow?"  which proves that in bright sunlight, the dominant colour of a shadow is BLUE ! Although this fact may be non-trivial to our eyes, the author of this paper proves this by the following experiment :He takes a digital photograph of a white sheet of paper in sunlight and shadow, and further analyzes them using a shareware  called ImageJ(which is free to download). He quantifies the pixel intensity of the RED, GREEN and BLUE, and finds that 50% of the light intensity constitutes blue colour.

It is a simple and elegant experiment, and reveals an interesting fact....shadows have their colour blue !