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Mind Matters- Introduction to the column


1.23 grams. 
That's all it weighed!


A crumpled mass years before- as watery as a melon , grey here and white there just like a middle aged man's beard- scattered in labs and museums across the world today, attracting handful of scientists poring into its secrets and countless awestruck visitors jostling to get a glimpse of genius- this was once the private property of a German immigrant in America, long deceased. One Mr. Albert Einstein.

Humans, by design or by accident, are highly curious creatures. We are ever eager to know stuffs like how Swarzneggers build their beefy torsos, how Beckhams could bend it so well, or how gallons of milk that Dhoni drank in his adolescence contributed to his helicopter shot and what not! It is the same curiosity that made an Archimedes storm out of his bath and run into the town, which induced a Newton to churn formulae reportedly out of an rendezvous with an apple- which also led an Einstein turn physics world on its head right from the confines of his patent office. And which , above all, prodded scientists to wonder what this man's brain had in it to belt out stunning path breaking discoveries.

It is this curiosity which we are going to feed on and feed to in this series of articles on how scientists conjure discoveries and inventions out of thin air ( or – to be precise and literal- from beneath their thin depleted hairs).

Scientists are looked upon by most people with disbelief and wonder otherwise reserved for aliens. Can anybody imagine a Newton who could be a socialite by the evening and path breaking scientist by the day? Or an Albert Einstein with well kempt hair and with looks challenging the Hollywood heartthrobs of his day?For most of us, they represent a slightly mutated human subspecies- homo scientius if you could call so. In short , they are simply way different from the common people- a comfortable excuse to the question of why others couldn't be as successful as they are.

While popular science continues to view scientists in this perspective, can't we researchers- future scientists by fate or fancy- peep a little deeper and decipher what their mantra to success was? In this series of articles, we would deliberate on what research and success in research are, and what they aren't!
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