Tag: Meghnad Saha

Subhas Chandra Bose, Meghnad Saha and the Birth of the National Planning Commission

Although Netaji was not around when independent India embarked on its five-year plans in the 1950s, it is obvious that the work of the Planning Committee he co-founded had been the pathfinder.

Subhas Chandra Bose was shining bright on the Indian political firmament in the mid-1930s. His unflinching commitment to the anti-colonial struggle, in spite of years of imprisonment and exile, had raised his popularity all over the land.

He was even well-known abroad; his book The Indian Struggle had been a success, and he had been featured on the cover page of Time magazine. It was in this scenario that Bose delivered his (rather long) presidential address at the 51st annual session of the Congress at Haripura in February 1938. In it, he outlined the strategy for socioeconomic development that India would largely follow for the next several decades. 

Bose started his speech with a detailed analysis of the workings of the British Empire.

He went on to elaborate the fundamental rights that citizens would enjoy in the future nation. He assured listeners that “the culture, language and script of the minorities and of the different linguistic areas shall be protected…All citizens are equal before the law, irrespective of religion, caste” and envisioned that “state shall observe neutrality in regard to all religions.”

Next, Bose turned the focus on the blueprint for economic and industrial advancement.

In his typically confident tone, he declared, “I have no doubt in my mind that our chief national problems relating to the eradication of poverty, illiteracy and disease and to scientific production and distribution can be effectively tackled only along socialistic lines” and hence one of the first duties of the future national government “would be to set up a commission for drawing up a comprehensive plan of reconstruction.”

Bose explained the importance of agricultural modernisation, abolition of Zamindari and land redistribution would not be enough and hence, “industrial development under state ownerships and state-control will be indispensable.”

Thus, it would be the duty of the planning commission “to carefully consider and decide which of the home industries could be revived …and in which sphere large scale production should be encouraged.”

In a poke at the Gandhian purists, he declared that “we cannot go back to the pre-industrial era” but then recognised the necessity to minimise the evils of big corporate-backed industrialisation and the importance of “reviving cottage industries where there is a possibility of their surviving the inevitable competition of factories.”

All of this was not futuristic speculation. Congress cabinets were in power (however limited) in seven provinces following the electoral success in the 1937 provincial elections.

Now Bose reminded the Haripura delegates that, in October 1937, the seven labour ministers had already met to work out a uniform programme for “education, health, prohibition, prison reforms, irrigation, industry, land reform, workers’ welfare etc.”

It was also in this context that the new president took a stand diametrically opposite to Gandhiji’s. He declared that there was no question about the Congress party withering away after the British left. “On the contrary, the Party will have to take over power, assume responsibility for administration and put through its programme of reconstruction. Only then will it fulfil its role.”

Bose concluded the section by asking the soon-to-be-set-up Planning Commission to “work for comprehensive scheme for gradually socialising our entire agricultural and industrial system.”

The first steps for policy-driven industrialisation had, of course, already been taken at the August 1937 session of the Congress Working Committee in Wardah. The CWC had empowered the provincial ministries to appoint an ‘interprovincial Committee of Experts’ for ‘national reconstruction and social planning.’ It was realised that ‘extensive surveys and the collection of data’ was essential and special mention was given to ‘comprehensive river surveys… for the development of hydro-electric and other schemes…[by] large-scale state planning’.

The words echoed the socialist spirit of Jawaharlal Nehru who, in his presidential address at Faizpur in December 1936, had stated that “only a great planned system for the whole land and dealing with all these various national activities, co-ordinating them, making each serve the larger whole and the interests of the mass of our people…can find a solution.…”

Jawaharlal Nehru speaks to a refugee. Photo: GOI, Public domain

However, not surprisingly, such words had alarmed the right-wing of the CWC and a significant section of businessmen and actual work had been slow. 

Bose’s own thoughts had been crystallising on this well before Haripura.

In January 1938, in an interview with Rajani Palme Dutt for The Daily Worker, he had stated that he wanted India “to move in the direction of Socialism.”

Also read: Remembering Nehru as a ‘Friend of Science’

A more elaborate view comes from his speech (titled Municipal Socialism) at the Bombay Corporation in May of that year.

Drawing upon the comprehensive work he had himself witnessed in Vienna, Bose urged his audience to understand that “today a modern municipality has to furnish not merely pure drinking water, roads, lighting, etc., but it has to provide primary education and it has to look after the health of the population …[including] infant mortality, maternity” and even banking. 

And, once in office, president Bose took it upon himself to speed up things.

In May 1938, he chaired a special CWC session of the seven chief ministers where setting up of industries and sharing of power resources was the focus. A couple of months later, in July, he asked for an early conference with Ministers of Industry to assess the existing industrial scenario “as preliminary to the appointment of the Expert Committee to explore possibilities of an All-India Industrial Plan.”

Subhas Chandra Bose addresses the first meeting of the National Planning Committee in 1938, Bombay. Others present include Chairman Nehru, Patel, Kripalani, Meghnad Saha, M. Visveswaraiah. Photo: Twitter/@Advaidism

It must be noted that while three decades of neo-liberalism may make many frown at such ideas today, in the 1930s, socialism-based state industrialisation was the most acceptable model to many Indian thinkers.

Not only the formal leftists, but Rabindranath Tagore’s Letters from Russia and Jawaharlal Nehru’s Soviet Russia are replete with admiration for what they felt would redress 150 years of unbridled capitalist-imperialist loot of the land. Various aspects of planned industrialisation were being discussed.

In August 1938, the prestigious ‘Modern Review’ carried a special issue covering a wide range of articles on industrial planning – with Acharya Prafulla Chandra Roy, professors S.S. Bhatnagar and V. Subrahmanyan, and A.R. Dalal among the authors. The legendary Sir M. Visveswariah and the economist N.S. Subba Rao had written books on the subject.

At the session of the Indian Science Congress, the president, Jnan Chandra Ghosh (the future director of IISc, Bangalore) elaborated on the necessity to bridge the basic sciences and industries. As Nehru summed it up in a letter to young Indira, “Everybody talks of planning now…The Soviets have put magic into the word.”

But, one man was perhaps the most strongly motivated of them all – physicist Meghnad Saha. 

Meghnad Saha. Photo: Public domain

A nationalist, who had dabbled with anti-colonial struggle during his studenthood, Saha’s rise – from the humble (and often humiliated) ‘low’ caste origins in rural Bengal to one of the stars of the international astrophysics fraternity – remains inspiring to this day. And, it is probably for this upbringing that he had absolutely no ‘soft nostalgia’ for serfdom-based rural life.

Hence, not content with his bright scientific career, Saha started the journal Science and Culture which became a steady source of research updates and scientific temperament, and counted Bose among its admirers.

A strong advocate of ‘large scale industrialisation’, Saha’s August 1938 essay ‘The Philosophy of Industrialisation’ hit hard at what he perceived to be the futility of  ‘Gandhian’ cottage industries and bluntly stated that many Congress leaders “themselves have no clear-cut philosophy of action for national reconstruction” evoking a counter from Gandhian cottage industries advocate, J.C. Kumarappa. 

It was at this stage that Saha invited Bose to the annual session Indian Science News Association. Here, at the questionnaire session, Saha wanted ‘Rashtrapati’ Bose to tell the audience if India was “going to revive the philosophy of village life, of the bullock-cart – thereby perpetuating servitude” or was there going to be “modern industrialised nation” to redress “the problems of poverty, ignorance and defence?”

Also read: Infinite in All Directions: Nobel’s Women, Meghnad’s Caste, Tantalum’s Decay

If the latter was the answer, would Congress “establish a National Research Council and mobilise the scientific intelligentsia of the country,” Saha asked.

Bose tackled the broadside with frankness. He conceded there were differences within the Congress on this matter, but then assured the audience that, within the party, “the rising generation are in favour of industrialisation.”

Bose went on to elaborate that since India was “still in the pre-industrial stage,” the industrial revolution was inevitable. The critical question was, according to him, whether “industrialisation, will be a comparatively gradual one, as in Great Britain, or a forced march as in Soviet Russia. I am afraid that it has to be a forced march in this country.”

His thoughts about national reconstruction and autonomy involved “growth and development of the mother industries, viz., power supply, metal production, machine and tools manufacture, manufacture of essential chemical, transport and communication industries.”

To achieve this, “technical education and technical research” (free from stifling bureaucratic control) would have to be updated with a “clear and definite plan” to send students abroad so that they can return and set up and join new industries. The big need of the hour was a “permanent National Research Council.”

And all this demanded a strong multi-tiered collaboration between politicians and scientists.

Bose stressed that “national reconstruction will be possible only with the aid of science and our scientists” and concluded with words that would resonate to this day:

“We, who are practical politicians, need your help, who are scientists, in the shape of ideas. We can, in our turn, help to propagate these ideas and when the citadel of power is finally captured, can help to translate these ideas into reality. What is wanted is far reaching co-operation between science and politics.”

The conference of Ministers of Industry was organised at Delhi in early October 1938. The ministers were present as were J.B. Kripalani (Congress secretary), G.D. Birla, Sir M.V. and Meghnad Saha. In his welcome address, Bose pointed towards the paradox that “unemployment may become worse as a result of scientific agriculture” but hoped that since “India is a country with resources similar to those of the United States of America,” planned exploitation of the superabundant natural wealth would serve the people.

He cited his favourite example, that of Soviet Russia which had been “no better than India…but within the last 16 years she has passed from a community of primarily half-starved peasants to one of the primarily well-fed and well-clothed industrial workers.”

He emphasised that the Soviet example “deserves our careful study and attention, irrespective of the political theories on which this State is based…”

An image of V.V. Giri on a stamp of India. Photo: GODL-India

The conference concluded with the decision to appoint a Planning Committee. It would submit its initial report within 4 months to the CWC and then get enlarged to a more inclusive All India National Planning Commission. V.V. Giri (the future president of India) was entrusted with the setting up of the commission. Immediate emphasis was placed on the ‘national importance that industrial and power alcohol should be manufactured in India and the necessary raw material, chiefly molasses’ procured from the ministries of Uttar Pradesh, Madras, Bombay and Bihar. 

Of course, Bose knew he would need help. And who better than the only one in the CWC who shared his socialist dreams – Nehru.

For most of 1938, Nehru had been abroad, canvassing for the Indian cause. Bose’s letter of October 19 found him in Spain. The warm tone reveals this was the high noon of their political (and also personal) bonding.

“You cannot imagine how I have missed you all these months…I hope you will accept the Chairmanship of the Planning Committee. You must if it is to be success.”

Nehru accepted without hesitation because, he felt, “It is a good thing to begin thinking on right lines and make others do so” and “because I am intensely interested in planning.”

Saha must have felt assured with the proceedings, but, he realised it would be better if Bose continued to be at the helm. To bolster support, he approached ‘the sun’ of India’s cultural world, Rabindranath Tagore. In sharp contrast to what one would expect from a ‘poet of nature’, Tagore’s love for scientific advancement was neither new nor casual. He had been a promoter of formal technical education, since the early Swadeshi and Khadi days. Hyper-enthusiastic Swadeshi enterprises which often ended in ridiculous failure, and ‘the cult of the charka’ were not his forte. The great scientist Sir J.C. Bose had been his lifelong friend. He considered Nehru and Bose as the only ‘two genuine modernists’ among the national leadership. 

