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Trials and Tribulations of Playing the Devil's Advocate

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Trials and Tribulations of Playing the Devil's Advocate RAA 2015 Vol. 15 No. 1, 1–14 doi: 10.1088/1674–4527/15/1/001 Research in http://www.raa-journal.org http://www.iop.org/journals/raa Astronomy and Astrophysics Scientific Reminiscences Trials and tribulations of playing the devil’s advocate Jayant V. Narlikar Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Pune 411007, India; [email protected] Received 2014 July 24; accepted 2014 July 30 Abstract Beginning with his student days at school and college, the author describes his training at Cambridge with special emphasis on his mentor Fred Hoyle. His early experience of participating in a controversy at Cambridge played a major role in giv- ing him the confidence to defend his scientific ideas. All through his later life he chose areas that were not part of mainstream research. These included the steady state the- ory and later the quasi steady state cosmology, action at a distance, noncosmological redshifts, quantum conformal cosmology, etc. After being a founding member of the Institute of Theoretical Astronomy (IOTA) at Cambridge, the author joined the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) in Mumbai and later moved to Pune to set up the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA). He briefly reviews his own work and ends by pointing out the difficulties a non-conformist scien- tist faces in his professional life. In the conclusion, he mentions his interests in science popularization and science fiction for which he has won awards and appreciation, in- cluding UNESCO’s Kalinga Prize. Key words: autobiography — cosmology — sociology of astronomy 1 THE EARLY YEARS I was born in Kolhapur in 1938. At the time Kolhapur was a princely state abutting the Bombay Presidency, part of the British empire in the Indian subcontinent. Both my parents were born there and had ancestral property dating back to the nineteenth century. My father was educated at Cambridge and as an Isaac Newton student had worked with Eddington, Larmor and Smart. While in Cambridge he was approached by Mahamana Madan Mohan Malaviya, the Founder of the Banaras Hindu University (BHU) with an offer to head the mathematics department after he finished his stud- ies at Cambridge. He accepted the offer and joined BHU in 1932. My mother, unlike most women in the 1930s, had a college education and a master’s degree in Sanskrit. That was how I came to be brought up in the quiet and beautiful BHU campus, receiving school as well as an undergraduate education there. My favourite subject at school was mathematics and while in standard III, I recall all of us children were asked to say what our fathers did. When my turn came, I promptly said that my father was a professor. “Professor of what?”, asked the teacher and I did not know the answer. “You should know that your father teaches mathematics”, the teacher said. While embarrassed at my ignorance I was also pleased that my father taught the subject I liked the most. This liking grew with time and was much aided by the books on extracurricular mathematics that my father introduced me to and further by the arrival in our household of my maternal uncle 2 J. V. Narlikar Morumama (Professor M. S. Huzurbazar who later retired as Director of the Institute of Science, Mumbai). I was then in standard VIII. Morumama had come to spend two years studying for his M.Sc. degree in maths and he noticed that there were two blackboards on the verandah wall. He promptly used one of them to write what he titled “A Challenge Problem for JVN”. It was a math- ematical puzzle which I had to solve as a test of honour. I did. But soon there appeared another challenge problem and I realized that this was to go on and on. As they say, I won some and lost some. But either way my mathematical horizon expanded well beyond that of a school boy. After my undergraduate years at BHU, my father got me admitted to his old College Fitzwilliam House (later Fitzwilliam College) at Cambridge. The tricky question of finance was solved by the handsome grant (part loan and part gift) from the J. N. Tata Endowment in Mumbai. I recall under- going a tough interview by the Director Mrs P. J. Vesugar. Despite her aggressive questioning she must have formed a good impression of ‘this raw boy from Banaras’. Anyway, throughout my stay as a student in Cambridge, she was friendly and helpful. Thus I sailed for Cambridge on September 5, 1957 on a fateful passage to England. Although I had topped the list at BHU, I found it tough going at Cambridge. A course that would normally take a year at BHU was finished in a fast track of 24 lectures delivered in an eight week term. Morumama’s training that involved facing challenges helped as did the weekly one to one supervision by a faculty member or a senior research student. Thanks to these, I finished the dreaded Mathematical Tripos with the honour of ‘Wrangler’ (First Class) in Part II and distinction in Part III. I was particularly happy to be awarded the Tyson Medal for best performance in astronomy in Part III, a feat my father had achieved thirty years ago with no other Indian following him till I did in 1960. Figure 1 shows me with R.P. Paranjpye who was Senior Wrangler, first from India (in 1899). 