Presidency Physics Reunion Souvenir 2014

REUNION
SOUVENIR 2014
DEPARTMENT OF PHYSICS, PRESIDENCY UNIVERSITY, KOLKATA

PRESIDENCY PHYSICS REUNION SOUVENIER 2014
I1
Reunion Souvenir 2014

Department of Physics
Presidency University, Kolkata
Publisher
Presidency Physics Reunion Committee
86/1 College Street, Kolkata 700073
Web: http://presiphysicsreunion.com
E-mail: presiphysicsreunion@gmail.com
Reunion Souvenir Committee

Subhrangshu Sekhar Manna (Editor)
Ritaban Chatterjee (Member)
Sanskriti Das (Student Member)
Shashwata Ganguly (Student Member)
Chief Patron
Honble Vice-Chancellor Prof. Anuradha Lohia
Reunion Organizing Committee
President: Somak Raychaudhury
Secretary: Gour Bhattacharya
Copy right
Somak Raychaudhury
Cover photography by
Abhijit Kar Gupta
Photographs contributed by
Somak Raychaudhury, Rakesh Saha, Arkoprovo Ghosh,
Abhiranjan Chatterjee, Ujjalendu Gupta,
Ritaban Chatterjee, Sushan Konar, Kaustav Mitra,
Sanghamitra Roy, Dipak Kumar Roy, Namrata Roy,
Suchetana Chatterjee, Argha Banerjee,
Sudipta Sengupta, Subir Majumder, Oindrila Sarkar,
Subharthi Roy, Ratna Koley, Kalipada Nahal.
Design and Computer Setting by

Kreative Koncept
1, Nabin Paul Lane, Kolkata - 700 009
Printed at
New Rainbow Lamination
32A, Patuatola Lane, Kolkata - 700 009
Published on
22 December, 2014
2 I PRESIDENCY PHYSICS REUNION SOUVENIER 2014
Treasurer: Ritaban Chatterjee

Local Organizing Committee: Suchetana Chatterjee
(convener), All faculty and staff members,
Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, Anirban Chakrabarty
(Assistant Registrar), Amitabha Banerjee (UG2),
Namrata Roy (PG1), Lopamudra Mukherjee (PG1),
Sunip Mukherjee (UG3), Aritra Ghosh (UG3),
Abhiranjan Chatterjee (alumnus), Debapratim Mishra
(Senior Systems Analyst).
Finance: Somak Raychaudhury (Chair), Arabinda
Nayak, Ritaban Chatterjee, Gour Bhattacharya,
Sukanta De, Subhrangshu Sekhar Manna (alumnus),
Ujjalendu Gupta (alumnus), Aritra Ghosh (UG3),
Arkoprovo Ghosh (UG1), Partha Sarathi Sengupta
(alumnus).
Academic: Saumyadip Samui (convener), Muktish
Acharyya, Kanan Datta, Debasish Datta, Suchetana
Chatterjee, Sabyasachi Bhattacharya.
Public Relations and Outreach: Suchetana
Chatterjee (convener), Barun Raychaudhuri,
Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, Arabinda Nayak,
Rabindranath Gayen, Chayan Chatterjee (UG2),
Agniva Roychowdhuri (UG2), Satyanu Bhadra (UG3),
Anwesh Majumder (UG1).
Cultural Committee: Suchetana Chatterjee
(convener), Ratna Koley, Kaustav Mitra (UG2), Tirna
Deb (PG1), Saranya Mukherjee, Gour Bhattacharya.
Food Committee: Ritaban Chatterjee (convener),
Sukanta De, Rabindranath Gayen, Satyanu Bhadra
(UG3), Anwesh Majumder (UG1), Dipak Kumar Roy
Vice Chancellors Message
I3
Introduction
Somak Raychaudhury
Head of the Physics Department, Presidency University
86/1, College Street, Kolkata - 700 073
Soon after I joined Presidency University as the head of the department of Physics, a couple of years ago, I had the opportunity
of travelling to Bangalore to give a presentation in defence of a much-needed DST grant to modernise our laboratories. I
ended up staying at the guest house of the Indian Institute of Science, and upon arrival, immediately headed to the department
of Physics in search of a former student of mine.
The language spoken in the corridor turned out to be familiar, and in five minutes, I was introduced to a pair of students who
proudly announced that they used to be students at Presidency College, and they were currently PhD students there. I was
intrigued to find that at least one of them was an experimentalist. I loudly wondered whether I could meet all the Presidency
alumni among the postgraduates over coffee the following day.
I wasn't prepared to meet a room full of fresh smiling faces when Dr. Arabinda Nayak and I turned up the following day. The
two dozen bright students who were there apologized for the several others who could not be contacted at short notice.
When I asked them what they worked on, they presented me with a broad sweep of the rapidly advancing boundaries of the
subject, encompassing the extremely theoretical to the very hands-on experimental. I had expected the former, but had not
expected many at the latter end of the research spectrum. After all, my impression was that our system produces the best
wielders of the pencil, but discourages the use of any other implement.
Apparently recent students of Presidency Physics constitute a large fraction of the research students of IISc, among the
majority of the research fellows who originate from Bengal. I have gradually discovered that this pattern is true in most of
the research institutions of the country. As the evening passed, I marvelled at the spirit and enthusiasm of this iridescent
bunch of young scientists, who talked about how the spirit of Presidency, in spite of the complete lack of coruscating
glamour and corporate lustre that one encounters elsewhere at similar institutes, had inspired them to stay on in India and
work hard in understanding physics.
Soon afterwards, over a different cup of coffee in an overpriced establishment in Kolkata, I faced a smug business school
professor, who haughtily declared that he used to be a student of Presidency College, and would never stoop so low as to call
himself an alumnus of Presidency University. "You have ruined my College", he proclaimed. "Nobody who can think straight
nowadays even considers going to Presidency. It is a ruin, all shambles."
I found these two experiences discrepant. It is clear that there is a near-unanimous opinion that Presidency had once been an
institution that attracted the very best scholars across the board. Most of the state toppers gravitated to Physics. A significant
fraction of the general public seems to believe that, in spite of this position of splendor in its Golden Age, at some point, the
institution went into free fall, and promising students have gradually abandoned ship.
I do believe that Presidency College, like most all institutions, did have one, or several, Golden Ages. This is true of Physics as
well. The renaissance in Bengal at the end of the Nineteenth century had a direct impact on Presidency Physics, and a second
Golden wave took Presidency to arguably similar or even greater heights in the Sixties. However, if the department, and the
larger institution, had turned into a pale palimpsest of its Sublime Past, we would not see recent students of the institution
in the top research institutions of the country and abroad, as well as exuding excellence in almost all walks of life. My
conviction is firm here: we continue to get top students of Bengal.
It is now the duty of us, those who are at the helm of the rejuvenated institution, to make sure that we do not fail them. Our
goal is to make Presidency University into an institution that is to universities what Presidency College was to colleges in West
Bengal. In the process, moreover, we would like to turn our university, and our department, into a destination for the best
students of the country.
When we started to prepare ourselves for this event of December 2014, we started by tracking down alumni of Presidency
Physics in India and abroad, and were soon overwhelmed at our discovery of the career trajectories of our alumni. When an
alumnus/alumna of physics chooses a life of law, politics, administration, culture or finance, are the years of training in
physics abandoned? The answer seems to be clear from our speaking to so many of our predecessors. Physics at Presidency
teaches us to rationally think, and be confident. It is hard to find a profession where these two qualities are not rudimentary.
Presidency Physics has thus always produced leaders, and continues to do so.
The overall purpose of an alumni event, or a "reunion", is predominantly that of nostalgia, to want to hear again the sounds
of old rooms, to hold hands and sing Auld Lang Syne. This event of 2014, of course, is the first one of this scale in many
decades, and so aims to wallow in nostalgia, of course.
However, this event is much more than that. We are assembling today in College Street to flag off a journey of our beloved
institution towards Glory. We want your thoughts and wishes to congeal, and help us to attain a state of pre-eminence that
is better than ever before.
I5
Editorial
bout five months before, some colleagues of the Presidency University, Physics Department (PUPhyD) announced
on Facebook that there would be a Reunion of the department at the end of this year, precise dates were not declared
though. I was pleasantly surprised to see my name included as a member of the organizing committee (OC).
I observed that I was the only bohiragato member in OC at that time! Though later, other such alumni members have also
joined the OC. Since it would not be possible to extend a day-to-day help, I started thinking, in which way I can help them.
It struck me, that perhaps it would be best if I take part in publishing, since I had some experience in editorial activities.
I proposed, let the magazine of the Reunion be a little different from the way it is usually done. Often, these magazines are
filled with advertisements, with a few messages etc. Instead, we may have articles written by our own alumni and present
members of the department. My idea was gladly accepted by the other members in OC. We decided to restrict ourselves to
articles of reminiscence and to those related to physics / science / education system etc.
Anything first, has some difficulties of its own. We first started inviting people for write-ups whom we know. Later we
realised that, in fact we should invite all alumni in general to send articles. An E-mail in this regard had been circulated to all.
In spite of that to get an article written by someone needs a little bit of persuasion. With our best effort we could finally
manage about twenty articles. Hope, next time it would be many more, more and more alumni will happily write for it.
It may be somewhat relevant to mention here that many alumni and present members of PUPhyD have formed a group on
Facebook, named, Presidency-Physics-Past-Present (P4) that has presently 555 members. We write, post and share all kinds
of things which may be relevant and of interest to the members of this group. We are happily extending our invitation to all
other alumni of PUPhyD who are not yet members of this group, to join this group. In this group there are ways to display an
article in the form of a "blog". Therefore, after a look to this souvenir if you feel like writing an article for the next Reunion
magazine you may consider about first submitting in P4. Later, the article may be published in the next magazine.
Now some formal words from the Editorial committee. We have edited very little, mostly typographical errors and formatting
inconsistencies. In spite of our most sincere efforts there can still be some errors for which we are extremely apologetic. An
important disclaimer would be, there is no way to check the authenticity of the detailed factual information presented in
different articles. Therefore the information given and the viewpoints presented in different articles are entirely the responsibility
of the authors.
Finally, I would like to profusely thank and express my most sincere gratitude to Professor Ritaban Chatterjee who helped so
much to publish this souvenir. I also thank all OC members in general and particularly Professors Somak Raychaudhury,
Suchetana Chatterjee, Gour Bhattacharya, Muktish Acharyya and present students Aritra Ghosh, Shashwata Ganguly, Sanskriti
Das for their constant encouragement and help. I would also like to thank all our sponsors and advertisers for extending
support to our cause.
I stop here, wishing you all a very happy and prosperous new year 2015 and hoping to see you again in the next Reunion
gathering.
Subhrangshu Sekhar Manna