Rabindranath Tagore at work in his study at Santiniketan. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

So Saha travelled to Shantiniketan and using numerical data explained how industrialized harnessing of natural resources had increased per capita productivity in the West while India lagged behind.

Tagore was impressed “by the forceful way Saha called for shunning all useless ancient tradition.” He agreed, “There is no spiritual solace in suffering and disease…and without scientific education and industrialisation, our heritage, whatever its greatness, was bound to get reduced to dust.”

Under Saha’s persuasion, Tagore wrote to Nehru, “I have had a long and interesting discussion with Dr Meghnad Saha… as you have consented to act as the President of the Committee formed by Subhas for the guidance of the Congress, I would like to know your views on the matter.” He also expressed his interest to Bose. 

When the All India National Planning Committee met in Bombay on December 17, 1938, under Nehru’s lead, it counted 15 experts. Besides Sir M.V. and Saha, it included scientists like Nazir Ahmad and J.C. Ghosh, economists K.T. Shah (who served as Secretary) and Radha Kamal Mukherjee. The businessman lobby – also prime Congress financiers – was well represented by Sir Purshottamdas Thakurdas, A.D. Shroff, Walchand Hirachand and Ambalal Sarabhai. Trade union leader N.M. Joshi and cottage-industry advocate J.C. Kumarappa were there as well, as were V.V. Giri and the ministers. It did seem representative of the multitiered complexities (and contradictions?) that had become integral to the anti-colonial struggle by now.

As Nehru noted crisply, “Some good people like Saha…others not so promising.”

Gandhiji was present even in his absence. Well aware that not much would be achieved without his support, both Bose and Nehru spent a substantial fraction of their speeches assuaging that ‘planning’ would not hamper the cottage industry.

Bose went on to simulate how “if in the city of Benares, we could supply electrically driven looms along with electrical power at the rate of half-anna per unit, it would be possible for the artisans working in their own homes to twin out sarees and embroidered cloth of different varieties at about five or six times the present rate of production …and rescue them from the depths of misery and poverty…”

Chairman Nehru made similar assurances about the cottage industries and then stressed that “the planning committee keeps itself in touch with the national movement.” It would have to have “a certain reality –intellectual, objective and psychological,” or it ran the risk of becoming a “tame affair…lost itself in the backwaters and simply discuss isolated and individual bits of industrialisation….”

Gandhi remained largely unconvinced as later correspondence shows, but the business lobby, with close ties to him and Sardar Patel, was satisfied.

Thus, a pivotal enterprise had been launched – one that would steer India’s decisions for decades to come. Significantly, the Committee prepared an exhaustive and detailed questionnaire and sent it to collect material data, and obtain helpful suggestions…from provincial governments, Indian states, organisations of trades, industries, commerce, labour and agricultural interests, firms and corporations, as well as to individuals “who have devoted thought and study to the general question of an all-round national planning for the economic regeneration of the country.”

A detailed analysis of the questionnaire and the subsequent proceedings demands more than an article by itself. But its sheer breadth – 167 questions in the primary list and another 70 in the supplementary, with several sub-enquiries – is overwhelming to this day and gives a good insight into the concerns of the men who had taken it upon themselves to build a modern post-colonial nation. Six months later, in June 1939, the answer sheets had been received (sometimes with prodding) and twenty-seven subcommittees had been appointed for in-depth analysis.

The ‘very commendable initiative’ earned the praise of even the London-based Financial Times. It was heavy-duty work and, as Nehru wrote to Bose in June 1939, “The work….which you entrusted to me last year grows bigger and bigger and takes up a great deal of time and energy. It is exhausting business.”

At the political arena, as is well known, Bose had now set ‘sail in a different boat’ that would soon lead him to an adventure like no other. In a twist of political meandering, the man who had envisioned a left-inclined socialist future for his people found himself allying with ultra right-wing oppressive regimes of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.

Also read: These ‘Foreign Hands’ Left Their Homes to Fight For India’s Freedom

But planning for India remained a core conviction and his articles and speeches, while at Berlin and Tokyo, show he was certain that “the Committee has already done valuable work and its reports will be helpful for our previous activity.” The Committee continued its work till September 1940.

And although Bose was not around when independent India embarked on the five-year plans in the 1950s, it is obvious that the work of the Planning Committee he co-founded had been the pathfinder. Decades later, on the golden jubilee of India’s independence, the Planning Commission, then chaired by Madhu Dandavate, honoured Bose’s efforts with a compilation of his speeches and letters on the subject and appropriately titled it ‘Pioneer of Indian Planning’.

Indeed, along with the National Anthem, it is Bose’s longest-lasting legacy to the republic and it is quite unfortunate that his pioneering efforts in nation-building have been obscured by a “perpetual death mystery.”

But it is high time to change focus. To quote from the Tom Cruise-starrer The Last Samurai:

‘Tell me how he died’

‘I’d rather tell you how he lived.’ 

Anirban Mitra is a molecular biologist and a teacher residing in Kolkata.

The Problem With India’s National Science Day

Of all the special days on the calendar, Science Day is peculiar because it memorialises one accomplishment by one male scientist.

On February 28, India celebrates National Science Day. The date was chosen to commemorate C.V. Raman’s discovery of Raman scattering (with help from K.S. Krishnan), the optical effect named for him and which earned him the Nobel Prize for physics in 1930. India has been celebrating National Science Day for 33 years, after the government designated the first such day on the request of the National Council for Science & Technology Communication (NCSTC).

India also celebrates a National Science Week, which is the week that ends on February 28. However, National Science Day has become much more popular.

On this day, research and communication institutions – including universities, libraries, planetaria, zoos, museums, etc. – undertake large-scale public outreach programmes as well as organise pedagogical and entertainment events. Their activities are often guided by a theme affixed to each science day. In 2020, for example, the theme is ‘Women in Science’.

Of all the special days on the calendar, Science Day is peculiar because it memorialises one accomplishment by one male scientist, chosen presumably because it secured its discoverer the Nobel Prize for physics. As a result, the NCSTC and the government have calcified a single event of scientific ‘genius’ picked almost arbitrarily from a sea of millions of events, valorising a single prize together with all the opportunity bias, discrimination and inequality winning the prize requires.

As much as we might like to reject the notion, privilege played and continues to play its part in securing recognition in Indian science. If nothing else, those with fewer privileges have to work harder to become visible, so to speak, on multiple levels. For example, how much Raman had going his way becomes clear when we compare his life to that of Meghnad Saha, who laid the foundations of modern stellar astrophysics. To quote historian of science Abha Sur,

Saha was the antithesis of Raman in terms of social station, political involvement and cultural upbringing. Raman came from a privileged South Indian family; Saha was from rural Bengal. His family was lower in the caste hierarchy and of modest means. Saha’s scientific writing was not flamboyant like Raman’s, nor did he receive any big scientific honour. Applied science held no appeal for Raman but Saha believed in using science to alleviate hunger and poverty.

Saha’s modest means and inability to secure money at a time of need cost him dearly. To quote from The Wire,

In 1917, he was financially strained and was faced with a disappointing prospect: that the paper he had sent to the Astrophysical Journal detailing [his] theory couldn’t be printed unless he bore some of the printing costs, which was out of the question. So he had the paper published in the Journal of the Department of Science at Calcutta University instead, “which had no circulation worth mentioning”.

Raman achieved enough recognition and fame in his lifetime, and is remembered today through numerous public places and institutions named for him as well as in classrooms, storybooks and the popular culture. On the other hand, the work of a lot of people still remains in the shadows.

Then again, the theme of this National Science Day – ‘Women in Science’ – doesn’t sit well with Raman given his well-known sexism. Sur’s book Dispersed Radiance (2011) records, among other things, the difficult experiences of three female students in his lab. Before he had any female students of his own, Raman had refused to accept any into the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, when he was its director. In the 1930s, he refused to admit Kamala Bhagvat because of her gender. Bhagvat had to struggle to get what she wanted, which she eventually did.

She reportedly later told the Indian Women Scientists Association, “Though Raman was a great scientist, he was very narrow-minded. I can never forget the way he treated me just because I was a woman. This was a great insult to me. The bias against women was so bad at that time. What can one expect if even a Nobel laureate behaves in such a manner?”

To redress these persistent imbalances, India must consider observing other special days (see list below) of the calendar year that prompt a more well-rounded appreciation of science or – better yet – retire the special day altogether.

(There is already a ‘World Science Day for Peace and Development’ that the global community marks on November 10. According to the UN, it “highlights the significant role of science in society and the need to engage the wider public in debates on emerging scientific issues. It also underlines the importance and relevance of science in our daily lives.”)

A panoply of Indian scientists have made numerous contributions to both pre-modern and modern science, so a celebration of Indian science can easily expand its horizons beyond Raman’s achievement, even beyond the remit of the annual theme, which is given only one day in the limelight.

Over the course of multiple science days, we have incrementally imparted knowledge of science and the scientists who build it to young students in India’s cities, so these days may have served some useful purpose. At the same time, their very existence seems to have consigned the engagement activities and scientific attitude on display on February 28 to February 28 alone.

Our excitement towards science doesn’t seem to be on display on any other day. Science is a fluid framework of thinking and reasoning about information, designed to admit wisdom and eliminate fallacies. However, it is often reduced to a few textbooks, the subject of contemplation of how we can be a ‘science superpower’, to a stamp of approval on unlikely factoids and, on National Science Day, perhaps a visit to the local university’s open day.

Acknowledging science as a way of knowing that permeates our daily lives could help transform the way we look at it, and access its methods. For example, to adopt Madhusudhan Raman’s idea: research institutions could have “grassroots-level engagement” with school students in their neighbourhood, such as through “weekend programmes where students can spend a few hours every week interacting with volunteer academic staff in an informal setting.”

For its part, the government could increase funding for science communication; improve access to the scientific literature; translate books; re-record songs and subtitle films to other languages; promote museums and libraries; support smaller-scale efforts to understand and reinterpret science through art, music, drama, dance, games, etc.; pay scientific workers properly and on time; and make it easier for people of all genders to enter and stay in the research workforce.

However, we have a government that, though it checks some of these boxes, also funds studies on cow urine; handicaps virus research centres while the world is on the cusp of a pandemic; destroys forests, grasslands and wetlands; has a fondness for opaque governance; supports unscrupulous godmen; is suspicious of its own scientists; and undermines support for non-applied research. And while previous governments have been guilty of similar acts, the incumbent is also so eager to champion alternate histories that it constantly denies any way of knowing, science or otherwise, that leads to different conclusions.

For the government, of course, a National Science Day is a godsend: it provides another excuse for posturing. Instead, let us redistribute our attention and interest towards events and issues that better reflect the best things about modern science, ensure we sustain it through the year, and ensure others do too.