2 ENCOUNTER WITH FRED HOYLE After the Tripos III, one entered the research career. It was clear to me by then that among all branches of maths, pure or applied, I liked astronomy best. This impression may have been formed partly after hearing lectures by Fred Hoyle and to some extent by R. A. Lyttleton and Leon Mestel. In any case as the Tyson Medalist I had the first pick of research guide amongst other astronomy grad- uate students. So, when the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP) sought the student’s choices, I opted for Hoyle as the research guide. And the day after the an- nouncement of the Tripos results, I was told by George Bachelor, the Head of DAMTP, to call on Fred Hoyle at his house at 10 a.m. the following day. I recall that June morning as a brilliant sunny morning of the kind when the English summer is at its best. 1 Clarkson Close was the address and I found it quite different from the typical Cambridge house. The doorbell was answered by Barbara Hoyle, Fred’s wife, whose chatty welcome soon put me at ease. She asked me about my family and where I came from. A few minutes later Fred came with his smiling face and suggested that we sit down outside on the lawn. Indeed when we sat on two deck chairs sipping iced lemonade, I could not help feeling how ‘un-English’ the whole set up was. After a few remarks on the weather and the recent Tripos examination, Fred came to the point. He described a menu of research problems that he considered interesting and worth tackling. These were spinning universes, stellar evolution, gravitational radiation, synchrotron radiation from radio sources, etc. Being a versatile scientist (easily the most versatile of his generation) Fred Hoyle’s range of interests covered almost the whole spectrum of astronomy and astrophysics. However, I noticed that he had not mentioned the steady state theory, of which he was a coauthor with Hermann Bondi and Tommy Gold. I asked him if I could work on some aspects of that theory. His reply was that he did not feel that a fresh research student should be exposed to a controversial topic. I was naturally disappointed but could see the logic in his reasoning. Ironically, I would recall this statement on a future occasion within a year. Trials and Tribulations of Playing the Devil’s Advocate 3 Fig. 1 Jayant with Senior Wrangler R. P. Paranjpye. That day I came back with work assigned on spinning universes. In particular, Fred wanted me to look at the spinning universe of Heckmann & Schucking¨ (1958). These authors had argued that a spinning universe would have centrifugal force to counteract gravity. Since in standard Friedmann- Lemaitre models (see Narlikar 2002) the spacetime singularity (i.e., a state of infinite density), is generally believed to be caused by gravity of matter, Heckmann & Schucking¨ were confident that their model would turn out to be nonsingular. Fred wanted to probe this model further. If the universe had no singularity, it might oscillate between finite density states and if so it would be worth investigating how the synthesis of nuclei operated. Would the expanding stage lead to a build up of nuclei from hydrogen to helium and other light nuclei which would break apart during the contracting phase? This approach set Hoyle apart from the typical relativistic cosmologist. The latter would only be interested in the mathematical solutions of Einstein’s relativistic equations, whereas Fred was more concerned with their physical behaviour. The Heckmann-Schucking¨ model had been obtained by the authors from a generalization of the classic Godel¨ model (Godel¨ 1949). Its geometric form was not fully determined but to Fred it was the physical behaviour of the model that mattered. I was planning to visit India for two months starting in early July. I had been away for nearly three years and was looking forward to being with my family. On checking my dates I discovered that on return to Cambridge on September 6, I had just one day of overlap with Fred before he left 4 J.
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