India's Contribution to Science & Technology

[Raman]

Prof. G. N. Ramachandran, of Ramachandran Plot fame.

Dr. Verghese Kurien, 1989 World Food Prize laureate

Dr. Abdul Kalam ('nuff said!)

[Alok Niranjan]

Originally posted by kgoan:
No. I have a copy of Bose's original paper (in one of those "classics of physics compendium"), and the corrections made by Einstein to it. Einstein deserved to have his name on it.

what were the corrections? significant or not? here are the references to the original papers ...

S. N. Bose, Z. Phys. 26 (1924) 178.

A. Einstein, Sitz. Berlin Preuss. Akad. Wiss. (1925) 3.

As far as I recall, Einstein generalized Bose statistics to all particles of integral spin ... hence, your comment about Bose having seen the connection to Spin is intriguing.

[vishnua]

sample from Subhash kak's article (2003) which i saved.

Aryabhata (500 AD) took the earth to spin on its axis and he described the planet periods with reference to the sun. He also took the solar system to be several hundred million miles across. In all of these things he was ahead of the rest of the world by more than a thousand years.

Bhaskara (12th century) was a brilliant mathematician. The last two names belong to the amazing Kerala school of mathematics and astronomy.

Mâdhava (c 1340-1425) and Nîlakantha (c 1444-1545), who made fundamental contributions to power series, calculus and astronomy, are amongst the greatest scientists who have ever lived. Their invention of calculus came two hundred years before Newton and Leibnitz.

more below
Indain mathmatics

Click on each place to get more info

There are only two in present day pakiland
paini (Attock) and Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (lahore) also includes two brits
ppl born in india

[Katare]

Advantage Asia: India, Singapore, China pocket most patents in '03

The heading is misleading, it's actually Taiwan, Israel and HK that pocketed most Patents but growth rates are higher for India and China at a lower base.

[Amber G.]

Ashok About your comments about SN Bose, I find a few things hard to believe. (Do you have any references for those comments)

About Bohr/Bathroom/housekeeper saga : Nice urban legend but most likely not true. AFAIK Bose has visited Paris (Worked with Mme Curie) and Germany (worked with Einstein) and stayed there for a couple of years, before he even visited Bohr’s institute in Denmark.

Only amusing story I know about Bohr/Bose (and it has been mentioned/printed many times) is once Bohr was giving a lecturer, and had some difficulty in explaining a point so he stopped and, turning to Bose, said, "Can Professor Bose help me?" .. But Bose had been sitting with his eyes shut- thick glasses made him look as if he was sleeping. The audience could not help smiling at Professor Bohr's words. But to their great surprise, Bose opened his eyes; went to the black board and explained the lecturer's point. Then he sat down and once again closed his eyes!

About Fermi-Dirac statistics for fermions, I never heard any indication that this particular work was done by Bose earlier. As few people have commented, his original paper, (which BTW he sent to Einstein after it was rejected by one of the journal) was translated by Einstein and was published. The result (for photon;s) was then generalized to Boson’s (all particles with integral spins) - and Einstein’s contribution there is certainly noteworthy.

Einstein was not one of those who stole credits from others and SN Bose has gotten the credit which he so richly deserved. …In spite of some racist tendencies (Lot of western authors in 40’s 50’s tried to call it Einstein-Bose or simply Einstein statistics..) in physics literature the accepted name is ‘Bose-Einstein Distribution. And particles are named ‘bosons’. …Einstein (and some others) saw to it that his name remains there.

(Similarly in other cases, for example ‘Mehta-Gaudin Distribution for nuclear shell structure = ..many – specially western people would try, either to rename it Gaudin-Mehta or even simply ‘Gaudin’ or even just Wigner distribution…) ..

[Amber G.]

Ok a story about S Chandrasekhar (From an old NY times article):

One story in particular illustrates Chandrasekhar's devotion to his science and his students. In the 1940s, while he was based at the University's Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, Wis., he drove more than 100 miles round-trip each week to teach a class of just two registered students. Any concern about the cost effectiveness of such a commitment was erased in 1957, when the entire class-T.D. Lee and C.N. Yang- won the Nobel Prize in physics.

BTW When this story was faviorite of the University president, and when he told this once, some one remarked that there used to be one more person who used to audit that course.. and that person was Enrico Fermi who is also a Nobel Prize winner in Physics. Chandra got the prize in 1983 too.

[Amber G.]

