December 14th, 2013

"When, according to habit, I was contemplating the stars in a clear sky, I noticed a new and unusual star, surpassing the other stars in brilliancy. There had never before been any star in that place in the sky."

This chap at one point in time personally owned 1% of the total wealth of Denmark. He also lived like that, in a huge mansion with a huge staff, holding large and lavish social parties. He was a stickler for etiquette - so much that he even avoided relieving himself once in a party, actually falling ill as a result! Some even say this contributed to his dying just a few weeks later. Some say he was poisoned. Some even say he was poisoned by his pupil for the huge amount of observational data this chap had. Of course you have to concede that this illustrious student of his - who arguably surpassed the mentor in scientific contribution - published all of the research he inherited from this chap in the original name.

Thank goodness then that this rich nitpicker of etiquette did not spend his time and energy in improving that 1% of his share in Danish wealth to 1.5% or 2%. Because he took up astronomy. And the result is there to see for all.

He is widely considered the last great naked-eye astronomer, before a certain Galileo built the first telescope. He proposed his own planetary model which differed from both - the popular and established Aristotelian version and the more revolutionary Copernican version - since it was geo-heliocentric! His observations made the sun the centre of all planetary motion as is the case, but his faith could not stop the sun from going round the earth. This last bit was of course proven incorrect, but that does not take away anything from the fact that his model formed a very critical stepping stone in the giant leap from Aristotle to Copernicus and Galileo. A stepping stone which his pupil Johannes Kepler used and proposed the landmark elliptical orbits theory.

This is just a part of what this fellow did though. He found out that comets passed through the supposedly still celestial spheres, traveling on their own non-circular paths not centred on the earth. Then he went further and made a major contribution to shattering the Aristotlean belief by identifying a new bright star and finding out using the then-path-breaking technique of parallax-measurements that this new bright star - literally 'de nova stella' - occurred outside all the planetary spheres. The name stuck, and we still use the names 'nova' and 'supernova' for such stellar explosions.

His great contribution to the way science (particularly astronomy) is studied, is evident from the fact that he calculated the angle between the lunar orbit and the ecliptic to an astonishing accuracy of a quarter of a degree (so much for a naked eye astronomer)!

This shows why he is considered a lofty standard-setter for empirical study - a benchmark for incrementally error-free, larger data-set-using, precise and objective observations. For science and scientists, this meticulous approach to observing, studying and analysing is arguably his more lasting legacy and a greater stepping stone than anything else he did. Oh and of course mentoring and teaching Johannes Kepler!

Happy 467th birthday Tycho Brahe!

December 5th, 2013

"No one understands my trip to Copenhagen. Time and time again I’ve explained it. To Bohr himself, and Margrethe. To interrogators and intelligence officers, to journalists and historians. The more I've explained, the deeper the uncertainty has become. Well, I shall be happy to make one more attempt". These lines are from an award-winning 1998 play depicting this chap's legendary trip to Denmark, in the midst of the second world war more than half a century before the play opened. Apart from Niels Bohr and his wife Margrethe (both mentioned in the line), this chap featured as the third character in the play. But the line also hints at his own identity, though in a gimmicky way!

He is known predominantly for one thing he discovered, mainly because it is also named after him. But the reality is that it was but one of his great achievements.

If we're surprised that he won the Nobel at the age of 31, we should check ourselves. Because it was only his second nomination, and he had been nominated once already, at the age of 27. And the signatory of that earlier nomination was one Prof Albert Einstein.

A lot of his path-breaking work was done before he was 35, when his career faced a setback. Mainly due to the Deutsche Physik movement which politicised scientific work and demanded that the scientists should conform to the National Socialism on the rise in Germany of the 1930s. And then, after being cleared by Himmler, he had to become one of the leads of the German effort to make a fission bomb. It was during the war that his aforementioned visit to Denmark happened. What he discussed with the old mentor of his continues to be a topic of speculation, and indeed, an entire play!

