India's two pathbreaking scientists sign out

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.

- DEVANGSHU DATTA

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 Schrödinger'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 skepticism 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.