Originally posted by vishnua:
[QB]aryabhata (500 AD) ...Bhaskara (12th century) Mâdhava (c 1340-1425) and Nîlakantha (c 1444-1545), /QB]

BTW I some times coach High/middle school math teams amd make a special point to make sure that correct terminlogy is used .. And these terms are being increasingly standard in new books and scientific literature ...

Eg Arctan(x)= x - x^3/3 +x^5/5 is now known as Madhava-Gregory series (Old text books, even published in India would call it Gregory series)

Similary I have seen expansion of sin(x) and cos(x) reffered as Madhava-Newton power series....

Of course, Brahmgupta's formula for cyclic quadrilateral is fairly well known... and I have seen many American Middle school math kids/books calling it as such...

[Amber G.]

Sridhar - Thanks for putting the poem here. Really enjoyed it.

BTW - Did I miss Ramanujan in the list?

[Sridhar]

Thanks for the compliments. I am guessing that the reference to Ramanujan is regarding the poem. I could bump somebody else off and include a line about Ramanujan. I have a good mind to do so. Shall let you know if I do it.

[smadhavan]

Some interesting information i came across during my brief and unsuccessfull attempt to learn astrology.

The concept of 7 days a week, 12 months a year etc seems to have been borrowed from indian astrology.

For example, September, in sanskrit, literally means 7 month. And september is the 7th month from when sun enters aries.

Likewise, october literally means 8 month (from aries). Similarly for november december.

The concept of 7 days a week seems to be have directly borrowed from indian astrology.

According to indian astrology, there are 7 important veins (nadi) in the body which are afflicted the most by planetary movements. Thus, there are 7 days, each pertaining to a nadi.

For example, people afflicted negatively by saturn (sani) ought to fast on saturdays. Saturday is supposed to reprsent saturn.

Probably someone with a good knowledge of astrology can comment on the above.

[svinayak]

This is true. The concept of aries being the first house itself in the star constellation is the contribution from India.

Read some articles from Koenaard Elst on this subject.

[smadhavan]

Well, the general trend now is to dis-associate with astrology.

Astrology, has 2 main parts.

Part 1: To predict(calculate) the movements of planets. Now, this is pure mathematcis. (Obviously, we were much ahead of newton, gallileo etc, astrology being more than 4000 years old at the least; This ofcourse, is a major source of discomfiture to the europeans)

Part 2: To predict the influence of these planets on individuals.

Since the first part is entirely mathematical, i guess one could call it pseudo science.

If i were to continue singing in the same metre(tune), a relevant analogy can be drawn to modern medical science.

One part is entirely scientfic. Involving experiments etc.

Relevance to the individual is entirely dependent on the physicians interpretations of the symtoms of the disease.

So, could we classify modern medical science as a pseudo science ??? Any takers ???

[abhishek]

Some thoughts,
Most of us know the contributions of Indians in ancient times and also about people like Bose, Khurana, Raman, Chandrashekar, etc, etc, etc. I think, in this thread we should talk more about the current Indian scientists who have been contributing a lot to the world of science from India and abroad.

e.g: Arun Netravali of Bell Labs, Narendra Karmarkar of TIFR, etc.

[Baruah]

Originally posted by abhishek:
Some thoughts,
Most of us know the contributions of Indians in ancient times and also about people like Bose, Khurana, Raman, Chandrashekar, etc, etc, etc. I think, in this thread we should talk more about the current Indian scientists who have been contributing a lot to the world of science from India and abroad.

e.g: Arun Netravali of Bell Labs, Narendra Karmarkar of TIFR, etc.

The first page of the thread has info about present day scientists/engineers (including the ones you mentioned).

[vsunder]

There are some errors in previous posts and this is also a check post to see if I am still registered.

1. It is good that Ashok Kumar mentions Pancharatnam. But the chronology/history is not quite correct. Pancharatnam discovered his phenomena in 1956, 30 years before Berry and his phenomena is exactly Berry's phase. Berry on more than one occasion has paid full tribute to Pancharatnam. For those of you who want to understand Pancharatnam's work I will try here, but you can read a very nice piece by Berry in Current Science, 1994, "Pancharatnam--- Virtuoso of the Poincare Sphere". Again in the book Geometric Phases in Quantum Mechanics, the first article is a reprint of Pancharatnam's famous article of 1956, which is rather remarkable eventhough it is written in language shorn of all reference to circle bundles and Hopf fibration that is the natural setting for understanding the effect.
The next paper is Berry's 1987 article from Journal of Modern optics where he pays full tribute to Panch. Pancharatnam died early due to TB and Oxford Press brought out his collected works in 1975. He was a relation of Raman and it is sad that they did not collaborate further for Pancharatnam's work is really the dawning of quantum optics.