BSc 1978 batch
Satyendra Nath Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences, Kolkata
Content
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17
Beyond Envelope
Sanskriti Das
20
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22
Asterix and Obelix in the Physics Department
Rangan Lahiri
25
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z% =
29
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41
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45
Puzzles in the Sky
Anirban Kundu
47
Being Struck by the Time Arrow In Presidency
Gautam Mandal
50
The Girl from Suburbia..
Sushan Konar
52
Entropy
Basab Dasgupta
54
,! x
x!
65
Presidency College in the Late Sixties ....
Jayanta Kumar Bhattacharjee
69
Those Were the Days, My Friend ...
Pradeep Parrack
70
Three Years in Shangri-la
Sreerup Raychaudhuri
75
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89
21 Years at Presidency College
Pradip Kumar Datta
94
Superconductivity: The Journey from Discovery to ....
Rajdeep Sensarma
96
From Presidency College to the Heart of ...
Surajit Sen
99
Can Physics Help Rethink Economics?
Dulal Krishna Basu
103
Life: A Physicist's Perspective
Amitava Banerjee
107
I7
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I 19
BEYOND ENVELOPE
Beyond Envelope
Sanskriti Das
Department of Physics, Presidency University,
86/1 College Street, Kolkata-700073.
Arrogance of dream
confesses to Alma Mater,
where the diversity of
homeless experience gets
reunited with asymptotic
convergence.
ear mom,
Did not care to write you for a long time. You will be surprised to hear
that I find you nowhere while churning the kaleidoscope of memories.
Because, still you are a burning present in front of my eyes. It feels very
romantic to enchant the springs and summers left away in past tense, or in
terms of reverse arrow of time; although they pretend to be 'present' at
present.
You came in our youth indomitable like a wild horse. But could not restrain,
or never tried perhaps. A kind of negligence characteristic of woods as well
as indifference of a banyan tree careless of individual business were all what
we had experienced. Sometimes it seemed to be too excessive, we would
not demand not to get offended at all. Nonetheless there was no alternative
of you for living life reinless against the blind monotonous stream around
us.
Thee, mater scientia had exhibited how to utilise the constraints of nature's
conservation in a wonderful way. A bunch of robust ideas breaking down all
prejudiced believes of uniqueness, invariance and absoluteness furiously
enhanced our hunger. An odyssey over all scales of time and space so elegant
and spontaneous to be loved! Alike wave and particle, matter and radiation
you played a dual role in our life- as a department of an esteemed institute as
well as a sophisticated subject ruling over natural sciences.
However, the utter intention of conquering all dimensions was sparkling in
our daring green veins. We could not help responding to the inevitable call
from the undulating world beyond your sphere of influence, opportune as
well as uncertain. Why should I get stagnant, say, living in a disgusting void of
saturated actions to gather moss around? How can I depict the exultation of
getting nipped from the feeble stalk of an inanimate foundation? Heus
century-old mother, can you feel the jerking induced in the consciousness
while tearing off dark roots of an immobile stuff? Does the absolute origin
ever bother of what happens during and at the end of the journey?
Thereafter, leaves, withered, began to fall and assemble; accumulating foams
of memories and bubbles of introvert amour propre -- rusted, devastated,
exhausted. What had once hurt the buds now turns out to be the aristocracy
of greatness embedded. Imagine, what a mistake we made! But, noble you
are, never cared to remind us of this -- leaving free to perceive in our own
way.
On the other hand, the roots we had gone away ripping apart, had already
spread over a lot behind our eyes too busy with selves. To measure her very
BEYOND ENVELOPE
depthis beyond our scope of imagination. The vigour that

had once gnawed our inert mediocrity now exhales
fatigue. Still a long way to go ahead. A kind of bridle,
at some point in the voyage of life is of a dire need. A
cozy shelter, too. In the form of motherly affection and
warm friendship.To get back the best days in our life.
And all colours within hues of black and white.

See you,
Yours lovingly,
an alumnus of Presidency Physics
(on behalf of all who left away and are coming back)
Sanskriti Das is a current BSc 3rd year student in the Department of Physics at Presidency University. While she keeps herself
busy deciphering the laws of nature through her physical insight and mathematical rigour, rolling her eyes at the juvenile
naivete of most of her classmates, and being restless to impose her intensity to the greater world, she is secretly torn about
leaving her alma mater and hometown as early as next year.
I 21
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A SKIT
Asterix and Obelix in the Physics Department

Rangan Lahiri
Ex-Student, Presidency College, Kolkata
This is a parody of the

Asterix comics series in the
setting of a typical physics
department with its
various stereotypes. Even
though this skit was
written while the author
was a student at
Presidency College, it was
finally staged at IIT Kanpur.
Act I
Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to this august department of physics. A place
closer to heaven than any physicist can dream of. The place where the best talents
of physics today have gathered teachers and students, theoreticians and
experimentalists in short everyone!
And now, let me introduce you to the physicists. The experimental group, headed
by the senior experimentalist Foot-Poundix. Being from the old British school,
he always works with feet. We also have the young dynamic chap Metrix.
These two giants have a few minor differences which they sometimes try to discuss!
Dong!
Foot-Poundix/Metrix - FPS / MKS / FPS / MKS / FPS / MKS / FPS / MKS...
Dong!
Also in the group is the experimental nuclear physicist, scatteringmatrix. And
lastly, Mechanix and Electronix the people who run everything.
Action : Mechanix comes and tightens screws in Foot-Poundix's head. Electronix
runs a current through it. Foot-Poundix shakes his head violently.
And now the theory group. The head and the source of vitality of the group
High-Energix.
Action : High-Energix comes running in VRRROOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMM!
Crystalix - the condensed matter physicist whose head is in a solid state. It is
actually a single block a fact often referred to as Bloch's theorem. Gravitix a
very attractive chap a walking proof of Newton's laws. The old fashioned
researcher Quantummechanix whose action is somewhat burdened with
uncertainty. And finally, Symmetrix who understands the world in the light of
spherical symmetry matlab ki inka funda gol hai.
Action : Beat starts Physicists start singing and dancing.
Chorus - I am a Physicist. I could change the laws of nature if I wished..
Theorist My weapon is the chalk, and my mumbo-jumbo talk
I can babble for an hour but you'll never get the gist.
Experimentalist He could never be a physicist.
Pencil in his hand, building castles in the sand
He's a dreamer in the crazy world, a lazy escapist.
He could never be a physicist.
I 25
A SKIT
Now I am the real physicist. With a lab that's full of meters,

refrigerators and heaters
Seeing nature, taking data, that's a proper realist!
Theorist Don't believe them. Don't believe them.
They are just a bunch of liars.
We have all the equations, we have all the theories
And we are out to look for buyers
Who'll buy my lovely theories who? You? You? You? You? You?
Oh! So few!
Obelix - What's new?
Physicist1 - Who are you?
Asterix - Asterix?
Obelix - And Obelix
Asterix + Obelix From Gaul
In answer to an admission call!
Accompanied by a schol.
look around the place.

Asterix - Thank you Ceaser - er Sir.
Action : Bell rings, professors depart mumbling 'I have a
class' and 'Me too'
Obelix - I am hungry, Asterix.
Asterix - Shut up. I am thinking. Did you notice Obelix
these people have such a lot of energy! Just like us when
we drink magic potion. But where do they ...
Action : Singe file of students march in.
alpha beta gamma delta eta zeta lambda rho
What you tell us we shall do and where you tell us we shall go.
Assignment or calculation, measurement of manipulation
Tra La La La La La ...!
Action: Professor shows up with whip.
Prof. Quantummechannix Left Right Left
Left Right Left
Action : Looks up the register.
Action: Bell rings, students take their seats.
Physicist2 - But now it's spring! You were asked to join in

fall!
Quantumemchanix - We continue with our discussion of

quantum mechanics. We are using natural units, that is,
h = c = 1. The unit of time is chosen as 1 semester. The
Hilbert space is six-dimensional spanned by the vectors: |A
>, |B >, |C >, |D >, |E >, |F > with the eigenvalue
equation: H|A >= A|A >. The eigenvalues are discrete,
which means that the particles are strongly bound. The
commutation relations are : [H,L] = 0, L being the generator
of the rotation of head. Physical interpretation of L is library.
The z-component of L, also known as the 'reserve section'
also commutes with H. However [H, S] 0, where S could
mean sports or SFS (students' film society), i.e, one can not
simultaneously be in an eigenstate of H and S. Ladder
operators: Using a ladder operator C, one can go from lower
to higher energy states, e.g., C|B >= |A > where C is the
class-notes. At t = 0 the system is in the state |I >. Then it
evolves into a superposition of all the basis vectors. At t = 1,
a measurement is made the system collapses into a
particular eigenstate, according to the interpretation of Niels
Bohr.
Action : Obelix falls with a thud.

Asterix - Obelix! How did you fall?
Obelix - But he asked us to fall, didn't he?
Asterix - Don't be silly. Get up and maintain a dignified
posture.
Action : Obelix takes a dignified pose.
Asterix - O Noble Physicists, we have travelled a long way to
learn the wonders of science. Please forgive us our blunder.
We had a one-way ticket on the time machine so we can't
even go back!
Physicist1 - What can be done?
Physicist2 - Let's call a meeting of the committee of the
emergency affairs.
Physicist3 - I beg your pardon Sir. This can only be decided
by the academic senate!
Asterix - Senate? Are they Romans? Didn't the machine work
properly?
Obelix - Romans? Should I get them?
Asterix - No! Let's see what happens.
Action: Meeting starts everyone speaks at the same time
for a few seconds then
Physicist1 - Order! Order! We have come to a decision. The
Gauls will be allowed to stay here until fall. You two can
Obelix - A boar? Roasted? Fried? With sauce? With mustard?

Asterix - Shut up Obelix.
Quantum-Mechanix - Perturbations in the class are not
permitted. You two are requested to leave.
Action : Asterix and Obelix leave the classroom. Come across
a man wearing socks of unmatched colours.
Obelix - Look this man's socks are funny! tee.. hee.. hee..
Man - What? Haven't you taken any field theory course yet?
According to mean field theory all socks are grey
A SKIT
See - little lies here and there kids talking to their mothers,
I guess. Well it's Sunday I'll get some sleep.
Action : Man busily walks away.

Asterix - What to do now?
Obelix - Should we go and hunt for a boar? I am hungry.
Asterix - Don't be a fool we are here on a mission. But
hey, we always found maths very tough. So why don't we
enter the maths class and find out what we can learn?
Action : Asterix and Obelix enter the mathematics class.
8
Mathematix - So we have proved that lim

= . Now I will
x
2
ask a question. What is lim
?
Volunteers?
One
of the new
x
comers please.
Action : Asterix thinks and writes .
4
Obelix - Hey, that's not right. I'll give you the answer. Draws
an arch.
Asterix - What's that?
Obelix - Oh! Should I have turned it the other way? Like
this? Draws an upturned arch.
Asterix - Sir, whose answer is correct?
Mathematix - You are both right, but I'll give you a better
answer.
Action : Consults notes and writes .
Action : Enters Monopole.
Monopole - Ah! There are some new people! Can you help
me? Can you tell me where can I find it?
Asterix + Obelix - What? What do you want to find?
Action: God sleeps.

Ring Ring
Mmm - somebody seems to be lying a lot. Just take a look
and tell me what's going on.
Action : St. Paul looks downwards.
St. Paul - It's an experimental physicist claiming that he
has some interesting data/results.
God - Oh! well goodnight.
RING RING RING RING
Oh God! I mean, Oh Myself! What is it this time??
St. Paul - It's a theoretician he has built up a model to
explain those results.
God - Nice of him. Is there no peace in this world? Sometimes
I wonder why I built it in the first place.
RING RRRRRRRRRRRRINGGG !!!!
Action : God franatically switches off breaks gadget.
Oh! How horrible! Why are you standing see what's going
on!
St. Paul - Those two discoveries being reported in an
international conference.
Background - We are the physicists. We could change the
laws of nature if we wished
Monopole - Didn't you know?

I'm in search of a magnetic monopole
You may wonder but I'm not a 'funda-gol'
I'm just looking for a magnetic monopole
I have searched in the deserts in the oceans and the seas
In the arctic, antarctic, Honolulu and West Indies
On Pluto and on Mars
In galaxies and stars
And believe me - the centre of a Black Hole
But I couldn't find a magnetic monopole!
God - This is too much. Get the leaders of those physicists

up here I want to talk to them.
Action : Monopole exits.
God - In any case, you are here. Now pay attention. If you
have to do all your stupid theories then do them secretly.
You are disturbing my sleep.
Act II
Let us leave the land of the physicists for a moment and look
at what's going on in heaven. God, it seems, has rigged up a
rather curious gadget.
St. Paul - What is this gadget, God?
God - It's a lie detector I have built it to keep an eye on
earth. As soon as somebody tells a lie back on earth this
bell will ring. See - I'll put it on.
Ting! Tong!
Action: St. Paul goes and brings High-Energix and FootPoundix.

