How to Recapture the Thrill for Basic Sciences in Higher Education By

810645850, 9811729491 December 2003. Designed and Printed by Calypso Communications, 9 Published by University Grants Commission. University Grants Commission Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg, New Delhi - 110 002 www.ugc.ac.in How to Recapture the Thrill for Basic Sciences in Higher Education JayantProf. Jayant V. Narlikar V. Narlikar Director, Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Pune UGC Golden Jubilee Lecture Series Chairman’s Foreword The University Grants Commission, an apex body of higher education responsible for the coordination, determination and maintenance of standards of university education in India, is celebrating its Golden Jubilee Year during 2002-2003. As part of the academic activities the UGC has conducted the ‘Golden Jubilee Lecture Series’ throughout the country by eminent individuals who have excelled in their respective fields and made a mark not only in India but abroad too. These Lectures have mostly been organized in Universities located in remote areas. The basic concept behind organizing these Lecture Series was to bring UGC closer to students, teachers and intelligentsia in that region. It is hoped that these luminaries including academicians, scientists, social scientists and others, with their rich and varied experiences have motivated and enabled the youth of the country to understand things in better perspective. To reach out to a wider audience, the UGC is presenting these lectures in the form of Golden Jubilee Lecture Series Booklets. I hope students, teachers, educational administrators and the general public at large, will benefit from the vast repository of knowledge of these achievers. Arun Nigavekar 1 IntroductionIntroduction I shall begin by narrating two episodes in Indian history. This lecture was delivered by Dr. The first one is from the life of astronomer Guillaume Le Gentil J.V. Narlikar at who came to India from Paris in 1761, on deputation by the Maharastra King of France. He had been recommended to the King by University of Health Science, the Academie Royale des Sciences, to observe the transit of Nasik on 25th Venus across the solar disc which was to be visible in April, 2003 as part Pondicherry in 1761. of the UGC’s Golden Jubilee Le Gentil, however, met several misfortunes in his ventures. Lecture Series. He left France on this deputation but because of the seven year war between England and his country, he had to take several detours to avoid the war zones. So when he reached Pondicherry the date of 6 June 1761 for observing the transit was already past. Like time and tide, astronomical events do not wait for anyone. Nevertheless Le Gentil decided to remain in India to observe another transit due eight years later on 3 June 1769. He stayed in India this period and did important work on the oceans and also carried out the determination of the longitude of Pondicherry. He published his results in Paris in 1779 under the title Voyages dans les Mers de l’Inde. However, his patience was not to be rewarded, since when the prescribed date for the transit came, the sky was overcast and no observations could be made. (If it was any consolation, the Scientists from British astronomers deputed by the Royal Society were similarly European thwarted at Madras in their rival attempt.) countries were When Le Gentil sailed back to France, his tale of woes willing to travel continued. He was twice shipwrecked en-route and arrived great distances much later than expected. He arrived back in Paris after 11 braving years of absence only to discover that he had been declared adventures, in ‘legally dead’ and his property given away to his relatives. order to observe astronomically Apart from a saga of misfortunes this story conveys a message. significant events Scientists from European countries were willing to travel great like eclipses and distances braving adventures, in order to observe transits, so that our astronomically significant events like eclipses and transits, so knowledge of the that our knowledge of the cosmos shall improve. In India cosmos shall religious taboo on foreign travel forbade such adventures. improve. Even so, we do not know of any local Indian astronomer 2 stepping out of his doors to view the transit of Venus for which Le Gentil came all the way from France. Why do we find no records of scientific observations being taken at solar and lunar eclipses? So far as the eclipses are concerned, one can see the reason in the age old superstitions relating to the mythical monsters Rahu and Ketu. That the situation has not changed substantially was demonstrated at the time of the eclipses of 1980 and 1994…when foreigners had thronged from thousands of miles to watch the spectacle while denizens of even the most advanced city in India, Bombay, had shut themselves within their abodes. Since I am speaking