Now what Pancharatnam did was take polarized light and split the beam into two. One beam is fixed as a reference beam and for the other beam the axis of polarization is rotated through a closed loop. The closed loop may be thought of as lying on a sphere, that is the tip of the axis of polarization vector lying on a sphere. So as the polarization axis moves the tip of the axis describes a curve on a sphere. Now at the end of the loop the axis of polarization of the second beam coincides once again with the axis of polarization of the first reference beam. The point is now that Pancharatnam observed and theoretically proved that the second beam is phase shifted with respect to the first reference beam and the amount of phase shift is exactly equal to the area the closed loop makes on the sphere/2.

Much later it was realized that this Pancharatnam effect was due to something called the Hopf fibration that was discovered in the 1930's by a mathematician called Heinz Hopf and also simultaneously discovered by a physicist called Dirac in his construction of a monopole. Berry was the one who established the link between the Hopf fibration and the Pancharatnam effect and this is the correct history.

Also Amber G. you should take a look at Chapter 8 of Chandrasekhar's book on "Introduction to Stellar Structures" . This chapter deals with quantum statistics and he consistently refers to the "Einstein-Bose statistics" in the text and title. I am not sure you would then categorize Chandra whom I knew as a racist. Thus I dont agree with your post that writing Einstein-Bose was synonymous of a racist. Chandra himself faced open racism. I have a first person account of a rather disturbing incident
when Chandra joined the Univ. of Chicago. There was a faculty dinner.
At the dinner Chandra as a a new faculty was invited and so was a mathematician G.O. Bliss who was a notorious racist. Hutchins was the president of Chicago and a visionary who had hired Chandra. At some point Bliss came up to Hutchins and said" President Hutchins you have forced me to shake hands with this black man Chandrasekhar you have hired and now I am going to the washroom to wash my hands".

Also Alok Niranjan your comments about the dispute between Chandra and Eddington are incorrect. You should read the two lectures Chandrasekhar delivered at Eddington's 100th birtday conference in 1982
and are in a collection of essays by Chandrasekhar entitled Truth and Beauty. The article is called "Eddington: The most distinguished astrophysicist of our time". It is a description of Eddington's work and touches on the controversy. The biography of Chandra entitled "Chandra" by Kameshwar Wali of Univ. of Syracuse is also illuminating.

The problem was that Eddington was harsh on many people, Jeans, Milne and Fowler all felt his ire, read Chandra's article and you will read many anecdotes. At that time only one white dwarf was known the companion to Sirius, known as Sirius B. This was thought as the ultimate fate of all stars. It was reasoned that even if Chandrasekhar was correct a star above the Chandrasekhar limit would in its death throes explode
and shed off excess weight thus explaining the supenovae of dying stars
and then after having shed off the excess weight prevent gravitational collapse and retire from life as a white dwarf. Thus the white dwarf was thought off as the fate of all stars. Radio-astronomy was unknown and thus the existence of pulsars( also called neutron stars)
and evidence for Black holes unknown. Remember that pulsars where only discovered in 1967. Even Landau wrote a paper in 1932, one year after Chandrasekhar's ApJ paper with the same conclusions as Chandra's paper and he dismisses his conclusions as a paradox of quantum mechanics.

[JE Menon]

Looks like BRF is up to its eyeteeth in physicists and mathematicians...

[Alok_N]

Alok Niranjan your comments about the dispute between Chandra and Eddington are incorrect. You should read the two lectures Chandrasekhar delivered at Eddington's 100th birtday conference in 1982
and are in a collection of essays by Chandrasekhar entitled Truth and Beauty. The article is called "Eddington: The most distinguished astrophysicist of our time". It is a description of Eddington's work and touches on the controversy.

I have not read the book. However, nearly half a century is a long time to forgive and forget ...

I don't recall where exactly I read about the problems Eddington created for Chandra ... I was many decades ago ... perhaps, you know of some sources? Why do you think that the controversy emerged in the first place?

[yaska]

I think the influence of Indian mathematics on current mathematics is vastly understated. There is evidence that differential calculus was invented in India and it was trasmitted to Europe by missionaries. Please see the articles by Dr C. K. Raju on this matter.

That Europe's mathematicians were familiar with Indian maths is beyond doubt. A famous challenge problem in Number Theory posed by Fermat was straight out of one of Bhaskara's work
(it was to find integer solutions for 61x^2 + 1 = y^2 , modern historians of explain this away as just a coincidence!). Given this, it is quite fishy that we do not find any acknowledgement of Indian sources in the works of these people.