As it turned out, the German effort did not succeed. This chap was arrested by the allies and questioned. Once they realised he was mainly involved in the theoretical physics related to it, and that the German project had not made much progress, they released him. In later life, he became the head of the illustrious Max Planck Institute. Though his involvement in the German bomb remains a blot on his career (as compared to someone like Otto Hahn - the discoverer of fission - who stayed away from it and risked arrest), it might perhaps be unfair, as we do not know the drivers that dictated his decision.

His landmark achievement in the 1920s was the Matrix method, which really started the Quantum Mechanics movement, and which was done using differential equations by Schrodinger almost around the same time. It was for this that he got the Nobel eventually, and was gracious enough to acknowledge publicly that his partner in the research Max Born deserved it as much as him.

But what he is universally known for was published by him in 1927 and he used a term which is closer to 'imprecision' or 'inaccuracy', than 'uncertainty'. Nonetheless, we all identify it with the term 'uncertainty', and so universally that there's even a rumour (untrue) that his epitaph reads "he lies here, somewhere".

Happy 112th birthday Werner Heisenberg!

November 20th, 2013

This chap's name is arguably the most referred in astronomy - more specifically in physical cosmology - by the virtue of the fact that the oldest and the most famous of NASA's three space-based telescopes is named after him. This telescope is also the only one of the big three which catches light in visible spectrum, and hence a lot of new pictures of newer galaxies, nebulae and other celestial bodies are credited with its name.

This chap can also be termed the Gandhi of astronomy as far as the Nobel prize is concerned, since he is the most famous and arguably the most deserving astronomer who did not win it! This was largely due to the fact that astronomy was not considered part of physics during his lifetime, and probably also enjoyed a lesser status as compared to physics and even lesser as compared to theoretical physics (as evident from the anecdote of Elsa Einstein, visiting the Mount Wilson observatory with her illustrious husband, looked at all the giant telescopes and complex machinery and remarked - "all this to solve the mysteries of the universe? My husband does the same on the back of an envelope!").

But this chap left the world shocked by his discovery that Andromeda is actually a different galaxy outside the Milky Way, and consequently, the universe extends much beyond the Milky Way, contains several other galaxies. He went further, studied the Cepheid variation and discovered that all the galaxies are moving away from each other at great speeds. He ended up concluding from this that the universe itself is expanding, creating the effect that all galaxies are moving away from each other. This later led to the hypothesis by others that this means the universe was probably accommodated in a single point - the singularity made famous by Penrose and Hawking - and expanded from there.

Known to be quite eccentric in his personal life (for example he went to study in England from the US and turned into a complete Anglophile, copying the pre-WW1 English style of dressing and speaking), this chap's another equally brilliant discovery was probably his assistant Milton Humason who was a janitor at the Mount Wilson observatory before rising to be an assistant to this great astronomer and making vital contributions in his discoveries.

Galileo - the father of modern science - was a man of several talents. If his mantle of theoretical physics can be said to be carried by Einstein in the 20th century, this man can be said to have carried Galileo's mantle of astronomy in the 20th century. Happy 124th birthday Edwin Hubble!

November 9th, 2013

"Except for children (who don't know enough not to ask the important questions), few of us spend much time wondering why Nature is the way it is; where the Cosmos came from, or whether it was always here; if time will one day flow backward, and effects precede causes; or whether there are ultimate limits to what humans can know. There are even children, and I have met some of them, who want to know what a black hole looks like; what is the smallest piece of matter; why we remember the past and not the future; and why there is a Universe ...

... There are naive questions, tedious questions, ill-phrased questions, questions put after inadequate self-criticism. But every question is a cry to understand the world. There is no such thing as a dumb question."

