From Particle Physics to Philosophy

Sundar Sarukkai is a philosopher and the author of books including Philosophy for Children and The Cracked Mirror. He did not start in philosophy. He studied physics at St. Joseph's College in Bangalore and at IIT Madras, and completed a Ph.D. in particle physics at Purdue University.

Most people would describe his career as a switch from science to the humanities. He sees it differently. Physics asks how the world works; philosophy asks how humans think and produce knowledge, including the knowledge physics produces. For him, both come from the same curiosity, approached with different tools.

That is a useful idea for students who feel they have to choose between being a 'science person' and an 'arts person'. The questions often overlap more than school timetables suggest.

Through the barefoot philosophers project, he has worked on bringing philosophy to children in rural India, in Kannada and Tamil. In one Tamil Nadu classroom, a student compared atoms to God, and a classmate answered with an example from a local possession ritual.

The story shows something important: children already think philosophically, in the language and with the examples of their own lives. Philosophy does not have to arrive in English, from a textbook, to be real.

The second half of the conversation turns to technology. He argues that AI and personalised media push us towards hyper-individualism, and that this wears down fraternity, the third ideal Ambedkar placed beside liberty and equality. He also argues that technologies are built around control, speed and efficiency because of who designs them.

He makes the case that lived experience belongs in social theory, and that traditions like the Bhakti movement and protest songs carried philosophy into everyday life long before universities did. And he suggests one practical habit for a divided world: paying close attention to language, because so many disagreements begin as misunderstandings.