St. Paul - This is the leader of the experimentalists. And this
of the theoreticians. And HE, is God.
Foot-Poundix - Pleased to meet you God.
High-Energix - I am not. I don't believe in you!
High-Energix - But if we stop research, how will we know

the mysteries of nature??
God - That's simple just ask me. I will grant each of you
the favour of asking me one question. But mind you only
one question. You first Foot-Poundix.
Foot-Poundix - Ah! Thanks! When will the funds for the
transatlantic accelerator be sanctioned?
God - My dear Foot-Poundix how old are you?
I 27
A SKIT
Foot-Poundix - 65.
time.
God - Not in your lifetime. Your turn High-Energix.
Asterix - But a lot of scientists are young.
High-Energix - When will string theory be accepted as the

true theory of everything by all scientists?
Old2 - They finished their research elsewhere!
God - Not in my lifetime!

Leaving Foot-Poundix and High-Energix to wallow in their
personal miseries, let us turn our attention to our foreign
visitors.
Action : Group enters singing "string theory song"
When you read, you begin with A..B..C..
When you sing, you begin with do..re..mi..
But in Physics, you begin with S..T..R..I..N..G..S..
alpha beta gamma delta eta zeta lamda pi
Think of physics when you laugh and think of physics when you cry
Talk of physics left and right
Dream of physics in the night
Trala lala lala lala la la la
left right left left right left.
Asterix- Hello! We are new students.
Asterix - And what about you?

Old1 + Old2 - We shall overcome someday. Oh deep in my
heart I do believe..
Young1 - Come on - enough waste of time. Let us get down
to useful work again.
Chorus alpha beta gamma delta eta zeta lamda pi
Think of physics when you laugh and think of physics when you cry
left right left
left right left.
Action : Students depart.
Asterix - They sing so much like Cacophonix! Look, Obelix, I
do not think we can stay for long enough to learn physics.
There is no Roman soldiers around to have any little fun.
Let's go and send Cacophonix instead.
Young2 - What did you come here for?
Obelix - Great idea! I am feeling rather nostalgic about boars.

Aparently here you talk about Neils Bohr all the time but
that's just a bore compared to roasted boars.
Asterix - To learn physics!
Action : Asterix and Obelix departs for their time machine.
Young3 - Do you know some physics already?
Another feast is in waiting to welcome back our great heros

in that little Gaulish village. No longer the fishmonger
unhygenix need to be busy stopping Cacophonix from
singing. He is finally dancing in a feast. Because Cacophonix
has been sent to the August institute the rumor is that he
has finally received the recognition he spent his life looking
for and has no intention of getting back. Everyone is happyexcept poor God who spends his time repenting his
creation.
Young1 - Ah! We are old ones yours seniors!
Obelix - No! Would it be too bad?

Old1 - It's good. You have nothing to lose!
Asterix - But Professor Old1 - I am not professor. I am a student!
Asterix - A student? At your age?
Old2 - Well we are doing research here. It takes a bit of
Rangan Lahiri (1966 - 1998) joined the physics department of the erstwhile Presidency College in 1983. Subsequently he
went to IIT Kanpur for his masters and later did a PhD in condensed matter physics with Sriram Ramaswamy at the Indian
Institute of Science, Bangalore. Physics was one of his passions, the other being writing. He penned a large number of very
fine poems. But what could undoubtedly have been his masterpiece was a Bengali adaptation of 1984, part of which was
staged under the aegies of the Bengali drama club (under the leadership of Prof. Abhijit Mookerjee, another Presidency
Physics alumnus) of IIT Kanpur. Unfortunately, he left this work unfinished, like many of his other endeavours when cancer
claimed him at the age thirty-two. He was a great human being, and is missed by all of his friends till today.
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Suparno Chaudhuri, an
alumnus of Physics
department is currently
based in New York area
and specializes in
digital marketing and
analytics. He is
currently a Director in
Digital Marketing
division at Dun &
Bradstreet (D&B). After
doing his PhD from
Saha Institute of
Nuclear Physics,
Suparno joined TIFR as
a scientific officer and
then moved into the
corporate world as a
Principal Consultant in
PricewaterhouseCoopers
and later worked as
heads of digital media
and marketing at
Netguru, and ITC
Infotech, amongst
others. Suparno loves
digital media and
modern marketing
technology and data,
fish and cartoons.
Whenever he gets time,
he still tries to draw
cartoons, his childhood
hobby, on iPad.
I 32
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By merely walking in a room.
1986 y , xy yy 2008 y yyy x ! y y z!!z

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PUZZLES IN THE SKY
Puzzles in the Sky

Anirban Kundu
Department of Physics, Calcutta University,
92, Acharya Prafulla Chandra Road, Kolkata-700009, India
About 70% of the

mass-energy content of the
Universe is in an enigma
known as the dark energy,
of which we hardly know
anything except the
experimental evidence of
an accelerating universe. In
this article I discuss, in a
pedagogic way, the puzzles
of dark energy, and the
associated cosmological
fine-tuning problem if one
identifies this with the
cosmological constant.
uilding an edifice takes time. Destroying it doesn't. Think of an earthquake, or

of 9/11. The same is true for physics. Think of the revolutions of the early
twentieth century.
Or so we have been taught. But it is, again, a partial truth. After the dust settles,
you see that you have salvaged a lot. In fact, almost everything that you need in
your daily life. There are very few cases when you actually see quantum mechanics
at play, unless you think deeply; e.g., why, if the atom is mostly empty, you just
don't crash through the ground and reach the centre of the earth? While the
underlying concepts took a severe beating, as far as application is concerned,
Newtonian mechanics - whether terrestrial or celestial - and Maxwellian
electrodynamics, supplemented with the laws of statistical mechanics, are still
extremely capable and useful.
Talking about concepts, Einstein played a pivotal role, as we all know; he was not
an iconic figure for nothing. He changed the concept of gravity. Newton said that
it is a force between two massive bodies, and given the nature of the force, it is
easy to work out the trajectory. But what causes that force? General Relativity
(GR), the baby Einstein was most famous for to sire, says that a massive object - it
can even be an energy concentration - deforms the space-time around it. It's just
as if you drop a brick in a flat mud bed and create a depression. Newton's laws
said that in the absence of any force, a particle travels in a straight line. However,
if the space-time is deformed, the trajectory is no longer a straight line, even if no
other external force is present. The curved trajectory, which we call a geodesic, is
the path a particle follows in a deformed space-time, i.e., near a massive object,
and this is what is known as gravity. Earth indeed moves in a straight line, but the
space-time around the sun is so curved that the trajectory appears to be an ellipse.
Thus, geometry is responsible for gravity and mass deforms the geometry, so
there should be a relation between the mass concentration and the geometry of
space-time. These relations are known as the field equations of General Relativity,
or the Einstein equations.
While the origin of these equations is entangled in a branch of mathematics known

as differential geometry, to get the physics out of them what you need to do is to
solve some differential equations. When Einstein tried to solve these equations
for an isotropic and homogeneous universe (a universe that looks the same from
every point) that does not change with time, he found that there is no solution for
such equations! The only way out is to introduce a term by hand, which he called
the cosmological constant and denoted by L. With a nonzero value of L, there is
an acceptable solution for a static universe, one that does not change wth time.
Einstein soon came to rue his decision when astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered
in 1929 that the universe is not static at all. It is expanding; all galaxies and stars
are receding away from each other, just like some dots on the surface of an
expanding balloon. The farther a galaxy is, the greater is its velocity of recession.
I 47
PUZZLES IN THE SKY
The light from a receding star will be Doppler shifted towards

the red end, and by measuring the red shifts from distant
galaxies, one can tell their velocities. It does not mean that
we are at the centre of the universe; every point is receding
away from every other point, and this is some feature that
must be incorporated into the geometry of the universe.
It was shown by Friedmann, Lemaitre, Robertson and Walker
(some American authors do tend to drop the second name,
that of a Belgian priest, but that is unfortunate) that there is
an exact solution to the Einstein equations in an isotropic,
homogeneous, and expanding universe, and this does not
need the L term anymore. Einstein promptly dropped this
term and called it his biggest blunder, and the venerable
assumption since then is that the cosmological constant is
identically equal to zero. From physics point of view, it is
always better to say something is zero, than something is
extremely small. The photon mass is zero and can be
explained why it is so from the quantum theory of
electromagnetism; the electron mass is almost 2000 times
smaller than the proton mass and we do not have any
explanation why it is so.
The geometry of this expanding universe is known, after its
proponents, as the FLRW geometry (or FRW in some textbooks).
One can study the evolution of the universe with time, either
in the forward or in the backward direction. If we evolve in
the forward direction, the universe can expand forever, can
come to a halt and remain there, or can stop expanding and
then collapse back to a point, depending on the mass of the
universe (the more the mass is, the stronger will be the selfgravitation and tendency to collapse). If we evolve backwards,
the universe becomes smaller and smaller, until it reaches the
zero of time, t = 0. At that point, the solution has a singularity;
an essential singularity that cannot be removed. This singularity
is known as the big bang; this is the point where GR fails. It is
meaningless to ask what happened at t = 0, at least as long
as we are confined to GR. This is supposed to be the start of
the universe, and there is absolutely no way to know whether
anything existed before that. The priest Lemaitre took it as a
hint of divine intervention at t = 0.
So far, so good. GR has come out with flying colours in every
experiment, and people are planning to check it in more
testing and weird circumstances. FLRW cosmology has been
taken as standard; the universe is expanding, and L is zero.
Penzias and Wilson have also found a remnant of the hot
radiation emitted at the time of the big bang, now cooled
down to almost absolute zero (the temperature of a radiation
is the position of the intensity peak assuming it to come from
a perfect blackbody). This radiation, now in the microwave
region, has been mapped, and people have observed a slight
asymmetry in the apparent homogeneous nature, which may
shed light on the possible mechanism of galaxy formation.
With all these successes, let us also mention the biggest
challenge gravity throws to the physicists: no one has been
able to formulate a successful quantum theory of gravity.
Electromagnetism was quantized to great success, and the

other two forces - weak and strong - were born quantized,
but gravity stubbornly resisted all attempts by the best brains
of the world. GR, with all its finer points, is still a classical
theory. Maybe a quantum theory will resolve the singularity
at t = 0. Maybe it will pave the way for unification with
other forces. We can only hope. Let this act as a teaser to
the Physics students of my alma mater.
We have talked about distance measurements; how do we
measure the astronomical distances? They are huge; even
the nearest star is more than 4 light-years away. The farthest
that we have explored is something like 14 billion (a billion
is one followed by nine zeroes) light-years, so that the light
coming from there originated almost at the time of the big
bang. The distance to the nearby stars can be measured by
the method of parallax, by observing the change in position
of the star six months apart, with the earth at the diametric
end of its orbit. This method fails if the distance is large; but
there is a standard set of candles known as Cepheid variables.
These stars change their brightness in a periodic manner,
and the period is directly related to their average intrinsic
brightness. If you measure the period, and find how bright
the star looks from the earth, you know how far it is. The
Cepheids are quite bright - can be about 30000 times brighter
than the sun. However, even this method fails for very distant
galaxies, because then we are not able to see the individual
Cepheids. Fortunately we have another standard candle.
Some very massive stars, when they run out of their fuel,
tend to blow themselves up in a massive burst of light and
matter. This yields a very bright output that lasts from several
days to several months. This is known as a supernova. When
a star becomes a supernova, its light output can be even
greater than the entire light output of the rest of the galaxy;
it can become very bright and stay there, before fading away.
The last supernova in our galaxy appeared in Kepler's time;
the next one is almost due and can appear any day, but it is
a statistical phenomenon and can't be predicted.
There is a type of supernova, called supernova Ia, whose
peak light output is almost constant, being directly related
to the radioactive decays of nickel and cobalt. If the light
output is constant, they can act as standard candles, the
apparent brightness of such a supernova immediately giving
its distance from us. And because they are so very bright,
the method is applicable way beyond the Cepheid limit,
almost at the edge of the universe that we can reach now.
And now some surprise.
Two group of scientists (they, of course, shared the Nobel
prize) observed a number of such supernovae, and found
that at the distance they are, their velocities are not what
you would expect from Hubble's law: the recessional velocity
is linearly proportional to the distance. From the red shifts,
it appeared that they are flying away at more speed than
they are supposed to, as if there is some acceleration which
is kicking them away. Where do we get this energy from?
PUZZLES IN THE SKY
There was, to start with, a source of such an energy. It was