For almost all of us reading this piece, the above quote by this chap is really a giveaway. He was an astronomer. More specifically, he studied cosmology - the branch that deals with the origin and the fate of the universe. His instrumental work in astronomy included till then the most accurate predictions of environmental conditions on the planet Venus and moons of Jupiter and Saturn. He correctly predicted presence of water on Europa. He concentrated much of his attention in the later part of his career to search for exoplanets and seeking any evidence for extra-terrestrial life. He was in fact a pioneer of this particular quest. He was the first one to demonstrate forming of amino acids from non-organic chemicals by radiation.

All of these achievements in astronomy and astrophysics are very significant in their own right. The work in space research in general, NASA missions in particular, and search for extra-terrestrial intelligence is in fact pioneering and unparalleled. But this chap is known the most for his most significant contribution. He is - quite simply - the greatest scientific storyteller and science populariser of our time. And that's no understatement. We have him and the likes of him to thank for whatever small reduction we've seen in the colossal amount of unscientific and pseudo-scientific nonsense that passes for knowledge. And this is no understatement, either.

And yet he was far from an idealistic crusader for purity of scientific thought in life. "Bright, curious children are a national and world resource. They need to be cared for, cherished, and encouraged. But mere encouragement isn't enough. We must also give them the essential tools to think with ... ... Both scepticism and wonder are skills that need honing and practice. Their harmonious marriage within the mind of every schoolchild ought to be a principal goal of public education". If ever there is a worldwide practical handbook of school education, it could start with these exact lines.

We lost him much earlier than we thought and hoped for. But if we make an honest and committed attempt to answer the very next question - any question - asked to us by any child, and go online or open a book to find the answer in case we don't know it, then his spirit of "marriage of skepticism and wonder" lives (it lives metaphorically of course - he would never have approved this writeup if I had left any ambiguity on spirits living!)

There is no such thing as a dumb question, indeed. Happy 79th birthday Carl Sagan.

November 7th, 2013 (III)

She was in Sweden, when her colleagues were conducting experiments on nuclear fission in their Berlin lab where she too worked not too long ago. She had been forced to flee, and was actually quite lucky to make it past the German border in spite of leaving the option of fleeing for very late. Her secret correspondence with her colleagues still went on, as they wrote to her the details of their experiments and findings, and she wrote back participating in the analysis. She was actually the key member of their team when it came to analysis. And this wasn't a small thing, considering it included Strassman and Otto Hahn!


She was closer to sixty at this time, and had faced throughout her career the odds stacked steeply against her. Mostly borne of prejudices because she was a woman in Europe on the cusp of nineteenth and twentieth century, where being a woman scientist was sadly very tough. Partly also because she was a Viennese Jew working in a Berlin establishment, even though that establishment was as esteemed as the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. She wasn't even a permanent member of the staff for thirty years - so strong were the prejudices! She had a couple of things on her side though. Firstly she was tutored by the great Ludwig Boltzmann. Secondly she became friends with the brilliant, honest and objective Otto Hahn - a team that stood the test of time for more than three decades, even when she had to escape from the new bigoted government. It was a very close friendship, marred only by his not publicly sharing the credit with her when he got a Nobel and she didn't.


Fast forward to the late thirties and her long-distance research from Sweden. Hahn had written to her sharing the expected and yet astonishing results of fission of Uranium nucleus. There were plenty of unanswered questions. Why Barium. Why the puff of energy accompanying the fission. It was her who - for the first time in the world - computed that the puff of energy corresponded exactly with the difference in the masses of the original Uranium and the resultant Krypton and Barium, if one applies Einstein's equation of mass-energy conservation! She was also the first one to propose that elements larger than Uranium in atomic number would not be found in nature. Her theory of the electromagnetic repulsion of so great a number of protons exceeding the strong nuclear force that bound them together was a landmark in itself.


She got an invitation to move to the US, and be a part of Los Alamos. What would someone do in this case? Someone who was a brilliant scientist, and faced so much prejudice all her life that she didn't even have a permanent job; and when she finally had, she had to flee from the persecution of a racist government? Well, she refused! "I will have nothing to do with a bomb"!


