Abstract : Our understanding of the physical world in modern times has progressed,  due, in part, to posing idealized, often minimal, questions and finding crisp answers. We will start with Feynman's choice of the atomic hypothesis as the most important understanding of the natural world and explore simple and obvious examples of its great utility in understanding even the macroscopic world. It will end with speculations about its limitations and where other paradigms might yield important insights, missing in this extremely successful approach.

Speaker Bio: Professor Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, Director of TCG-CREST, is a condensed matter physicist and works primarily on dynamical aspects of disordered, soft and granular systems. Educated at Presidency College, Kolkata, University of Delhi and Northwestern University in the USA, he did post-doctoral research at the Magnet Laboratory at MIT and at the University of Chicago. He spent two decades at the Corporate Laboratories of Exxon Corporation and the NEC Corporation in New Jersey, US before returning to India as Director of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai. He was a former C.V. Raman Professor of the Physics Department, Ashoka University.