Jayant Vishnu Narlikar: A contrarian cosmologist and his worldviewJayant V

 Jayant Vishnu Narlikar, who passed away on Tuesday at his residence in Pune, is revered by India’s scientific community as a founding father of the related disciplines of astrophysics and cosmology. He was the founding director of India’s foremost astrophysics institute, the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA), and indeed, it was his brainchild. Dozens – if not hundreds – of India’s scientists were mentored by him during his long career, and he also pursued his own research interests until the end of his days.

 

As with many scientists (think of Schrodinger’s Cat and Feynman’s safe-breaking exploits), there was a playful aspect to his intellect. He looked at things from unusual perspectives. He wrote alternative what-if histories, explained difficult scientific theories with funny analogies, and leavened his lectures with jokes and humorous asides.

 

 

That playfulness was combined with a certain intellectual stubbornness. Narlikar never accepted the “Big Bang” theory, which is the most commonly accepted explanation for the origin of the universe. His scepticism may have resulted from the fact that his PhD adviser at Cambridge was the legendary Fred Hoyle. Hoyle actually coined the term “Big Bang”, but he did so ironically because he never believed in it, putting together an alternative explanation in the Steady State hypothesis, which Narlikar also espoused.

 

While the Big Bang postulates the universe began in one catastrophic explosion, the Steady State model suggests there was no such explosive start to creation. Most scientists are on the Big Bang side of the fence, but Narlikar continued to look for ways to tweak the Steady State hypothesis to fit with known data all his life.

 

The Hoyle–Narlikar Hypothesis attempted to synthesise Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity with Mach’s Principle, bringing in gravity to suggest that the inertia of any object is influenced by all the other mass in the universe. His other research interests included: Quantum cosmology, which assumes the universe is a wave and asks questions such as whether there is a particle that imparts gravity, just as the Higgs Boson imparts mass; and action-at-a-distance physics, which looks at the way in which quantum entanglement works.

 

By the mid-1960s, Narlikar was well-known in Cambridge’s physics community, where he had attained the distinction of becoming Senior Wrangler (the undergraduate topper in the mathematics tripos). 

 

But in 1972, he decided to return to join the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) in Mumbai, where he led the theoretical astrophysics group. This marked the beginning of India’s domestic research into astrophysics. 

 

In 1988, he became the founding director of IUCAA, which tried a new approach. It aimed to promote research through collaboration, bringing together fellows drawn from different institutions. Under his leadership, IUCAA became a global centre for theoretical and observational astronomy.

 

Narlikar was also a great science communicator, and that filtered through into the IUCAA ethos. On open days, IUCAA invites schoolchildren to wander around the wonderful campus, and it holds many open lectures aimed at general audiences.

 

There are uncounted numbers of young scientists whose first encounter with science came at an IUCAA open day. Narlikar also headed a committee set up by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) to redesign school textbooks in science and mathematics. Decades later, those textbooks are still lauded on social media as masterworks, which introduced maths, physics and chemistry to generations of young Indians.

 

Narlikar also tirelessly promoted the scientific temper referred to in the Constitution by writing innumerable popular science books and articles, in English and Marathi. In tandem with his friend, the late rationalist Narendra Dabholkar, he set up public experiments that hilariously debunked astrology.

 

He also appeared on radio and television programmes, explaining science in a simple manner with funny analogies. When the LIGO experiment first detected gravitational waves in 2016, he used an unforgettable analogy to explain the sensitivity of the LIGO apparatus: “Imagine a fly sitting on an elephant. The weight of the fly is added to his body but the elephant will not feel it. What LIGO detected was much smaller than the impact of the fly sitting on the elephant.”

 

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In his spare time, he wrote intriguing science fiction stories and alternative histories. Some readers may recall his famous story where the Marathas win the Third Battle of Panipat in 1769, and the map of India is thus altered. He was a good enough writer to have won a Sahitya Akademi prize for his Marathi autobiography, and he was awarded the Unesco Kalinga Prize in 1996 for his untiring efforts to popularise science.

 

Narlikar received many other awards and honours in his career, including the Padma Bhushan and the Padma Vibhushan. He served as president of the International Astronomical Union’s commission on cosmology from 1994 to 1997, a testament to his global standing. And of course, he served on multiple Indian committees.

 

Apart from his accomplishments as a researcher, he leaves a great legacy as a mentor, a builder of institutions, and a communicator. The institutions he helped to build, the textbooks he helped compose, and the ideas he proposed continue to influence the way science is practiced and taught.