§

1. International Day of Women and Girls in Science, February 11

2. International Rare Disease Day, February 29

3. World Meteorological Day, March 23

4. International Transgender Day of Visibility (in STEM), March 31

5. Human Spaceflight Day, April 12

6. International Day of Biodiversity, May 22

7. World Mental Health Day, October 10

8. World Statistics Day, October 20

9. National Immunisation Day, November 10

10. National Pollution Prevention Day, December 2

Aashima Dogra is a science journalist and cofounder of The Life of Science. Vasudevan Mukunth is the science editor of The Wire.

The Shrinking Space for Scientific Temper in India Is Worrying

We should celebrate India’s constitutional provision for the scientific temper and vigorously safeguard it.

Indian television channels delivered a rude reminder of the arrival of a ‘new India’ when they blared news of defence minister Rajnath Singh emblazoning a Rafale fighter jet with an ‘om’ and decking it with flowers, coconut and lemons, purportedly to ward off evil.

Singh’s actions sharply contrast with the country’s older crop of politicians, many of whom kept their religious beliefs to themselves instead of advertising them in public. India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, was impatient with religious rituals; Vikram Sarabhai cited this attitude in one of his letters to a friend as an example of the newly independent India’s aversion to overt acts of religiosity.

Sudhir Kakar narrates an interesting incident in his autobiography, A Book of Memory (2011). Gujarati textile mill owners insisted on a Hindu priest performing the opening ritual for the new Ahmedabad Textile Industry’s Research Association building in Ahmedabad. Kakar quotes Sarabhai saying, “Panditji tolerated him to start with but when [Nehru] was asked to rub his shoulder to the door, he exploded! I was so glad.” From this time, when India was discovering a new future for itself, we appear to have arrived at one where the country seems to lack such imagination.

Also read: The Uncertainty and Obsolescence Vikram Sarabhai Saw in India’s Future

Jawaharlal Nehru coined the term ‘scientific temper’; he defines it as an attitude of logical and rational thinking. An individual is considered to have scientific temper if she employs the scientific method when making decisions.

Science and technology as we know them became popular in India in the mid-20th century, precipitating socio-economic changes in turn. Researchers and philosophers had anticipated these changes during the independence struggle. Nehru had said:

India must break with much of her past and not allow it to dominate the present. Our lives are encumbered with the dead wood of this past, all that is dead and has served its purpose has to go. But it does not mean a break with, or a forgetting of, the vital and life-giving in that past. We can never forget the ideals that have moved our race, the dreams of the Indian people through the ages., the wisdom of the ancients, the buoyant energy and love of life and nature of our forefathers, their spirit of curiosity and mental adventure. … There is in fact essential incompatibility of all dogmas with science. Scientific temper cannot be nurtured by ignoring the fact that there are major differences between the scientific attitude and the theological and metaphysical attitude; especially in respect of dogma.

Eminent scientists like C.V. Raman, Satyendra Nath Bose, Meghnad Saha and others were also at the frontline of this social revolution. In those days, the Indian Science Congress was an excellent platform for dialogues between the political and the scientific classes, both of which believed that science and its application could effect economic advancement as well as in the national social outlook.

The science policy resolution that Parliament passed in 1958 reflected these sentiments. In 1976, the Government of India reemphasised its commitment to cultivate scientific temper through a constitutional amendment (Article 51A), and setup a nodal agency called the National Council of Science and Technology Communication (NCSTC). But despite these efforts, scientific temper did not permeate through society and didn’t much alter the national psyche.

There is a deep relationship between scientific temper and the idea of secularism, another celebrated facet of our Constitution. The practice of secularism derives strength and support from the ideas of science while the science can best motivate change in a society that appreciates secularism. So the role of scientific temper cannot be overemphasised in a tradition-bound country like India, where dogma and superstations rule the roost.

Also read: When P.M. Bhargava’s Biochemistry Lesson on Beef Threw Golwalkar Into a Fit

Today, religious extremists question the relevance of science as a force that guides our spirit and culture. In the late 1990s, Murli Manohar Joshi, the then minister of human resources, sought to have astrology taught in universities as a branch of science. More recently, since 2014, the government has supported the idea that ancient Hindus achieved many feats that Western scientists are achieving only today, especially in physics and medicine.

Even today, there are people discussing scientific theories purportedly secreted in the Bhagavad Gita and how they outstrip general relativity and quantum mechanics in their ability to faithfully describe nature. Political leaders dispute the theory of evolution and declare cow urine can cure cancer. Even others have advanced a majoritarian lie that the Vedic civilisation originated in India.

Many of the world’s cultures were born when humans had little exact knowledge of the natural world and looked to religious doctrine for answers. The advent of modern science knocked back against this tendency. The progress of science is punctuated by conflicts with religious beliefs. Galileo Galilei’s support for heliocentrism was controversial during his lifetime as well as for him personally. In 1615, the Roman Inquisition concluded heliocentrism “explicitly contradicts in many places the sense of Holy Scripture.” After Galileo reasserted his views, the inquisition forced him to recant and spend the rest of his life in house arrest.

Religion and scientific consciousness are two parallel streams. They don’t converge. As religious beliefs can’t be tested or challenged through experiments, it is difficult to explore the religious texts that motivate these beliefs using the methods of reason.

We recognise that there are no clear answers to all the questions raised in public conversations, so opinions expressed in public shouldn’t be based in religious ideas; instead they should be reasonable and welcome reasonable challenges. Blind faith has affected the course of science in India as well. The forces trying to take India back to the Middle Ages are undoing the idea of India that its people formulated after years of struggle and sacrifice.

The shrinking space for scientific temper in India today is worrisome for the same reasons, and doesn’t augur well for our development. It is not difficult to see that countries dominated by theocratic ideals struggle to make scientific and technological leaps. Iran, for example, was one of the major contributors to the Islamic Golden Age but today, a thick blanket of Islamic fundamentalism throttles its creativity. Closer home, Pakistan provides a similarly fitting example.

Also read: When Will Pakistan Get Its Slice of the Moon?

India’s failure to execute Nehru’s idea of scientific temper in its entirety could be one major reason for the growth and spread of superstitious beliefs and fundamentalism today.

When they met in May 1936, C.V. Raman told Gandhi, “Mahatmaji, religions cannot unite. Science offers the best opportunity for a complete fellowship. All men of science are brothers.” Gandhi joked, “What about the converse – all who are not men of science are not brothers?” Raman replied, “But all can become men of science.”

Let’s hope that someday all cultures free themselves from the shackles of blind faith – with science likely to play a major hand in this endeavour. Unto a similar goal, we should celebrate India’s constitutional provision for the scientific temper and vigorously safeguard it.

C.P. Rajendran is a professor at the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Bengaluru.

The Scientist as Rebel in the Indian Cultural Milieu

The dynastic blood relation as a prop for personal advancement is a fundamental theme of our cultural ethos, and it stifles original research and thinking in India.

Gagandeep Kang was recently in the news as the first Indian woman fellow elected to the Royal Society. In an interview to The Hindu Sunday Magazine, she was asked a very interesting question on how rigid the hierarchies in our scientific institutions are. She replied:

Absolutely. No question about it. We grew up in a culture where to question is to question authority, and I see that in my PhD students. If I need them to ask questions, it requires two years of group prodding and even then, it will take them a long time.

She added that this attitude prevails in several southeast Asian countries, unlike the fearlessness that pervades American schools and colleges. According to her, the reason for this reticence is the Indian examination system that compels students to learn by rote rather than motivate them to think independently.

It is true that the Indian educational system derived from the British is too obsessed with the examination system and does not encourage inquisitiveness in children. (How the Hindu elites incorporated many 19th century Victorian values into their outlook is another study). The examination system and unimaginative curricula are also to blame. However, the question was about the rigidity and hierarchy in our scientific institutions, and how such an environments evolved to generate only mediocrity, not excellence. I don’t think Kang addressed the essence of the question, the likes of which questions have been raised on many occasions in the past and in India and abroad.

If the science must excel, it needs to promote free spirit at the basic level. This free spirit also is a rebel in some sense, as the physicist Freeman Dyson in his 2006 book, The Scientist as Rebel. Dyson – a contemporary of Richard Feynman, the preeminent scientist-rebel – argues that science is an inherently subversive act, whether it upends a longstanding scientific idea or when it questions the received political wisdom, and that it is a threat to establishment of all kinds. He writes: “Science is an alliance of free spirits in all cultures rebelling against the local tyranny that each culture imposes on its children.”

Also read: Is There an Indian Way of Doing Science?

Such ideas must have played in the minds of major physicists like Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, Feynman and others when they turned the scientific theories of their days upside down. Galileo Galilei and Nicolaus Copernicus also took firm stands against the prevalent wisdom despite their religiosity. As Dyson quotes the biologist J.B.S. Haldane: “Let him beware of him in whom reason has become the greatest and most terrible of the passions.” Haldane was a brilliant British biologist and irreverent scientist. He migrated to India in 1957 and was eternally dissatisfied with the Indian scientific enterprise and its organisational values. He soon began to refer to CSIR (the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research) as the ‘Council for the Suppression of Independent Research’.

Homo hierarchicus

In a 2010 editorial in the journal Current Science, P. Balaram, a noted biochemist and former director of the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, explained ‘irreverence’ as a “good humoured disdain for perceived wisdom and disregard for authority”. Can we promote such an irreverence in Indian science by changing personal attitudes and by creating new organisational values?

This is easier said than done. To revere is our wont, be it our senior colleagues or film actors, singers or politicians. This trait will not go away merely simply by changing the way we organise ourselves and our institutions. We are here talking about the essential and fundamental attributes of the Indian cultural baggage that we call the Indian identity. It will be interesting to explore the ecology of our Indian cultural development to understand why everybody is required to conform to group identity.

This cultural part of our identity (which also includes caste equations) determines our attitude towards our superiors and subordinates, obligations in family life, our behaviour at work or in public spaces, status and several other things in life. Sudhir Kakar and Katherine Kakar ably mapped these through an excellent sociological analysis presented in their 2007 book, The Indians: Portrait of a People. This culture is wired into our brains from childhood. The Kakars trace the source of reverence, a reflection of our general obsession with hierarchy and seniority (the word they use for Indians is Homo hierarchicus), to our joint family enterprise and the organisational setup.

This family landscape is authoritarian (though benevolent to the obedient) in its dealings. Children are sensitised to a collective self rather than fostering individuality. We grow with a loss of self and learn to subsume our worth as an individual. To be fair, the joint family system provides some context for some sort of social security for the less fortunate and the elderly. Then again, even that is questionable as we witness a greater number of the elderly, mostly widows, being abandoned on roadsides during large religious festivals like the Maha Kumbh Mela.

Family relationships also help members to, for example, find jobs or even get promoted, etc., with the result that an Indian has internalised her familial and social position in her family and has become highly hierarchical in her social attitudes. Thus, she is culturally tuned to uphold the family’s integrity, caste and/or regional identity rather than her individual strengths and creativity.

