Science in India and a few stories

The rich scientific and technical heritage, which our country possesses, is unknown to a major section of the people in our country. In this article, my endeavor is to put across few facts and achievements made by Indians in the field of science and technology. Let us start with the field of mathematics.

This dates way back to 1000 BC when Indian scientists first proposed what the number system is and how does it assist us in day-to-day life. In this respect, the Nalanda University (presently in Bihar and earlier known as state of Patliputra) did a commendable job in creating a high value learning atmosphere and was a unique institution of that era. Amongst the luminaries of that period was Apastamba (about 600 BC) who first proposed how to calculate the values of irrational numbers upto fifth decimal place so that the measurement of microscopic particles in those days could be made with appreciable accuracy. Then came the gift of “ZERO” (the number “0”) by Aryabhatta-I. He solved the mystery of “NOTHING” in mathematics. Actually, it is still a very interesting topic of research amongst mathematicians what this “0” is? His topics covered arithmetic, algebra, plane geometry and spherical trigonometry. He developed the whole concept of QUADRATIC equations, and continued fractions. Around 600 AD, Bhaskara (Saurashtra) played a crucial role in correct estimation of the number “” (called ‘pie’). His efforts lead to the expansion of trigonometric functions using polynomials and estimated the possible errors in these expansions. Around the same time, Brahmagupta stepped in with his brilliant postulates on the digit “0”. He gave reasons for all the possible operations, which were done using “0”, and still today they are not questioned. One of his quotes were,

“When zero is added to a number or subtracted from a number, the number remains unchanged; and a number multiplied by zero becomes zero”

By far, in the nineteenth century, India produced one greatest mind in the field of mathematical sciences, Srinivasa Aiyangar Ramanujan. In his short span of life (only 33 years, 1887-1920), he made some remarkable contributions in the field. His most significant contributions were:

1) Elliptic functions, continued functions and infinite series.

2) How to solve cubic equations, and his own method to solve quadratic equations.

3) Calculation of Euler’s constant upto 15th decimal places and his own investigations on Bernoulli’s number.

4) Proposition of Hypergeometric series, which is the basis of large problems encountered in the field of Science and engineering (especially Chemical and Electrical).

5) Foundation of “Indian Mathematical Society”.

There were a few more, genius of whose work, have not been quoted here like, Brahamdeva, Harish Chandra, Ramanujam, Yatirbhasava etc. etc.

The field of physical sciences is equally rich as their mathematics counterparts. It started again way back in 1000 BC and continued till the 15th century. However, all the evidences related to scientific developments taking place in India were destroyed during British colonization of India by East India Company. Moreover, India never saw an Industrial Revolution as it happened in the west. Therefore, in that respect we abysmally lagged far behind the west as far as our development on scientific and technical prowess was concerned during the 17th and 18th century. But, once the ruling power was taken over by the Queen (after 1857); there came some hope of revival on this front. Starting it all was, Meghnath Sircar (1833-1904), a lower middle class lad from the state of Bengal. Even though, his contributions did not lead to some cutting-edge research, he fought fiercely for establishment of Universities in India. Due to his sincere and pain-staking struggle, Calcutta University became the first University to be established on 24th January 1857 in modern India. It was essentially meant for exploiting the huge pool of talented young individuals of this country (as was thought by the Queen of the Britain). During its initial days, Calcutta University saw an unprecedented growth in terms of availability of foreign scientific literature, better experimental facilities and many more. In those days, this was only hub in the entire country to get access to the world class journals and articles (selected ones), which were easily available in the west. The presence of the facilities of this kind enthused the young generation to fulfill their desire to learn. Dr. Meghnath Sircar’s research mainly included application and understanding of the newly developed Maxwell’s equations at that time.

He was followed by great many researchers/scientists but most of them were from the state of Bengal and nearby. Most of them were classmates and showed tremendous camaraderie to take India to a commendably strong position in the field of Science and Technology. They were Meghnath Saha, Satyendra Nath Bose, Nikhilranjan Bose, J.C. Ghosh, Girijapathy Bhattacharya and many more like them. They came in contact with Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose during the freedom fighting movement who bolstered their confidence and encouraged them to create a better learning atmosphere. As all of you must have heard the name of Sarat Chandra Chatterjee (famous for his Devdas and other novels), also shared the same period at Calcutta University.

