Welcome to Tensors & Quarks
Exploring the cosmos of Physics & the depths of Machine Learning.
Latest Posts
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Can We See the Shape of the Universe?
1. Introduction
What is the shape of the universe? Is it infinite or finite but unbounded, like a video game world that wraps around on itself? While general relativity has given us profound insights into the local curvature of spacetime, it leaves unanswered the question of the universe’s global shape. In her 2001 paper, Topology and the Cosmic Microwave Background, Janna Levin explores how cosmology and topology intersect—how the universe’s large-scale connectivity might be imprinted in the faint glow of the early universe: the cosmic microwave background (CMB). This paper not only bridges mathematics and astrophysics but also pushes the philosophical boundary between what can be known and what must remain an assumption.
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Will We Colonise Mars in the Next 50 Years?
This was my assignment for a university coursework module, where I was tasked to evaluate the likelihood of humans colonising Mars within the next 50 years. As someone fascinated by space exploration and future technologies, this topic struck a chord with me. What began as a research task soon turned into a deep dive into the science, speculation, and possibilities surrounding Mars colonisation. Here’s what I found.
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Exploring the Solar Poles: Unlocking the Sun’s Final Frontier
Introduction: The Last Great Frontier of Solar Exploration
For centuries, humanity has observed the Sun — tracking sunspots, solar flares, and cycles of activity. Telescopes, space observatories, and satellites have offered remarkable insights into our star’s behavior. Yet, an entire region of the Sun remains practically unexplored: its poles. The paper titled “Exploring the Solar Poles: The Last Great Frontier of the Sun” (Nandy et al., 2023) sets out to emphasize just how critical this overlooked region is to understanding the inner workings of our star. The authors argue that the solar poles hold vital clues to the Sun’s magnetic field generation, its cycle, and the behavior of space weather.
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Exploring astroML: Machine Learning Among the Stars
The Astronomer’s New Toolbox
Modern astronomy has evolved into a data-driven science. With massive sky surveys like SDSS (Sloan Digital Sky Survey), Pan-STARRS, and the upcoming LSST producing petabytes of data, traditional approaches no longer suffice. Manual inspection and simplistic models simply can’t scale with this astronomical data deluge. Enter astroML, a library that bridges the gap between astronomy and modern machine learning. astroML is a Python-based library built on top of familiar scientific computing tools like NumPy, SciPy, matplotlib, and scikit-learn. But what sets it apart is its thoughtful design — tailored to real-world astronomical problems. From irregular time series to galaxy classification, astroML brings statistically sound and domain-specific tools to the fingertips of astronomers, physicists, and data scientists alike.
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Attention Is All You Need: The Paper That Changed Everything
If you’ve ever interacted with ChatGPT, asked an AI to summarize a document, or translated a phrase using Google Translate, you’re experiencing the legacy of a paper that redefined modern artificial intelligence. Published in 2017 by Vaswani et al., the paper “Attention Is All You Need” introduced the world to the Transformer architecture. This seemingly simple idea — that attention mechanisms alone can model complex language patterns without relying on recurrence or convolutions — has since become the bedrock of nearly every major NLP system.
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