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A Stroboscopic View of Professor E. C. G. Sudarshan
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- The shloka reads: vaasanaad.vaasudevasya vaasitam te jagat.trayam sarva.bhuuta.nivaaso.si vaasudeva namo.stu te. It can be found towards the end of Vishnu Sahasranama, which itself is part of Anushasana Parva - literally, the 'Book of Instructions' - in the Mahabharatha. Its meaning is: Vasudeva's fragrance permeates all three worlds, And all life resides in Him: Vasudeva, I bow to you. Its relevance to the title of the talk, which mystified me then, and does so even now, can perhaps be understood only by appreciating Sudarshan's lofty sense of universal being.
- At that time I knew only two works of Raja Rao. Kanthapura, written in 1938, was a prescribed text for college students at one time, and I had been amused and impressed by how the author described common native rituals naturally without being stifled by English as the medium. In The Serpent and the Rope, published in 1960, the author discussed in a charmingly autobiographical style, weaving between France and India, such concepts as Existence, Illusion and Reality. The title is a reference to the central concept of the Advaita, of ignorance that leads to the mistaking of Illusion for Reality, the rope for the serpent.
- The citation for the latter reads: 'for his lifetime achievements in different branches of theoretical physics; especially for being the first to propose the Universal V - A Theory of the weak interactions, and to formulate the Quantum Optical Equivalence Theorem, the predictions of both of which have been confirmed by experiments in their minutest details'.
- Rothman, T. and Sudarshan, G., Doubt and Certainty, Perseus Books, 1998. The book is not perfect by any means and has many ideas patched together, somewhat glibly on occasion, but the sheer scope and breadth of topics covered is admirable, often entertaining: quantum mechanics, particle physics, cosmology, symmetry, chirality, Zeno effect, metaphysics - everything that seems to be needed to be appreciative of Nature's ways. Rothman was a tem temporary faculty member in the Applied Physics Department in my School, so I got to know how the book came about. By the way, Sudarshan did not take any royalty from the book.
- The papers presented at the 75th birthday meeting in Austin, 'Sudarshan: Seven Science Quests', appeared in full or as abstracts, in J. Phys: Conf. Series, 2009, 196. In his Dirac Medal lecture, Sudarshan said that the number 'seven' was chosen for reasons of symmetry with his age.
- The selection committee did not advance Sudarshan in the first year of the nomination, but chose him next year. I was somewhat disappointed because I left my position at ICTP a few months prior to the award ceremony. I went back to ICTP to be part of the ceremony, but had to return to New York; as irony would have it, a few hours before the lecture; thus, I have had to content myself by watching it on YouTube. All I could do, even though I was no longer in charge, was to assign a person to take care of Sudarshan's logistical needs; he was not particularly well by then. The Dirac Medal was shared with N. Cabibbo (posthumous). The citation for Sudarshan reads: 'Sudarshan's important contributions to theoretical physics include the discovery (with Robert Marshak) of the V-A theory of weak interactions, which opened the way to the full description of the unified electroweak theory. He has also made innovative discoveries in the field of Quantum Optics, including the Optical Equivalence Theorem, which provides the foundation upon which the investigations of the manifestly quantum or non-classical character of the electromagnetic field are based'. Towards the end of his Dirac lecture, Sudarshan says something as follows (not verbatim but close): 'My friends tell me that my work is not fully appreciated because I publish them in different journals as short papers … and I was pleased that the Proceedings of the Conference for my 75th birthday highlighted my contributions; the contributors were all my friends who would not steal anything from me.' Somehow, that statement seemed to be Sudarshan's own assessment of his scientific interactions; he seemed somewhat at a loss and a shadow of his earlier self.
- Bilaniuk, O. M. P., Deshpande, V. K. and Sudarshan, E. C. G., 'Meta' relativity. Am. J. Phys., 1962, 30, 718.