If for some reason European civilization were to suddenly disappear from the face of the Earth, what we Indians would owe them in terms of science technology would be less than what Europeans owe India.

Originally posted by vishnua:
[QB]aryabhata (500 AD) ...Bhaskara (12th century) Mâdhava (c 1340-1425) and Nîlakantha (c 1444-1545), /QB]

BTW I some times coach High/middle school math teams amd make a special point to make sure that correct terminlogy is used .. And these terms are being increasingly standard in new books and scientific literature ...

Eg Arctan(x)= x - x^3/3 +x^5/5 is now known as Madhava-Gregory series (Old text books, even published in India would call it Gregory series)

Similary I have seen expansion of sin(x) and cos(x) reffered as Madhava-Newton power series....

Of course, Brahmgupta's formula for cyclic quadrilateral is fairly well known... and I have seen many American Middle school math kids/books calling it as such...

[Sridhar]

If for some reason European civilization were to suddenly disappear from the face of the Earth, what we Indians would owe them in terms of science technology would be less than what Europeans owe India.

There is no doubt that the world owes much to India, particularly in the field of mathematics. But statements like the above undermine the credibility of whatever else is said and ensure that they are not taken seriously (even if they are correct). Hyperbole is best avoided when making any claim.

[yaska]

Ok, you have a valid point but, I did not think the statement I made was a hyperbole!

I guess we have all internalized the western propoganda to a large extent. Any deviation from the standard picture of the great western scientific tradition starting with the greeks is viewed with suspicion at best and condescension at worst.

There is no doubt that the world owes much to India, particularly in the field of mathematics. But statements like the above undermine the credibility of whatever else is said and ensure that they are not taken seriously (even if they are correct). Hyperbole is best avoided when making any claim.

[Gudakesa]

Regarding the Berry phase phenomenon. Pancharatnam was one of the earliest to recognize this phenomenon in optics. Also, Van Vleck considered the occurence of this phase in atomic and molecular systems in a paper on the Born-Oppenheimer approximation in the early 1930's. Berry has taken the trouble to investigate the history of this geometric phase and he was the one to recognize Pancharatnam's contributions and make people aware of them.

Regarding Einstein-Bose statistics, Einstein very much deserves his name in it because he recognized the generality of Bose' work on the distribution of photons, to all bosons and thereafter extended this work to more general cases. Besides, Einstein did not need to get credit for work where he had no contribution. He was by then, already the greatest physicist after Newton.

PS: The correct title of the book mentioned is "Geometric Phases in Physics" Eds. Shapere and Wilczek, if anyone wants to check it out (it is a really nice compilation.).

PPS: It is important to know about Indian contributions to science and technology. At the same time it is also important to recognize the contributions of others. Science is not a political matter. Everyone benefits when someone does an important piece of scientific work, so pretending that European contributions are not really that important is self delusion.
We must recognize that we have a great deal to do in these matters. For example, may I point out that while Chandrasekhar and Khurana are Indian by birth, they have done all their work abroad in countries with an European tradition of research, and they were/are no longer Indian citizens. Someone like C.V Raman or Pancharatnam or G.N Ramachandran are far more important because they did all their work in India and were a link to an older, indigenous tradition of knowledge.

[Sridhar]

Yaska:

The point is that extolling one's own contribution does not automatically imply denying others' legitimate contributions. For some, these two seem to have to go together. That is where 'hyperbole' comes in. Stick to the facts and nobody will have any problems with what you say.

Further, if you truly believe that there wasn't a great advance in science and technology in Europe in the last few centuries or indeed that the Greeks did not contribute to the development of science and that it is all 'Western propaganda', I shall have nothing more to say!

It is one thing to put the facts correct and ensure that ancient (or for that matter modern) Indian discoveries get due credit. It is quite another to try and take away legitimate credit due to others. That may be ok in 'Krauncha Dweepa' while partaking of the ghee in the ocean of ghee surrounding it but not necessarily in the real world (Bharatavarsha in Jambudweepa which is unfortunately surrounded on three sides not by an ocean of ghee or a 'ksheera sagara' of milk, but one with undrinkable salty water).

Now back to documenting and discussing the contributions of India to Science.

[yaska]

Err...do you think it is possible that you are suffering from the disease that you are so eager to diagnose? If you read my statement carefully, I was talking in terms of what Indians and Europeans owe one another. I have not diminished the acheivements of either side. It would be foolish to suggest that european innovations are without value.

