How well do we know the universe? Remembering Indian scientist Jayant Vishnu Narlikar

Everyone has heard of the “Big Bang Theory.” Naturally. Because it is the most widely accepted, now quite the standard, model of how the universe began. Its staunchest critics are those who take the narrative of creation literally. But few are aware that this very term was coined, somewhat derisively, by its principal opponent, the Cambridge astronomer, Sir Fred Hoyle. That too on a BBC show.

What is equally astonishing, if one thinks of it deeply, is how closely the “Big Bang” theory resembles the creationist religious beliefs of its staunchest opponents. It was proposed by a Catholic priest, Georges Lemaître, the Belgian cosmologist who thought that everything came out of an original “super-atom.”

For a few decades, the principal competitor of the “Big Bang” theory was Hoyle’s “steady-state model,” which evolved into the Quasi-steady-state cosmology (QSS) model and, eventually, and relatedly, to the Oscillating Universe Theory. These theories hold that the universe always existed, whether in a steady state or, now much more likely, in cycles of expansion and contraction across very large intervals of time, going into billions of light years.

Why are we suddenly talking about these issues? Because one of the last main proponents of these alternative cosmological models, Dr Jayant Vishnu Narlikar, is no more. He passed away on May 20, just two months short of his 87th birthday. Narlikar, the recipient of many awards including the Padma Vibhushan, the second highest civilian honour in India, was a well-loved scientist, administrator, teacher, researcher, and writer. Besides hard-core research, Narlikar also popularised science and, later in life, became a fairly well-known science fiction author.

Growing up in Varanasi, where his father was a Math professor at Banaras Hindu University and his mother a Sanskrit scholar, Naralikar went on to pursue higher studies at Cambridge. He was a Senior Wrangler, a very prestigious recognition of genius, at Cambridge, and went on to work with Hoyle for his PhD. He also collaborated with Hoyle on several major and fundamental problems in astronomy, cosmology, and physics. Returning to India, he worked at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai. Later, he founded the famous Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) at the University of Pune.

Narlikar’s influence was enormous, but the fact that he was so well-liked is reflected in the glowing tributes and obituaries flooding the Indian print and digital media. He reached for the stars and, quite literally, revealed a great deal more about them than we knew earlier. One of his other favourite theories, though much less known, was about the origins of life.

Again, following Hoyle, he believed, as he told me personally, that the impulse probably came from outside the earth or our own planetary system. Hoyle called it stellar nucleosynthesis and panspermia, the idea that the potential for life exists throughout the universe and is transmitted by information travelling across galaxies in space dust, meteoroids, comets, even space crafts. Once again, this is now considered somewhat of a fringe belief and not widely accepted by the scientific community.

Many of us who had the occasion and the privilege to know JVN, as he was called, however briefly, couldn’t but be impressed not only by his awesome reputation but also by his humble, understated, humour, and wit. Discounting the “Big Bang Theory” to a fellow author and columnist, he wryly commented that if true, it must have taken less time than to make chai (tea). With me, his conversation was more serious. I met him a couple of times to solicit a chapter for a book on Science and Spirituality in Modern India (2006), which I edited. As I recall, the title of his chapter was, quite evocatively, “The Culture of Science.”

During these exchanges, he said to me, somewhat confidentially if not conspiratorially, that the “Judeo-Christian” school won out with the “Big Bang” idea. It made me think how deeply religion, or religious ideas, are embedded in cosmology. By the same token, “steady-state,” “quasi-steady state,” and “oscillating universe” theories correspond with the Hindu-Buddhist way of thinking. Of course, entropy comes in the way of ideas of the contraction, cyclicity, and the “Big Crunch.”

Narlikar, no doubt, attained a great deal of fame and renown, but when I visited a couple of times, he seemed a trifle disappointed, though not embittered. I got the sense, and I may be wrong, that he felt he had missed the bus — which to me was a metaphor of the Nobel Prize. Science, like fame, is a cruel mistress. In his case, he might have felt that it had gone the other way after coming so close to him. But, then, his guru, Hoyle didn’t win it either.

In that sense, from being a scientist to a science administrator or, what people are now calling him, a “science communicator,” is quite a comedown. I am reminded of other “science communicators” in India, who were not even great scientists, but occupied every conceivable position of importance in India’s huge science and education bureaucracy.

JVN also acknowledged to me that really top class science was very difficult to do in India. Why, I asked. He said, reflectively, and I am paraphrasing from memory, “It is not just a matter of funding, which everyone complains about. The problem is too much politics, too much bureaucracy, but more importantly, society. Society does not seem to support or understand it.”

So much for Jawaharlal Nehru’s “scientific temper,” enshrined as a Fundamental Duty in Article 51A(h) of the Indian Constitution. We have some distance to go before science is fully integrated in what is a deeply traditional and conservative society, which some would say is still trapped in the past.