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Isaac Newton: The Last Keemiyagar

  Newton gave us gravity and a lifetime of numericals. What our Matric books never told us is that he also spent some thirty years chasing the sang-e-paras. Chai ka cup uthaiye, yeh kahani mazedaar hai. “ Uske haath mein to mitti bhi sona ban jaati hai .” We say this about people with a golden touch, na ? Well, today I want to introduce you to a man who took that muhaavra quite literally. Everyone of us who has sat a Matric physics paper knows Isaac Newton. An apple falls on his head, and gravity is discovered; and the night before the board exam we do ratta of his three laws from some key book. Basss… that is our whole relationship with the poor man. But what if I told you that the same Newton, the hero of reason our Master sahibs practically worshipped, wrote or copied out roughly a million words on alchemy? 1 Yes, much of it was copied from other alchemists’ books, but still, janaab , that is a mountain of ink. For about three decades he kept a furnace going in hi...
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The Ground Beneath Twenty Million People: What is known about Karachi's earthquake risk, and what is not

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  1  The faults around Karachi The outer shell of the earth is broken into large rigid pieces called tectonic plates. They move slowly and constantly in different directions. Where they meet, they grind against one another, and the stress that builds up along those contacts is released as earthquakes. Karachi lies roughly 150 kilometres east of a point where three of these plates meet: the Arabian plate, the Indian plate and the Eurasian plate. The Arabian plate is moving towards Eurasia at 28 to 33 millimetres a year, about the speed at which a fingernail grows. Over a century that is three metres of accumulated movement. Box 1.1  What is a fault? A fault is a fracture in the rock of the Earth's crust where two blocks of rock can slide past one another. Most faults are not visible at the surface. Many lie buried under sediment, roads and buildings. A fault is described as active if it has moved in the recent geological past and is expected...
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