our visit to the lovely IUCAA campus in Pune, India

It’s a beautiful calm space with lots of places for students and professors etc to meet and confer and connect. The architecture is lovely quiet and instrumental to thinking about astronomy. There’s a lot of symbolism designed in the buildings, their names, and the surrounding gardens that speaks to Indian mythology and modern astronomy. It’s worth a visit to see some world-class scientific thought happening right here in lovely Pune… here are some notes and photos of our visit. . Beautiful angel trumpet blossoms…

This building is one of the latest built in the IUCAA campus. Gifted by Pu La Deshpande, this is where public outreach events take place. If the building is the sun, take note of the four spheres in the garden, and the four large round mounds --- they reflect the eight planets (sorry Pluto!). Saturn’s rings are indicated by a built-up berm around one mound…

Walking over to the main IUCAA campus… along with us was the outreach coordinator Prasad sir and a high school student Adi who is very interested in Astronomy and was showing us photos of Saturn that he took thru his telescope this morning at 4am. So great to see young folks so deeply into something like this 🩷🧡💚 Lots of inside outside spaces like where the bamboo is growing. The triangular planting design in the residential hall courtyard space is based on the Sierpinski triangle. . (from wiki: The Sierpinski triangle is a fascinating fractal, characterized by its recursive self-similarity and overall shape of an equilateral triangle. It's created by repeatedly removing the central triangle from an equilateral triangle, and then repeating this process on the remaining triangles.) . Here you’ll see photos of the central courtyard that has a great feeling of a shallow stepwell —- stones set at different heights at 90 degrees to each other —- a perfect place to sit and meet and chat with the person sitting next to you. There are four statues in this space —- Aryabhatta, Galileo, Newton with apple (under the banyan tree), and Einstein —- along with many trees planted by the various visionary founders and leaders of IUCAA. This space is bounded on four sides by administration offices, the sky dome (see video) & canteen, the research spaces, and the meeting spaces. . The research spaces surrounding a courtyard and the covered walkway around may be my favorite part of the campus. The covered stepped arches frame the two majestic banyan trees in the center and a stone curb traces the infinity symbol around them. The light and air filtering thru the trees and into the walkway was mild and breezy. Painted pale lilac on the outside and deep green on the inside, the building seems to be a perfect form and design of a human intervention within nature!

The various hallways have posters for information on new programs, collaborations with other institutions, latest efforts like the 30m diameter telescope being built in Hawaii etc. . There are also two murals by Martin Zimmermann --- their partner Ruth an astrophysicist had visited IUCAA several years ago. More about the murals can be found in this IE article... https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/pune/art-meets-cosmos-swiss-artists-paint-astrophysics-on-walls/lite/ . And rounding out the experience and photos —- here’s the Foucault Pendulum —- there’s an electromagnet that keeps the pendulum swinging. At this latitude, the pendulum takes about three days to go all the way around. We got to see the pendulum shift ever so slightly from 11:05 to 11:50 (the start and end of our visit)! Thank you 🌼🌸🌺🌿

I got a few Qs about the pendulum swinging and how the electromagnet works… and what the impact of the length and weight of the pendulum is… these Google search snippets should help answer them!& contrary to some notions, duration of full rotation is based on latitude and not length/weight of pendulum…