I will start with Meghnath Saha whose work was mainly focused on ionization of atoms at high temperature environment as it is found in stellar matter (sun, stars etc.). His work led to determination of temperature of different stellar objects in terms of all existing physical parameters. In 1919, the Premchand Raychand Scholarship took Saha to Europe for about two years. He spent five months in Imperial College, London, where he developed his theory further with the help of Professor A.Fowler. In November 1921 Saha returned to Calcutta as Khaira Professor of Physics, a new chair created from the endowment of Kumar Guruprasad Singh of Khaira. He left for Allahabad in 1923, to return in 1938 as Palit Professor of Physics at University of Calcutta. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1927 at the age of thirty-four. Saha took keen interest in the establishment of Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science (IACS which is presently located at Jadavpur, Calcutta), and became its first full-time director in 1952. He also established what is now known as the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics (SINP) in 1948 and installed a 38-inch cyclotron or atom smasher, the first of its kind outside America and Europe. “Saha’s ionization formula” is something which one cannot escape while studying basic Nuclear physics.

Thereafter, it was the genius Satyendra Nath Bose. Satyendra Nath Bose was born on the first of January 1894 in Calcutta. His father Surendra Nath was employed in the Engineering Department of the East India Railway. Satyendra Nath was the eldest of his seven children; the rest were all daughters. Though Surendra Nath Bose lost his wife at an early age, without losing heart, he brought up his children well. It is said that, when Satyendra Nath was hardly three years old, a Bengali astrologer made this prediction: "This child will face many obstacles all through his life; nevertheless he will overcome them with his exceptional intelligence and attain great fame." The father, naturally, took a special interest in his son's progress. Though he had seven children he took care to see that nothing came in the way of the boy's education. At this young age, he never seemed to be eyeing for anything big but once he was trapped in the competitive environment of Calcutta University, he molded himself from an ordinary student to an extraordinary one. During his stay at the Presidency College, Calcutta he caught the eyes of all the Professors and teachers there. Once in paper of mathematics, he scored more than 100 (exactly 110) and the teacher was bound to award him the extra marks as he solved couple of problems (correctly!!!) in more than three ways. He joined Calcutta University in 1916 as lecturer and remained there till 1921 (in his first stint). After that, he joined Dacca University where he did something which created history. In the spring of 1924, he sent a six-paged letter to the great Sir Albert Einstein (then in Germany), in which discussed few issues related to “Planck’s law of radiation” and “Light Quantum Theory” which were themselves in an infant stage. Sir Einstein was so impressed with the content of the letter that he, himself translated it in German and got it published in the famous German Journal “Zeitschrift fur Physik”. Even though Satyendra Nath had only Master’s degree, the German government got ready to bear all the expenses for his trip. In Germany, he worked with Sir Albert Einstein and gave the scientific community “Bose-Einstein Statistics” which was absolutely a new way to perceive the concept of “Light”. They also gave a theory for a unique kind of condensation known as “Bose-Einstein” condensation. In fact, those particles, which follow Bose-Einstein Statistics, are known as Bosons.

(Bose first visited Paris in 1924. He stayed there for a year. He conducted research in the Madame Curie Laboratory, which had special facilities. Here he became acquainted with several physicists. The next year, he left Paris for Berlin to join Einstein and worked with him. There he came into close contact with noted scientists like Schroedinger and Heisenberg. He participated in all the meetings and discussions held there. While Bose was in Berlin, the post of a professor fell vacant in Dacca University. J. C. Ghosh and other friends persuaded him to apply for the post. Bose had not yet got his doctorate. It was, therefore, difficult for him to secure the professorship. A recommendation from Albert Einstein to select him would have made things easy for him. So, with great hesitation, Bose approached Einstein. Einstein was surprised. He said, “You are so proficient in your subject; is there a need for any other certificate or recommendation?” He wrote a letter to the authorities of Dacca University in which he said, “Can you find another scientist as proficient as Satyendra Nath? He is quite fit for the post” It had the desired effect. In 1926, Satyendranath Bose was appointed Professor and Head of the Department of Physics).

