Who Knew Physics Could Be This Fun? Ankur Did.
These past Saturdays, our usual weekend at Hour Space looked a little different. Instead of the usual hum of calls and keyboards, our open area had a projector screen, a room full of curious faces, and a man explaining physics using nothing but a pair of shoelaces.
That was Tarqi Insaan; or rather, Ankur Panchal, the person
behind it. Ankur's background reads like someone who was always going to teach physics differently: an ex-particle physics researcher, an IISER Pune graduate, and now a science content creator who's built an entire following around one simple belief: that physics is usually taught backwards.
What's interesting is that Ankur didn't start out trying to simplify physics, he started out doing the hard, technical kind, the sort that involves particle accelerators and research papers most of us would find difficult. Somewhere along the way, he realised the gap wasn't in people's intelligence; it was in how the subject gets introduced in the first place.
Why Formula When a Shoelace Works?:
Ankur's whole pitch, and the one that got us genuinely excited to host this, was that traditional physics education
skips the most important step: building the right intuition (or just making his attendees ignore their intuition) before throwing formulas at people. So instead of starting with equations, he started with string.
He broke down the Pythagorean theorem- yes, that one from every math class you've ever sat through- using knots and ties instead of numbers. No chalkboard theorem-proving, no memorized formula. Just a physical, hands-on way of seeing why the theorem works, which somehow made more sense in five minutes than most of us remember it making in school.
The Most Important Question: Should You Switch Your Vote in Mafia?
The session's big moment was something a lot of the room was interested in: a dive into the Monty Hall problem, explained through the lens of a game almost everyone in that room had played at some point: Mafia.
If you've ever played Mafia and wondered whether switching your vote mid-game actually helps you, Ankur had an answer, and it wasn't the one people expected. In the classic Monty Hall problem, switching your choice is mathematically the smarter move, because the host already knows where the prize is and deliberately reveals a wrong option to steer you. But in Mafia? Nobody knows where the mafia is hiding, and the person revealing information cannot interfere. That one missing piece of certainty changes the entire math, and switching your vote doesn't carry the same advantage it would in Monty Hall's world.
It's the kind of detail that sounds small until you realize how often we borrow intuition from one scenario and misapply it to another, which was really the whole point of the session.
A Classroom That Didn't Feel Like One:
What made the session work wasn't just Ankur's content; it was also the room it happened in. Our open area isn't built like a lecture hall, and that ended up being exactly the point. People were sitting around casually instead of in neat rows, the projector sat where a client presentation would usually go, and there was enough informality in the air that people just interrupted to ask questions instead of politely waiting till the end.
It's a strange, lovely thing, watching a coworking space turn into a classroom for two hours and somehow feel more natural than most actual classrooms do. No one was worried about looking like they didn't get it. No one was rushing off to the next thing. It was just a bunch of people who walked in curious and walked out a little more curious than they came.
PS//Got Something Worth Hosting?
If you've got an idea for a session, a workshop, or an event you'd love to host in a space like ours, we'd love to hear about it.