The Kakars further argue that these patterns of family life provide the template for the relationships in our university departments, scientific institutions, science academies, political parties, cinema and, of course, bureaucracy. Unlike those in the West, Indians are more likely to revere than admire. So when the prime minister makes  fun of the prime opposition party for being led by dynasts, he is forgetting the irony of the dynastic blood relation as a prop for personal advancement is a fundamental theme of our ‘Bharatheeya’ cultural ethos, through which he actually takes pride.

Our cultural baggage

This authoritarian, familial, social structure tends to kill individual brilliance and excellence. Is this the reason Indian scientists who have gone abroad and out of earshot of the Indian cultural ambience are apparently doing much better than the researchers home? Venkatraman “Venki” Ramakrishnan, who won a part of the 2009 Nobel Prize for chemistry, makes a convincing case of how life-long irreverence can create the necessary conditions that support new ideas and discoveries.

Also read: Interview: Venki Ramakrishnan and the Race to Decode the Mother of All Molecules

Interestingly, in a 2004 commentary in Nature, a Chinese neurobiologist named Mu-ming Poo  accused cultural factors such as conformity and respect for authority as impediments to excellence. Some parallels in Chinese society, still dominated by the Confucian tradition of respecting customs and hierarchy, to its Indian counterpart were striking. It seems that such traditional societies automatically generate conditions that are amenable for authoritarian rule and political conformity. It is their respective cultural baggage that keeps India and China from breaking the mediocrity barrier despite some strong fundamentals compared to other developing countries. And creativity in science can be fostered only in a free and unfettered intellectual ambience.

In similar vein, R.A. Mashelkar, a prominent Indian scientist and former director-general of the CSIR, wrote a guest editorial in Science in 2010 discussing the issue of why India is unable to break the mediocrity barrier. He also concludes that tradition-bound countries like India need to free themselves from the cultural chains of the past to foster original research and thinking. Mashelkar agrees with Dyson in seeing iconoclasm in C.V. Raman, S.N. Bose and Meghnad Saha, great Indian physicists for whom science was an epic pursuit for fundamental truths as much as it was a rebellion against British domination and the fatalistic ethos of Hinduism.

The big question is how to foster irreverence in Indian scientific communities. Changes in the educational system will be necessary but not sufficient. This will happen only as part of social change because of greater urbanisation, the growth of nuclear families and, most importantly, women’s empowerment through education. Cultural shifts will take time – perhaps a whole generation – provided we are able to maintain a healthy and vibrant democracy embodied in the Constitution, that amazing, futuristic Indian document.

C.P. Rajendran is a professor of geodynamics at the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Bengaluru.

Why Gandhi, Meghnad Saha and Satyendra Nath Bose Didn’t Win the Nobel Prize

Though the Nobel Prizes may rank among the most prestigious distinctions, they have a character of their own.

This article was first published in September 2015. It was republished on October 2, 2018.

About three weeks from now, the Nobel Foundation will announce the winners of the 2015 Nobel Prizes. Every year, commentators, opinionators and enthusiasts try to guess who will win the awards – some of them have become famous because they’ve been able to guess the winners with uncanny accuracy.

However, as it happens, the prizewinners’ profiles have sometimes exposed patterns which tell us how they might have been selected over others. For example, winners of the physics prize have also typically been awarded the Wolf Prize. For another, like a recent study showed, winners of the medicine and physiology prizes seem to have had similar qualitative preferences for their inter-institutional collaborations.

More light is likely to be shed on its opaque selection process by the Nobel Foundation’s decision to open up its archives and reveal the name of not just all nominees but also the nominators who got those names on the rosters each year.

The complete list for all prizes – except economics – awarded between 1901 and 1964 is now available for the first time. The lists for awards given after 1965 are not visible because they’re sealed for 50 years. With the information, the question of “Who nominated whom?” is worth asking not just for trivia’s sake but also because it throws up clues about the politics behind decisions, the kinds of names that were ignored for the prizes, why they were ignored, and how the underpinning rationale has changed through various social periods.

There are three famous examples with which to illustrate these issues.

Mohandas Gandhi

The first is of M.K. Gandhi. The Nobel Committee admitted in 2001 that overlooking Gandhi had been one of its most infamous mistakes. In 1937, in a total of 63 nominations by prominent people, Gandhi received his first: from Ole Colbjørnsen, a Norwegian politician. Colbjørnsen would nominate Gandhi in 1938 and 1939 as well. After that, the name of Gandhi among the nominees reappears in 1947, put there by G.B. Pant, B.G. Kher and Mavalankar, and in 1948, this time with the endorsement of Frede Castberg (a Norwegian jurist), six professors of the University of Bordeaux, five from Columbia University, the American Friends Service Committee, Christian Oftedal (a Norwegian politician) and the American economist Emily Greene Balch.

Gandhi was assassinated in January 1948, and since the Foundation doesn’t allow posthumous awards, his ‘case’ ended that year.

The winners in the years he was nominated in were

  • 1937 – Robert Cecil
  • 1938 – Nansen International Office for Refugees
  • 1939 – No winner
  • 1947 – AFSC and Friends Service Council
  • 1948 – No winner

The committee declined to award the prize in 1948 because “there was no suitable living candidate”. This was with reference to Gandhi, who may have received the prize had he not been killed that year. There have also been some discussions on whether the committee could have made an exception for Gandhi and awarded it posthumously, especially since the nominations had arrived a few days before his death and because his death was quite unexpected, too (incidentally, posthumous awards of the physics prize were allowed until 1974 if the awardee was alive at the time of nomination).

On the other hand, even if these arguments had been taken seriously, they wouldn’t have fetched the peace prize for Gandhi – why he wasn’t chosen alludes to a different issue.

The nomination process is essentially one of filtering, and though it differs for each prize, they are all variations of the following: some 3,000 individuals around the world are asked to send in their preliminary nominations, out of which the Nobel Committee filters out and passes on an order of magnitude fewer names to relevant institutions. Finally, the institutions, represented by members on the committee, vote on the day of the prize, with the result being announced immediately after the counting. The person/persons/institutions with the most votes wins the prizes. There is a distinct committee for each of the prizes.

The number of nominators increases every year – to also include the previous year’s winners, for one – so the names of the first winners were essentially sourced from a handful of individuals.

In 1999, Øyvind Tønnesson, then nobelprize.org’s peace director, wrote that in Gandhi’s time, the members of the committee weren’t in favour of him for two reasons. First, many of them couldn’t help but blame Gandhi for some of the incidents of violence in India during his supposedly peaceful resistance, going as far as to claim he should’ve known that his actions would precipitate violence – for example, and especially, the Chauri Chaura incident in 1922.

Second, as Tønnesson wrote, the members preferred awardees “who could serve as moral and religious symbols in a world threatened by social and ideological conflicts”, and on that note were opposed to the political implications of Gandhi’s movement – especially his role in effectuating the Partition as well as an inability to quell the widespread violence that followed.

Oddly enough, the Nobel Peace Prize is essentially a political prize, and its credibility often can’t be dissociated from the clout of members of the voting committee. In fact, alongside the literature prize, the duo has often been the subject of controversy simply by illustrating the linguistic and cultural differences between the Scandinavian electors and their multitudes of candidates.

In 1965, U. Thant, then the UN secretary-general, was not given the award because the chair of the Nobel Committee then, Gunnar Jahn, was opposed to him despite a majority having favoured Thant for defusing the Cuban missile crisis. One plausible reason that has been advanced, based on Jahn’s track record when he was the chair, was that Thant was only doing his duty and that none of his initiatives to secure peace in the world stepped beyond that ambit – contrary to the actions of the recipients of the 1947 peace prize, in Jahn’s opinion.

Another incident betrayed how Jahn’s influence was inordinate, too, despite all assurances that the selection process was democratic: he threatened to resign if Linus Pauling wasn’t awarded the peace prize in 1963 while the majority had voted against the chemist.

Another contention has centred on the measures of worthiness. Why can’t the Nobel Prize be awarded to more than three people at a time? Why is the time-difference between the award-winning work being done and the award being given so huge? And on what grounds will each prospective laureate be judged precisely?

In the case of the 2013 Nobel Prize for physics, Peter Higgs and Francois Englert were named the recipients for work done 49 years ago, in 1964, even as four others who’d done the same work in that year were ignored. Jorge Luis Borges has been repeatedly overlooked for the literature prize with rumours abounding that the committee was not supportive of his conservative political views and because he had received a prize from Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.

On the other hand, some of the greatest writers in history have been politically motivated to produce their best works, so in not specifying the bases on which candidates can be rejected, the Nobel Committee makes the literature prize an exercise in winning the approval of a group of Scandinavians who may or may not have a sound knowledge of non-European politics.

Meghnad Saha

Meghnad Saha was an astrophysicist known for an eponymous equation that allowed astronomers to determine how much various elements had been ionised in a star based on its temperature. Saha first published his results in 1920, which were built upon by Irving Langmuir in 1923. Ever since, the equation has also been known as the Saha-Langmuir equation.

Presumably for this work, Saha was nominated for the physics prize by Dehendra Bose and Sisir Mitra in 1930, by Arthur Compton in 1937, by Mitra again in 1939, by Compton again in 1940, and by Mitra again in 1951* and 1955. On February 16, 1956, Saha passed away.

While his equation has become applicable in different high-energy physics contexts, at the time of its conception it was advertised as being limited to astrophysics. In that context, however, a shortcoming was spotted among Saha’s assumptions by Ralph Fowler and Edward Arthur Milne in 1923, who then improved the equation to fix the consequences of that shortcoming.

Even so, there appeared to have been some misconceptions in the wider astrophysics community, especially in Europe, about who was the originator – not of the equation but of the more important underlying theory, which Saha called the theory of selective radiation pressure.

In 1917, he was financially strained and was faced with a disappointing prospect: that the paper he had send to the Astrophysical Journal detailing the theory couldn’t be printed unless he bore some of the printing costs, which was out of the question. So he had the paper published in the Journal of the Department of Science at Calcutta University instead, “which had no circulation worth mentioning”.

To quote from the Vigyan Prasar archives, which in turn quotes from Saha himself,

“… I might claim to be the originator of the Theory of Selective Radiation Pressure, though on account of discouraging circumstances, I did not pursue the idea to develop it. E.A. Milne apparently read a note of mine in Nature 107, 489 (1921) because in his first paper on the subject ‘Astrophysical Determination of Average of an Excited Calcium Atom’, in Month. Not. R. Ast. Soc., Vol.84, he mentioned my contribution in a footnote, though nobody appears to have noticed. His exact words are: ‘These paragraphs develop ideas originally put forward by Saha’.”

Later in the same article, now quoting one of Saha’s students, Daulat Kothari:

It is pertinent to remark that the ionisation theory was formulated by Saha working by himself in Calcutta, and the paper quoted above was communicated by him from Calcutta to the Philosophical Magazine – incorrect statements to the contrary have sometimes been made. Further papers soon followed. It is not too much to say that the theory of thermal ionisation introduced a new epoch in astrophysics by providing for the first time, on the basis of simple thermodynamic consideration and elementary concepts of the quantum theory, a straight forward interpretation of the different classes of stellar spectra in terms of the physical condition prevailing in the stellar atmospheres.

