Modern science reveals that matter is made of atoms and molecules. Molecules in liquids and gases move randomly; there is an average distance between two nearest molecules. This distance is used to model the properties of the gas. However, there are certain problems, like  turbulence, that cannot be solved using just the distance, which is a single scale. We need to consider all scales from large to small. Such systems are called multiscale systems. 

In an earlier episode of The Joy of Science Shambhavi Chidambaram spoke to Professor Shravan Vasishth about, among other things, the joy of psycholinguistics. In this interview, Professor Vasishth talks in detail about teaching statistics and the need to understand uncertainty both to students and the general public. He is the author of “Shravan Vasishth’s Slog”, a blog about statistics. This interview has been edited for clarity and conciseness and has been run past Prof Vasishth for accuracy before publication.

In this episode of The Joy of Science, Shambhavi Chidambaram speaks to Professor Shravan Vasishth, an Indian-origin professor of psycholinguistics at the University of Potsdam in Germany. In addition to his research, Prof Vasishth is an author of two interesting blogs—“Shravan Vasishth’s Slog”, where he talks about statistics, and “Things People Say”, a moving personal blog about his experiences of dealing with kidney failure and hemodialysis, and navigating the German health care system. 

We all know that the geometric object of minimal surface area amongst all shapes with a fixed volume is the round ball, whose boundary is spherical. Water blobs try to minimise surface area and curl into spherical droplets. The physical problem of surface-area minimisation is thus quite well understood. What about the opposite problem of surface-area maximisation? Does the problem even make sense? Indeed it does. Trees try to maximise surface area to get the most of sunlight through their leaves.