Dr. Who and/or Professor Shanku — scientists have changed but has the popular perception ?

I was recently accused of being a person who lacks a sense of humor, in Bengali termed as “Berasik”. The fault was refusing to go to a see a popular Hindi movie in Mantri Mall at Bengaluru. The same person, in the same breadth, told that most scientists are the same everywhere — serious, humorless and grumpy — always thinking and working and worrying — unfit for the civilized world.

Even though heard these before,  I got upset first but then  thought must be there was an element of truth as these were aired repeatedly. I realized that most of the pictures of scientists in books and internet portray a serious, often bearded men, as if there is a competition who can look more serious.

In a number of TV show characters — like Dr. Who, and stories like Satyajit Roy’s Professor Shanku — the scientist-professor seems a crazy character — certainly unsocial.

But in the real world at present the scientist I see around me seems quite different. There is no “gentleman under the elms” symptom any more. What we see largely a group of professionals who can be quite focused and   calculative. There is no “benign neglect” of material life any more.

But at the same time the dichotomy seems to persist.

I also saw in You Tube a few lectures of courses given in famous universities by famous scientists. Professors mostly look serious, almost in pain. There are a few lectures of mine uploaded by my students and colleagues. I looked equally grim, as if a lot depended on what I was going to lecture upon (while exactly the opposite was true!).

I found, personally,  that the mathematicians are the “worst”. I have not seen lectures by philosophers. Physicists also look pretty grim. Einstein was an exception he often smiled through his beard.

Among the chemists however  I  found many excellent speakers who are also entertainers, like Dick Zare, John Mary Lane who can be full of humor. Close to home, Professor CNR Rao, BharatRatna, has always been full of humor and laughter. I remember a trip with him along with many other scientists to Konarak Sun Temple. He kept the whole group entertained with his great sense of humor.  I forego the details of him observations.   But we had many good laughs.

This reminded me of our poet Rabindranath wrote a great short poem where he asserted that he would never get that old when he would looked down upon jokes and laughter and stopped being merry.

But somehow the  label of grim and serious image of scientist has got embedded in popular culture. Let me analyze the scenario at a deeper level. We scientists are certainly a complaining lot.  Scientists have been kicked around from time eternity. Galileo and Copernicus, and many even during 2nd World War. But of late reasons seem to be different. A different kind of kicking, might not be fully un-deserved (excuse me!).

The latest reason is of course the grant. The source of endless pain and tension. One wonders how come we got ourselves into this mess.Scientists have become managers — always traveling, attending meetings …

I cannot imagine how you can be too happy being a manager when you can be a scientist. Being a scientist, solving problems or thinking about them, even writing about them,  can be so much more fun.

Then there  are prizes and Fellowships of various academies. These are real, not just because of the prestige but often your promotion and salary are tied to this. All these perhaps making a scientist more grumpy these days !

At the end of the day  we shall  always have Feynman for us and to show to the rest of the world. I hardly saw a picture of him where he was not smiling. One just feels happy looking at him. He told us to have fun doing science. Actually you can do good science only when you are having fun.

Biman Bagchi

http://www.bimanbagchi.com

profbiman@gmail.com

 

How smart are monkeys, truly?

I am not aware of any IQ tests on monkeys but from my recent close encounters with a monkey in my home 3 times in the last 3 days convinced me that if we could devise apprpriate tests, their IQ  would rank pretty high in animal kingdom (man included). But that does not necessarily imply that they will do well in scientific research. Actually this can be used to disprove any claim of such correlation that one often tries to make.

The monkey I am talking about is an aged male monkey who managed to fox us and enter house by opening lock at apprpriate times, ate banana  and other edibles, then took a nap in front of us, in the balcony. Third time (yesterday) he made a magnificent entrance when the maid opened the balcony door for cleaning. He entered, looked around, smiled ( the is, opened his face with teeth in full view) in greetings and then sat down on a small central table, in front of two of us. He looked at us without malice. In fact I got the distinct impression that he expected an applause.

He then proceeded to eat the artificial flowers that were on the table, as if to complain why we are not giving him banana. We coaxed (actually tried to intimidate) him into leaving but he was completely fearless.He even yawned a few times, as if trying to tell “stop these non-sense”.

