Unimaginative India

Can Indians think of nuclear physics beyond bombs and reactors?

Everything about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Nuclear Research Centre (CERN) in Geneva is big. The money spent on the project — $3.8 billion — is big. Thousands of scientists, thousands of instruments are part of this mega project.

The 27-km tunnel is the longest for a project of this kind. The instruments which line the tunnel are a few thousand in number, especially the super-sensitive, super-precision magneto-detectors which are key to the success of the super-duper experiment ever in theoretical physics. It is here that Indians make their dramatic appearance, though it is kind of a bit role in the lavish drama. Fifty per cent of those magneto-detectors have been engineered by Indian scientists, right from conception to execution and installation.

What is overlooked in all this number crunching of the elementary kind is that beyond the big budget, big site-laboratory, big instruments and big teams of scientists is that it all stems from a big idea — what is the source of the universe. Without the pioneers’ passion to cross the frontiers of knowledge, to go back to the ancient beginnings — now reckoned to be approximately 13.7 billions years or so — the whole enterprise would be a titanic empty shell.

It should be a matter of pride that Indians are playing a small but the most crucial role in the quest for the Holy Grail of modern physics — to get to know how it all began, and what were that primal stuff and its constituents at ground zero of space-time.

The Indian participation will not be limited to providing instrumentation. India’s string theory groups will be involved in analysing and interpreting the data that flows out of the collision of protons at very nearly the speed of light.

It would be shamefully timid on the part of Indians, who are only too eager to get into a paroxysm of nationalist fervour at the drop of a hat, if they do not ask the question: Why is it that Indian scientists who can make those marvellous instruments which can detect the elusive cosmic particles should not be doing something similar in the country itself?
Why is it that India is not yet a leader in frontier science? Why is it that we are left to play an auxiliary role in the march of science?

These questions need to be asked if India has to forge ahead into the future as a strong and successful country. It is not enough to be a hub of outsourcing in information technology (IT) services and for creating base of thousands of call-centre workers, unless the country is also able to make a breakthrough in staking out a place for itself in technology breakthroughs.

It boils down to this: Can Indians think of big ideas? Or, do big ideas come only when you have big money? It is clear that big money is required to pursue big ideas, but that big ideas are not dependent on access to big funds. This has much to do with the mind-set.

It is quite true that ever since Independence, India has been partial to technology rather than science under the mistaken assumption that science for its own sake is as frivolous as art for art’s stake.

Consider what nuclear means for most informed Indians? It just brings to mind nuclear power, nuclear bombs, nuclear medicine, not necessarily in that order. But very rarely would it also connote in the minds of these people the teasingly infinite, infinitesimal universe of sub-atomic particles.

Indians will be able to cross this mental frontier if they can stop thinking of science in terms of its utility, in terms of visible technology and its benefits to India.

It would be a tragedy of Indians were to be happy with the business prospects of providing instruments to international science projects and earn billions of dollars in foreign exchange.

Of course, money matters. Foreign exchange earnings are good. But there is need for the country to think on its own, and think original as well. Indians, who adore everything American so much, should realise that Americans are quite worried that they have lost the leadership in the field of physics with the LHC venture. It is Europe that seems to be forging ahead.

In spite of its international colours, the LHC certainly remains a European venture because it is Germany, France, Britain and the Netherlands which put in the money.

The United States has contributed $500 million, which is a fraction of the total cost. But it has the largest — 1,000 of them — non-European contingent of scientists in the project.

It is time for India to think as to what it wants to be, what it can be. It is not enough to mouth empty slogans of inculcating scientific thought as laid down in the Directive Principles of the Constitution, and then not do good science.

Email:  r_parsa@dnaindia.net