No offense meant, but can we think beyond stereotypes?

The point is that extolling one's own contribution does not automatically imply denying others' legitimate contributions. For some, these two seem to have to go together. That is where 'hyperbole' comes in.

[Sridhar]

No legitimate case can be made that the contributions of Europeans to science and technology are less than what ancient Indians did. It does not require much effort to see this. If anything, the advances in the last few centuries, primarily by people living in the Western world, are phenomenal - much more than in any time in history. This is not to deny the huge contributions made by other civilizations, including the Indian civilization. Without that foundation and particularly the foundation in mathematics laid by Hindu mathematicians, none of the discoveries and inventions of the last 3 or 4 centuries would have been possible.

It is definitely hyperbole (and an extreme one at that) to claim that we have had less to benefit from European developments in science than they have from us (i.e. that we owe them less than they owe us). And to claim this to anybody degrades the value of even truthful and legitimate claims that may be made.

Regarding stereotypes, if your refernce is to my comment on Jambudweepa etc. my apologies. It was only in jest.

This is my last post on the topic.

[yaska]

Without that foundation and particularly the foundation in mathematics laid by Hindu mathematicians, none of the discoveries and inventions of the last 3 or 4 centuries would have been possible.

Then you do support my statement!

[Sridhar]

Nope, I don't agree with you and I don't find it (i.e. the claim that the Europeans owe more to us than vice versa) to be a logical consequence of what I said (that the later discoveries would not have been possible without the earlier ones). For that matter, even the discoveries by Indian mathematicians did not come from nowhere. They built on earlier work and there is evidence to the effect that there was much interchange of knowledge in both directions (to and from India) even in ancient times.

Since I said that it was my last post, I shall not discuss this further. It is a digression from the main topic of the thread, which is to discuss the achievements in Science and Technology in India.

[kvjayan]

In a scientific discussion, let's be correct. Please note-it is (Prof.) Khorana and not Khurana.

[abhishek]

Indian physicist vindicated in black hole controversy

[Vadivel]

Meet the Indian who took on Stephen Hawking

An Indian theoretical physicist who questioned the existence of black holes and thereby challenged Stephen Hawking of Britain at last feels vindicated. But he is sad.

Abhas Mitra, at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) in Mumbai, was perhaps the first and the only scientist who had the guts to openly challenge Hawking of Cambridge University who is regarded by many as the modern-day Einstein.

For over 30 years Hawking and his followers were perpetuating the theory that black holes -- resulting from gravitational collapse of massive stars -- destroy everything that falls into them preventing even light or information to escape.

Mitra, four years ago, in a controversial paper in the reputed journal, Foundations of Physics Letters, showed that Hawking's theory was flawed. He proved black holes couldn't exist because their formation and existence flouted Einstein's general theory of relativity.

Except a handful, the majority of mainstream scientists dismissed Mitra's conclusions even though, till now, no scientist has contradicted him in writing. Mitra invited several notable black hole theorists including Hawking and Jayant Narlikar of India to criticise his work but no one replied.

Naturally, Mitra now feels vindicated following Hawking's own admission two weeks ago at a conference in Dublin, Ireland, that there isn't a black hole "in the absolute sense."

In essence, Hawking's "new" black holes never quite become the kind that gobble up everything. Instead, they keep emitting radiation for a long time -- exactly what Mitra showed in his paper.

Hawking's about-turn has vindicated Mitra. But, in retrospect, he feels sad about the treatment he got at home while trying to take on Hawking all by himself.

Too "embarrassed" to be associated with a man who challenged Hawking, even Mitra's close colleagues avoided him and he became an outcast. To add insult to injury, BARC authorities removed Mitra from the theoretical physics division on the excuse that this division was meant only for those doing "strategic research."

"The ironic element in this whole exercise," Mitra told PTI, "is that the person who actually dared to show that there cannot be any black holes was completely ignored both by the academicians and the media."

A black hole is characterised by an imaginary boundary called the "event horizon" that shuts everything within. But in 1976 Hawking introduced quantum mechanics into the problem and claimed that black holes do radiate energy -- although at a low rate -- and ultimately vanish into nothingness.

The vanishing act, however, destroys all the trapped information as well - directly conflicting with the laws of quantum physics that say that information can never be completely wiped out. This is the "information loss paradox" associated with black holes that, in a way, was created by Hawking's own work.