Had Saha’s work appeared in the Astrophysical Journal in 1917, would his fortunes have been different?

Given that the publishing industry has been growing very fast of late, do the prizes remain representative of the research being conducted? This question may be suppressed by arguing that the prizes are awarded to remarkable research, of the kind that is so momentous that it can’t but see the light of day. At the same time, as in Saha’s case, how much research passes under the radar of the foundation even if it is most in need of the kind of visibility the award can bring?

Perhaps this is the more important question: of the dozens of nominations the foundation has received every year for the Nobel Prizes, how many lost out because they published their work in low-visibility journals?

Satyendra Nath Bose

The third example is of Satyendra Nath Bose. Despite seminal work done in the 1920s, including on a topic that was quickly recognised as being radical and employed by multiple Nobel-Prize-winning scientists later, Bose was never awarded the physics prize. Perhaps his greatest honour for performing that work, apart from contributing to the science itself, was the British physicist Paul A.M. Dirac naming a significant class of fundamental particles after him (bosons).

When Higgs and Englert were awarded the physics prize in 2013 for having conceived the theory behind the Higgs boson in 1964, a cry went up around India calling for Bose to recognised for his work and be awarded a share of the prize that year. The demand was misguided because the Bose-Einstein statistics describe all bosons whereas the ‘Higgs Six’ had focused on one peculiar boson. If anything, Bose could have been awarded the prize separately: he was nominated by Kedareswar Banerji in 1956, by Daulat Kothari in 1959 and by S. Bagchi in 1962.

In contrast, the only other Indian to have won the Physics Prize (before 1964), C.V. Raman, was nominated by no less than 10 people, including Ernest Rutherford, Louis-Victor de Broglie, Johannes Stark and Niels Bohr – all then or future laureates – in the same year.

So a case of “who nominated whom”, then? Not quite. Another reported flaw of the physics prize has been that it has favoured discoveries over inventions, with the 2014 edition being the most recent of a handful of exceptions to that rule. And among those discoveries, the prize’s selectors have consistently preferred experimental proof. That would explain the unseemly gap between Higgs’s and Englert’s papers in 1964 and their awards in 2013 – and it would also explain why Bose never won the prize himself.

Bose’s work in statistics helped understand an already observed anomaly but it provided no other new predictions against which his theory could be tested. In 1924, Einstein would make that prediction: of a unique state of matter since called the Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC). The BEC was first experimentally observed in 1995, fetching three physicists the 2001 physics prize. That the statistics would also explain the superfluidity of liquid helium-4 was first suggested by Fritz London in 1938 and proved by Lev Landau in 1941 (so winning the 1962 Physics Prize).

However, this is not a defence of Bose not winning the prize as much as a cautionary note. Though the Nobel Prizes may rank among the most prestigious distinctions, they have a character of their own, and that human enterprise cannot be divided as Nobel-class and non-Nobel-class, as if it were an aircraft carrier.

Among the more than 800 laureates the Nobel Foundation has counted since 1901, the omissions stand out as much as the rest. Apart from the few already mentioned, Chinua Achebe, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Rosalind Franklin, Václav Havel, Lise Meitner, J.R.R. Tolkien and John Updike come to mind. In Bell Burnell’s case, in fact, another man receiving the physics prize for a discovery she made only highlights another failure of the Nobel Foundation and has since become an example often invoked to highlight the plight of women in science.

*Also in 1951, Saha nominated Arnold Sommerfeld, a German physicist infamous for being overlooked for a Nobel Prize despite having received more than 80 nominations over many years.

Note: This article was updated at 3:40 pm on September 16, 2015, to say Arnold Sommerfeld was a German physicist, not British as was stated earlier.

Remembering Nehru as a ‘Friend of Science’

Recalling India’s first Prime Minister’s scientific legacy today is a must to insulate the upcoming generation from the effects of bigotry and unscientific rhetoric coming from the highest offices of government.

The last few years have seen a sequential erosion of scientific temper in this country. From the head of the legislature to heads of judiciary, science in India has been whipped naked by theocratic, irrational and narrow-minded rhetoric. The day is ruled by suave and not so suave babas and yog gurus, who unfortunately guide the scientific temper in the country through their nexus with the politicians in power. This is in striking contrast with the leadership of the first Prime Minister of the country, Jawaharlal Nehru, who was a strong protagonist of scientific temper in the Indian society. As believers of science it is thus very important that we remember Nehru’s legacy of science and scientific temper on his 54th death anniversary (May 27) because the gradual assault of traditional passé thought on India’s scientific environment has caused a major dent on our credibility in the global scientific community. A reminder of Nehru’s scientific legacy today is a must, particularly for the upcoming generation of Indians so as to insulate them from the effects of bigotry and jargon of unscientific rhetoric coming from the highest offices of the government.

Jawaharlal Nehru addressing the Indian Science Congress, Lucknow, January 3, 1949. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

The cultivation of science and its benefits to humanity were crystal clear to Nehru even before independence. He became the first non-scientist to preside over the Indian Science Congress on December 26, 1937. In his address he said:

“It is science alone that can solve the problems of hunger and poverty, of insanitation and illiteracy, of superstition and deadening custom and tradition, of vast resources running to waste, of a rich country inhabited by starving people.”

The above statement is the soul of Nehru’s core belief in the ability of science to solve socially relevant issues, like poverty and hunger.

The country which Nehru inherited from his colonisers had a scientific infrastructure which was only meant to fulfil the economic and defence needs of the rulers. There was paucity of an infrastructure meant to harness science to benefit the society at large. His efforts at opening scientific institutes of research and national laboratories of importance were thus an important step towards the country’s quest for adopting a scientific attitude. New-born India needed inputs of science not through hollow words, but through concrete efforts directed at building the necessary infrastructure from scratch. Nehru galvanised important scientists of the time and gave them freedom in setting up institutes which subsequently became temples of India’s scientific research. Some of the greatest names of the time, including Homi J Bhabha, Sir C.V. Raman, Satish Dhawan, Nalini Ranjan Sarkar, J.C. Ghosh, Meghnad Saha and S.S. Bhatnagar, were given a free hand in establishing the country’s best institutes of scientific learning.

In her interesting book, Growing the Tree of Science, Indira Chowdhury mentions that at the stone laying ceremony of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (in 1954), Nehru addressed a gathering of scientists and commoners in Hindi and said;

“Lots of people may not know, why such an emphasis is being put on science. Why so much money is being spent Why did I take the trouble to come from Delhi? The big countries have more power while our country has remained poor….If we wish to empower our country, which is now independent, we have to create a strong base–so we can learn the basics…This may not show immediate results but finally result in the uplift of the country.”

The speech defines Nehru’s total commitment to investment in science even when he realised that we as a poor country had more pressing problems at hand. His visionary outlook could decipher the long term benefits of such an investment.

Nehru’s sincerity to the promotion of science is visible throughout his career as Prime Minister. It is worth mentioning that one of his scientific advisors was the British physicist and Nobel Laureate, Patrick Blackett. Blackett, in an interview in 1967 (after Nehru’s death) had praised Nehru’s intellectual capacity and scientific temperament in loud words.

Hijli Shaheed Bhawan in IIT Kharagpur. It was a detention camp during British rule and now houses the Nehru Museum of Science and Technology. Credit: Wikimedia Commons/Saugato Banerjee

It was Nehru again who, in consultation with Bhabha, established the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) of the country on August 10, 1948 with Bhabha as its head. It may be noted that it was Nehru’s statesmanship on display that despite establishing an important agency like the AEC, he could understand the disastrous effects of atomic research. He had said:

“Today there is conflict in the world between two things, the atom bomb and what it represents, and the spirit of humanity. That is the paradox of the atomic energy-sputnik age. The fact that nuclear tests continue even though it is well-recognised that they are very harmful in the present and in the future, because of the fact that all kinds of weapons of mass destruction are being produced and piled up even though it is universally recognised that their use may well exterminate the human race”.

Nehru had realised that science without technology was like a body without soul. It was his vision which saw the inception and establishment of some of the most important and socially relevant technology hubs of the country. In March 1952, he inaugurated the fertiliser plant in Sindri and on March 10, 1954, he inaugurated the Hindustan Antibiotics Limited in Pimpri. Five Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) were established on the recommendation of the Sircar Committee throughout the length and breadth of the country. On the inauguration of the first IIT in Kharagpur, Nehru said:

“Here in the place of that Hijli Detention Camp stands the fine monument of India, representing India’s urges, India’s future in the making. This picture seems to me symbolical of the changes that are coming to India.”

Jawaharlal Nehru’s scientific vision can also be seen in his shunning religious and traditional practices. He said that, “science was not merely an individual’s search for truth; It was something infinitely more than that if it worked for the community.” He went on to explain:

“For a hungry man or hungry woman, truth has little meaning. He wants food. For a hungry man, God has no meaning. And India is starving and to talk of truth and God and many of the finer things is mockery. We have to find food for them, clothing, housing, education and health are absolute necessities that every person should possess. When we have done that we can philosophise and think of God. So, science must think in those terms and work along those lines on the wider scale of coordinated planning.”

Unfortunately, Nehru’s legacy of science has been under assault in the “New India” of today. The current onslaught, particularly by the political class against science in our country is dangerous because it is putting faith and religion in direct conflict with science. In a country like India, where a large chunk of the populace is deeply religious, this conflict between opinion and fact can evolve quite dangerously. Nehru’s hard-earned and precious legacy should not be allowed to be wasted by his political successors. On the 54th death anniversary of the country’s best friend of science from among the political class, our venerations to Nehru would be in embracing rationality and science as he wanted us to.

Shah Alam Khan is Professor of Orthopaedics, AIIMS, New Delhi, and author of ‘the book, Man With the White Beard. The views are personal. 

With Ministers Like These, Every Day Must Be Science Day

The discovery of the Raman effect was a product of multiple factors, not a single moment in the history of science – so ‘Science Day’ should be a commemoration of all those factors as well, and not confined to one day.

February 28 is not India’s first ‘Science Day’ in 2018. In fact, it’s the fourth.

The first ‘Science Day’ was on January 20, when Satyapal Singh, minister of state for Human Resource Development (HRD), said Charles Darwin was wrong and scientists from around the country rose up in measured frustration against his statement, had three science academies issue a statement and, most of all, elicit an admonition from HRD minister Prakash Javadekar against Singh.

The second ‘Science Day’ was budget day, February 1, when Arun Jaitley’s dismal offerings for fundamental research sparked a conversation of both hope and despair among scientists in labs around the country.

The third ‘Science Day’ was when the MHRD announced the Prime Minister’s Research Fellowship without, it would seem, any consultation with stakeholders, the result being some scientists dubbing it an unmitigated disaster poised to demoralise the bulk of India’s best young research minds.

