India’s bestknown physicist, his brilliance was matched only by his wit
NEWDELHI: A brilliant physicist and a scintillating person is how N Mukunda, 79, a retired professor from Indian Institute of Sciences (IISc), remembers his former teacher and long-time collaborator, Ennackal Chandy George Sudarshan. The acclaimed theoretical physicist died on Monday, aged 86.
Sudarshan, India’s bestknown theoretical physicist, was professor emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin at the time of his death.
“He was a scintillating person filled with ideas,” Mukunda said of his former doctoral adviser.
Urjit Yajnik, a professor of physics at IIT Bombay, who was supervised by Sudarshan in the 1980s, remembered him as a father figure who was “difficult to work with because he was a man of strong opinions.”
Yajnik remembers driving up to his supervisor’s house to find him in his comfortable veshti (dhoti ), listening to Carnatic music, busy gardening. “These were free-for-all sessions,” Yajnik recalls, “we could tell him anything, disagree with him on anything.”
What charmed both students apart from Sudarshan’s brilliance as a physicist was his wit — a combination that made him “unusual” . Despite the controversy about not receiving a Nobel Prize for his substantial contributions to his field overshadowing his later years, they said he never lost his good humour.
Sudarshan was born in Kottayam, Kerala in 1931. He studied at CMS College in his hometown before attending the University of Madras and later the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. He studied and taught at the University of Rochester and then at the University of Texas at Austin, where he taught for over 40 years. Yajnik remembers a man caught between India and the US.
Though Sudarshan left India to pursue his doctoral studies at the University of Rochester under Robert
Eugene Marshak in 1955, he never lost touch with India, visiting a few times every year, according to Mukunda. Sudarshan set up the Centre for Theoretical Studies at the IISc in Bangalore in 1972. Initially a place of multidisciplinary studies, it soon gave rise to three specialised centres: Centre for High Energy Physics, the Centre for Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences and the Centre for Ecological Sciences.
The weak interaction in elementary particles based on research that Sudarshan did in 1957 is one of his two contributions that Mukunda believes are most important.
In 1979, three scientists who brought the line of development to its conclusion were awarded the Nobel: Sheldon Lee Glashow, Abdus Salam and Steven Weinberg.
His work in quantum optics around 1963 was another notable contribution seminal in many ways, Mukunda said. It became the basis for the Glauber–Sudarshan P representation. However, only Roy J. Glauber was awarded the Nobel in 2005 “for his contribution to the quantum theory of optical coherence.”
Sudarshan was deeply disappointed at being passed over. “He believed he was not judged and treated and fairly,” Mukunda said. But he was also a man who “was never at a loss for words.” In 2007, speaking to the Hindustan Times, Sudarshan said: “The 2005 Nobel prize for Physics was awarded for my work, but I wasn’t the one to get it. Each one of the discoveries that this Nobel was given for work based on my research.” He was honoured with several other prestigious awards like ICTP Dirac Medal, Padma Vibhushan (2007), Padma Bhushan, Majorana Prize, TWAS Prize, Bose Award (1977) and C V Raman Award (1970). The disappointment over the Nobel didn’t dim the eminent physicist’s sense of humour.
At a social dinner in Bangalore with many non-scientist celebrities, Sudarshan recounted to Mukunda with amusement how he was mistaken for an actual Nobel prize winner. Someone across the table pointed to him and asked a neighbour: “Who is that bearded person there?” The reply: “Don’t you know? He is the world famous physicist Chandrasekhar from the University of Chicago who won the Nobel Prize for his work on liquid crystals!”
Despite overhearing the conversation, Sudarshan did not correct the mistake.