What if reality itself is fundamentally non-absolute — and the universe has been telling us this all along? In this wide-ranging Sangam Talks podcast, Dr. Mrittunjoy Guha Majumdar discusses his fifth book The Universe is Pranking Us, supported by Nobel laureate physicist Professor Brian Josephson. The core thesis: Newtonian determinism was always a convenient fiction. From childhood fascination with oil-slick iridescence to quantum indeterminacy to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, the universe repeatedly reveals that what we mistake for solid ground keeps dissolving.
The book draws the surprising connection between Western physics’ slow discovery of non-absolutism and India’s ancient Chatushkoti (four-cornered logic) and Jain seven-valued logic — frameworks that built epistemic humility directly into their architecture. India never needed to “discover” indeterminacy because it never assumed absolute determinism in the first place. The tragedy is that colonialism forced India to adopt the exclusivist, deterministic Western scientific premise, abandoning its own richer epistemological tradition.
The conversation closes with a term Dr. Majumdar coins — cognitive republic — for what India truly is: not merely a political nation-state but a civilisational entity whose metaphysics, philosophy, and way of knowing must inform its scientific pursuits, geopolitics, and social order.

About The Speaker:
Dr Mrittunjoy Guha Majumdar is an Adjunct Professor at the National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS), Bengaluru, and an Assistant Professor at Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Delhi NCR. He holds a PhD from the Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge. He has conducted postdoctoral research at Harvard University, the Indian Institute of Science, and with Nobel Laureate Prof. Brian Josephson. His research spans quantum information, entanglement, and quantum machine learning. A recognized science communicator and policy advisor, he has worked with UNESCO, the G20, and the Government of India. He is the author of several bestselling books, like ‘From Shiva to Schrödinger’ (Penguin) and National Convenor of Mandala, a platform integrating science and Indic knowledge systems.
Twitter: @Zeit_MjGM
Instagram: @mrittunjoy.guhamajumdar
Facebook: @mjgmajumdar