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!