One logical resolution of this paradox would have been to realise that black holes did not exist. But Mitra says that such sweeping, yet logical thinking "was never undertaken by either party involved in this prolonged debate and they kept on debating effectively to make the paradox more popular and perpetuating."

It was then that Mitra published his seminal paper showing that gravitational collapse of massive star can at best produce an "Eternally Collapsing Object" but not an "event horizon" or a black hole in the strict sense. "Since no event horizon is formed, there is no paradox at all in the first place," Mitra argued.

In a subsequent work Mitra showed that the "Eternally Collapsing Objects" that he proposed are actually the massive compact objects now referred to as Black Hole Candidates (BHCs).

Motivated by Mitra's work, American physicists Stanley Robertson and Darryl Leiter have confirmed in 2002 that BHCs have intense magnetic fields as predicted by Mitra and therefore are not real black holes which cannot have magnetic field.

Mitra says that in the light of new developments, "the supposed black holes are not really black holes and it would be intellectual dishonesty to still call them as black holes and keep the debate alive."

Though his own colleagues had sidelined Mitra after his first paper, he is solaced by the encouraging e-mails he had received from several physicists around the world.

One from Salvatore Antoci, University of Padova, Italy, a noted relativist says: "Let me express to you my great joy in seeing your much-disputed paper eventually accepted for publication by Foundations of Physics Letters. Convincing the community of relativists about the mythical nature of black holes will remain a tremendous task, but it is a little less desperate thanks to your success."

Peder Norberg, of the Department of Physics, Durham University, UK, said he carefully read through Mitra's paper and found "that most of the results presented there are more than impressive" while Stanley Robertson, a relativist of South Oklahoma State University, USA said: "On first becoming acquainted with your work, I was dubious, thinking it unlikely that something as profound as belief in the existence of black holes could become erroneously established in the literature. In the meanwhile, I have found no errors in your work. It is fascinating."

The only Indian who praised Mitra's work was relativist Pankaj Joshi of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai.

The BARC scientist recalls the episode in the 1930s when Subramanian Chandrasekhar's work on the upper mass limit of white dwarfs was considered incorrect by celebrated astrophysicists like Sir Arthur Eddington even though no one could precisely point out any error in Chandra's work.

[vsunder]

The name Yellapragada Subbarow may not be familiar to most Indians and even less familiar to physicians of Indian origin in the Yew Nited Pradeshes, certainly more should be done to honor him. Subbarow was born in 1895 in Bhimavaram in West Godavari district. He took a medical degree from Harvard and then got a Ph.D. in biochemistry under Fiske.
Later he joined the Pearl River division of Lederle labs in 1940. There he was instrumental in synthesizing folic acid, tetracycline and other drugs.
Unfortunately very few people know about him. Here is one article

http://www.vigyanprasar.com/dream/july9 ... ticle2.htm

Another one is:

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi- ... 4/ABSTRACT

There are others on the web.

[JTull]

Simplifying AIDS cocktail

[Neela]

Indian physicist vindicated in black hole controversy

Is this the paper ?

Journal:Foundations of Physics Letters
NON-OCCURRENCE OF TRAPPED SURFACES AND BLACK HOLES IN SPHERICAL GRAVITATIONAL COLLAPSE
Abhas Mitra
Volume 13, Issue 6, Dec 2000

[SaiK]

if true, why is it BARC not appologizing?

[Ajith]

Hello Friends,

One name we should mention here is Mr. Sam Petroda for his contribution to telecommunication ad electronics as general. He holds many patents.

Another person will be Dr. Vidya Sagar he worked in the filed of control engineering and later went on to establish Center For Artificial Intelligence and Robotics in Bangalore. I am not sure where he is now. He left CARE some time back.

If some one can post more info on the above people, it will be great !!

Cheers,

Ajith

[JE Menon]

Krsna,

Firstly not sure how BARC can apologise...and to whom. The allegations so far have come from the media. I watched the unassuming scientist on TV today and he said his ideas were supported by many people at BARC and TIFR as well as overseas. He noted that he was isolated only "in a broader sense" and even that quote was from the interviewer. Funny thing was, interviewer asked the poor chap to explain what it was all about, and a few seconds after Dr. Mitra started, said interviewer cut him off saying it was getting "too technical for our audience" - and that was that. The culprits? NDTV.

[Krishna]

Another person will be Dr. Vidya Sagar he worked in the filed of control engineering ...
I am not sure where he is now.

Ajith,

Dr Vidyasagar is now a VP in TCS. This is Dr Vidyasagar's Homepage

Krishna

[abhishek]

Dr Vidyasagar is now a VP in TCS. This is Dr Vidyasagar's Homepage

I read all his articles in his TCS homepage....man...I have to respect this guy......I would suggest every one to read them....

