Jayant Narlikar

Some Lesser Known Facts About Jayant Narlikar

• His father was a mathematician and theoretical physicist who worked as a professor and was head of the department at Banaras Hindu University in Varanasi.

• Jayant Narlikar grew up in Banaras (now Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh), so he picked up the North Indian language. He also had the discipline of Marathi culture, which he got from his parents.

  

• At Cambridge University, Jayant Narlikar was a Senior Wrangler, a top math student.

• He was also a member of Fitzwilliam College.

• He was a student who did well in all subjects and also enjoyed sports.

• He played badminton and later switched to tennis.

• When he was a Ph.D. student, Jayant Narlikar started his theoretical cosmology research; his guide was Fred Hoyle, a famous scientist.

• After completing his Ph.D. in 1963, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow at King’s College, Cambridge.

• In 1972, Jayant Narlikar returned to India and began working as a professor at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) in Mumbai. There, he was the head of a theoretical astrophysics group.

  

• He became popular after he started explaining science to the public through books, articles, radio, and television.

• In the late 1980s, Jayant Narlikar appeared as a guest speaker on the television show Cosmos: A Personal Voyage by Carl Sagan, which aired on PBS.

• In 1981, he helped start the World Cultural Council.

• In 1988, Jayant Narlikar became the first director of the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) in Pune.

• He used to play a set of tennis every morning at the IUCAA Pune campus.

• From 1994 to 1997, he served as the president of the cosmology commission of the International Astronomical Union.

  

• During his research, Jayant Narlikar studied Mach’s principle, quantum cosmology, and action-at-a-distance physics.

• He was not satisfied with the Big Bang theory and looked for other possible models (non-standard cosmology).

• Jayant Narlikar created the Hoyle-Narlikar theory of conformal gravity with the scientist Fred Hoyle.

  

• This theory tried to connect general relativity with Mach’s principle. It said that a particle’s mass depends on all other masses in the universe, and changes over time.

• This theory was not accepted by many other scientists.

• Jayant Narlikar then worked with other scientists who also questioned the Big Bang. These scientists included Halton Arp, Geoffrey Burbidge, Fred Hoyle, and Chandra Wickramasinghe.

• He helped in growing microorganisms from air samples taken from 41 km above the Earth with Chandra Wickramasinghe.

• Jayant Narlikar was a member of the Royal Astronomical Society in London.

• He was also a Fellow of three National Science Academies and the Third World Academy of Sciences in India.

• In 2009, Jayant Narlikar was on the jury for the Infosys Prize in Physical Sciences.

• In January 2021, he led the 94th Akhil Bharatiya Marathi Sahitya Sammelan in Nashik.

• Jayant Narlikar wrote not only research papers and science books, but also science fiction, novels, and short stories in English, Hindi, and Marathi.

• Some of the books include The Lighter Side of Gravity (1982), The Return of Vaman (1989), From Black Clouds to Black Holes (1996), An Introduction to Cosmology (2002), and A Different Approach to Cosmology: From a Static Universe through the Big Bang towards Reality (2005).

  

• After that, he was appointed as the head of the NCERT committee that created science and math textbooks for schools in India.

• Jayant Narlikar liked travelling to distant places in his free time.