VISMAYA: History & Philosophy of Physics
Below are the YouTube links to the 2 talks I gave on C.V. Raman on the occasion of India’s Science Day
The first talk is about : C.V. Raman: A brief History
Organized by IISER Pune Science Activity Centre
Age group 6 to 100: Students, Teachers, Science Enthusiasts and all Members of the Public
The second talk is about : C. V. Raman : History of Ideas
Organized by Science Club IISER Pune
Target audience: Science students and researchers
Raman was an extraordinary scientist, great communicator of science, and a very interesting human being with strong opinions and independent thought…. his scientific journey is an ‘audacity of hope’. His human endeavour.. from Bowbazar to Bengaluru..is what makes Raman what he is…and what he will be remembered for..
Raman’s work was deeply influenced by many great classical thinkers, and Euclid was one of them. To quote Raman
“Not until many years later did I appreciate the central position of geometry to all natural knowledge. I can give a thousand examples. Every mineral found in Nature, every crystal made by man, every leaf, flower or fruit that we see growing, every living thing from the smallest to the largest that walks on earth, flies in the air or swims in the waters or lives deep down on the ocean floor, speaks aloud of the fundamental role of geometry in Nature. The pages of Euclid are like the opening bars in the Grand Opera of Nature’s great drama. They lift the veil and show to our vision a glimpse of the vast world of natural knowledge awaiting study.”
To know more, you may want to attend the announced talks..
Happy Science Day !
Since my student days, I have been studying various things Richard Feynman wrote. His 3 volumes of lectures in physics have been one of the ‘go-to sources’ on basic physics. I have also enjoyed reading his lectures on advanced topics, including nanotechnology and computing. Apart from all this, I have also been impressed by Feynman’s viewpoint on science, society and human living.
In the passing, I have read that he did not like philosophers, but I always felt that Feynman’s thoughts were deeply philosophical without the frills of sophisticated language.
Recently, I came across a wonderful conversation with Leonard Susskind, a close friend of Feynman and an accomplished physicist himself. In this video (around 40.18 min), Susskind highlights that Feynman was deeply philosophical. He emphasizes that Feynman did not like the way philosophical discourse was conducted, especially in the context of the philosophy of science. This point kind of reinforced my impression of Feynman and was heartening.
I admire Feynman for making science interesting, but I am also very well aware that Feynman has been criticized for being sexist. Feynman was a scientific genius, but he had his flaws.
Anyway, the whole conversation with Susskind is educative. The best part is when he talks about why he likes teaching (around 1.06 hours in the video), which is worth watching.
“The physicist is most cogently identified, not by the subject studied, but by the way in which a subject is studied and by the nature of the information being sought.”
Above is an interesting quote by Sol Gruner, James Langer, Phil Nelson, and Viola Vogel from a 1995 article in Physics Today titled WHAT FUTURE WILL WE CHOOSE FOR PHYSICS?
Although written more than 25 years ago from the viewpoint of US physics community, many of the issues discussed in this article are pertinent even today. Probably more so in the Indian context.
Nice read :
What Future Will We Choose for Physics?
Sol M. Gruner, James S. Langer, Phil Nelson, and Viola Vogel
Citation: Physics Today 48, 12, 25 (1995); doi: 10.1063/1.881477
View online: https://doi.org/10.1063/1.881477
IIA days…
It was late summer/early monsoon season of 2003, in Bangalore. The BTS bus travel from Rajajinagar to Koramangala via Majestic used to take 90 min or more. This commute, which I did for about 2 to 3 months, as summer student at Indian Institute Astrophysics (IIA) is still etched in my memory. I had just finished my first year MSc (Physics), and was seriously hooked on to physics in general, and astrophysics in particular. My summer project was on second solar spectrum guided by Prof. K. N. Nagendra (KNN) at IIA. It was he who introduced me to the fabulous world of polarization optics in the context of solar physics. This opened my eyes to the spectacular world of photon transport through an inhomogeneous medium, and hence multiple scattering of light. It was KNN who also introduced me to the classic : Radiative Transfer by Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar. My first task as a summer student was to read the first chapter of this book and understand the representation of polarized light using Stokes parameters. The summer of 2003, was also the first time I encountered the power of computational methods to solve scientific problems, and ever since then I have deeply appreciated the role of computers in solving scientific problems. This introduction to computational physics and polarization optics (in the form of Jones, Stokes and Muller matrices) has turned out to be an important concept which I still use in my research. I thank KNN for this.