[JE Menon]

Post on behalf of vsunder who is experiencing some technical problems with new forum software:

____________________________

Since there have been allusions to this controversy above and some have asked what was this controversy I shall take a stab and explain the situation is I hope High School language. The events detailed in this post took place almost 74 years ago to the day. Chandrasekhar was on board the SS Lloyd Triestino enroute to Venice on his way to Cambridge to study under Ralph Fowler. He left Bombay on July 31, 1930 and had with him three books on Physics: 1. Eddington's "The Internal Constitution of Stars" herafter called Book E, 2. Arthur Compton's " X-rays and Electrons"
and 3. Sommerfeld's "Atomic Structure and Spectral Lines". In addition he had read Fowler's 1929 classic on "Statistical Mechanics" with its applications to Astrophysics and was thoroughly familiar with its contents which would play a crucial role on what happened on the voyage.

Our first order of business is to understand what an eqn. of state is. Loosely it is an eqn. connecting various thermodynamic quantities.
In school we give it colorful names, Boyle's Law, Charles's Law and they are all versions of the eqn.

PV=nRT
where P is pressure, V=volume, n=number of moles of the gas and T=temperature and R is an absolute constant. This is the eqn. of state of an ideal, dilute gas. Now for our purposes I plan to write it a little differently that what your favorite teacher in school did. I will divide by V the volume and identify
n/V, number of moles/Volume as density=d. So our eqn can be re-written as

P=(density)RT----------(1)

Now let us turn our attention to those exotic objects, Stars. It is quite amazing we can figure out what a star does sitting in our homes or offices.
Now what keeps a star in equilibrium. There are three objects at work.

1. The pressure of the stuff making up the star or at least its core.

2. The radiation pressure of the fusion process converting hydrogen and helium

3. The gravitational pressure of the weight of the star.

Basically the equilibrium is achieved by the first two balancing the third,
so we have

Pressure of the stuff+ radiation pressure=Gravitational pressure.

Now a white dwarf has exhausted all its nuclear fuel so no help from the radiation pressure anymore and only the pressure of the stuff can compensate the gravitationl pressure so in a white dwarf equilibrium is achieved by:

pressure of the stuff making up the star= gravitational pressure------(2)

Now the gravitational pressure is easy to calculate. It is found in Eddington's book or Chandrasekhar's book on stellar structure,


gravitational pressure= A (mass of the star)^1/3 x (density of the star)^4/3 ---------(3)

here A is a universal constant.

Now what is the pressure of the stuff( a better word and more sophisticated word is degenerate electron pressure) well for that
we need to figure out the eqn. of state, a link between pressure and density and here the fun begins. Well Chandra knew from reading Fowler's book that the eqn. of state in the stellar core is given by,

Pressure = c (density)^5/3 ------(4)

c is a universal constant. Notice immediately unlike our old gas law, the temperature term is missing. This formula is obtained by using Fermi-Dirac statistics of quantum mechanics and need not bother us except for one fact that immediately jumped at the 19 year old Chandrasekhar on board the ship. In obtaining (4) the quantum mechanics( Fermi-Dirac statistics in particular) is combined with the NEWTONIAN formula from schooldays:

momentum =mass x velocity. -----(5)

Now Chandra reasoned that in the stellar core of white dwarfs the densities are enormous, after all a teaspoon of the stuff making up the white dwarf weighs 3-4 tons. So he reasoned the electrons making up the stuff must be moving around at near relativistic speeds. So he decided to find what (4) look like if we replace (5) with its correct analog from the special theory of relativity. He expected everything to still work out the same and the world to be still OK. Now why does the stuff in the stellar core move around at relativistic speeds. This is simple to understand for BR types. Take Musharraf in his Fuehrer bunker. Now imagine a bunker with moveable walls. Now in the beginning he can move to several rooms. Now imagine the walls closing in on him, his mobile space gets limited. What does he do; he gets more agitated, he runs about more and more in the limited space. So we have pinned his location exactly and he compensates by his momentum increase.
This is the so-called Heisenberg uncertainty principle and explains the reason why in the degenerate matter in the white dwarf the speeds are getting to be relativistic as the star crumples on itself. Allright back to Chandra. As soon as he decided
replacing (5) with its correct relativistic analog and re-calculating (4) he set about it, the books he had on board were enough to finish the calculation to re-do (4) and what did he get:

Pressure = b (density)^4/3 ------- (6)

here b is a universal number.
So now we get immediately the mass -radius relation of Chandrasekhar.