something just like an energy density of the empty space,
the so-called vacuum, the energy that a unit volume holds
even in the absence of any particles or radiation. This is the
once-championed and now-maligned cosmological constant.
But we have already put it to zero, can we restore it again?
in it. You supply energy and excite the higher-energy states,

and the excitations are observed as particles. However, even
in the vacuum state with no particles in it, the field carries
some amount of energy. This is quite similar to the zeropoint energy of the harmonic oscillator, which is the lowest
energy configuration.
The answer is yes, because there is no symmetry principle

that forces it to be zero. Again think of the mass of the photon;
it is precisely zero because there is something sacred called
gauge invariance, which is responsible for the conservation
of electric charge in any process. Without any such symmetry,
perhaps we can make L nonzero, providing a source of
vacuum energy and thus the acceleration of the universe?
There is, thus, another source of energy in our universe: the

ground-state energies of the fields. There are all these
particles, and one can estimate the amount of energy one
gets from this. This turns out to be something of the order
of 10-60, in the system of unit mentioned earlier. Compare it
with the expected value of L.
The problem is that the cosmological constant, to match

the present data, must be extremely small. In a certain system
of units, the value of L is about 10-120, but a certain number,
in particular if it has a dimension, is neither big nor small
unless compared with some other number. Why do we think
that is so small? Well, we cannot go into the details, but this
follows from the fact that universe is quite old and quite
big, and we do not observe any deviation from GR at smaller
distance scales. In fact, we have quite precise bounds on L.
Can the acceleration come from some other type of force?
Maybe the cosmological constant is still zero but there is
some other force? Well, it can be, but this is against the
spirit of Occam's razor. This is a principle, first attributed to
the 14th century British logician William of Ockham (now
spelt Occam), that "entities should not be multiplied
unnecessarily". In other words, if you have to choose between
two theories which are equally good for the data, do choose
the one with lesser number of free parameters or adjustable
constants. Thus, if you are forced to accommodate
acceleration of the universe, why not use the simplest route?
If something behaves like a cosmological constant, and has
properties like a cosmological constant, perhaps it is the
cosmological constant?
Unfortunately, we also have particles in the universe. These
particles are described by laws governed by quantum
mechanics. You know that the photon is associated with the
electromagnetic field. To be precise, the electromagnetic
field, in its lowest possible energy configuration, does not
have a photon. This is, again, the vacuum of the
electromagnetic field. As soon as we supply energy, the
ground-state configuration is excited and we see the
excitations as photons. The same thing is true for all
elementary particles, like electrons. There is a field for every
particle, and there is a vacuum state with no such particles
Now, this is not only strange, this is bizarre. What we need

is something like 10-120 but what we get from the particles is
60 orders of magnitudes too large! Not 60 times that we
would not care about - but by a factor of 10 60! There is no
way to reduce the particle contributions; there is neither
any way to have a bigger cosmological constant.
The situation is more awkward than it seems. The value of
L, as comes from the geometry of space-time, is something
undetermined. There is no theory that can calculate its value
from first principles, so it is just a free input, like the electron
mass in electrodynamics. Let us call this number L cosmo. There
is another contribution, completely unrelated, that comes
from the field content of the universe, and which is of the
order of 10-60. Let us call this L field. The actual L, which is of
the order of 10-120, must be a sum of L cosmo and L field. So,
these two unrelated quantities must be equal, at least to 1
part in 1060 their first sixty digits must be identical! This is
known as the cosmological fine-tuning problem the two
unrelated quantities are so finely tuned that the cancellation
works to such a high, and completely improbable, order.
So, should we scrap Occam's razor and try to have some
other explanation for the new source of energy, often called
the dark energy? This could have been most welcome, but
unfortunately there is no theory that can satisfactorily explain
all aspects of dark energy (do not confuse this with the dark
matter, which is just some matter that we cannot see, and
can feel only from its ordinary gravitational interaction).
Should we be back to the "biggest blunder" of Einstein, a
nonzero L? How to solve the fine-tuning problem? Does it
have an answer in the quantum theory of gravity?
We don't know.
There are so many unanswered questions like this. That is
what makes physics interesting and challenging. That is what
makes it a subject worthy of the best brains.
Prof. Anirban Kundu is a member of the 1985-88 batch of Physics at Presidency. After that, he did his M.Sc. from Calcutta
University, Ph.D. from Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics, was a postdoc at TIFR Mumbai, and later a Humboldt Fellow in the
University of Dortmund, Germany. He was a faculty member at Mehta Research Institute (now the Harish-Chandra Research
Institute), Allahabad, and then Jadavpur University, from which he moved to Calcutta University in 2003. He is a particle
physicist by profession but is also interested in cosmology.
I 49
BEING STRUCK BY THE TIME ARROW IN PRESIDENCY
Being Struck by the Time

Arrow In Presidency
Gautam Mandal
Tata Institute of Fundamental Research,
Homi Bhabha Road, Colaba, Mumbai 400005
The author reminisces

about his days at
Presidency, in particular,
how some of the
professors shaped his
thoughts about physics. He
ends with an incident
during his Presidency days
about how an interesting
puzzle related to everyday
phenomena drew him to a
deeper understanding of a
basic issue of physics,
which later became an
integral part of his
research.
spent the years 1980-1984 in Presidency. Before the youngsters jump to any
conclusion, the fourth year was not because yours truly failed his exams; it was
a bonus Calcutta University provided those days, through its ingenious
procrastination which allowed many months of carefree lounging after three years
of hard work in the classrooms, the canteen and on the steps. It is sad to see that
the younger alumni have lost this privilege.
To get back to the story, those were the most exciting years of my life. To give
you a glimpse of those times in the Physics Department, let me tell you a bit
about my professors.
To begin with, our Head of the Department was the quintessential gentleman
with his impeccable dhoti and razor-sharp wit. As I learnt years later, Professor
Amal Kumar Raychaudhuri was a highly renowned cosmologist, who had
discovered a famous equation of General Relativity, called the Raychaudhuri
equation (I will come to this equation once more later). We didn't know any
of this at the time, of course, but he awed us with his ability to make everything
simple, including a subject like quantum mechanics. I still remember a class
in which he taught us the theory of the Hydrogen atom. He unfolded layers
of Mathematics like an orchestra conductor, wielding his chalk, all straight
out of his head, leading to a climax in which he arrived at the beautifully
simple spectrum of Hydrogen. His lectures on Classical Mechanics, given several
years before my time, challenged preconceived notions of time, force and
motion, in a style reminiscent of Plato's dialogues, which resulted in a treatise
famous for its rare insights. All this intellectual prowess did not take away
from AKR's human qualities. He was wonderfully affectionate to me (and, I
am sure, to others too). I recall his asking me once, "Are you well? Your hair
looks somewhat dishevelled (ushko-khushko)!" (in truth, my hair was merely
over-shampooed). On another occasion when my father (who was a Professor
of Mathematics in Presidency) was looking for me, AKR told him that he was
sure he had seen me sitting on the steps of Baker lab with some girls the
fact that he noted my whereabouts with accuracy was at once flattering and
embarrassing!
The other professor who made an indelible effect on me was SSG, Shyamal
Sengupta. In many ways he was poles apart from AKR. His approach to science
was that of a strong nationalist, while AKR's science did not have any boundaries.
While AKR swept you with his wit, often with a mischievous twinkle in his
eyes, SSG gave the impression of a serious, almost sombre, professor. He was,
perhaps understandably, not the most popular professor. However, there was
something in the way in which he built, brick by brick, the story of
thermodynamics (the science of heat) and its principal actors, which enthralled
quite a few of us.
The other remarkable professors were Hemen-babu (HNM) and Rashbiharibabu (RC). Hemen-babu taught us Optics, from a book by the famous physicist
Max Born and his colleague, Emil Wolf. The piece de resistance of his lectures,
BEING STRUCK BY THE TIME ARROW IN PRESIDENCY
besides the lucid exposition, was his drawing of perfect,

concentric, circles spanning the gigantic blackboards of
our classrooms. We would wait with bated breath, as his
chalk created an ever-widening arc across the blackboard,
till it ended the faultless circle with a flourish, leaving us
with a sense of exultant relief, as if we just watched a
great vocalist finishing a perfectly executed improvisation.
RC was like the uncrowned monarch in our lab; the
creaking, age-old instruments, in relentless usage perhaps
from the times of J. C. Bose, would tend to rebel against
inferior mortals like us, whose only recourse was to
complain to RC who would make all those instruments
fall in line.
Let me end this story with an incident during my Presidency
years which shaped a lot of my research in later years as a
physicist. Before that, however, I have to take you along
a detour through an interesting bit of science.
There is a rather delicious puzzle in everyday life, which is
called the puzzle of the arrow of time. As we all know, a
marble thrown on the ground stops after a while. Suppose
you take a movie of this event and run it in reverse; it will
look like one of those comic flashbacks in movies: a
stationary marble jumps to life and speeds away.
The reverse event, therefore, looks impossible; we say that
it shows an arrow of time.
This is, of course, all very true, and familiar from our daily
life e.g. hot tea gets cold and not the other way around.
Where is the puzzle then? To understand it, imagine that
in the marble experiment you use a movie camera so
fantastic that it can zoom onto the atomic scale. As we
know, the marble stops because atoms of the marble
collide with atoms of the ground. If you zoom so much
that you can only see two atoms at a time, the original
process shows a collision of two atoms and the reverse
process also shows the collision of two atoms going the
other way. You can hardly distinguish between the original
movie and the reverse. The reverse event should,
therefore, be certainly possible. Indeed, it is true! The
micro world does not have an arrow of time (this can fail
a bit if we consider some exotic subatomic entities, but it
is okay to ignore them in this discussion).
Now, phenomena at larger scales are governed by the
same microscopic laws as those at atomic scales. So how
come a process, which is possible when viewed on an
atomic scale, seems impossible when viewed on a large
scale? The answer to this puzzle is not easy, and is known
only partially. The basic realisation here, obtained through
a century of work by many physicists, is that a large
number of atoms behaves in a way not entirely obvious
from a study of a small number of atoms (a bit like how a