Recently, I was shocked to know that Prof. KNN passed away. His death was untimely, and a very sad news to me and many of the people who knew him. My condolences to his family, friends and students.
Weinberg inspires…
Recently, I also came to know about the sad demise of Steven Weinberg. Thanks to a special paper on Introduction to Quantum Electrodynamics in the final semester of my MSc, I learnt a bit about Weinberg as we were introduced to some aspects of unification of weak and electromagnetic forces. Also, with great enthusiasm, I learnt a lot from his fascinating book : The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe. Undoubtedly, the scientific world has lost a great thinker.
The greatest impact of Weinberg on me was in a different context. In summer of 2004, I was selected for a PhD position at JNCASR. Prof. Chandrabhas had agreed to take me in as a PhD student, and I was elated and excited to join his group. I still remember the first time I visited his lab (after the selection) sometime in late May or early June 2004. As I entered the lab and opened that famous sliding door, there was a print-out of an article which was pasted right beside the door. This article was the Four Golden Lessons by Steven Weinberg, which was then recently published in 2003. This was literally, the first article I read as a PhD student in the lab, and has deeply impacted my work.
I still revisit the four golden lessons, time and again, and has been extremely useful throughout my career. As a tribute to him, below I reproduce the third lesson, which I think is worth contemplating :
My third piece of advice is probably the hardest to take. It is to forgive yourself for wasting time. Students are only asked to solve problems that their professors (unless unusually cruel) know to be solvable. In addition, it doesn’t matter if the problems are scientifically important — they have to be solved to pass the course. But in the real world, it’s very hard to know which problems are important, and you never know whether at a given moment in history a problem is solvable. At the beginning of the twentieth century, several leading physicists, including Lorentz and Abraham, were trying to work out a theory of the electron. This was partly in order to understand why all attempts to detect effects of Earth’s motion through the ether had failed. We now know that they were working on the wrong problem. At that time, no one could have developed a successful theory of the electron, because quantum mechanics had not yet been discovered. It took the genius of Albert Einstein in 1905 to realize that the right problem on which to work was the effect of motion on measurements of space and time. This led him to the special theory of relativity. As you will never be sure which are the right problems to work on, most of the time that you spend in the laboratory or at your desk will be wasted. If you want to be creative, then you will have to get used to spending most of your time not being creative, to being becalmed on the ocean of scientific knowledge. (emphasis is mine)
Thank you, KNN and Weinberg…for some golden lessons…
Thanks to Gautam Menon, I came across this article in Nature, which makes an interesting case for being self critical of one’s own published work.
Perhaps, this is a good way to go, although much easier said than done. Overall, I strongly support the line of thinking of looking inward and being critical of one’s work.
One of the motivations for writing my blog is to highlight the human element of doing science, and honest mistakes in the pursuit of science are very much part of it.
This is indeed a good culture to inculcate and encourage in a day and age where everything negative and critical is looked down upon as a disadvantage.
The article also reminds me of Peter Medawar’s talk: “Is the scientific paper a fraud?” , which was one of the most refreshing viewpoints on the pursuit of science that I have read. Interestingly, there has been quite a lot of debate on this question, and is worth exploring.
Also there is an element of Gandhism in being truthful to oneself and others, which is refreshing to see in scientific world :-)
Central to scientific thinking is the ability to create an idea, test it rigorously, and report the results. This thinking is made coherent and expressed in the form of writing. Scientific research indeed can be fostered and improved by writing well, especially when guided by the goals to achieve accuracy and clarity.
I recently read a wonderful article by Prof. Raghavendra Gadagkar, which elegantly makes a case for why scientist must write to a wider audience, and why the boundary between the roles of a scientist and a science writer should be diminished.
The article reads like a manifesto for science communication, as the author himself states at the end. I strongly recommend this article to anybody who is involved in pursuit of science.
Perhaps I will add one more point to what the author mentions. There might be a very important role for science writers who can take emerging developments in science literature and translate it into vernacular language. An authentic scientific voice in regional language can really impact not only the interest of students, but also of the general public, including policy makers and politicians.
India and the world needs more science, and scientific way of life. Therefore, doing science is as important as communicating it. Prof. Gadagkar’s article makes an excellent case for this.