On the fourth ‘Science Day’, two of the country’s science academies, the Indian National Science Academy and the Indian Academy of Sciences, have together organised an event in Delhi today with its chief guest being none other than Satyapal Singh. It seems the original plan had been to conduct the event at the Rashtrapati Bhawan convention centre with the country’s president in attendance along with a few ministers, giving a talk to scientists, 300 schoolchildren, etc. As one scientist told me, “Science Day has to be celebrated with scientists, not politicians”, so the absence of the majority of those invited shouldn’t play foul to what can still be a useful occasion for school-goers to connect with veterans of research. One of the organisers mentioned that today is also International Rare Disease Day, and the gathering will be used to discuss rare diseases as well.

Actually, February 28 is the 59th ‘Science Day’ this year, since it’s the 59th day since the start of the year. This is because every day is ‘Science Day’. In fact, it was ‘Science Day’ on February 26 when a scientist announced the improvised version of a card game, developed since 2015, on Twitter to help its players understand “information exchange during mate choice”. It’s ‘Science Day’ every Monday because there’s a new Life of Science article out. It’s ‘Science Day’ every morning when science writers and journalists think about what they are going to write about that day.

February 28 has traditionally been used to commemorate the discovery of the Raman effect by C.V. Raman, India’s sole Nobel laureate in the sciences; this way, the day has quietly become the foundation for a state-sponsored valorisation of a single prize awarded by a bunch of Swedish academics. India has seen many scientists of the calibre of Raman but many of them are not as well-remembered because they didn’t win international – particularly Western – recognition nor were they members of the upper castes who could afford science education and research (consider the story of Meghnad Saha).

This is the same West that many of our ministers are also fond of deriding. The truth is that it’s complicated. We know the West will favour the West, infrequently because of irrational prejudices and frequently because of systematic defects that repeatedly and increasingly penalise India – and most of Asia, Africa and Latin America – for the way it treats national scientific enterprise. Others are to blame, sure, but we’re to blame the most. Part of the problem is our top-down approach to administering scientific research and education, a symptom of which is ‘celebrating’ science on a single day and relegating to it a nook behind the mind’s backburners on all other days.

The myth of the ‘lone genius’

Additionally, it must be noted that the Raman effect was not discovered on a single day, nor was it discovered by the endeavours of one person alone. Sure, Raman may have been looking through the data, piecing the numbers together and elucidating the presence of an effect he was the first in the scientific literature to make sense of (though even this is disputed). For India at the moment, it’s more important to examine the things that fell in place for his discovery to become possible. This isn’t a prompt to draw up a roster of the people who helped (such as Lokasundari Ammal and K.S. Krishnan) but rather an occasion to reflect on such intangibles as theoretical foundations, inspiration, social support, the academic environment in which Raman conducted his experiment, the political environment that ensured he had the money, the opportunities he had to correspond with international scientists and journals, etc. In short, the discovery of the Raman effect is a product of multiple factors, not a single moment in the history of science.

But no – it would seem ‘Science Day’ is a day to think about the science. This is unfair; we have scientists who know how to conduct their research. Let’s use the day – and all days – to make such research more possible, meaningful, enjoyable and equitable, please?

Also read

  • The March for Science: Did the government even blink?

  • Scientists in the lurch after imprecise MHRD notice about ‘paid journals’

  • An Indian drug discovery success story – and why it might not happen again

The government has had opportunities to remedy the situation every year but it fails to bite. This is a nonpartisan judgment: the UPA I and II regimes that preceded the prevailing reign of the BJP might seem more benign in contrast but that means nothing to a postdoc scholar whose stipend hasn’t been paid in months, nothing to a community the total public expenditure on whom is the highest today at a shocking 0.69% of GDP, and nothing to an enterprise whose usefulness is being gauged solely in terms of what it has to offer to the shape-shifting, self-serving agenda of “national interest”.

Away from the funding front, we also have opportunities every year in the form of instituting better fellowships, smoothening the process of applying for and receiving research grants on time, fostering more consultations between industry, government and academia, etc. On a broader level, the private sector has cut ahead in areas where the corporatisation of science has become desirable because the bureaucratisation of science has become detestable. A common example is drug research and discovery.

Here’s an uncommon one: awards. The Infosys Prizes are better organised than are the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prizes. There’s an email blast that goes out to journalists when the winners of the former are announced; the press is invited to sit in during the award ceremony; then a PR team kicks in, pushing interviews with the prize’s winners among journalists from prominent media outlets. On the other hand, the Bhatnagar prize has been awarded for 60 years to over 500 scientists – but nothing of the sort Infosys undertakes has ever happened. In fact, on the sole occasion there has been fanfare surrounding a prize, it was awarded to Appa Rao Podile – the VC of the University of Hyderabad, a plagiarist as well as a man accused of specifically disprivileging lower caste students on campus –  by the organisers of the 2017 Science Congress.

(Disclaimer: The Wire‘s science section is funded by Rohan Murty, the son of N.R. Narayana Murthy, in turn one of the trustees of the Infosys Science Foundation that awards the eponymous prizes.)

Hell, we have everyday opportunities in the form of getting ministers to celebrate legitimate scientific achievements instead of abdicating one’s responsibility towards lakhs of scientists and crawling back into the now-barren womb of “ancient India”, puranas and whatnot.

Science day every day

It’s evident by now that it’s not the availability of opportunities but the will to seize them. Further yet, it’s not that the will doesn’t exist but that the intent doesn’t. We’re not faced with a group of ministers bungling their jobs but a group that knows exactly what it’s doing: angle for what they say is the ‘national interest’, and force everything else to tag along. By cornering our reasons to celebrate science into the confines of a single workday, we’re at risk of abetting what our ministers are doing: abdicating responsibilities towards science on other days.

This includes attending schools, colleges and universities; interacting with schoolchildren and college students; sitting down with apex investigators to hear their concerns out; instituting independent science evaluation and funding bodies; giving talks about the importance of scientific research. In all, engaging with the country’s multifarious research establishment towards reducing the separation between administrator and practitioner, and engendering a more consultative approach to decision-making in the national interest.

Science is an everyday endeavour; celebrate it, scrutinise it, share it, demand it on every day of the year. Just the same way marking ‘Earth Hour’ is doing nothing to help Earth if you’re not going to have environmentally conscious daily routines, you might as well not mark ‘Science Day’ if you’re going to mark it on just one day.

Remembering the Classical Academician’s Spirit of Satyendra Nath Bose

“He was engaged in creating a culture of intellectual discourse.”

“He was engaged in creating a culture of intellectual discourse.”

Satyendra Nath Bose at Dacca University, Bangladesh, in the 1930s. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Satyendra Nath Bose at Dacca University, Bangladesh, in the 1930s. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

The celebrated astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar once told his biographer that while India had no modern scientists of international repute before 1910, it suddenly had five or six between 1920 and 1925. He put it down to a need for national self-expression – to show the West that, in all realms including science, Indians were equals.

Among these stalwarts were his own uncle, C.V. Raman, the astrophysicist Meghnad Saha and the theoretical physicist Satyendra Nath Bose, whose 125th birth anniversary it is today. All these men achieved great success at a relatively young age. In Bose’s case, a paper published when he was only 30 forever associated him with Albert Einstein. But while success may have come early, the struggle to become a professional scientist in colonial India had been far from easy.

Bose entered Presidency College in 1909, a remarkable batch that included the chemist Jnan Ghose as well as Saha. From high school to a BSc in mathematics in 1913 and an MSc in 1915, Bose stood first in every public examination while Saha came in second. Though he was unable to get gainful employment after, Bose caught a break when Sir Ashutosh Mukherjee founded the University College of Science (science teaching had until then been monopolised by Presidency College) in 1916, and roped in bright minds like Bose and Saha. Bose was asked to learn Einstein’s theories of relativity while Saha was asked to study quantum theory. They set about the task with books borrowed from P.J. Bruhl of the Bengal Engineering College, Shibpur.

In 1920, the duo published the first collection in English of Einstein’s work on special and general relativity, only a year after one of Einstein’s predictions had been verified in a famous experiment by Sir Arthur Eddington.

Subsequently, Bose moved to a readership at the University of Dacca in 1921, only to have to struggle to retain his appointment thanks to a financial wrangle between the Governments of Bengal and India. It would be in this difficult period that Bose would author the paper that made his career.

The law of blackbody radiation is a cornerstone of quantum theory, and had been derived by the German physicist Max Planck in a paper published in 1900. In the course of this work, Planck had resorted to a self-described “act of desperation” when making certain arbitrary assumptions. He had reasoned that “a theoretical interpretation” of what he had been studying “had to be found at any price, however high it might be”.

Seizing the day

This price is considered to have been the birth of quantum theory – when Planck elucidated that nature had to work in a way that significantly departed from the laws of physics that most scientists had been working with until then. Specifically, when a body of a certain temperature emits electromagnetic radiation, the law (also called Planck’s law) estimates the frequencies at which that radiation will be emitted. Planck also found that this emission of radiation couldn’t be a continuous stream of energy but had to be in discrete packets, called quanta. The energy encapsulated in each quantum could be calculated by a fixed number multiplied by the radiation’s frequency. The number is called Planck’s constant.

In 1905, Einstein joined in the affray and developed a theory that could explain unsolved problems like the photoelectric effect. However, few others took the idea of quanta seriously over the next two decades.

But Bose and Saha grasped the importance of Einstein’s theory early. Saha was able to publish a paper based on the same by 1919. In 1923, Bose sent a paper describing his ideas to the Philosophical Magazine in London. He had derived Planck’s law without reference to classical physics, but the paper was rejected. Bose then sent it to Einstein, with a note at par with Srinivasa Ramanujan’s to G.H. Hardy in significance,

I have ventured to send you the accompanying article for your perusal and opinion. I am anxious to know what you think of it. … I do not know sufficient German to translate the paper. If you think the paper is worth publishing, I shall be grateful if you arrange for its publication in Zeitscrift für Physik. … Though a complete stranger to you, I do not feel any hesitation in making such a request. Because we are all your pupils though profiting only by your opinion through your writings.

(The full note is available to read here.)

Einstein got the paper published (with a note of his own approval). Kamleshwar Wali, Chandrasekhar’s biographer and a physicist, called this event one of the most exciting episodes of 20th century physics because it gave rise to a class of mathematical rules used to describe the behaviour of certain fundamental particles, called Bose-Einstein statistics. In honour of Bose’s contribution, the English physicist Paul A.M. Dirac called these particles ‘bosons’.

The postcard that Einstein replied with got Bose both a two-year study leave in Europe as well as a German visa without a fee. After travelling for a bit, and meeting Einstein, he found a place at the X-ray laboratory of Louis de Broglie at Marie Curie’s institute, with a recommendation from Paul Langevin.

Bose returned to a professorship in Dacca in 1926, where he set up an X-ray crystallography laboratory. In 1945, spurred by the increasing communal tension in Bengal, he took up the Khaira Professorship in Physics at Calcutta University. He retired from there 1956 to become the vice chancellor of Visva Bharati and was bestowed the honour of a national professorship as well.

