Featured writing / Physics discoveries
How two detectors made a black-hole merger measurable
GW150914 became a strong claim through a chain of measurements, comparisons and checks, each with a different job.
Read the essayThe blog of Santanu PradhanScience, technology & life
Fieldnotes.
On science, and the world around it.
Questions from the laboratory.
Ideas from the wider world.
A little room to think out loud.
From the notebook.
6 entriesAI research10 min read
How attention gives a language model context
A walk from an ambiguous sentence to token representations, attention weights, training, and next-token generation.
Physics explained10 min read
How laser light slows an atom
A photon can push an atom, and a carefully tuned set of lasers can turn those tiny pushes into cooling and confinement.
Technology11 min read
Making a research result rerunnable
A practical way to preserve the input, calculation, assumptions, and evidence behind a small numerical result.
Scientific life10 min read
Reading a paper you do not yet understand
A patient way to find what a paper claims, what evidence supports it, and where a careful reading can stop.
AI research11 min read
What an AI protein structure can tell us
A reader's guide to predicted coordinates, confidence scores, and the experimental conditions behind a protein's shape.
Written with curiosity.Meet Santanu