crowd may behave differently from an individual!). It is
not that the reverse process in the marble experiment
cannot happen; indeed, the marble can jump up and
speed away, but only in one out of a humongous number
of repetitions of the experiment; in the rest of the cases
it will just stay put and try your patience.
During my BSc days I did not quite know all this very
deeply; however, I got enough glimpses, mostly from
SSG, to be fascinated by it. I was, consequently, very
puzzled when, during one of the lazy strolls through a
library after my BSc final examination I found an article
in a rather reputed journal where a professor at a certain
American university, claimed to have found an arrow of
time in the micro world. I was quite sure that there must
have been some mistake and after treading on through
the article, found it. I went to SSG for his verdict, who
immediately agreed with me and suggested that I should
write a rebuttal paper. I was mortified by the thought;
to publicly lock horns with a university professor was a
scary notion for a mere undergraduate student like me.
However, egged on by SSG, I finally agreed and sent an
article. After a few agonising days of wait, a wonderfully
polite letter cameback from the journal, addressing me
as professor Mandal, and carried a response by the
original author who essentially trashed my article. I was
utterly disheartened. When I went to SSG again, he asked
me, "Have you looked at his response?" Frankly I had
not; I was too busy wallowing. At SSG's insistence, I wrote
a point-by-point "response to the response" and sent it
back to the editor. After a week or so, a curtelegram
came saying that my article was accepted for publication!
Both SSG and I were vindicated by this "victory". I learnt
an important lesson for later life that acceptance and
politeness are not the same thing!
My fascination with the arrow of time only kept growing
after this incident. After more than a decade, I found, in
course of my research with some colleagues in TIFR,that
the kind of time irreversibility mentioned above (friction,
cooling etc.) is related to another famous one, related to
black holes, which are supermassive objects in the sky to
which things can fall but never come out. After about
another decade, I found, during the course of some other
research with some other colleagues in TIFR and abroad,
that in the relation between these two kinds of time
arrows, a crucial role is played by the equation discovered
by AKR, the Raychaudhuri equation. This completed a
logical circle for me, which began with SSG and ended
with AKR. Of course, the seed sown during those years in
Presidency is deep enough that I am still fascinated by
the subject and, hopefully, will continue to be.
The author is a professor of Physics at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai. After completing his BSc in
Physics at Presidency in 1984, he joined TIFR as a PhD student. He went to the Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton for
postdoctoral work. His area of research is String Theory, Black Hole Physics and Quantum Field Theory, with current and
recurrent interest in time-dependent, especially dissipative phenomena.
I 51
THE GIRL FROM SUBURBIA..
The Girl from Suburbia ...

Sushan Konar
NCRA-TIFR, Pune, India
It started out as
an ordinary dream, but
turned out to be an
obstacle race ....
t started out as an ordinary dream, the kind every aspiring student loves to
dream with the promise of an exciting yet unknown future ahead of her. In the
end though, it turned out to be an obstacle race for a girl trying to enroll in the
Physics Department of the Presidency college. Thankfully there were people, kind
sympathetic people, who helped her find a way despite the obstacles. Last summer,
Somak-da (Prof. Somak Raychaudhury) took the students of his department on a
tour of physics institutes around the country. When his retinue reached our institute
one afternoon, I was overjoyed to find a huge proportion of young girls in that
group. We have indeed come a very long way from the days when I ran that
obstacle course as a young girl. So, when the request for an article for the reunionsouvenir came, I felt that for the younger generation it might be interesting to get
a glimpse of what their fore-sisters(?) have gone through.
It was a bit of an accident. And I accuse three people for being the sole reason for
giving me that kind of dream - Einstein and the physics teachers in our school,
Parbati-di (Bhattacharya) and Sudipta-di (Prabrajika Aseshprana). It was 1978,
the centenary of Einstein and whole of Kolkata was celebrating, as Bengalis always
do whenever they find the slightest excuse for a celebration. There were all sorts
of competitions going around. And these two ladies took it in their heads to
enroll us for a variety of these. I don't recall what exactly the competitions were
about, but we were asked to read up loads on Einstein, on Curie, on physics
(whatever an eighth standard girl was capable of understanding) and a lot more.
Both of them were inspirational teachers and the real reason behind me opting
for physics (against my family's express wishes). And we were hooked. Had no
real idea about what a life in physics meant at that age, but the decision was
made - physics it would have to be!
Then the luminaries appeared on the horizon, primary among them were Somakda and Gautam-da (Gautam Mandal, TIFR). We were still in school. And these two
had their photos splashed across the newspapers when they topped the higher
secondary examination and opted to study physics in Presidency college shunning
the standard route to medical or engineering degrees. (We were still quite green
to know that a seat in the physics department of Presidency College has always
been counted as far more glamorous than any other option available.) Ah! The
choice was made. Under the circumstances, it was inconceivable for a young
hopeful not to dream of joining the department which teaches her dream subject
and boasts of such immediate seniors!
But it was not an easy option. Not for me, in the least. There were hurdles in every
step of the way. The first serious fight started more than a year before. With two
physician grandfathers it was kind of expected from the eldest grandchild to
follow in their footsteps. Though everyone in the family had an inkling that the
said grand-kid was not really keen to walk along the paved line, nobody seriously
THE GIRL FROM SUBURBIA..
thought that I would have the courage to defy the

expectations. So the first step of rebellion was to deliberately
avoid filling up the forms for the joint entrance examination.
A classmate of mine couldn't prevent this step, appeared for
the exam and submitted blank sheets in order to opt for
physics. I was not brave enough. And at that age, the stigma
attached to the statement 'she couldn't clear the JEE' - was a
bit heavy to carry! Instead I chose to brave my mother's wrath
upon hearing that I 'forgot' to fill up the JEE forms!
Then came the next step. In our time, the departmental
entrance exam was the one and only step between the young
hopeful and the hallowed portals of the Baker hall. Alas,
that was more than a hurdle. To this day, I have no idea how
my name appeared in the list, after my totally dismal
performance in the entrance test! Well, I did have some help.
There was some disruption in the bus link from Tamluk (where
my parents lived) to Mecheda (from where I had to catch a
train to Howrah). So my uncle (who typically has the last
word in all practical matters in our family) decided that I
should stay in Jadavpur with his family, and he would
supervise all my entrance examinations as I was not yet
allowed to roam around Kolkata on my own. Now this police
officer uncle of mine, who made a name for his severity
amongst the criminals, has always been very scared of
anything academic. So he dictated that I must wear a sari to
appear for the entrance examination of 'such a prestigious
college'! I don't know how or why wearing a sari could have
any bearing on a physics examination but who could venture
an opinion to this strictly disciplinarian policeman! And the
sky, very kindly, chose to open itself up on that very day. I
have not been to Kolkata in the rainy season for many years.
But in those days even the slightest rain had the capability
of creating waist-deep pools in that part of Kolkata. No
wonder I arrived in the examination hall, probably looking
like someone out of a not-so-reputable Bollywood fare!
Worrying about the flow of water through a complicated
pipe was not something one would have liked to focus on
under such circumstances. I was totally lost. And the
discussion (amongst some of the would-be-classmates who
turned out to be physics stalwarts in later life) overheard
outside the hall after the exam put me in total despair. I
almost begged my father not to go and check the selection
list. Even after all these years I have a nagging doubt about
that result!
The struggle did not end there either. Actually, the final and
the most difficult round started now. It was not easy for a
girl from a suburban family to come and study in Kolkata. I
had been lucky so far, being brought up in a boarding school.
But Presidency did not have a girls' hostel then. Two of my
classmates were commuting from Andul and Santragachhi.

Given the distances involved, doing the same from Tamluk
(and later from Medinipur) was completely out of the
question. Even though I had quite a few relatives residing in
Kolkata, my parents were totally enamoured of the idea of a
hostel life. They were thoroughly convinced that I would be
completely spoiled by doting aunts and uncles, and physics
demanded a life of far more serious devotion.
Off we went in search of hostels. There used to exist just one
'sarkari' hostel, meant for students studying in various
government colleges registered under Calcutta University and
/ or in the university itself. Understandably, the waiting list
was mile-long, with no chance of even getting into the
waiting list unless one had some obvious political blessings.
And even then, all the seats were occupied by the revered
student-leaders of the said political organisation. (These
student-leaders, by some magic always managed to maintain
their names in the college rolls, even though many of them
were older than some of the senior professors in those
colleges!) Private hostels were somewhat better in that
regard (they only asked for exorbitant admission fees), but
the living conditions would certainly have made the presiding
deity of physics take a flight! As a last resort (why last would
be apparent in a moment), I went back to the Ramakrishna
Sarada Mission run hostel in Entally, where I spent two years
while doing my higher secondary in Lady Brabourne College.
The nuns were very understanding but they could not allow
a girl studying in a co-educational college to reside in their
hostel. It would have corrupted the morals of the rest of the
girls! I might add here that I have actually been raised by
the nuns of this same order during my school days. But rules
were rules, and moral-corrupting practice could not be
allowed!
At this juncture, when I was getting really desperate - the
more traditional minded part of my family came out of
slumber. Of course, why does this girl insist on going to a
co-educational college when other 'good' options exist? Why
indeed not, my previous alma mater, Lady Brabourne, for
instance? Seriously, who could explain the lure of the
hallowed portals to such people? Then my grandmother,
bless her soul, put her foot down and exercised her supreme
veto power. She said "Enough is enough! It is time a girl
had the opportunity to study wherever she wants to. It's the
task of her elders to make arrangements for that to happen."
Of course, her wish was obeyed and the rest, as they say, is
history. But I have always wondered how many before and
after me could not make it simply because their gender or
their particular situation erected insurmountable barriers in
front of them.
Sushan (BSc: 1981-84) is an astrophysicist, and professionally supposed to spend her time on trying to understand the
nuances of neutron stars. Though she would rather use her time writing blogs or getting ideas about improving the situation
of women in academia, in particular, in Astrophysics community of India. Her activities can be found at - http://
www.ncra.tifr.res.in:8081/~sushan/
I 53
ENTROPY
Entropy
Basab Dasgupta
Ex-vice president, Component operations at Sony,
San Diego, California
The concept of entropy

is the first real abstract
concept that physics
students encounters
in their long journey to
the goal of becoming
physicists. This article
is a fond recollection
of my own exposure
to this concept.
hen I studied physics in high school it was a very interesting subject to me

because I could relate what I was studying in physics with events in my
daily life: various kinds of motion, boiling and freezing of water, generation and
propagation of sound, colors in a rainbow, operation of a light bulb and so on.
When I took adimssion to the Presidency College as a physics honors student, one
of the subjects in our first year's curriculum was thermodynamics. In this course,
I encountered for the first time in my life, a totally abstract concept: that of entropy.
It was abstract because I could not point to any specific property of any object
which I could measure, perhaps with a very sophisticated instrument in the physics
lab, and say that its entropy is of a certain amount. Entropy was defined only by
a mathematical formula; an incremental change in entropy of a substance was an
incremental increase in its amount of heat divided by its absolute temperature.
Remarkably this entity had all kinds of implications in the transformation of heat
energy into work, even though we could not quite define it in words. There was a
somewhat vague interpretation of entropy though. Entropy of a system was
supposed to be a measure of disorder or "randomness" in the system. Although
this statement was never "proved" and therefore had to be taken for granted by
our faith in physics, it added to the mystique of the concept of entropy, simply
because concept of "disorder" was equally fascinating, although perhaps not quite
as abstract and did not seem to be directly connected to heat transfer.
Typically, many students of physics and engineering lose interest in the subject of
thermodynamics at this point. They would only want to learn how to solve certain
problems in a mechanical way, following the examples in the book. They don't
find it worthwhile to spend their time pondering about the concept and debating
its significance with their classmates. We owe it to our professor, Shyamal Sengupta
(SS) at Presidency College, for generating an intrigue about entropy. SS had a
personality which could be described as a combination of that of a poet and a
philosopher. He introduced the concept of entropy to us in a way that suggested
it was from another world. It almost seemed like understanding entropy was
perhaps a little bit like understanding God!
I believe that his teaching had a profound impact on his students which no one
fully appreciated at the time. It made us realize that we belonged to a special
group; a group which had the ability to go beyond the obvious and ability to
think about and appreciate the brilliant abstract concepts that physics offered. It
also forced us to explore our own full potential in this respect and prepared us for
more abstract and difficult concepts to come later in our studies, especially those
of theory of relativity and quantum mechanics.
Appreciating entropy was the first test in separating the "men" from the "boys", so
to speak: the ones who were intellectually sophisticated enough to pursue the
mysteries of the universe from the ones who were there studying physics just to
ENTROPY
get a college degree and a job. There was a silent