The classical academician

Satyendra Nath Bose was unique among his contemporaries. Like with his friend Saha, Bose’s nationalist credentials were never in question. Indeed, despite his deep interest in Bengali, Sanskrit and English literature, his choice of studying science was rooted in the ideal of national self-reliance, central to the Swadeshi Movement. But unlike Saha, who was close to both Subhas Chandra Bose and Jawaharlal Nehru, had initiated the Congress Party’s embryonic attempts at ‘National Planning’ in the 1930s, finally became a bitter critic of the party and entered Parliament as an independent in the 1950s, Bose never wore politics on his sleeve. And unlike Raman, few controversies surrounded him. And unlike Saha, Raman and Jnan Ghosh, he was not an institution-builder.

In fact, Bose was the classical academic scientist who spent his career toiling away in university laboratories and classrooms, like thousands of others today. As Wali tellingly writes, “Scientifically, he devoted himself almost exclusively to teaching and guiding research” – suggesting Bose supervised many scholars rather than simply focussing, as many do, on their own private ideas Partha Ghose, a former scientist at the S.N. Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences, Kolkata, once recalled,

Whenever he was not taking a class or attending a meeting, there would be a continuous stream of visitors to his room and Satyendranath would get involved in their academic problems for hours. It could be any branch of physics, chemistry, history, hieroglyphics, or indeed any subject under the sun. He was engaged in creating a culture of intellectual discourse.

Kapil Subramanian is a historian of science. His other writing is available here.

Infinite in All Directions: Apolitical Scientists, Bose v. Newton, Science That Matters

Infinite in All Directions is The Wire‘s science newsletter. Subscribe and receive a digest of the most interesting science news and analysis from around the web every Monday, 10 am.

Infinite in All Directions is The Wire‘s science newsletter. Click here to subscribe and receive a digest of the most interesting science news and analysis from around the web every Monday, 10 am.

Credit: seanpanderson/Flickr, CC BY 2.0

Credit: seanpanderson/Flickr, CC BY 2.0

Homegrown apathy

… what undermines [J.C.] Bose’s claims is the lack of a respected institution in India to vouch for his achievements, that has made any systematic attempts to preserve his notes and reports, and, most importantly, which has professionally engaged in dispelling claims that would disabuse Bose of his claims to primacy. While his books and papers are easily available – on the web or in print – there is a conspicuous lack of efforts in situating them in historical contexts and in communicating such assessments to the people. The absence of such institutions is becoming obvious by the day, as is the ignorance with which their authority is being undermined. In the almost 290 years since Newton’s death in 1727, institutions like the Cambridge University Library have been responsible for preserving his legacy in the public consciousness, so much so that he’s still able to take a smidgen of credit for thinking of capillary action in plants in the 1660s or 1670s. J.C. Bose, on the other hand, continues to [languish in contested territory].

This is an excerpt from a post I wrote two years ago about how there are no institutions, nor institutional efforts, in India to “situate [the work of our scientists] in historical contexts and to communicate such assessments to the people”. It’s not difficult to realise that a closely related problem is we don’t take our homegrown repositories of scientific information and literature as seriously as they should be. I’ve seen evidence of this every year for the last decade. The most recent was on February 3, when The Hindu published an interesting story: that the work of a researcher formerly affiliated with CMC Vellore had been ignored by scientists who grabbed eyeballs last week for claiming to have solved the mystery of the 1995 encephalopathy deaths in Muzaffarpur, Bihar.

I’m sorry for myself that The Wire missed this story.

As The Hindu reported, T. Jacob John had published papers in 2014 and 2015 in the journal Current Science establishing a strong biological link between malnourished children eating a fruit from the litchi family and subsequently becoming epileptic or comatose, often leading to death. However, the scientists who finally got all the attention published in The Lancet Global Health, had a press release crafted for their efforts by the US Embassy in Delhi and received coverage all the way from India Today to the New York Times. I wouldn’t go so far as to say John’s plight is due entirely to the apathy of science journalists (scientists are to blame, too, but that’s a different discussion) – but we played a role.

A similar issue I wrote about in 2015 concerned the scientist Meghnad Saha, and why his contributions to stellar astrophysics (specifically, the theory of selective radiation pressure) may have been ignored while two white men who built incrementally upon it have been celebrated for their work on the same theory. Long story short: Saha couldn’t afford to publish in the prestigious Astrophysical Journal, which wanted him to bear some of the printing costs, so he published in the Journal of the Department of Science at Calcutta University, “which had no circulation worth mentioning”.

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Physics and liberty

I reviewed a biography of Enrico Fermi called The Pope of Physics for The Wire. I must say I was particularly motivated by a new magazine called Inference Review and the review they published of the same book. While the magazine is one of the better ones out there – much better sometimes – its review wasn’t exactly a review as much as a summation of what was going on in the book, and it had sidelined the issue of Fermi’s apolitical agnosticism and focused instead on his science. This is perfectly fine, except when I was reading The Pope of Physics, I somehow found it quite difficult to move past the fact that Fermi could be as apolitical as he was in the times he did live through.

In fact, in one paragraph, Inference Review does speculate that Fermi wouldn’t even have bothered to emigrate from Italy had his wife not been Jewish (while Hitler and Mussolini went insane with their racial persecution laws). I somehow don’t believe this because it wasn’t just his wife, many of his colleagues were Jewish, as were his collaborators in the broader field of quantum mechanics from around Europe. But I’ll be cautious about this claim; the author of the magazine review, Jeremy Bernstein, seemed to have known many of them personally.

Anyway, I may be completely wrong (which I’m open to being, so if you do tell me if I am and why, do be nice about it) but I’m not sure what the takeaway here is; I’m leaning towards the former: to be apolitical in the face of a threat to individual liberties is to side with injustice altogether or to always have a choice between being a fighter and not because that is a liberty being fought for, too. Which way would you lean?

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First, to explain the problem

All hail Scott Aaronson! It seems he – a famous and particularly gifted theoretical computer scientist, if you didn’t know – was recently asked by John Nash (before he died) and Michail Rassias to put together a chapter for a book they were editing about the greatest open problems in mathematics. So after much procrastinating (how pleasing to hear Aaronson did this, too, though he probably spent the rest of his time doing other awesome things and not playing Raptor: Call of the Shadows), he did – and also uploaded it as a PDF on his blog. He has tackled the P/NP problem, first hit upon by Nash himself in 1955 and which has since become one of the hardest problems in mathematics, even to this day. And Aaronson has done a splendid job of breaking it down to tell you why. As a first step to judging his efforts, and at the risk of seeming naïve, I suggest googling for the P/NP problem first, looking at the problem definitions from around the web, and then looking at how Aaronson tackles it:

In 1900, David Hilbert challenged mathematicians to design a “purely mechanical procedure” to determine the truth or falsehood of any mathematical statement. That goal turned out to be impossible. But the question—does such a procedure exist, and why or why not?—helped launch two related revolutions that shaped the twentieth century: one in science and philosophy, as the results of Gödel, Church, Turing, and Post made the limits of reasoning itself a subject of mathematical analysis; and the other in technology, as the electronic computer achieved, not all of Hilbert’s dream, but enough of it to change the daily experience of most people on earth.

Although there’s no “purely mechanical procedure” to determine if a mathematical statement S is true or false, there is a mechanical procedure to determine if S has a proof of some bounded length n: simply enumerate over all proofs of length at most n, and check if any of them prove S. This method, however, takes exponential time. The P ?= NP problem asks whether there’s a fast algorithm to find such a proof (or to report that no proof of length at most n exists), for a suitable meaning of the word “fast.”

That in itself should tell you that he knows what he’s talking about.

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It Matters Because

A lot of very cool science has happened since I last sent this newsletter and I think it’s important that you hear about all of them. I’ve wanted to write about each one of the developments but I could barely keep up. To compensate, the following is a rapid recap with a single sentence telling you why it matters. I’m calling this section It Matters Because.

Astronomers have found that 51 Pegasi b, the first exoplanet to be found orbiting a Sun-like star, in 1995, contains water in its atmosphere and very low levels, if at all, of carbon dioxide and methane. It matters because the technique the astronomers used in 1995 and 2016 was the same, just more sensitive in the latter case.

The polarising effect of vacuum birefringence on electromagnetic radiation was measured for the first time, confirming a prediction that Hans Euler and Werner Heisenberg made in 1936. It matters because it shows that magnetic fields can affect how light propagates through vacuum.

In 2016, the IceCube neutrino detector at the South Pole ‘looked’ through Earth, using the planet as a filter to block out atmospheric neutrinos, to detect and observe neutrinos coming from space. It matters because it confirmed the existence of extragalactic neutrinos and because it’s cool.

Astrophysicists have found that estimates of the rate at which the universe is expanding don’t match with the number arrived at by the ESA Planck satellite. It matters because this rate, called the Hubble constant, is closely linked to the nature of dark matter and dark energy, and variations in its value inform us about the composition and future of this universe.

+ In June 2016, the universe was found to have been expanding 5-9% faster than we figured it was.

Anthropologists from the University of Cambridge and Banaras Hindu University have attempted to reconstruct how citizens of the Indus valley civilisation used water and adapted to its availability. It matters because their findings help determine “the resilience of subsistence practices” that many Indian researchers and farmers are exploring in an effort towards instituting sustainable agricultural practices.

By September 2017, Brian Nosek wants to “establish a single prototype of a highly credible, high prestige psychology journal that meets the present culture demands for outlets that signal high achievement”. It matters because it’s a radical confrontation of the trustworthiness problem the psychology research community is currently facing, and its success could have implications for how journals in other much-contested areas of science are run.

Around 100 million years ago, the Indian plate began to break off from the Gondwana supercontinent and start a lonely journey towards Eurasia, getting there between 55 and 50 million years ago. However, German researchers recently found that certain species of midges, preserved in amber from the time in Europe and India, have remarkably similar features. It matters because the finding suggests the Indian, Asian and European biospheres weren’t entirely isolated 50 million years ago, and that a chain of islands may have connected the Indian and Eurasian plates.

Aparajith Ramnath, a historian of science and technology (and someone who helped me understand the work of Thomas Kuhn very well six years ago), has started a wonderful new column on interpreting ancient science, for The Wire. It matters because Ramnath is doing it by reviewing one book every month.

Solid-state physicists (as in scientists who study solid-state physics) have found that when graphene is placed on a superconducting substance called praseodymium cerium copper oxide, it becomes superconducting – but in a different way. This particular press release matters because look how confusing.

The Indian Academy of Science, one of the country’s three national science academies, recently published a document called ‘Scientific Values: Ethical Guidelines and Procedures’. It matters because it’s a seminal document – given its contents as well as origins – that seeks to establish a template upon which research ethics in the country can be founded and measured.

Researchers from Madurai have found that microbes in the human gut break down organophosphates into glucose, contributing to diabetes. It matters because OPs constitute a common form of insecticide and their prevalence could imply a higher burden of diabetes in rural India than thought.

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Infinite in All Directions: Nobel’s Women, Meghnad’s Caste, Tantalum’s Decay

Infinite in All Directions is The Wire‘s science newsletter. Subscribe and receive a digest of the most interesting science news and analysis from around the web every Monday, 10 am.

Infinite in All Directions is The Wire‘s science newsletter. Click here to subscribe and receive a digest of the most interesting science news and analysis from around the web every Monday, 10 am.

