Tag: Science Day

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.

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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.

Five Reflections on National Science Day

C.V. Raman won a Nobel Prize for discovering the light-scattering effect named for him on February 28. But by designating this date as National Science Day, India has come to celebrate the Nobel Prize itself more than anything else.

Science Day isn’t a very meaningful occasion in and of itself. It is the day C.V. Raman discovered the light-scattering effect named for him. Raman won a Nobel Prize for his discovery, and – by commemorating February 28 as ‘Science Day’ – India has come to celebrate the Nobel Prize itself more than anything else. Indeed, if we had to save one day each for all the significant contributions to our knowledge of the natural universe that Indian scientists have made, a year would have to be thousands of days long. And every day would be Science Day (as it should). However, February 28 has been Science Day for over three decades, so even if not for Raman, it has become embellished in our history as a tradition. It ought to be dismantled, of course, but if it is not, it ought to be accorded an identity and purpose more suited to India’s aspirations in the 21st century. It appears the theme for Science Day 2019 is ‘Science for the people, people for the science’. So let’s repurpose the opportunity to reflect on some things the people are doing vis-à-vis science in India. 1. Since 2014, the Narendra Modi government has ridden on multiple waves of fake news, superstitions and pseudoscientific beliefs. An unexpected number of writers and journalists have countered it – with varying degrees of success – and, in the process, have engaged more with science and research themselves. There are certainly more science writers in 2019 than there were in 2014, as well as more publishers aware of the importance of science journalism. 2. Scientists were slow to rise to the mic and express their protest as a community against the government’s bigotry, majoritarianism and alchemies – but rise they did. There is still a long way to go in terms of their collectivisation but now there is precedent. There is also a conversation among scientists, science writers and journalists and some government officials about the responsibilities of science academies and the importance of communication: either speaking truth to power or having a conversation with the people. (AWSAR is a good, if awkward, step in this direction.) 3. The rule of the BJP-RSS combine, together with various satellite organisations, has helped disrupt the idea of authority in India. Consider: some bhakt somewhere forwards a dubious claim; another finds an obscure paper and an obscure expert to back their beliefs up; a third staves off scrutiny by taking jabs at commentators’ lack of expertise. But if we’re to beat back this deleterious tide of make-believe, we must all ask questions of everything. Authority longs for exclusivity and secrecy but it must not be allowed to get there, even if it means the ivory towers of the ‘well-meaning’ are torn down. 4. Many, if not most, scientists still cling to the modernist view of their enterprise: that it is the pursuit of objective truths, and that only science can uncover these truths. But in the last five years, it is the social scientists and humanities scholars who have helped us really understand the times we live in, forging connections between biology, psychology, class, caste, gender, politics, economics and cultures. Reality isn’t science’s sole preserve, so thanks to the non-scientist-experts for helping us situate science in these fraught times as well. 5. Scientific illiteracy can be less ignored now than it ever has been because of the way the BJP, and members of the upper-castes to which it panders, have sought to exploit it. From gau mutra to “braid cutting”, from attempting to rewrite textbooks to formalising Vedic education, from failing to condemn the murders of rationalists to spending Rs 3,000 crore on a statue instead of improving higher education, the government has run roughshod over too many aspirations. So kudos to the teachers in classrooms, and the parents who place a premium on education.

The Little Known Calcutta Scientist Whose Shoulders Hawking Stood On

Amal Kumar Raychaudhuri described the dynamics of light’s motion through the curved parts of spacetime. It was “perhaps the single most important input” for one of Hawking’s major findings.

One of Stephen Hawking’s more celebrated contributions to physics had to do with the dynamics of blackholes’ ‘surfaces’. His passing on March 14 was mourned by scientists and non-scientists alike, and people around the world remembered his research as much as they remembered Hawking himself. But what many don’t know is the influence the work of a Calcutta-born scientist had on Hawking’s own.

We all know that massive bodies exert a gravitational pull on objects around them. Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity reimagined this scenario – stating that massive bodies curve the fabric of spacetime around them, and that the force of gravity is just the force experienced when other bodies move through this curved area.

When a certain kind of star implodes under its own weight, all its mass falls inward to the star’s centre and forms a core of ‘dead’ matter called a supernova remnant. If the remnant is more than two to four times as heavy as our Sun, then the remnant itself collapses inwards, its entire mass forced into a vanishingly small point of spacetime called a singularity. (Note: there are other ways in which blackholes form.)

In this context, there is a link between the theoretical investigations of Hawking and the late Amal Kumar Raychaudhuri from Calcutta (now Kolkata). Raychaudhuri was a brilliant but less-well-known physicist. While his work recast the landscape of general relativity, he spent a chunk of his life being forced to do mundane lab work – something he admitted in a 2005 documentary. In fact, it is a miracle that he managed to do meaningful theoretical work despite compulsions from university authorities. (This is akin to the reprimand Vainu Bappu received from Indian diplomats after he co-discovered the Bappu-Bok-Newkirk comet in 1949.)

Hawking’s doctoral thesis begins with his work on the Hoyle-Narlikar theory of gravitation, which was quite popular in those days as an alternative to Einstein’s framework. In the second and last chapters, Hawking makes use of some of Raychaudhuri’s findings in 1955 while arriving at results on the existence of singularities in general relativity. Published research papers based on his thesis and later work quote Raychaudhuri’s contribution extensively.

In fact, the first mention of the term ‘Raychaudhuri equation’ appears in a 1965 paper by Hawking and George F.R. Ellis. More notably, in 1970, Hawking and Roger Penrose also refer to a “Raychaudhuri effect”, according to Sayan Kar, a theoretical physicist at IIT Kharagpur and the president of the Indian Association for General Relativity and Gravitation.

Raychaudhuri’s most important finding “embodies the physical intuition that the gravitational force is always attractive,” Ghanashyam Date, a physicist at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai, said.

The theorem concerning singularities made Hawking famous – and this, according to Kar, “very rightly has its roots in the Raychaudhuri equation.” He added that, in fact, “Hawking’s work was largely responsible for highlighting the importance of the Raychaudhuri equation.”

In the 1950s, Raychaudhuri was studying how a bundle of light rays might move through the curved parts of spacetime. Would the curvature force the bundle to contract in size or to shear?

“Raychaudhuri described this dynamics through an equation that was perhaps the single most important input for Hawking’s area theorem, and the Hawking-Penrose singularity theorems,” said Suvrat Raju, a physicist at the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences, Bengaluru. The ‘area theorem’ describes a connection between a blackhole’s entropy and its surface area; the singularity theorems describe the conditions in which gravitational singularities are produced in the cosmos.

“The Raychaudhuri equation continues to be a key tool to investigate the behavior of blackhole horizons” in modern physics.

Further, the equation has its roots in simple geometry and not in Einstein’s theory of relativity. This means that Raychaudhuri’s insights will endure even should Einstein’s theory become replaced with a different or more advanced paradigm – an idea that Kar thinks is “remarkable”.

In other words, Raychaudhuri’s work was as fundamental as it could have got. Yet we remember Hawking – and C.V. Raman, Meghnad Saha, S.N. Bose and Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, etc. – more than we do him. It is true that Hawking admired Raychaudhuri’s contributions to physics, but we should not have to appreciate a homegrown star through the admiration of others. It is about time the government created an institution in his honour so students in India can specialise in relativity and carry on his great legacy.

Aswin Sekhar is an Indian astrophysicist working at the University of Oslo, Norway.