Jayant Narlikar - People Quotes

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Biologists conventionally think that it is a crazy idea. First they argued that micro organisms cannot last through the passage through UV, X rays, gamma rays. Now people have shown in laboratory experiments that bacteria learn to survive. So that argument doesn't work. People are still not receptive. It is like the heliocentric theory of Copernicus. Biologists are going through the same phase.

Jayant Narlikar
Each scientific institute in my opinion should have a public outreach program... all the research you are doing is funded by the government. The government gets MONEY from the people, so you owe something to the people. You are shutting yourself in an ivory tower, saying that all these people outside the scientific community do not understand it. That is not the right attitude.

Jayant Narlikar
In 1963, when I completed my PhD, it was mostly on the steady-state theory using mathematical formulations to describe creation of matter. People always argued that you cannot have matter coming out of nothing, what would happen to the law of conservation of matter. It is a normal criticism of the steady-state theory. One could answer it either in one sentence by saying what is the big-bang theory where the entire universe came out of nothing, so you are violating the law of conservation of matter and energy in a big way. But that would be to point out the weakness of the other theories and not answering your own theory.

Jayant Narlikar
So it was better to think of formulations which could explain the creation of matter without violating the law of conservation of matter... For that we used what is called as negative energy, which at that time was considered unrealistic. There was a good example of negative energy, mainly Newtonian gravity. Newtonian gravity is a negative energy system because gravitational potential energy is negative and we i. e, Fred Hoyle and me, worked out a fairly consistent method of describing this whole thing. Today what people call phantom fields, an idea which is catching up with people trying to explain some problems of the big-bang, these phantom fields are what we had proposed way back in the 1960's.

Jayant Narlikar
In western society, there is a problem similar to India that the income of a research scientist is less than that of a management person. But perhaps the facilities and the infrastructure being much advanced in the western universities, they are able to attract and retain the people. In our case this can happen but not to the extent we would like. A corrective measure to some extent has been taken by the establishment of the Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research (IISERs). They are doing for pure sciences what IIT's do for applied sciences. Since they are attracting good talent it may happen that you will have more input in research in the next ten years.

Jayant Narlikar
There people who were leaders in their field in Cambridge and they lectured. And what impressed me the most was that all these big names never said that they were busy in their research and did not want to be burdened with lectures. They took their part in the lectures actively.

Jayant Narlikar