Jayant Narlikar: Walking softly, carrying a big shtick

Stellar cosmologist Jayant Narlikar's passing at 86 on Tuesday, peacefully and in sleep, is reminiscent of the gift of death at will, or the "ichha-mrityu" that grandsire Bhishma supposedly had in the Mahabharata. And speaking of grandsires, the demise of this much-decorated and beloved doyen of Indian astrophysicists coincides with the departures of larger-than-life grey eminences M R Srinivasan, venerated "architect" of India's atomic power programme, and Saroj Ghose, the much-admired "father of the science museums movement" in India.

A man of exemplary personal grace and modesty, Narlikar epitomised what the American adage of "walk softly but carry a big stick" advocates. And what a shtick he wielded. Barely in his twenties, had he not the intellectual audacity to challenge the scientific theories, if not shibboleths, advanced by mages of the calibre of Albert Einstein and (posthumously) Ernst Mach and Kurt Godell? The Hoyle-Narlikar Theory of Gravity challenged the more popular Big Bang Theory of the birth of the universe, ostensibly from nothingness.

Rather than sudden inflation, Narlikar and his mentor envisioned a steady expansion as an alternative model of cosmic genesis. Of course, in the true spirit of science, evidence "background radiation" garnered later put more bucks on the Big Bang than on Slow Pulse (prompting Prof Hoyle to recite a line to The Times of India during a long interview: "Theories that come roaring like lions also, alas, retreat bleating like lambs!")

Like our early science stalwarts C V Raman, Homi Bhabha and Meghnad Saha, Narlikar was brilliant at public outreach and pedagogy. And the centre he set up for inter-universities research in Pune did win him a Unesco Kalinga Award.

When he won the Sahitya Akademi Prize for his Marathi autobiography Narlikar spoke out against kite-flying - flights of fancy and fashionable claims being made on behalf of "ancient" Indian science these days. These included make-in-India vimanas and astras used by gods, demons and heroes for settling local land disputes.

To separate such claims from science fiction - a genre in which Narlikar had also made a mark just as his mentor Fred Hoyle did - pure science demands stronger proof, or Pramana. The latter also happens to be the title of the India-born research journal on physics and maths, an arena in which Narlikar excelled winning a Wrangler at Cambridge (with a mathematical Tripos), just as Narlikar's father had done.

By claiming credit for things about which we have no evidence or proof, Narlikar warned we run the risk of reducing the credibility of what our scientists did achieve in the past.

Conversely, in his book Scientific Edge, Narlikar exhorts our science buffs and aficionados to boast about epic inventions of our ancestors, such as the concept of zero that completely revolutionised mathematics globally.

In his fireside chats about the story of "Zero as a Hero", Narlikar also used to highlight a "publish or perish" (aka 'publicise or perish' for scribes) moral for wannabe scientists. For the longest time, he emphasised, Arabs got exclusive credit for what are now rightfully called "Hindu" numerals.

The polymath also used to extol the ancient roots of scepticism in India, not perhaps of the kind of journalism practised by Skeptical Inquirer today but that of the Rig Veda, the oldest recorded Sanskrit poem in the world, which contains the priceless Nasadiya Sukta, an epiphany that dares to question the very existence of gods while raising cosmological questions of such profundity as would gladden moderns seers such as Guth, Hawking and Penrose.