understanding among the members of the first group about
this and this realization also provided a life-long unifying
force among them! They developed the belief that only their
classmates, who shared their passion about entropy, would
be the ones who could truly understand them.
The concept of entropy shook up our brains and enhanced
our confidence. Equally abstract as the concept of entropy
was the second law of thermodynamics, which stated that
the entropy of the universe could never decrease! What does
it even mean when you have difficulty in grasping the
meaning of entropy in the first place? If nothing else, it made
us think and think beyond anything we had learned up to
that point in our education. It was also amazing how many
different interpretations existed for the concept of entropy
and in how many different ways the second law of
thermodynamics could be formulated. Just understanding
that these different formulations were indeed equivalent was
a formidable task in itself.
One of my college friends once jokingly asked me "Basab,
do you lose sleep worrying that the entropy of the universe
is continuing to increase every second?" It sounds almost as
bad as the increase in population on this earth or increase
of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; but is there something
really alarming about ever increasing entropy? Would the
earth cease to function normally if the total entropy exceeded
a certain threshold? Could it be that global warming or
nuclear disasters such as the ones in Fukushima are somehow
a consequence of this law? The argument would be that if
we could convert heat energy directly into work with one
hundred percent efficiency, something the second law of
thermodynamics precludes, we would have no exhaust gases
full of carbon dioxide or "spent" nuclear rods lying around in
a nuclear plant. On a more intellectual level, since the second
law of thermodynamics is not symmetric with respect to
direction of time,it has been proposed to supply an
explanation of the difference between moving forward and
backwards in time, such as why the cause precedes the effect

(the causal arrow of time).
Perhaps there is something even more profound about this
law. Perhaps it is only a special case of a much more universal
principle which applies not only to the inert objects that
physics deals with, but also to living objects. We can easily
correlate such a principle with the fact that it is easier to
create clutter than order. Perhaps it also implies that it is
easier to be noisy and chaotic than calm and quiet and it is
easier to hate than love.
I am also fascinated by the term "entropy" because I find
myself entrapped in the concept! It is such an exotic name
and unlike almost all other terms used in physics, such as
force, energy, work, power, inertia, resistance, current,
pressure etc., it has no usage in our everyday language.
Apparently, the name "entropy" was coined by the German
physicist Rudolf Clausius from the Greek word "tropos" which
means "transformation". Clearly the transformation involved
here is the transformation of heat into work.
When I was teaching a freshman level introductory physics
course after my PhD, I had occasional discussions with a
colleague of mine, who was also teaching the same course,
about how to make the course more interesting to the
students and we both agreed that interjection of humor
would be appropriate. He told me that, in one of his tests
with multiple choice answers, one of the questions was "What
is entropy?" As possible answers he included: a) "Amount of
heat in a system"; b) "Measure of disorder of a system; c)
"Measure of temperature of a system" and d) Name of a
stripper downtown. When I thought about his last answer,
I felt that it was probably not a far-fetched idea to think of a
seductive temptress as an embodiment of entropy. She
mesmerized us, appeared before us in a variety of different
ways, dared to explore her, prepared us for future interactions
with damsels like her and most importantly, separated the
men from the boys!
Basab Dasgupta attended Presidency College from 1964 to 1967. He went on to University of Calcutta where he ranked first
in the MSc examination and then went to USA. He received a PhD in theoretical solid state physics from University of
Wisconsin, Milwaukee in 1976. He worked in the academia for five years eventually becoming an assistant professor at
Marquette University. Subsequently, he moved to industrial positions at RCA and Sony and eventually became a vice president
of component operations at Sony. Currently he is enjoying his retired life in San Clemente, California in hobbies like writing,
painting and traveling.
I 55
ENTROPY
Cartoons: Suparno Chaudhuri
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I 65
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I 67
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yyry e_ yy! y# &# D# D#_ zy#
Presidency College in the Late Sixties

An Efficient Dispenser of Education?
Jayanta Kumar Bhattacharjee
Harish Chandra Research Institute, Chhatang Road, Jhusi, Allahabad - 211019, UP
Presidency College in the

late sixties was perhaps
ironically a nearly ideal
model for efficient
imparting of education.
ollege life began in late August or early September difficult to remember

more than four decades later. What I do recall very well is that soon after the
classes began there was a month-long break (actually slightly more than a month,
since Presidency in those days reopened only after Jagadhatri immersion). This
was a welcome relief. After an utterly relaxed school life ( five hours fifteen minutes,
including a half-hour gap, each day for five days a week and a holiday at the drop
of a hat ) the college schedule was impossibly hectic. It was classes again in
November. This was quite unacceptable given that year after year our school had
closed after the finals in November and never reopened till maghotsav was over (I
went to a Brahmo school). Those precious, lazy, mild, winter weeks were to be
spent in parks and public spaces and not in the confines of a class room. Well,
relief came in the form of Robert McNamara, the president of the World Bank and
the US secretary of state when China had clashed with India in 1963. To help the
likes of me, the man came to town and the city decided to shut down, McNamara's
support for India in the '63 fiasco presumably being the reason for protest. Well
earned holiday and the basic lesson of life was thus firmly established for me in
my college transit never accept anyone's logic, think it out for yourself and be
aware of conflicts between private inclinations and public posturing.
Fair amount of classes tempered by sporadic bandhs (holidays) took one to the
next November. University regulations required screening test for Part-I
examinations to be over by December and by the middle of that month regular
classroom engagements came to an end. Months and months of examinationbreak ended sometime in July when classes for the third year began. They ended
soon thereafter, first due to a few days of torrential rain and then due to social
upheaval. That was the end of college life about nine months later it was to be
revived for a month to "finish the syllabus" for the Part II examination. That was a
month best forgotten.
Did the college fail us? Not really. The college provided a strange incentive for the
learning process. A year wasted in the end (three years dragging into four) was certainly
uncalled for but the environment that the college managed to produce allowed one
to learn on one's own the best way to learn at the end of the day. That is what was
special about the college. For all aspiring educationalists there is a moral to be stored
away from this overburdening the student by pouring on them everything you
ever learnt may not be the most efficient process of imparting education. Encouraging
to think and providing the right atmosphere does count a lot.
The author received his bachelor degree from the college in 1972 - a degree which
should have been received in 1971. The remainder of his education was in Calcutta
University and University of Maryland. His working life began in IIT Kanpur and is
about to end in HRI, Allahabad after stints at IACS, Kolkata and S N Bose Centre,
Kolkata. The proximity of Kanpur and Allahabad suggests that life has come full
circle but the fact that it did not close indicates life could not have been flat.
I 69
THOSE WERE THE DAYS, MY FRIEND...
Those Were the Days, My Friend ...

Pradeep Parrack
Dept of Biochemistry, Bose Institute,
93/1, Acharya Prafulla Chandra Road, Kolkata - 700 009.
Life in the Presidency

College during 1974-77
has been described as seen
by the author in his late
teens, with interesting
anecdotes about teachers
and other students, some
of whom have become
famous in later times. The
author also speaks about
several of his own
classmates, and touches
upon how a training in
physics has helped him in
his present occupation:
research in biochemistry.
have not started my article yet, and may already have left some of you wondering
with my affiliation. When I was a student of the BSc class of 1974 at the
Physics Department of Presidency, I myself would have laughed out loud if I was
told that one day I would end up as a professor of biochemistry. Strange and
unexpected things do happen in life. Perhaps that's what keeps you going.
As I reflect upon the past, I cannot but feel wondering at the extent to which
things have changed compared to how we used to live in our college days. To
borrow from a post shared by a friend in Facebook, those were the times when
Window was just a square hole in a room and Application was something written
on a paper; when Keyboard was a Piano and Mouse just an animal. File was an
important office material and Hard Drive just an uncomfortable road trip; Cut
was done with knife and Paste with glue; Web was a spider's home and virus was
flu. Apple and Blackberry were just fruits...
Where do I begin? Whatever I think of, whatever I try to remember, appears so
very different from things that happen these days! My first days at Presidency
College were, like many of my mates, the days when we came to collect forms for
admission, submit the filled forms, and came thrice again before actually starting
off on a three-year journey filled with fun and excitement: to appear for the
admission test, to check our names on a small list on the notice board announcing
the results of the test, and to get admitted to the college. Nothing unusual about
all that... except for the fact that each of us, with some rare exceptions perhaps,
came to the college alone, entirely on our own. Forty years ago, our parents were
content with signing at the required places in the forms and hand over to us the
money for admission. A student who was accompanied at college for things like
admission or examination by his / her mother or father, was branded as one who
has not grown up enough to leave school and join college. And mind you, we all
were one year younger to a typical first year student of today, having studied only
up to class XI in school before starting college.
Things were very, very different when there was no cellphone (even landline phones
were not there in many houses), making outstation calls ('trunk calls') was difficult
and costly, and we wrote letters to each other. Xerox did not exist. There was no
access to any sort of computer, and PC was yet to be invented. And in the city
itself: no flyover at Sealdah, which was perenially a traffic bottleneck and typically
took a long time for buses to cross, the metro rail in Calcutta was in the process of
getting built (adding to the general chaos) and power cuts ("load sheddings")
were the order of the day. But let me not get carried away with the past, which
we tend to always think of as 'better times' (often wrongfully so), and come back
to Presidency college in 1974.
When I saw my name somewhere in the middle of the list of qualifiers (I even
remember my rank there: 18, in a list of 30 or so), it was happiness mixed with
disbelief that filled me. My admission test had been terrible.

I could not solve most of the problems in the test, though I
had tried hard. My answer script may have had only a few
(~25%) correct solutions, and some unfinished attempts. I
did not have the time or courage to even attempt some of
the questions. Frankly, I had not expected to make it to the
final list. Rather, I had done well for the admission test in
Mathematics, where my name appeared near the top. And
yet, I chose to join the Physics Department. Much later I had
come to realise that in Presidency College admission tests,
they checked not only the answer, but also the approach of
a student. Additionally, there was a healthy weightage from
the marks scored in higher secondary, our school leaving
exam. And if I am not wrong, this healthy trend continues
to this day.
bulb of the thermometer was missing. I did not know what

to do, and called the teacher who was around. He happened
to be MGB. He heard my story with contempt and disbelief,
and quickly took another thermometer and inserted it into
the same hole. The same sequence of events was repeated.
Now it was his turn to get surprised and confused. What
is this? What is going on? He shouted out in Bengali
(Baangal). Before I could prevent him, he took one more
thermometer and tried the same thing. Nothing else had
changed. The boundary conditions remained the same, only
two humans were getting more and more nervous and
excited. Needless to say, the third thermometer, true to
physics, behaved like its predecessors, just as it should have.
Now MGB was all smiles: You had overheated the disc, boy!
he pronounced.
Among my classmates was one boy whom I had befriended