There is a Sherlock Holmes short story of a failed case, after which Holmes instructs Watson to say just one word "Norbury" in his ears if he ever felt Holmes was getting complacent or arrogant. Well, if one ever starts judging a scientist's contribution by the awards and the accolades, or the Nobel prize, one just has to say Hubble. Or Mendeleev. Or Hoyle. Or Meitner.


Happy 135th birthday Lise Meitner.

November 7th, 2013 (II)

In the summer of '21, this chap was standing on the deck of a ship making its way through the serene waters of a land-locked sea, and admiring - to quote his exact words - the 'wonderful blue opalescence of the Mediterranean sea'. He was a young man in his early thirties, already a professor of his favourite field at a renowned university in his country, in the middle of a 'golden period' of his career in his own judgement, on a voyage through the Mediterranean in glorious summer weather. Like most of us in these circumstances, his mind might have wandered to the treasures held by the surrounding lands - the olives, the pyramids, the Renaissance art, the vineyards, the golden sand on the south, the rolling green hills on the north. Like most of us would in these circumstances, he was enjoying the deep bright blue hue of the water and the gentle rhythmic waves. Unlike most of us though, he was wondering if the colour was due to scattering of light and change in its wavelength by the molecules of water.


He devoted the next few years to the study of this phenomenon, and found that molecular scattering of light in gases, liquids and crystalline solids was due to local fluctuations in the optical density caused by thermal agitations. He and his colleagues even managed to correct Einstein's calculations in this area, and found formulae which agreed with observation better.


He found something else too, and much more remarkable than the classical scattering effect. He found - for the first time experimentally - that a very small fraction of photons being scattered do so 'inelastically', meaning their wavelength is different after scattering. He also found that the change in wavelength of a photon is solely a property of the matter which causes the scattering. This was a huge huge step towards gaining more and deeper knowledge about the structure and nature of matter, and was considered landmark research for which he got a Nobel - his country's first in science.


One can realise the scale of his work by the fact that he lived and worked in a country and culture that was very unscientific, even more so in those years, and yet he got recognised at the world stage bang in the middle of a period of time which saw arguably the biggest breakthroughs in physics. It was the era of the Einsteins, Heisenbergs, Bohrs, Diracs, Paulis, Schrodingers, Borns and their theoretical unraveling of nature's miracles. And yet, one experimental physicist stood tall.

"In the history of science, we often find that the study of some natural phenomenon has been the starting-point in the development of a new branch of knowledge". His words. Think the blue opalescence of the Mediterranean. Think Raman effect.


Happy 125th birthday CV Raman!

November 7th, 2013

This remarkable woman perhaps inherited her questioning, reasoning mind and her tenacity from her family - both qualities would certainly play a crucial part in her future accomplishments. A daughter of a free-thinking math teacher in increasingly volatile Eastern Europe under threat from Russian imperialism, she and her elder sister quickly formed an agreement to pursue further education in spite of their parents not being able to support it. She would work as a governess in affluent families, enabling her sister to travel to Paris and study. After two years, once her sister had a degree, their roles would reverse and her sister would support her travel to Paris for her own education!

After completing her part of the bargain, this woman went to Paris herself to study math and physics, and - well - created history. The recognition she got afterwards is apparent in the fact that she has universities named after her in the city of her birth as well as in Paris, apart from several institutes and laboratories and even a nuclear reactor. But were she alive today, she couldn't have cared less about all that - as she demonstrated amply in her lifetime. Nor would she have cared much about the fact that she was the first woman to win the Nobel, the first person to win two of them, and the only till date to win them two in two different science categories! Not to mention the first and only person whose spouse, daughter and son-in-law also won the coveted prize.

She would have been more proud of her discovering radioactivity as a subatomic phenomenon, discovering new elements radium and polonium (named on her native country), and the tremendous amount of research that she did, and enabled at several labs she helped start.

