Splash Biography

VIJAY NARAYAN, Physics graduate student at Berkeley

Major: Physics

College/Employer: UC Berkeley

Year of Graduation: G

Brief Biographical Sketch:

Hi! My name is Vijay, and I am currently a first-year Physics grad student at UC Berkeley. I did my undergraduate at Yale, majoring in Physics and Mathematics. My primary interests are Particle Physics and Cosmology. Essentially, I try to understand the fundamental laws of nature and basic mysteries of the universe. This is certainly no small task, but humanity has made some decent progress so we'll see how far we can go! Fun fact: As an undergrad, I got to spend two summers at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland working on the Large Hadron Collider.

Past Classes

(Clicking a class title will bring you to the course's section of the corresponding course catalog)

S210: Science behind the movie "Interstellar" in Splash Fall 2016 (Nov. 19, 2016)

Have you seen the movie "Interstellar"? Did you know that there is a lot of interesting, cutting-edge science and technology involved in this movie? From the biology of a plant disease plaguing earth, to the chemical makeup of other habitable worlds, to the physics of beings in an extra dimension, we will explore some of this science in an accessible manner. You will also get to learn about wormholes, blackholes, and other exotic phenomena at the frontier of our understanding of fundamental laws of nature.

S146: Gravitational Waves and General Relativity in Splash Spring 16 (Apr. 02 - Nov. 19, 2016)

Have you heard about the recent announcement by the LIGO collaboration of the direct detection of gravitational waves? If not, come learn more about one of the biggest scientific discoveries of our generation and the physics underlying it, Einstein's theory of General Relativity. Discovering gravitational waves gives us a whole new set of "eyes" to explore the Universe - it is sort of like Galileo building the first telescope. It is not often that you live through such a historical moment!

S54: Particle Physics in a Nutshell in Splash Fall 15 (Oct. 10, 2015)

The Standard Model of Particle Physics is the most complete theory we have for the fundamental constituents and forces of nature. We will discuss the Standard Model in the most nontechnical manner possible while still trying to understand its mathematical structure and simplicity. It is so simple it can be written on a t-shirt! Towards the end we will discuss the various hints the universe gives us that there must be physics Beyond the Standard Model (BSM), and we will talk about some of these possibilities.