just a month back: Arnab Raichoudhuri. His aunt and my
father were classmates in Presidency Physics many years ago,
but we had come to know each other only recently. I
remember some moments of my first class, taken by none
other than Hemen-babu, alias HNM, who spoke to us with a
firm but friendly accent, punctuated by wise and meaningful
pauses. He taught us something called General Properties
of Matter. The whole class wondered in awe when he picked
up a chalk and drew a perfect circle on the blackboard behind
him, while he was facing us and talking to us. Gradually we
encountered other teachers like MGB (Madan Gopal Basak)
who had his own typical style of teaching the subject of
Current Electricity, speaking in his inimitable "Baangalaccent,
with an occasional stammer that added spice to his lectures.
Whatever he lacked in the way of finesse, he more than made
up with his sincerity and emotions. I still remember his
description of the deflection of the galvanometer undergoing
damped harmonic motion at over-damped, critically damped
or under-damped conditions: Jaitasey, jaitasey, jaitasey...,
Jailo and,Jaitasey-aaitasey, jaitaasey-aaitasey respectively.
We came closer to both of them later in practical classes,
where we realised that HNM would troubleshoot our
experiments in a very effective way, never really telling us
what was wrong, but would keep on asking questions like
So you are not getting a null point. Have you thought why?
What could be wrong? ... no, the switch is in place. So what
next? etc. Indirectly, he would teach us to think in a
systematic and logical manner, just the way he taught in the
theory classes. MGB was extremely good with soldering.
However, I distinctly remember him getting really nervous
on two occasions in the lab, when I met with accidents while
conducting experiments. The first one was to do with
measurement of thermal conductivity, where one had to
insert a thermometer into a hole in the side of a thick metal
disc whose conductivity was being determined. When I
brought out the thermometer to take the reading, I found
that the mercury covered the entire capillary space within
the thermometer, which looked odd. Then I saw that the
On another occasion, while trying to measure the boiling

point of aniline, vapours of aniline had somehow leaked
through the cork stopper, and caught fire from the Bunsen
burner used to boil the flask. The aniline-filled glass container
stood there on the burner with a crown of flames adorning
its cork-stoppered head. There was some commotion around,
and MGB rushed in. Fire... fire! You... he was visibly
trembling (at least his lips were), and could do little other
than making all of us nervous. Then somebody put out the
fire, perhaps just by turning the burner off, and someone
else brought a thick piece of jute bag and used it to douse
the flames.
If either of the mischievous duo of Sugato Bhattacharyya
(SB) or Saurabh Das (SD) was near you in the practical class,
you had to watch out for trouble. Once Deepanwita and her
partner Arundhati (the only two girls in our class) were
working on a heat experiment using ice, water bath and
thermocouple, and the temperature refused to rise in spite
of heating for long. It so happened that from time to time
SB or SD would come and pick up pieces of ice from the
girls' experimental setup and quietly slip them into another
part of the experiment where their beaker was being heated.
The famous Amal-babu (AKR) was one we loved, respected
and feared. He always wore a dhoti and a white khadi
punjabi. We never missed his classes, which were made all
the more enjoyable with his unique approach, his subtly
humorous way of speaking and typical shrugs. He used to
teach Thermodynamics. In his first class, while stating the
laws of thermodynamics, he remarked that in physics, it was
customary to start by giving definitions. But often,
definitions are useless because you have no idea of the matter
from definitions. And then, AKR gave a stark simple example:
How would you define milk ? You can say that it is a white
liquid, you can say that it is good to drink, etc. etc., but
these would convey nothing to a person who has not seen
milk. Later he stated the two versions of the second law
and proceeded to show us that these (the Clausius and the
Kelvin-Planck statements) were equivalent. Though we were
I 71
fond of him, many of us were put off by his very obvious

brilliance and kept a distance, and never asked him
anything... it was indeed a great loss, because we did have
the chance to interact with him and learn so much more
(some among us did, but most, including me, were too scared
to speak to him, for no good reason. I think the present
students are smarter in this respect).
Of course, I am not going to cover all teachers, but I must
tell of SS, my favourite. Salil Sarkar was a young and shy
dhoti-clad person who discovered in his first class (on
mathematical methods) that none of us knew calculus. It
was something that was not in the school syllabus, and we
were supposed to learn it in our 'pass course' mathematics
class. Pass course subjects were generally neglected: mostly
by students, and sometimes also by the respective teachers.
After all, what can you do if you face an uninterested (and
sometimes, empty) class day after day? So SS took upon
himself to teach us the rudiments of calculus before he
proceeded with his subject proper. I must confess that to
this day, even after having moved so much away from
physics, I have not forgotten what he taught: starting from
limits, to derivatives and then integration all the basic
facts briefly but rigorously covered in five or six classes. And
then he asked us to practise from Abbott's Teach Yourself
Calculus, which was then available in a cheap and popular
'Teach Yourself' series of the ELBS. I have replicated his
approach with much success with many high school kids,
including my own children. SS was also very gentle and had
a rare sense of beauty and propriety. On one occasion,
between classes, one of our classmates Bithi (an extremely
talented singer who later left Presidency and went on to
join the MBBS course) was singing (Tomra ja bolo taai bolo)
to us, having failed to refuse our joint plea for a song. It was
perhaps at the Sanchari (Ami kisher mo-o-dhu-u-u...) that
SS had reached for the next class, which was his. He stood
there and let Bithi finish her song before entering. A few of
us who sat at the door side had seen him standing patiently,
appreciating the song. Unfortunately, we did not have SS as
a teacher for long. He was transferred to another government
college in Jhargram or elsewhere.
There were also others whose classes we sometimes deserted
en masse ("mass cut") and went off to sit and chat at Coffee
House or Mouchak or some other joint. This is again
something which was an act of utter foolishness and grossly
wrong, but great fun for the 17/18-year-olds of those days.
Their names themselves were so interesting I can bet that
you would not find such names any more. The thin and
unassuming Kachiram Bera (who, during a practical
examination he was invigilating, had asked one of us to do
all our calculations using the log table. When told that the
calculations in questions were some additions, he remained
unfazed and insisted that all calculations must be done with
log tables) was one of them. I have now forgotten what he
taught. Then there was the unforgettable Badal Kumar Betal,
a simple and humble person who happened to be of dark

complexion and was a bit on the heavier side. He, like
Kachiram, provided comic relief to our young mischievous
lot. Sometimes we attended these classes just for the fun of
it. Kounish Chandra Sen (KCS) used to teach 'Sound' by
reciting his lecture memorized from a popular textbook.
Some of us (usually Saurabh, Subrata or Sugato
Bhattacharya) would deliberately ask a question in the middle
of such an engrossed KCS recital, upsetting his rhythm, and
he would have to again start from the beginning. This had
happened a number of times. As I write these lines, I cannot
but feel sorry at how unjustly we had treated them at times,
and am filled with a sense of remorse. After all, they had
tried in their own way to cover the part of the syllabus they
were assigned, most of which were really boring stuff. An
essential property of memory is to remember the best and
the worst, the funniest and the most tragic. All the rest gets
washed out. Therefore what remains in my memory now
after four decades is bound to be somewhat biased and may
not reflect the exact truth, but is somewhat close to what
really had happened.
In the college, I used to spend a lot of time at the common
room in the main building, along with some other classmates
like Sutirtha Bhattacharya, Atanu Bhadra, Ashis Pal, Amitabha
Mukhopadhyay or Subrata Sen. I would play table tennis or
auction bridge. It was during one such time that a big
commotion followed by sounds of running brought me out
into the corridor, along with others. As I came out, Tapanda,
one year senior to us and a Geology student, rushed towards
us and almost fell down near me. Instinctively, I picked him
up and saw that he was bleeding profusely from his nose
and mouth. In a distance, some other boys who were
obviously chasing him saw the group near the common room
and retreated. In the following days, protest meetings were
organized and many apolitical students came forward to
join the fight against atrocities in the name of student politics.
Some of us gave impromptu speeches at the portico of the
main building. If I am not wrong, it was there that I first
heard Sugato Bose of history (one year senior to me in college,
and now an M.P.) give a speech.
Those were charged times. Chhatra Parishad (C.P.) was going
strong and Arunabha Ghosh, whom we see a lot on the TV
screen now, was the leader at the C.P.-controlled union.
However, he was not so popular among many of us for his
high-handed attitude. Scuffles between C.P. and a newly
formed apolitical body of students were not uncommon.
This body was rapidly gaining popularity. Tapanda belonged
to this group and was thus a target for C.P. Sometimes C.P.
students would even come and force us to quit classes
because they had called a strike. All these kept us in a semiexcited state, and dull moments were rare. The political
atmosphere of the country itself was rather volatile in those
days. The declaration of emergency took place when we were
BSc students.
Among other notable characters whom I can remember from

those days was Suman Chatterjee (now a journalist of some
repute), my batchmate from the history department, who
was seen a lot in the cricket field. There were several Sumans
in college, and he used to be referred to as Khisti Suman
because of his preference for certain Bengali expletives which
always adorned his conversations. Sugato Marjit of
Economics is another well-known name today. He was a year
junior to me, and always enthralled us at college functions
with his Noyon Bhora Jol or other raagprodhan songs. From
my own department, the batch two years senior to us was
widely regarded as an exceptional group of extremely bright
students. Sumit Das, Ashok Sen, Palashbaran Pal Majumdar
(now he has dropped the last part of his name), Anuradha
Raychaudhury, Somen Bhattacharya and Dipankar Home
were all together in that class. Many of them have later
become important names in physics in India and elsewhere.
It seems that while Sumit was expected to top the class,
Ashok Sen surprised everybody by securing the first rank
when the results of part-I (which was at the end of second
year then, and there was no part III) were announced. Anup
Sen, who later moved to computer science and is now a
faculty member in IIM Calcutta, was also in the same class.
Personally, I used to admire Palashda a lot and secretly
became his fan, attracted by his multifaceted talent and
activities. An excellent speaker and storyteller who was
extremely witty, Palashda used to write really well. He
possessed a set of notebooks, one for each topic of physics
(Gravitation, Properties of matter, Electrostatics etc.) where
he had written down the essentials of the subject, along
with derivations, neatly and systematically. These notebooks
were often borrowed by us. In those days, an unwritten bond
existed between alternate batches, purely for a very practical
reason. Questions used to be repeated in alternate years.
Thus what they had encountered in the university exams
were likely to be 'important' for us. Besides this, I used to
adore Palashda's singing which had a fine lyrical quality, and
his style of singing used to convey the emotions of the song
very truthfully.
Palashda's batch was also exceptional for other reasons. They
organized seminar classes and revived the departmental
reunion in 1974. It was in these reunions that I witnessed
for the first time, the extraordinary plays by Badal Sarkar
and his group. I can remember 'Tringsho Shatabdi' and
'Bhuma' enacted before us in the open ground where we
played cricket. I also became aware, for the first time, of the
existence of the short film Two (a dialogue-less classic by
Satyajit Ray) and another one featuring Ravishankar playing
a raga, where the sitarist was not visible for the major part
of the film, but the sound of sitar formed the backdrop
against all sorts of scenes where ordinary lives of ordinary
people were depicted. These were shown on the occasion of
departmental reunions.
Among my own classmates, Saurabh Das, Sugato
Bhattacharyya, Subrata Sen, Rana Dasgupta and Sutirtha

