How Things Work: An Introduction to Conceptual Physics

Imagine if you travelled back in time 100 years, still armed with all of today’s technology and understanding.  Would mobile phones, GPS, weather forecasting, medical imaging, self-driving cars, television – be classed as magic?  Most sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, until you can “look behind the curtain”.  Physics attempts to take the “magic” out of natural phenomena and technology we encounter in everyday life. It illustrates that with a FEW principles, we can try to make sense of a wide variety of things we encounter in our daily lives.  Not only does it de-mystify the workings of nature and modern technology, it shapes our world view so that we can apply methods of scientific reasoning to separate the consequential from the irrelevant. Knowledge is power, and this course, designed for science and non-science students alike, will start you on your journey to understand the principles that underpin the world we live in. 

Niranjan grew up in Mumbai, and studied for his Bachelor’s degree at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. Subsequently, he obtained my Doctoral degree at the University of California at Berkeley in 1993, and moved to Munich to work at the Max Planck Institute for extraterrestrial Physics, first as a post-doctoral researcher, and then as a staff scientist. Since 2003, he has been a member of the Physics faculty at Oxford. He has taught at LMH since 2010.

His research focus is astronomical instrumentation. He is the Principal Investigator for HARMONI, the first light spectrograph for the European Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) being built by the European Southern Observatory. He is also PI of the SWIFT integral Field Spectrograph, a common-user facility at the Palomar 200 inch telescope. His scientific research focus is on nuclear regions of galaxies, and on direct imaging of extra-solar planet. For more information about his research and teaching, see his departmental webpage.