Date: March 10, 2026
Time: 05:30 PM
Venue: Lecture Hall 1003, Block 7, IISER Berhampur
Flyer Link: Click here to view
Chance from Chaos. Or, How Random is a Coin Toss?
Tossing a coin in order to choose "at random" between two options is common in everyday life, especially in games (such as cricket or football). Similarly, the throw of a die gives one of six outcomes at random has been used since antiquity in games such as Ludo or Snakes and Ladders. Considering that these are simple mechanical systems --the tossed coin is a spinning disc of known mass, and the initial velocity and other conditions can be specified, why do we take the outcome to be random? Or more to the point, what do we mean by randomness here?
In this lecture I will discuss the mechanics of this problem and show how the existence of chaotic dynamics along with co-existing final states (heads or tails) can give rise to unpredictability such that the smallest uncertainty in initial conditions makes it impossible to predict the outcome.
(The lecture will be accompanied by an audience experiment. Please bring a suitable coin for tossing.)
Prof. Ramakrishna Ramaswamy - Prof. Ramaswamy holds Ph.D. in Chemistry from Princeton University. He has about 200 journal publications and book articles relating to chemical dynamics, classical and quantum chaos, semiclassical quantization, disordered systems and statistical physics, molecular dynamics and cluster physics, computational biology and genomics. He has receivedTIFR Alumni Association Excellence Award, 2009. He is the Elected Fellow of TWAS, The World Academy of Sciences, 2008. He was awarded with the J C Bose fellowship of the Department of Science and Technology, India, 2008. He is the Elected Fellow of the Indian National Science Academy, New Delhi, 2007. He has served as Santa Fe Institute International Fellow (2000- 2001). He is the Elected Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore, 1993.
