Jayant Vishnu Narlikar Quotes

Science in India is getting better support now than in the past... Doing research has changed in the way that it is very grant oriented. The mentality that some accepted paradigm must be believed has become more rigid.

Space-time in an expanding universe changes over time, so the full quantum description of a neutrino. in that type of universe is different in the past and the future. Neutrinos would behave in both expanding and unchanging "steady state" universes.

Science popularization involves information about science explaining the things and their implications in detail, or any beliefs the reader might have and also tell them about the newer discoveries so as to enlarge the persons horizons.

A black hole is the ultimate manifestation of a region of strong gravity. The pull of gravity in a black hole is so strong that even light cannot escape from it and time stands still.

Now with the big bang there is only one event that happened. So like the sun you can’t say that there are other big bangs going on that are what ours was like. The second problem is that at the big bang mathematics and physics break down. So there is no way of mathematically describing it. That is not a satisfactorily scientific approach, to ascribe something to speculations which you cannot justify using mathematics and physics.

He, a Cambridge physicist who, along with Fred Hoyle, Thomas Gold and Hermann Bondi, believed there was no start to the universe – no "big bang", as Hoyle so memorably (and mockingly) put it.

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.

When you claim that the universe started in this particular way you are making a very profound statement. If I make a statement saying that the sun started in a certain way, I would immediately be asked for proof that the sun started in that way. I will have to go around gathering evidence of [[w:Solar systems}Solar systems]] forming, stars forming. I will have to produce evidence saying that this is how new solar systems are being formed, so the sun must have been formed in the same manner. That is a reasonably credible assumption.

If you see firm evidence of neutrinos arriving at the detector before they are sent, that can't happen in a Steady steady state cosmology, so the [[w:Big Bang|big bang has to be right. Or equivalently, no faster-than-light neutrinos, no big bang.

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.

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.

His idea may not solve the mystery of faster-than-light neutrinos, and it may not even shed much light on it – the details of the analysis might be wrong, or be filled with old-fashioned ideas. But I thought it was fascinating that a 50-year-old New Scientist story touched on a topic that is all over the headlines today.

Fred Hoyle and Wickramasinghe have argued that microorganims fill up the whole of space. One finds dust and biological molecules between stars. Why not microorganisms? They assumed in one example, E. coli filling up interstellar space and then they calculated how much the absorption of light at different wavelengths from the E. coli model would be. They showed that the extinction curve i.e. absorption curve, was precisely followed for some infra red source. So their argument was that these micro organisms must exist.

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.

Cambridge was my goal, so once I got admission and scholarship, I decided to go there - I went there after my B.Sc at 19, I did my Masters in 3 years, by age 22 and PhD in another 3 years, by 25 years of age.