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!