There cannot be a better fulfilling activity for an academic institution than launching a journal. And, there cannot be a better way of launching a journal in the discipline of physics, than with a lead article that deals with the phenomenon of dualism—of particles appearing as waves and waves appearing as particles—the paradoxes and contradictions of which led to intensive, exhaustive, and highly emotional discussions among such stalwarts of physics as Heisenberg, Bohr and Schrodinger in the 1920s, and which made Heisenberg question himself repeatedly late into night: "Can nature possibly be so absurd as it seemed to us in these atomic experiments?"

This agony continued till Neils Bohr along with other Physicists at Copenhagen, resolved it by proposing the `Complementarity Principle', according to which a quantum can either behave as a particle or as a wave, but can never be both simultaneously. This perhaps made physicists, led by Heisenberg and Bohr, to move towards Indian mysticism which proclaimed its inadequacies in capturing the `ultimate' in the known language: tad ejati, tan naijati, tad dure tad vad antike/tad antarasya sarvasya tad u sarvasyasya bahyatah, "It moves, and It moves not; It is far, and It is near; It is within all this, and It is also outside all this" and realize that the universe is "a web of relations between the various parts of a unified whole".

At a later stage, a less orthodox interpretation of this dualism was proposed by Englert: the wave and particle attributes of quanton are allowed to co-exist with a postulation that a stronger manifestation of the particle nature results in a weaker manifestation of wave nature, and vice versa. And Englert coined the phrase `duality condition' to describe it. This was followed by experiments—welcher weg (`which path')—in interferometers and such other setups with an objective to prove or disprove the `Complimentarity Principle'.

Among them, the experiment carried out by Shahriar S Afshar at the IRIMS—the findings of which are published in the New Scientist invalidating the `Complimentarity Principle', duly backed by the father of the transactional interpretation of Quantum mechanics, John G Cramer—has been sensational. This sensational claim of Afshar has, of course, been rejected by many, each in his/her own way.

Against this backdrop, Danko Dimchev Georgiev, the author of the first article of this issue, "Quantum Operator Approach to Unruh's and Afshar's Setups", presents a complete mathematical proof of non-existent which way information in both `Unruh's and Afshar's setups' that is written in the formalism of quantum operators. He states: "The belief that the lens at the image plane always provides which way information independent of the setup is fallacious and mathematically inconsistent."

In the next article of the issue, "Group theory, Three Vectors and Maxwell-Lorentz Matrix", the authors David Pendleton J, López-Bonilla J and Sosa-Caraveo C have demonstrated the intimate connection of Maxwell equations with the Lorentz group and in the process, have come up with an interesting symmetry of the Hermitian and Unitary generator matrices.

Driven by the belief that Lagrangian systems have been receiving renewed attention in the recent past, authors Sadeghi J and Imani A of the article, "The Solution of Three Coupled Scalar Fields", have proposed an exact approach for the solution of three coupled scalar fields. The authors opine that the solutions proposed by them may be useful to any cosmological system in five dimensions.

The authors César Mora and Rubén Sánchez of the next article, "A Survey of Lanczos Potential", have presented a short survey of the properties of Lanczos potential and commented upon its relevancy for derivation of the Weyl Curvature tensor, along with examples. The authors opine that the parallelism of the tensor with the corresponding electromagnetic potential vector paves the way for a better understanding of the behavior of the gravitational field.

The last and equally interesting article of this maiden issue articulates a phenomenon which is perhaps as old as the discipline of Physics, "Equality and Identity and (In)distinguishability in Classical and Quantum Mechanics from the Point of View of Newton's Notion of State". Peter Enders, the author of the article, argues that the treatment of equality, identity and (in)distinguishability shows that Newton's notion of state should not be abandoned, but be exploited in addition to Laplace's one.

Launching a research journal is, as always, a very satisfying event for us at the IUP, although it is a challenging task of immense responsibility. We therefore, earnestly appeal to all the researchers to use our journal as a platform to disseminate the results of their research.

We look towards you for the success of our humble endeavor!

- GRK Murty
Consulting Editor