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.

LaserFest - Charles Townes

When I first learned about stimulated emission formulated by Einstein, it was part of introduction to LASER in my post graduation days. If you think I was introduced to it late and that I should have been introduced to it much before in my graduate days or during my high school you are right - I was introduced to it much earlier but never really grasped it and neither do I have any vivid memory of learning it before my post graduation days. Now, because I understood it only with respect to LASER I kind of had the idea that amplification must have been on the mind of Einstein after he formulated it. Also I had the idea that after the stimulated emission was formulated, the scientific world saw clearly that LASER were in principle possible. The only hurdle was to have the technology to do it. Looks like that was not the story!!!

I came across this video wherein Charles Townes, who is credited with developing the MASER - a predecessor to LASER, talks about the time when the idea of MASER came to his mind. What really interested me though was when he mentions that Einstein didn't think much about the amplification and its application!!

IF you are used to watching videos on youtube then you will find the video quality pretty ordinary. Nevertheless, the man in the video is not. Because his work led to the development of LASER which now plays such a vital role in our high tech world.