Because plug in (6) and (3) into the equilibrium eqn (2)

b(density)^4/3= A(mass of the star)^1/3 x(density)^4/3

Now the astounding thing, (density)^4/3 cancels out and we get,

mass of the star= (b/A)^3

So if mass of the star exceeds (b/A)^3 there is NO EQUILIBRIUM possible and the gravitational pressure wins and the whole business scrunches down to a point, COLLAPSE. The quantity (b/A)^3 when calculated out is exactly 1.5 Solar masses the CHANDRASEKHAR LIMIT!!!!! This is the threshold which can be supported by the pressure of the stuff, above it gravity wins.

Our reasoning was very Newtonian and if we re-did this using general relativity we would have found instability and formation of a black hole.
Chandrasekhar did this in 1962, that is re-did the above heuristic computation on board the ship in 1930 in the framework of general relativity. Off course in 1930-1931 he wrote several papers putting the discussion above onto a firm rigorous basis. The argument above is not rigorous to publish!

Now for Eddington this was a shock. He never believed eqn. (6).
He labelled (6) as "the illegitimate child of an unholy wedlock between relativity and quantum mechanics". Basically he had no mathematical or Physics argument against (6) but he did succeed in giving the impression that Chandra knew neither quantum mechanics or special relativity and had combined them in an illegal way and the white dwarf was the ultimate fate of all stars and relativistic degeneracy as obtained by Chandrasekhar a fraud.
This is what I would tell a High school student about the controversy.

[putnanja]

Triple helix & Indian science

AUGUST 7 is a historic date in Indian science. It was on this date, 50 years ago, that G.N. Ramachandran, he was popularly known as GNR, unravelled the basic structure of the biomolecule collagen. The work is undoubtedly the most important in the fundamental sciences to emerge from independent India.

[JE Menon]

More from vsunder
on the Abhas Mitra black hole issue


Here is an article that appeared in the OP-Ed of the New York Times on Tuesday. It casts a lot of light on what Hawking said and did not say.
It seems that DDM has taken this fellow Abhas Mitra for a ride and unfortunately he will get shafted. It seems that Hawking speculated not on if black holes exist which they very much do since 1918 but on whether information can be retrieved from them. The situation is as I know as follows.
In 1916 when Einstein proposed his General theory of Relativity no solutions were known for his field eqns. The very next year in 1917 Karl Schwarzchild
found a solution. He communicated it to Einstein from the Russian front.
This solution has the property that at a certain distance from the origin
space coordinates and time coordinates get reversed. This sheath around the origin(where time and soace coordinates get reversed) is called the event horizon and thus by general relativity information cannot leak out from inside the event horizon. Schwarzchild died 6 months after his solution to the Einstein eqn. was published. Einstein and the Physics community were astonished with the Schwarzchild solution. The Schwarzchild solution is called a Black Hole solution. Later in 1963 Roy Kerr found another solution to the Einstein eqn. This was a rotating Black hole unlike the static solution of Schwarzchild. Thus by general relativity Black holes exist, they are the solutions to Einstein's field equations. Nobody disputes that, except DDM. After all Chandrasekhar has a 500 page book called The Mathematical theory of Black Holes.

Now the point is to bring in some quantum mechanics and this is the holy grail of physicists to couple Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. Hawking showed some 30 years ago that if some quantum effects are allowed then the impervious barrier of the event horizon of general relativity becomes a little penetrable in the sense that
radiation can escape but he did not establish that information can escape. That is if I went into a black hole
I would disappear but from the radiation that Hawking predicts that a Black hole emanates it is still unknown or uncertain you would be unable to re-construct me or my history. That is this is still an open question and debatable that information also leaks out. That is a holy grail too decide one way or another is information transfer possible by allowing quantum effects
in General relativity or not. General relativity pure and simple says nothing can ever leak out.


Now Hawking has speculated and this is the operative word speculation, not a shred of calculation or evidence; that "perhaps" it is possible that information can be retrieved from a black hole. Well I can speculate that Musharraf loves India,
and like Hawking take a poll amongst my friends and decide if that is true.
This is not Science but the ramblings of a man who should be austere and quiet like Chandrasekhar was and base ramblings with rigor than seek cheap publicity with speculation.


You can read the Ginsparg article and understand this. In any case the amount of time it would take to retrieve the information from a black hole is longer than the total age the universe will survive. So in principle no information will leak out even after hell freezes over.