I have a soft corner for scientists. Growing up in Bangalore, while it was more a science capital than an IT city, most families had at least a couple of scientists; those who couldn’t hack it became engineers. Medical science was acceptable. The also-rans studied commerce. Total losers or rebels like me studied arts. All that’s in the past when sighting a car was as rare as a traffic-free day today.
While blue-chip IT companies changed Bangalore almost beyond recognition one of them has put science on a pedestal. The Infosys Science Foundation, set up by Infosys and its board members has instituted the Infosys Science Prize, the largest award in India for excellence in science and research. The prize includes USD 100,000, a 55 gm 22 kt gold medal and a citation.
Over the past 15 years, the awards have increased to six categories – Engineering and Computer Science, Humanities, Life Sciences, Mathematical Sciences, Physical Sciences, and Social Sciences. Past winners have subsequently won international accolades including the Nobel Prize, the Fields medal, the MacArthur ‘genius’ Grant and so on. Several have been elected fellows of the Royal Society.
One of the highlights of January in Bangalore is the award ceremony where the winning scientists are treated like rock stars. It is a crisp and tastefully produced event in a five-star setting with razzle-dazzle followed by a good dinner. The speeches are aimed at a general audience as the winners make in-depth presentations to the cognoscenti the previous day.
For the audience, it’s an opportunity to engage with the brightest and best minds, as apart from the winners, there are also several eminent jury members and high-profile guests. The ceremony for the 2023 awards a few days ago was even more attractive to me as two of the awardees are from Bangalore and are known to me. Dr Mukund Thattai, the Infosys Prize winner in the Physical Sciences category, is a physicist who forayed into biology and is a professor at the National Centre for Biological Sciences. I am convinced that he’s going on to win many more big awards. Jahnavi Phalkey, the Humanities Prize winner, is the founding director of the Science Gallery Bengaluru has an intriguing speciality as a historian of science and technology. Interestingly, two other winners in different categories are professors from IIT Kanpur – SachchidaNand Tripathi for Engineering & Computer Science and Arun Kumar Shukla for Life Sciences. Both said they owed their success to IIT. The other two winners are Bhargav Bhatt, University of Michigan, for Mathematical Sciences and Karuna Mantena, Columbia University, for Social Sciences.
I am a huge fan of The Big Bang Theory sitcom, and I know more about physics thanks to it than the years studying science in school. I was keen to hear from the chief guest at the awards, Brian Schmidt. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2011 for discovering that, contrary to expectations, the expansion of the universe was accelerating. He also correctly measured that the universe is 14 million years old (as the show’s lyric goes, ‘it all started with a big bang’).
Schmidt is an astronomer and pointed out little-known facts for which astronomy deserves credit such as the technology in our smartphones. The GPS which relies on general relativity (developed by Einstein), the Wi-Fi (invented by Australian astronomers), the CMOS camera developed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory for a mission to Jupiter, and the touch screen invented in CERN can all be traced back to basic scientific discoveries dating back to the Greeks and before.
Focusing on what he called ‘The Virtuous Cycle of Science’, Schmidt talked about the complex nature of technology that keeps building upon the ideas that come from the basic research of many scientists over long periods.
The evening had some light-hearted rivalry as well, though all the speakers spoke about collaboration and the interconnection of sciences. Prof Shrinivas Kulkarni, Professor of Astronomy and Planetary Science at the California Institute of Technology, has been the jury chair for physical sciences since the prize›s inception. He declared that Physics was the ‘King of Science’, and that it was aided by a ‘great queen’ which he was very fond of (Mathematics). And referring to Dr Thattai’s field of biological physics as a new branch of physics, he congratulated his biologist friends by saying, ‘You have now been upgraded.’ But any viewer of the Big Bang sitcom would ask – what would Sheldon Cooper have made of the professor’s quest for a geologist to give next year’s physics award to?
Sandhya Mendonca is an author and host of ‘Spotlight with Sandhya’ podcast.