- Bilaniuk, O. M. P. and Sudarshan, E. C. G., Particles beyond the light barrier. Phys. Today, 1969, 22, 43.
- Thouless, D. J., Causality and tachyons. Nature, 1969, 224, 506.
- Narlikar, J. V. and Sudarshan, E. C. G., Tachyons and cosmology. Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc., 1976, 175, 105.
- Feinberg, G., Possibility of faster-than-light particles. Phys. Rev., 1967, 159, 1089.
- Are there particles faster than light? Sci. Res., August 1967, p. 34.
- Feinberg, G., Particles that go faster than light. Sci. Am., 1970, 222, 68.
- The New York Times, 23 April 1992, obituary section, p. 24: 'Gerald Feinberg, 58, Physicist; Taught at Columbia University'.
- Sudarshan, E. C. G. and Marshak, R. E., Origin of the universal V - A theory. AIP Conf. Proc., 1994, 300, 110. In this paper, the authors post their opinion of the Feynman-Gell-Mann paper as follows: 'Apart from the priority question - which seems easy to resolve - it is difficult to see how the mass reversal invariance argument improves upon chirality invariance in 'deriving' the universal V-A interaction'. As far as Sudarshan was concerned, chirality invariance was the most fundamental level of understanding possible; he seemed to have thought that everything else was a bit of obfuscation.
- R. Marshak discussed this a few times. The gist can be found in the Oral History Interview of Marshak, posted on the AIP website, towards the end of Session IV. It also describes how J. J. Sakurai's paper got written on the same subject (Nuovo Cimento., 1958, 7, 649) - with some crucial input from Marshak, but no acknowledgement of this by the author. Marshak's recollection of events on the weak interaction work is also described in his after-dinner lecture at the 60th birthday celebrations of George Sudarshan, 'The pain and the joy of a major scientific discovery', 1991. He regretted that he did not do enough to promote Sudarshan's work.
- Mukunda, N., The life and work of E. C. George Sudarshan. Curr. Sci., 2019, 116(2), 000-000.
- Feynman, R. P. and Gell-Mann, M., Theory of Fermi interaction. Phys. Rev., 1958, 109, 193.
- Krauss, L. H., Hiding in the mirror. Resonance, 2011, xx, 801.
- Feynman, R. P., Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman!, Norton & Co, New York, USA, 1985, pp. 250-251.
- Around 2005, I had a relatively long conversation with Gell-Mann about this topic (and others), during a ride from Los Alamos to Albuquerque when we were the only two passengers in a limo. My recollection is that he made somewhat different statements during our meeting from the published version referenced below, but I will stick with the latter.
- M. Gell-Mann's interview with S. Lippincott, Caltech Archives, 1997.
- Jagdish Mehra is the author of Richard Feynman's biography. The Beat of a Different Drum: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, 1994 and several volumes on The Historical Development of Quantum Theory.
- On 6 March 1984, Sudarshan nominated Mrs Indira Gandhi for the Nobel Peace Prize as the 'voice of peace and social justice throughout the world'. Alas, she was assassinated in October of that year.
- In his presidential address of the Psychical Society - see Proc. Soc. Psychical Res., 1919, 30, 273-290 - Lord Rayleigh, an outstanding outstanding scientist, honoured with the Nobel Prize for discovering argon, the Cavendish Professor to succeed J. C. Maxwell, President of the Royal Society, etc. had this to say: 'Scientific men should not rush to conclusions, but keep their minds open for such time as may be necessary… Our goal is the truth, whatever it may turn out to be, and our efforts to attain it should have the sympathy of all, and I would add especially of scientific men'. He also added: 'Every trio now knows that the stones to be seen in most museums had an origin thought impossible by some of the leading and most instructed men of about a century ago'. The concern is whether this benevolent and obviously judicious principle allows a lot of crackpot ideas to flourish; and the real question is whether the observations in question can be repeated in many environments and are subject to strict experimental control.
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