Institute Colloquium by Prof. S. P. Mahulikar on 23rd April 2014

Institute Colloquia started approximately at the same time as IIT Mandi started functioning from its transit campus at Mandi and we had many eminent people as our speakers such as Prof. J. V. Narlikar, Prof. R. Gadagkar, and Prof. S. Ramaswami. This time our speaker was Prof. S. P. Mahulikar from School of Engineering of IIT Mandi. It is interesting to note here that Prof. Mahulikar is by profession an aeronautical engineer with expertise in Mechanical engineering but surprisingly he also does research in Astrophysics. In this colloquium he has presented part of his research work on the area of astrophysics.

The main theme of the talk was to understand Black-Hole as a ‘Thermodynamics Dissipative Structure’. The Lecture Hall was full with faculties and students of both IIT Mandi and Vallabh Gov’t College and the lecture went on for more than 90 minutes. Participants discussed lot of questions on different aspects of the black hole with the speaker during the lecture. The talk generated a lot of interest and discussion continued informally even after the lecture was over.