Above picture : A group of 5 students of Raman. Front row- Left to Right 1) S. Vekateswaran, whose observations on the polarized ‘weak fluorescence’ of glycerine in early 1928 started the last lap of investigations which led to the discovery of the Raman effect. 2) K. S. Krishnan, he was 31 when this photograph was taken. 3) A. S. Ganesan – spectroscopist, later editor Current Science, who worked with Raman. He compiled the first bibliography of the Raman effect which Rutherford submitted to the Nobel Committee when he proposed Raman for the Nobel Prize. Back row. 1) C. Mahadevan, who later became renowned geologist who did his post-graduate work with Raman on X-ray studies of minerals. He was present at the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science in Calcutta during the momentous discovery of the Raman effect and he has left graphic accounts of what happened then. Right S. Bhagavantam, another renowned student of Raman, who worked with him after the discovery of the Raman effect and is well-known for his application of group theory to the Raman effect. Reproduced from Current Science, Vol 75, NO. 11, 10 DECEMBER 1998
Today is National Science Day in India. We celebrate this day in commemoration of the discovery of the Raman effect. I have previously written about the significance of this day.
One of the important aspects of the discovery of the Raman effect is the role played by the then student K.S. Krishnan, who went on to be become a distinguished scientist and the founding Director of National Physics Laboratory, Delhi. There were also a few others who played a part in this discovery too (see picture)
Raman Research Institute has an excellent repository of the collected works of Raman. It also has a lot of content about Raman.
Of the many documents, the one which caught my attention was an interview of K.S. Krishnan by S. Ramaseshan, which was published in Current Science. Below I reproduce a few excerpts from the article:
“I (Ramaseshan) said there was a view that he (Krishnan) years discovered the Raman effect for Raman and this view had again surfaced. His reply was ‘It is a blatant misrepresentation. The best I can say is that I participated actively in the discovery”
Krishnan goes on to say how it all started with Raman taking the initiative. In fact, Krishan vividly describes the scene :
‘The story starts in the early Febrauary 1928 when Professor (Raman) came to
my room and said “I want to pull out of the theoretical studies in which
you have immersed yourself for the 2 or 3 years. I feel it is not quite healthy
for a scientific man to be out of touch with actual experimentation and experimental facts for any length of time’
Interestingly, Raman and Krishan fell out of each other, and this interview has some snippets of this controversy. The article has some comments by S. Chandrasekhar on the credit of discovery behind Raman effect, in which he attributes Raman and Krishan’s collaborative approach towards the discovery, and mentions about the importance of exchanging ideas between two researchers working on a problem.
Overall, I must mention that the interview and the historical anecdotes in the document are riveting to say the least, and also showcases the complexity and sociology of a scientific discovery.
Science, per se, is objective. But pursuit of science has a human element, which makes it complex and interesting…
So always remember that as we commemorate the effect named after a person, but there are a few more people who have contributed to it. After all, science is a collective human endeavor.
Happy Science Day !
As student of science and as a practicing researcher one can always ask why should we do science?
If you look at this question from an utilitarian viewpoint, especially in times where vaccination is in the news (for right and wrong reasons), one does not need to give strong justifications for doing science. Its relevance is there to see in our lives and its impact is it ubiquitous.
So, do scientists always think about an application while doing science? The answer is : not always.
In fact many important discoveries and inventions in science, even those which turn out to have huge applications, were not envisaged with an application in mind.
An illustration of this aspect is beautifully communicated in the above video by Prof. P. Balaram, who is an excellent scientist at IISc, and also served as its director in the past.
I should mention that during my PhD course work days, I had the privilege of taking professor Balram’s molecular spectroscopy course in the molecular biophysics unit of IISc.
Being a student of physics I was introduced to the fascinating concepts of molecular spectroscopy from biophysics and biochemistry viewpoint. I learnt a lot about molecules, their stereochemistry and their interaction with light in this fantastic course. Even to date, when I think about chirality in the optical physics, some of the lessons learnt during this course has come extremely handy. Undoubtedly this was one of the best courses I have attended.
General advice, especially for students in physics, is in order to get a deeper intuition in physics it is good to study some fundamental aspects in chemistry and biology. For sure ones understanding of concepts such as chirality and symmetry is enriched if we look at these topics from the chemistry and biology viewpoint.
Similarly students of chemistry and biology can get a deeper insight into the structure and dynamics of molecules if they understand the nature of light in the context of polarization, phase and momentum etc.
After all the universe we live in does not discriminate between the disciplines we used to study it…