under the auspices of a medical university, my second episode is drawn from the annals of Indian medicine. The endemic fever of malaria had been a perpetual bane to the inhabitants of India since time immemorial. However, in the 19th century it was Ronald Ross, a British ex-patriot who tackled the mystery of its origin and transmission and hence cure. Ross began the study of medicine at St. Bartholomew's Hospital in London in 1875; entered the Indian Medical Service in 1881. He commenced the study of malaria in 1892. In 1894 he determined to make an experimental investigation in India of the hypothesis of Laveran and Manson that mosquitoes are connected with the propagation of the disease. After two and a half years' failure, Ross finally succeeded in demonstrating the life-cycle of the parasites of malaria in mosquitoes, thus establishing the hypothesis of Laveran and Manson. Why should it have taken an ‘outsider’ to come and solve our problems? Why did no one in India, seeing the havoc caused by the disease, feel the urge to investigate its origin and find ways to combat its effect? 3 Basic Science:Science: thethe UrgeUrge toto KnowKnow Both these examples, drawn from two widely different areas, share a feature that is common to all basic sciences, namely the urge to know. It is this urge to know the why, how, and when about the natural events taking place around him that drove man from primeval times to become a scientist. In basic science, one is driven by curiosity as the prime motive…even in Ronald Ross’s case it was the desire to know for sure the basic cause for malaria that made him launch his research. In any society, this curiosity is an energizing and refreshing trait that keeps it on an intellectually upward path. It prompts creativity that is on the same high level enjoyed by the creativity of the artist, the musician or the literateur. Indeed a society needs to carry out serious introspection if this creativity seems to be dying out. My two examples drawn from the colonial era illustrate how in terms of scientific creativity, the Indian subcontinent was in a decadent state. A Nobel laureate from the subcontinent, the late Abdus Salam has drawn an interesting parallel between the development of India and Europe in the seventeenth century. He mentions that the Taj Mahal in Agra and St Paul’s Cathedral in London are contemporary masterpieces of architecture showing that creativity in this field was running high in both countries. However, in a few years, England and the rest of Europe enjoyed the first important revolution in science, initiated by Isaac Newton’s work. There was to be no parallel development in the Indian subcontinent. The urge of scientific creativity simply did not seem to exist. Or if it existed in a latent form, the social ambience certainly did not seem to encourage it. While the arts, architecture and music enjoyed royal patronage, science had no foothold amongst the creative intellectuals or their patrons. That India did have such an urge a few centuries earlier is seen by the golden age of science starting from Aryabhata in the 5th century and extending to Bhaskara in the 11th century. It was the period, when Europe was nowhere on the intellectual scene. The Arabs who had earlier acted as conduit for transfer of knowledge from the ancient Greece to Asia, 4 were now looking to India for new ideas. Thus it was that Al’Biruni translated Sanskrit works by Brahmagupta and others on astronomy and mathematics. This was when the Hindu system of writing and manipulating numbers became popular, to say nothing of the important concept of the number Zero! A resurgence of the old spirit of scientific enquiry took place in the beginning of the twentieth century, when even under the colonial rule Indians began to assert their intellectual potential in science. Names like Srinivasa Ramanujan, Jagadish Chandra Bose, Meghnad Saha, Satyendra Nath Bose, Chandrasekhar Venkat Raman are examples of this new resurgence. Alongside these names from mathematics, physics, chemistry and botany I may also mention the gynaecological genious the late Dr V.N. Shirodkar, now very often remembered by the ‘stitch’ named after him. These people were all distinguished as teachers who inspired younger generations of students with their examples. So succeeding generations of students in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s were motivated by them to take up research and teaching in basic sciences. I give a few examples. Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, as an undergraduate was inspired by the work of Ralph Fowler in Cambridge to work on the state of matter at very high density in the white dwarf stars. He wrote a paper on this work and after some correspondence with Fowler, it was accepted for publication in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London.

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