… more to follow

The Raman Effect - Nobel Prize in 1930

The Nobel Prize in Physics 1930 was awarded to Sir Venkata Raman. The citation read "for his work on the scattering of light and for the discovery of the effect named after him". Here is a link where you can find the presentation speech delivered by Professor H. Pleijel, Chairman of the Nobel Committee for Physics of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, on December 10, 1930 before felicitating Sir Raman.

Also, a brief history around Sir Raman's discovery clarifies many questions and doubts. So, here is an article which briefly describes the scientific research activities which was going on around that period, across the globe and corresponding events that could probably have lead to what we call "Raman Effect".

Karl Popper and the Black Swan

I was reading the novel 'The Black Swan' by Nassim Nicholas Taleb during the winter of '08-'09. Since the internet has become just a click away, as a habit I read reviews and make general google research on the book and the author that I am reading. It was during one of these research readings that I came across Karl Popper - who is generally regarded as one of greatest philosophers of science. Being a student of science for most of my life it was surprising, and ignorant of me, to not have heard of the man and his contributions. Nevertheless, I tried to make amends and read a sufficient amount of material on the man. To write a post on a personality, let alone a philosopher is a herculean task and beyond the scope of the post. More importantly I cannot safely say I have read enough of his work to really build an article on the subject. Instead what I will do is introduce Karl Popper, if you are not already introduced to him, with slices of material I read with regard to Black Swan, Nicholas Taleb and Karl Popper.

Writing for the New York Times, Taleb starts his article/book with this paragraph.

Before the discovery of Australia, people in the old world were convinced that all swans were white, an unassailable belief as it seemed completely confirmed by empirical evidence. The sighting of the first black swan might have been an interesting surprise for a few ornithologists (and others extremely concerned with the coloring of birds), but that is not where the significance of the story lies. It illustrates a severe limitation to our learning from observations or experience and the fragility of our knowledge. One single observation can invalidate a general statement derived from millennia of confirmatory sightings of millions of white swans. All you need is one single (and, I am told, quite ugly) black bird. 

He goes on to elaborate on the subject and give a three characteristic of a Black Swan event and more. Also, the following set of paragraphs would allow you to see the link between Taleb and Popper.

The problem of demarcation:

Every genuine scientific theory then, in Karl Popper's view, is prohibitive, in the sense that it forbids, by implication, particular events or occurrences. As such it can be tested and falsified, but never logically verified. Thus Popper stresses that it should not be inferred from the fact that a theory has withstood the most rigorous testing, for however long a period of time, that it has been verified; rather we should recognize that such a theory has received a high measure of corroboration. and may be provisionally retained as the best available theory until it is finally falsified (if indeed it is ever falsified), and/or is superseded by a better theory.

Popper has always drawn a clear distinction between the logic of falsifiability and its applied methodology. The logic of his theory is utterly simple: if a single ferrous metal is unaffected by a magnetic field it cannot be the case that all ferrous metals are affected by magnetic fields. Logically speaking, a scientific law is conclusively falsifiable although it is not conclusively verifiable. Methodologically, however, the situation is much more complex: no observation is free from the possibility of error—consequently we may question whether our experimental result was what it appeared to be.

Thus, while advocating falsifiability as the criterion of demarcation for science, Popper explicitly allows for the fact that in practice a single conflicting or counter-instance is never sufficient methodologically to falsify a theory, and that scientific theories are often retained even though much of the available evidence conflicts with them, or is anomalous with respect to them. Scientific theories may, and do, arise genetically in many different ways, and the manner in which a particular scientist comes to formulate a particular theory may be of biographical interest, but it is of no consequence as far as the philosophy of science is concerned. Popper stresses in particular that there is no unique way, no single method such as induction, which functions as the route to scientific theory, a view which Einstein personally endorsed with his affirmation that ‘There is no logical path leading to [the highly universal laws of science]. They can only be reached by intuition, based upon something like an intellectual love of the objects of experience’. Science, in Popper's view, starts with problems rather than with observations—it is, indeed, precisely in the context of grappling with a problem that the scientist makes observations in the first instance: his observations are selectively designed to test the extent to which a given theory functions as a satisfactory solution to a given problem.