An engraved bust of Alfred Nobel. Credit: sol_invictus/Flickr, CC BY 2.0

An engraved bust of Alfred Nobel. Credit: sol_invictus/Flickr, CC BY 2.0

The physics Nobel

I got the sense on Tuesday (after the physics prize had been announced earlier that day) that few journalists were taking the trouble to explain the work that had won. My first reaction was to ask if I’d taken the trouble to explain it in my analysis for The Wire for nothing; “perhaps this isn’t the noteworthy or done thing”. Thankfully, it turned out later that it wasn’t non-noteworthy at all but that few writers could really understand what the work was about. My own explanation in my piece may seem reductionist – but I’m going to stick by it because it makes perfect sense from a first-principles point of view. Anyway, the impression that few had understood I got from two physics writers: Chad Orzel (Forbes) and Philip Ball (Prospect). And between the two, Ball’s piece was to me the more insightful one if only because it articulates an idea that had struck me but I’d left out. Here we go:

What Anderson meant was that you can’t deduce how lots of particles will behave simply from understanding how one of them behaves. Never mind recondite bosons—just think of a swallow. Biologists knew a vast amount about the anatomy, physiology and phylogeny of a swallow several decades ago, and they could for good measure have known also its genome down to the last piece of DNA, and still they would have been as perplexed as they were about how on earth flocks of swallows at dusk execute those extraordinary synchronized ballets called murmurations. They didn’t know this not because they were poor scientists, but because murmurations are a property of many swallows—and because they are a question of physics (though not necessarily of the kind that must be conducted within a building tendentiously labeled “Department of Physics.”)

A murmuration is what physicists call a many-body effect, which means it arises from the mutual interactions of many bodies—and doesn’t depend on the fine details of what those bodies are (starlings make murmurations too) but is much more a question of the mere fact of their interaction. The properties we observe in matter are almost entirely and inevitably many-body effects of their atoms and other constituent particles. What makes it tractable to study them mathematically is that the numbers of particles are typically so vast that one can approximate the collective behaviour from statistical averages of the behaviour of the components. That is why the field is known as statistical physics. (The intermediate stage between one and many—that is, few-body systems, where averages are less reliable—is arguably the hardest to handle, and is still something of an uncharted frontier.

cube-molecule

Rewards, not incentives

One longstanding argument I’ve had with a scientist-friend is if the Nobel Prize should be administered differently. He’s staunchly been of the opinion that given the amount of attention and material benefits the prizes bring, they should be awarded to younger scientists – people who are just setting out but whose work shows a lot of promise, and who might have more years left to enjoy the rewards. I’ve been of the opinion that the Nobel Prizes aren’t required to function like grants do and that they’ve built up their reputation by being a reward.

An editorial published in the journal Nature quoted an official saying that whatever the prize should be, its administrators aren’t concerned.

“I don’t think the reputation of the Nobel prize was built by people caring about the reputation of the prize.” And, for good measure, he adds: “It is not necessarily a remit to go out and find out what the world thinks of the Nobel prize and try and adjust our behaviour because of that … It is interesting to know what the world thinks of the Nobel prize, but should that change our behaviour?”

I say easy for this official to speak given what the Nobel Prizes have become, the reputation and prestige they’ve accrued.

What do you think?

magnet

Where are the female laureates?

But whatever reputation it’s built up has been on some uneven footing. For one, the physics prizes have been awarded to women twice – and to men 202 times. This lopsidedness isn’t even explained by the fact there are more male than female physicists. In fact, nothing explains this at all except for implying that there’s something wrong with the people who pick the winners.

Rachel Feltman wrote in WaPo about Vera Rubin, the one woman whose discovery of dark matter has for some reason been repeatedly overlooked by the Nobel Committee, and whose being overlooked has been exemplarily baffling for physicists:

Don’t weep for the gravitational-wave guys. They’ll be fine. But let’s take a second to talk about Vera Rubin. Rubin and her colleague Kent Ford provided the first real evidence of dark matter — yes, dark matter, the unseeable, unknowable, mysterious stuff that makes up more than a quarter of the universe, which is kind of a big deal — decades ago. Her time in the Nobel spotlight is overdue.

“The existence of dark matter has utterly revolutionized our concept of the universe and our entire field; the ongoing effort to understand the role of dark matter has basically spawned entire subfields within astrophysics and particle physics at this point,” Emily Levesque, an astronomer at the University of Washington in Seattle, told Astronomy.com. “Alfred Nobel’s will describes the physics prize as recognizing ‘the most important discovery’ within the field of physics. If dark matter doesn’t fit that description, I don’t know what does.” Although Rubin, a D.C. local who earned a PhD in astronomy from Georgetown University, has been a favorite to win for the past several years, she has repeatedly lost out — to blue light-emitting diodes in 2014, neutrinos in 2015 and now to studies of exotic states of matter.

For other writing on women who have been overlooked, I recommend Jane Lee’s piece from 2013 and Scientific American’s in 2008. Additionally, here’s a piece by Helen Briggs in BBC from last week about a woman science itself forgot.

The second disservice the prize does is to have stipulated that, at a time, only three people can win the prize. In June 2015, science writer Matthew Francis set out five reasons why we should stop taking the Nobel Prizes so seriously. One of them was:

The prize is given in honor of a specific discovery in scientific research, but it’s given to a small number of researchers. To use the recent example of the Higgs boson, at least six physicists contributed to the theory, and probably even more deserve credit for working out the details. But by the rules, only three physicists received the prize. To be succint: science is collaborative and cumulative, but the Nobel Prize awards individuals as though they work alone.

And before the other fields can twirl their moustaches: only four and 11 women have won the chemistry and medicine prizes, in that order.

head-brains

On The Wire

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We’re a non-profit publication. Please make a donation and help support our journalism.

Why the otters left Goa – and are coming back now by Mukta Patil

Openly burning garbage around Agra is discolouring the Taj Mahal by T.V. Padma

The ‘purple carnival’ of the flower that blooms once every seven years by Jui Pethe

The story of how the orphaned tigress of Bandhavgarh was rehabilitated by Pushp Jain

How big is your gross national happiness? by Padmaparna Ghosh and Samanth Subramanian

There’s plenty of room at the bottom – the Nobel chemistry laureates put a nanocar there by me

How the physics laureates used geometry to tame the very weird of the very small by me

Did CSIR’s anti-diabetic drug deserve Modi’s praise? by K.S. Jayaraman

rocket

Caste and Meghnad Saha

This tweet here is the sort of thing I’d like to on Twitter and add “This.” to. On October 6, Dhrubo Jyoti, a journalist with the Hindustan Times, recalled that it was the 123rd birth anniversary of the Indian astrophysicist Meghnad Saha. Importantly, Jyoti recalled how Saha’s work had been affected by his caste.

If you’re interested in reading more, this biographical essay by Daulat Kothari might be a good place to start at. An excerpt:

After the completion of his primary education there was no certainty that his education would continue further. Their parents would have preferred to have him work in the family’s grocery shop. In any case they did not see any use of further education in running the shop. Moreover there was no middle school nearer to his village. The nearest middle school was at Simulia, which was 10 kms away from his village. Saha’s parents did not have the means to take care of the expenses of his boarding and lodging. At this stage his elder brother Jainath came in his rescue by locating a sponsor in Ananta Kumar Das, a local doctor. The kind-hearted doctor agreed to provide Saha free boarding and lodging in his house provided Saha washed his own plates (a condition that reflected the prevailing rigid caste system) and attend minor household works including the taking care of the cow. Saha readily accepted all the conditions as he had a strong urge to continue his studies further. Every weekend he used to visit his village. When the village became flooded he would row all the way, otherwise he would simply walk down. Saha completed his middle school by topping the list of successful candidates in the entire district of Dhaka. As a result he secured a scholarship of Rs.4 per month.

Last year, I analysed why Meghnad Saha was passed up for a Nobel Prize in physics even though there had been credible proof that he was the originator of an important astrophysical concept called selective radiation pressure. One reason definitely was that he couldn’t afford to get his paper published in a prestigious journal – perhaps he might’ve been better off had he been from a higher caste, and so more able to devote his time to research and securing a lucrative position.

protective-gloves

Tantalic decay

Scientists don’t know how the element tantalum-180 forms. Scientists don’t know how tantalum-180 decays. But if it does decay, then it has a half-life of at least 45,000 trillion years, the results of a new experimental study say.

Tantalum-180m is a bit of an oddball. It is what’s known as an isomer — its nucleus exists in an “excited,” or high-energy, configuration. Normally, an excited nucleus would quickly drop to a lower energy state, emitting a photon — a particle of light — in the process. But tantalum-180m is “metastable” (hence the “m” in its name), meaning that it gets stuck in its high-energy state.

Tantalum-180m is thought to decay by emitting or capturing an electron, morphing into another element — either tungsten or hafnium — in the process. But this decay has never been observed. Other unusual nuclides, such as those that decay by emitting two electrons simultaneously, can have even longer half-lives than tantalum-180m. But tantalum-180m is unique — it is the longest-lived isomer found in nature.

Why even bother with studying something so rare? Clearly because finding the answer could open news vistas in physics. The study’s results also brought to mind a study from last year that found that if the electron was an unstable and in the habit of breaking down into lighter particles, it would do so once every 66,000 trillion trillion years. Physicists are interested in this number because, if an electron is kind enough to decay while humans live, it would also violate a fundamental law of nature on the way and give physicists a way past the Standard Model.

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Away from EurekAlert!

The American Association for the Advancement of Science, popularly known as AAAS, runs a press service called EurekAlert!. Last month, someone hacked it, cutting off many science writers’ access to embargoed press releases and journal papers. Its going down also threw many journals’ PR machines also out of whack. Last week, EurekAlert! came back online. One of the more resourceful takeaways from the incident has been that science writers shouldn’t be dependent on EurekAlert! alone for their science news. On October 6, Tara Haelle wrote on healthjournalism.org about how to start – a write-up that can be useful to all journalists and bloggers who are just setting out and would like to build a network. Excerpt:

As you learn which researchers interest you the most (because of their area of expertise, leadership in the field or publishing prolifically or some other reason) go to PubMed and set up author alerts. You can set them to email you each day that author’s next study is added to PubMed, or once a week or month on a day of your choice. This is a great way to keep tabs on the ongoing research in certain areas even if I’m not going to report on it right away. In fact, several feature ideas have arisen from seeing clusters of studies on a similar interesting topic from the same author.

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Other bits of interestingness

Why does Elon Musk so desperately want to take humans to Mars when it’s not entirely clear what humans could get from going to Mars?

“Twitter, Facebook, Vine, Instagram, YouTube and even Pinterest can create an environment that removes some of the distance separating astronauts and the public, transporting the public’s eyes into orbit and letting them experience a little of the almost-spiritual wonder for themselves. But human astronauts don’t have a monopoly on engaging Twitter accounts.”

Why do the Twitter accounts of Elon Musk, Tim Cook, Larry Page and Satya Nadella follow so few women?

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