The Solvay 1927 group photograph (made famous on the internet now) of the best of the scientific minds has only one woman in it. But what a woman it is! Her work is second best to few if any and indeed towers over many. Happy 146th birth anniversary Maria Sklodowska, or Marie Curie.

October 19th, 2013

This chap has got the world's most sensitive space-based X-ray observatory named after him. And a dimensionless number representing magnetic field. And a cosmological limit related to gravitational collapse which he was perhaps a decade ahead of time in discovering!

Born in an enlightened family - his uncle won a Nobel and his mother translated Ibsen's work into Tamil - he won a scholarship to study at Cambridge with the renowned Prof Ralph Fowler.
Thank goodness for the fact that he had nothing to do on the voyage to London that interested him, for he worked out the cosmological limit on the ship! He worked on it for the next half a decade and was advised by people like Paul Dirac, Fowler, Max Born and Niels Bohr. His work was made famous then for the wrong reason though, as the eminent astrophysicist Sir Arthur Eddington publicly criticised and ridiculed it - so strongly that many other physicists like Dirac and Wolfgang Pauli who supported the research remained largely silent.

The chap and his research was proved right later though, and created a lasting impact on the world of physics. So much that he got the Nobel mainly for it, more than 50 years after that voyage to London. Eddington's unfortunate treatment of his work that time was to be America's good fortune though, as the hurt young physicist sought work outside the UK, serving at the University of Chicago for half of a century since then, and even getting an offer to be a director at Princeton which he didn't take up.
In 60 years of career studying and teaching science and physics, the average age of his scores of co-authors always remained the same as what his age was when he had started the career - it is a remarkable proof of his enthusiasm to work with young aspiring students.

But perhaps very few tributes to the man come closer than what his own student at Chicago and that master of scientific story-telling - Carl Sagan - said about him - "I discovered what true mathematical elegance is from Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar".

Though I have read that he encouraged only those students who've completed their PhD to use his shortened name, and that he was 'Chandrasekhar' for the rest, I'll take the kind of liberty which NASA took when naming their X-ray telescope, out of fondness for the chap's contribution to our knowledge. Happy 103rd birthday Chandra!

October 7th, 2013

This chap has an anecdote associated with him which is probably fictitious, but has become a legend in its own sense, and definitely portrays accurately his aptitude in his chosen field, and his spirit of free-thinking.

He was failed in a school exam for answering the routine question about "how to measure the height of a tall building with a barometer", as "hang the barometer from the roof with a piece of string and measure the length of the string". When he challenged the result, arguing his answer is not essentially wrong, he was asked to meet an arbitrator who said the answer does not show knowledge of science or physics and so he'll need to provide a better answer, preferably more scientific. The student's response was -
"You should drop the barometer from the roof of the building, and measure the time it takes to hit the ground. Then using s = u.t + 0.5att, calculate 's' which is the height of the building. But that's bad luck on the barometer, so you can stand the barometer vertically on a clear sunny day, measure its length and the length of its shadow, measure the length of the shadow of the building, and then using the proportion compute the height of the building". Towards the end he added - "and of course if you want the usual boring orthodox way of doing this, measure the air pressure on the ground and on the roof and that should give you the height of the building".

Of course the chap needs no anecdotes to introduce him. His is unarguably one of the most breathtaking contributions to the golden era of physics, including being one of the founders of the quantum revolution. Apart from proposing a revolutionary new atomic model (for which he received the Nobel Prize in 1922, a year after his good friend Albert Einstein), he was instrumental in mentoring a generation of young physicists like Heisenberg and Pauli and making valuable contributions to quantum mechanics. A vast amount of study and research has been done by a large number of illustrious physicists in the institute named after him in his home country. His epistemological debates with Einstein are still a subject of a good amount of study.

Happy 128th birthday Niels Bohr!