When there was no banana in view he reluctantly left us, giving us a look of reproach that you get when you do not treat your guest well.

These close encounters got me into thinking about monkeys to the extent that I started dreaming about them. In one dream, the monkey was telling me how to solve a tricky problem when I woke up with a start only to find that there was no monkey in the dark room.

We are certainly giving monkeys a raw deal, taking away their habitat and also sources of food. After that we shamelessly complain about their trouble.

If monkeys had a writer of their own , what story he/she would have written about mankind ? I would guess they would have nothing but disdain for us. In the movie “Planet of the Apes” (starring great  Charlton  Heston) a pathetic end of man was shown, but the  movie did not depict monkeys correctly. Monkeys in general are not violent, certainly much less than men.

In another example, Richard Dawkins, in his book “Blind Watchmaker” used a monkey as a mindless object typing Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”. May be Shakespeare himself would have used the monkey better.

Biman Bagchi, Bengaluru,

http://www.bimanbagchi.com

profbiman@gmail.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

Without early training and exposure, we are sending Indian researach students on steep downward path in science

[Some blogs are more fun than others and the present one is anything but funny. It is downright sad and is on a topic which makes me angry because this can be amended with some effort. Anyway, please read on. Thanks.]

A few days ago I received a phone call from an ex-PhD student of mine who is now a full professor  and is an established scientist, fairly well-known. This young faculty had been to a Faraday Discussion in England. During the course of conversation, she pointed out that it is futile to blame our students for failure in recent times because our students are hardly prepared for research,  saddled with fairly useless but intensive studies of 5-6 years of the same bookish memory-based training that was in vogue 50 years ago. In Europe, there are now, for the last 15-20 years at least, an increasing number of schools  (summer schools, winter schools, autumn schools — you name it) that train young students, starting from undergraduate level, to advanced methods of research, by the best scientists who are inventors themselves. Teaching and training is intense and sincere  in these schools. Clearly, a tradition is at work there !

This is combined with much better schooling from 7th or 8th grade.

Science has  progressed greatly in the last 50 years.

Let us take the case of computational chemistry, a subject that has become an essential tool in studies of chemistry, biology and materials science. This field has undergone a complete renaissance with huge improvements, driven by rapid advances in computer speed, storage area and related peripherals, in the last two decades. Fairly sophisticated techniques and programmes of free energy calculations in complex systems, calculations of the rates of reactions and rare processes, quantum chemical calculations of fairly large molecules, molecules on surfaces,……  progress has been manifold and vigorous.  Many new packages have appeared (like GROMACS, Amber, DFT etc) that are fairly robust now. Successful use of these techniques require considerable amount of training.

The other area that has undergone great development is the spectroscopy, fueled by rapid advances in laser technology (nano — pico — femto — atto — we traversed these in just 20 years or so).

To continue with  this specific example, our science students come to PhD programme without knowing the very basics of computers, and spectroscopy. The students who come from state universities and colleges have hardly set their eye on a desktop. Because of laptop, they either possess one or at least seen one but their  use has  been limited to word processing, internet, may be photoshop. Nothing that trains them for a professional career in science.

Our young generation has a much better chance of becoming a Tendulkar than a Nobel Prize winning scientist or of that caliber. We are giving them no chance what-so-ever.

Students getting no chance to develop perspective.

In Europe and USA, may be also in Japan, students get exposure to these field may be even in high schools. I knew of a paper co-authored even in 1980 on percolation theory by a student who was in 12th grade. I also know of  high school students who attended classes at Stanford University.

In science research, especially in theoretical research, it is either one or zero in accomplishment. You need to be very good and performing at a high level to succeed. Unfortunately, we do not give our even highly gifted and talented students a fair chance to succeed in today’s highly competitive research. The students perform as they are told by his/her guide. We teachers get frustrated with the lack of originality. May be a glimpse begins to show in the 4th year from those who are talented.

It is all very sad, to say the least !

The least one can do is to start a large number of specialized schools. Actually they need not be too specialized. Talented hungry students will pick-up concepts and techniques pretty fast.

