The Eternal Thing

Hi, How are you doing? I think you remember a scene in the Saaho movie, where the hero jumps off the mountain cliff along with a parachute bag. Of course, if the hero jumps along with the bag, there is no problem and no need for this post. But, the bag goes down before our hero, and still, he outruns the bag and catches it before reaching the ground! Before we dive in, here is the scene for your reference. (You can safely skip if you already watched/remembered it) But how is it even possible to catch the bag theoretically?  What do we think when we see an object falling? The object gets accelerated because of the gravitational force. So the velocity increases as it goes down and finally hits the ground. As per that logic, the bag and hero fall one after the other, so the former should hit the ground first and then the hero. Right? Not exactly, though. It turns out that we are missing a concept called Terminal Velocity from our analysis! What is a terminal velocity? When a body fal...

In science, whenever we observe a novel event, we start sharpening our brains to decode it. We make a couple more observations related to that event, and try to get a reason for it. It was also the same with the previous generation of scientists. They observed various new phenomena and they gathered as much information as possible to get the accurate reason behind them. But there was a problem with the human mind. In the past days, when there was limited information at hand and more time was required for getting new information, scientists had to make the best possible theories (i.e., explanations) with whatever data was available. It was like a competition, where the scientist with the best theory would win. This "winner" scientist, should be able to explain the data from future experiments with the theory. Consider that, a new experiment happened later, but the results were not explained by the theory of our scientist, then the theory was to be changed, and again the compet...