My personal favorite is this paragraph.

In the view of many social scientists, the more probable a theory is, the better it is, and if we have to choose between two theories which are equally strong in terms of their explanatory power, and differ only in that one is probable and the other is improbable, then we should choose the former. Popper rejects this. Science, or to be precise, the working scientist, is interested, in Popper's view, in theories with a high informative content, because such theories possess a high predictive power and are consequently highly testable. But if this is true, Popper argues, then, paradoxical as it may sound, the more improbable a theory is the better it is scientifically, because the probability and informative content of a theory vary inversely—the higher the informative content of a theory the lower will be its probability, for the more information a statement contains, the greater will be the number of ways in which it may turn out to be false. Thus the statements which are of special interest to the scientist are those with a high informative content and (consequentially) a low probability, which nevertheless come close to the truth. Informative content, which is in inverse proportion to probability, is in direct proportion to testability. Consequently the severity of the test to which a theory can be subjected, and by means of which it is falsified or corroborated, is all-important. 

Even after reading some of the articles on Popper, I am yet to completely understand and make my personal comment on his work. Nevertheless, I think he makes sense to me almost always and that encourages me to read more of him. Need to get hold of some of his written works. Suggestion in that regard would be most helpful.

To conclude here is what William W. Bartley has to say about Popper:

Sir Karl Popper is not really a participant in the contemporary professional philosophical dialogue; quite the contrary, he has ruined that dialogue. If he is on the right track, then the majority of professional philosophers the world over has wasted or is wasting their intellectual careers. The gulf between Popper's way of doing philosophy and that of the bulk of professional philosophers is as great as that between astronomy and astrology.

Science in India: current scinario

INDIA: the land of Raman, Bose and Ramanujan. India contributed many things to the scientific world in past. Right now, with increasing number of research articles per year from India, India still needs to show its potential in doing a leading edge research in the field of science and technology. I started thinking on this issue of "science in India" after I read an article by R.A. Mashelkar that appeared in Science magazine in last week of April. That paper analyzes the situation science in India and suggets some points that can be considered for making the situation better. Opening new IISc's has done little to improve the situation.

Picture: Moon's surface taken from lunar orbit by Chandrayaan-1. Chandrayaan I found ice near Moon's north pole. (courtesy THE HINDU website)

detail at: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/reprint/328/5978/547.pdf

Paul Dirac: Interviewed by Thomas Kuhn and Paul Wigner (Niels Bohr Library and Archives)

Paul Dirac, another legend who was deeply involved in the development of Quantum Mechanics in the decade of 1920-1930's. He was closely associated with other luminaries and visionaries of that era and was highly admired for his simple, deep-rooted physical interpretations without delving too much into Mathematics. His main contributions were fixing the "FREE PARTICLE" problem in Quantum Mechanics by employing Dirac-Delta functions, extending the probabilistic interpretation given by Max Born to many other branches of Physics and Science and formulating the Quantum Mechanics for the relativistic cases.

Here is an transcripted interview of Paul Dirac that I have found at the American Institute of Physics Web-page on Neils Bohr's library and Archives. The interview was taken by great Philosophers (Thomas J. Kuhn and Paul Wigner) who were contemporary to Paul Dirac but were not technically (or mathematically) involved in the development of Quantum Mechanics. Since, they were good friends and great admirers of each other, the straightforward and direct questions are really interesting and reply from Dirac are quite impressive!

Erwin Schroedinger: Indian influence on the development of Quantum Mechanics

Erwin Schrodinger was one of the main architects of quantum mechanics. Schrodinger developed the wave mechanics. It became the second formulation of quantum mechanics. The first formulation, called matrix mechanics, was developed by Werner Heisenberg. Schrodinger’s wave equation (or Schrodinger equation) is one of the most basic equations of quantum mechanics and used to describe all micro- and nano-level phenomenon. Schrodinger was awarded the Nobel Prize for his exemplary work in the year 1933.

As he mentions in his interviews and writings, he was highly inspired by ancient Vedic Philosophy of Karma. Here is an article I found on web which elucidates this aspect of Erwin Schrodinger's life and work.