Another alternative comes to mind. Since our educationists and administrators have failed science research students, the students should be encouraged to form their own groups. During our undergraduate studies, the greatest gift was that the Presidency College remained closed for much of the first half of our entire undergraduate studies. That really helped us to branch out. We discussed a lot among ourselves, even tried our hand on research problems — very naive choice of problems but we did learn a few things.

But how to fashion such get together of interested students, obviously on a internet platform. I do know some students communicate via different forums and chats, but that happens more often at PhD level. One needs exposure much earlier.

In Japan I found senior students help junior students in many ways. May be our PhD students can serve the science students in a significant way by keeping contact with their undergraduate institutions. Of course Institutions themselves need to play a role in fostering this interaction. That is where the problem lies.

[After writing this blog, I realized that this  reads more like a siren call, arising from personal  frustration,  although the same is shared by most of my colleagues I discussed with. The frustration is against the static system we continue to adhere to and seem unable to change. Anyway, here it is …. better we express ourselves than otherwise.]

 

Biman Bagchi, IISc., Bangalore.

http://www.bimanbagchi.com

profbiman@gmail.com

 

Fast outside, slow inside ?

Today I received a mail from a university well-known in India containing a  cheque of a few hundred rupees for a service I rendered a year ago or so.It came an old Brown envelope, with hand written address. It was stapled in so many places that we had to tear it open. It reminded me of the letters one used to get from my own university 40 years ago. It brings home the stark message — nothing much has changed in India state and central universities in the last 50-60 years, probably all through our Independence — may be from King Babar’s time.

It is truly amazing how offices in those universities managed to remain the same among the rapid changes (internet, mobile, apps …) that go around them. It reminded me of a story I read in childhood. The story had the title “The same tradition continues” and was quite revealing and went as follows.. A young man used to see a father who used to run a grocery store and used to live in the adjoining quarters (as was the norm in our times) read Ramayana to his young son of 8-9 years of age. It was an every day phenomenon. After a few years our young man (the author of the story) left the locality on job. He returned after retirement after 50 years. One evening while walking back from his everyday stroll, he found the same old thing being repeated and he was so surprised by the image from 50 years back that he almost fainted, as he first thought that he was hallucinating. After gaining composure he realized the 8-9 years old son in his childhood image is now the father reading Ramanaya and son is the next generation.

The author of the story felt very positive about the continuity of tradition but to me it meant that these families have resisted change…. 50  years is a long long time.

We often take a lot of pride in so-called tradition. Tradition certainly has its place in SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS spheres of life like marriage, temples etc.

But what really is tradition ? In the recent movie “Pink” starring Amitav Bacchan, the same issues were raised. What goes in the name of tradition might not always be good for progress. In the said movie, the villain justifies many of his actions in the name of tradition, traditional male values. I encourage you to see the movie.

Thus, when a society becomes too respectful of tradition, progress can be hindered. A person who believes in tradition follows the same path while a more liberal person seeks out new avenues. One must question a tradition before accepting it.

One country where we do not hear of tradition is the USA. You may say that they do not have history or tradition. But one cannot deny that the second half of twentieth century belongs to them entirely, even now. Very few societies have made such an impact as the USA.

I find that among my students the mediocre ones are traditional. They are respectful to teachers, more than necessary and often devoid of any new ideas. Often the bright ones are less traditional in their approach. They challenge me and are more successful in research.

Now I come to the central point of my Blog. When a society pays too much respect to tradition, we often lose the creative, non-traditional students and people in general suffer. The society unknowingly (or, probably knowingly) discriminates against the non-traditional, unusual ones.

In India, we do expect students to behave in certain fashion. We train them to be respectful.

A story told in Robert Jungk’s famous book “Brighter than a thousand Suns” is really revealing. The great German physicist Arnold  Sommerfeld started every class by telling students”there is a wall in front of you which is to be taken down….”, implying that old theories and concepts need to be dismantled.

You cannot be a scientist if you are too respectful. Be a little rebellious and ask questions even when it antagonizes your teachers.

 

Biman Bagchi,

http://www.bimanbagchi.com

profbiman@gmail.com