Bhattacharya were the ones whose sharpness and brilliance
really stood out and shone. Interestingly, circumstances of
life did not allow any of them to remain in Physics. Saurabh,
the brightest among us then, unfortunately decided to take
his own life at a later stage while he was a PhD student in
the USA. Sugato joined IIM after BSc and is now a faculty
member in the Finance department of University of Michigan.
Subrata abandoned Physics during his PhD days in the USA
and studied electrical engineering, eventually ending up as
an engineer in Qualcomm, and lives in San Diego. Rana is in
Phoenix, Arizona, presently looking after Net and Cloud
computing at American Express. Sutirtha left midway
between his MSc to take up a job in a reputed insurance
company, and within a couple of years became an IAS officer.
Presently he is in the news, having been appointed the
C & MD of Coal India, and lives in Hyderabad.
Who, among my other classmates, have remained in
academics? Arnab (Raichoudhuri) is a professor in the
department of Physics, IISc, Bangalore, studying solar physics.
Subinay Dasgupta is a faculty member in the Physics
department of Calcutta University, and Subhrangshu Sekhar
Manna, a scientist at the SNBNCBS. Ardhendu Ghoshal
(Instrumentation, Jadavpur University) and Avijit Pathak
(Sociology, JNU) are also faculty members, and so am I, who
ended up in the Biochemistry department of Bose Institute.
Many of us have changed areas, but have done fairly well in
our fields of choice. A question that sometimes comes up in
my mind and in conversations with friends is, how has
studying physics helped usin areas outside physics?
For me, the reason for leaving physics was rather simple.
While studying MSc I realised that more and more of physics
is not going to be my cup of tea: it was getting very difficult.
On the other hand, the special paper Biophysics that
I studied as a part of my MSc physics course in Calcutta
University was like a fresh draft of air, full of wonders.
As a result, I pursued the PhD programme in Biophysics at
IISc, Bangalore. I now spend time studying the structure
and interactions of proteins connected with gene
regulation in bacteria, using experimental methods. There is
practically no physics that I use in my regular research work,
except for some occasionally encountered biophysical
chemistry.
Nevertheless, I have felt at times that unlike many of my
colleagues, I am not put off by equations, which we have to
sometimes deal with in our research. But most importantly,
studying physics has somehow left in me the ability to think
critically and analytically, and look at unknown problems
free from the bias that biologists sometimes have. Objective
thinking and the awareness of one's limitations become
integral parts of the thought process of a person trained in
physics, who is much more receptive to new thoughts and
ideas: an extremely important asset that is helpful in all
I 73
spheres. Such a person is also able to connect diverse ideas

and entities into a complete coherent picture. This view is
shared by my BSc classmates Sutirtha Bhattacharya and
Bidyut Bhattacharya, both of whom are now in important
administrative positions in the government.
Thinking back, the words Those were the days my friend /
We thought they'd never end / We'd sing and dance forever...
accurately reflects my feelings of college days, some forty
years ago. But things do change, and it is only because the
older lot ages, retires and leaves, can new people with fresh
and new ideas and enthusiasm take over. While speaking of
past memories, I may sometimes have made remarks here

and there which could have perhaps been avoided. I
apologise for having done so. What I had tried is to truthfully
portray a part of my memories. No doubt, much has
remained unsaid. I have not spoken a word about the other
side of our college life that consisted of semi-romantic
relationships that did occupy much of our times. But some
things are best left unsaid.
The facts in this article are correct to the knowledge of the
author. He apologizes for any unintentional inaccuracy that
remains by mistake.
Pradeep Parrack did his MSc in physics from Calcutta University in 1980 (officially) / 1982 (actually) and PhD in Biophysics
from IISc, Bangalore in 1988. He has worked at the Bioinformatics Centre, Bose Institute, and National Institutes of Health,
USA, before joining the faculty of Department of Biochemistry, Bose Institute, in 1994. He is keenly interested in Bengali
literature and music, and is associated with two Bengali magazines Rango Byango Rasikeshu and Maskabari, to which he
regularly contributes stories, poems and other articles in Bengali. He published a book of poems from his college days, called
Kono Abhijog Nei, in 2001, and has translated Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone in Bengali.
THREE YEARS IN SHANGRI-LA
Three Years in Shangri-la

Sreerup Raychaudhuri
Homi Bhabha Road, Colaba, Mumbai 400005
A glimpse of the days

lingering in the very
personal attic of memories.
The author glides through
his salad days while
examining the mundane
present, which somehow
remains unchanged in its
essence. Delving into every
corner of Presidency in the
wink of an eye, from a
'friendly' football match to
funny experiences in
laboratories, from hearing
about a non-romantic view
of science for the first time
to the feeling of seeing a
renowned legend with
bare eyes, this is an ode to
his alma mater.
etting off the running tram was easy, since it was crawling along at walking
pace along College Street and I was barely eighteen years old. But since it
was my first time in this part of the world, I made the unpardonable mistake of
getting off in front of the Calcutta Medical College and inquiring of a disgusted
tea-shop owner if that red building was Presidency College. Aghast at the kind of
idiots who were coming to Kolkata's or was it the Universe's? intellectual
hub, the man stared at me for a whole minute as if unable to make up his mind
whether to speak to such a degenerate creature. But perhaps my woebegone
expression softened his heart, for he finally nodded his head westwards and told
me, rather curtly, to walk ahead and find a big iron gate to my left. And that was
my entry into the wonder that was Presidency College.
Many years later, now a grizzled science professor carrying much more avoirdupois
than the callow youth who had slipped through that iron gate one muggy
September morning, I decided to revisit my alma mater. I had come to Kolkata for
a few days, and had my fill of mishti and "motton" rolls. It is when one is thus
satiated that a hunger for nostalgia begins to overwhelm all the tele-bhaja and
lebu-cha experiences. Finding, therefore, a parking place for my hired car
somewhere on the other side of College Square (for now I no longer dared to
board a tram or a bus), I walked, as if in a dream, over the unchanged cobbles of
College Square, shared a moment of recognition with the many-times-beheaded
bust of Vidyasagar, escaped the frenzied talons of pushy booksellers (was it
imagination, or were they less aggressive now than they formerly used to be?),
and managed to turn in at the same iron gates, which had only changed in getting
a fresh coat of paint.
Nothing had changed! There was the grand portico and the majestic sweep of
stairs, where legend has it that Mr. Oaten rolled down after being pushed by the
young Subhas Chandra Bose. There was the plaque mentioning Sir J.C. Bose and
his pioneering scientific work done in that very building. It is true that the building
did seem to have been painted some time in the last decade, instead of some time
in the last century, as I remembered it, and the marble plaque also looked a little
less dusty than it used to be. But these were trivial differences. The pigeons fluttered
overhead with the same soft crooning noises as before, and tiny saplings peeked
out of the brickwork in hidden corners, just as they used to in the old days.
There was, as usual, a throng of young people lounging in the grand portico,
playing carroms in the common room, or sitting around eating out of "tiffin"
boxes. If it were not for the universally-crooked elbows, indicating the cell-phone
revolution, they could well have been my batch-mates of yore. It is true that there
were more girls wearing baggy jodhpurs than bell-bottomed jeans, and there
was hardly a sari in sight, but many of the boys still wore neatly tailored trousers
and kept their shirts hanging out, just as my intellectual friends had been wont
I 75
to. Branded backpacks seemed to have replaced cloth jholas,

but I could see the same expressions, the same owlish glasses,
the same stylishly-puffed cigarettes no wait a bit, here
was a difference. There were more girls smoking than boys,
something to gladden the cardiologist's heart and make my
old mom sniff in disapproval. And of course, instead of former
times, when I would be greeted by a friend every two steps,
now I was either politely ignored, or treated to the "whatdoes-this- fellow-want- here" look with which we, in our salad
days, used to gaze on old boys who strolled thus into the
hallowed premises.
Crossing the main building, I walked down the path to the
Baker Laboratory. There it stood, solid and reassuring, as it
had stood a hundred years ago, and the afternoon sun shone
harshly on the same painted wooden shutters as it surely
used to shine a hundred years ago. And there was the
entrance to my old department, there was the iron grille
protecting the H.O.D.'s office and there was the old gutter
running along the wall, as full of leaves and debris as it ever
used to be. Overwhelmed with memories, I sat myself down
on the dusty steps leading to that entrance - as I used to do
once upon a time - and closed my eyes. In an instant, the
years rolled back and I was a Presidency College student
again.
*
It was thus we had been sitting on our very first day as

students of the venerable College, savouring the winter
sunshine - for in our year classes had started only in December
- when an extremely ancient old man (he was probably about
55, now that I come to think about it) walked out of the
building and spoke to us. The Sun shone on his shock of
white hair no less than on his spotless dhoti-kurta and seemed
to give him a special aura of superior knowledge. Or so it
seemed to us poor novices. But this oracle seemed to be
very confused.
"You must be the first-year students," he began, but then
paused and shook his head. "Oh, no, no, how could you be
the first- year students?" And saying this, he went inside
before any of us could pipe up saying that we were indeed
the first-year students.
Bibhas and I were sitting side-by-side, though we had never
met before. We now looked at each other and burst out
laughing simultaneously. What a funny old man! But we
were stopped in our tracks by Shamik, who knew everything
and still does. "That was the Head of the Department" he
warned us, looking askance at us down his long nose. "He is
a Famous Scientist. people respect him all over the world.
Though", he admitted, "he does seem to be a bit absentminded."
This was even more exciting. Not only do we see a famous
scientist on the very first day but he also turns out to be that
legendary character, the absent-minded scientist. But this
thrill did not last long, for the Famous Scientist again shot
out through the door and said "Oh, you are the first-year
students after all. Why didn't you say so?"
Probably no reply was expected, for the monologue
continued. "Well, you have no classes this morning, since
both the teachers who were to take your classes have been
transferred to other colleges, and we have not got any
replacements. After lunch, you will have a class with Professor
Sen Sharma. But you can go ahead and sit in the first- year
classroom upstairs. Some of your seniors are very anxious to
make your acquaintance."
And that was all the welcome we got, for with a mysterious
smile, the Famous Scientist departed, leaving us to the tender
mercies of a bunch of ragging seniors.
To tell the truth, ragging in Presidency College was rather
gentle, and did not hold any of the horrors one reads of in
the newspapers. In fact it was rather fun. I got off cheaply,
because when asked what talents I had, I said I could draw
cartoons and was immediately asked to draw a cartoon of
the H.O.D. on the blackboard. This was easy, since a shock
of white hair is very easy to draw in white chalk on a
blackboard, and so the cartoon was recognizable in spite of
my shaking hands. Though I was threatened that the H.O.D.
would be called in to see my handiwork, I could see that the
seniors were pleased, and so I escaped their further attention.
Others were not so lucky. The worst affected was big, burly
Ranjan, who claimed he could sing, but then produced such
a bull's bellow that the seniors decided to teach him a lesson.
He was asked to mimic a record on a turntable, turning round
and round as he sang. When he slackened speed, he was
told to mimic the corresponding distortions in his song.
In the afternoon we had our class. As we sat expectant - our
new notebooks studiously opened at the first page and our
pens poised expectantly - in came a short, drab-looking
person, clad entirely in homespun khadi cotton. Two large,
bulbous eyes looked out from beneath a wavy crop of pepperand-salt hair. Those eyes looked at me with the accusing
stare of a dead fish, and the voice which came out was a
deep baritone without any modulations whatsoever. Clearly
the professor did not believe in blinking. Nor did he waste
his time in punctuation marks and such decadent stuff.
"Why have you all come here to study science?" he demanded,
once we had all answered to our names when called. "Most
of you have just some vague romantic ideas about science
and you have come here thinking that you will all make great
discoveries in science so let me disillusion you about science".
A faint smile appeared at the corners of the professor's
otherwise grim mouth. "If you work in Science if you are a
theoretician you will spend all your life searching for a sign
mistake or a missing factor of two if you are an
experimentalist you will spend it searching for the loose
contact in your circuit so you should ask yourself why you
have come to study Science what is there about Science that

has attracted you and others like you that you should come
to study Science..."
"Well, we were not even born then," laughed the boys. "But
my father studied here, in the Economics Department. Maybe
you knew him?"
Almost every phrase he uttered had the word Science in it,

and instinctively we flinched at the capital S. It turned out
that the time table had two successive lectures by this
professor on Mondays. Today, being the first Monday of the
session, he had decided to give us an inspiring talk. After
two hours of such 'inspiration', most of us thoroughly
regretted that we had come to study Science, capital S or
not. It seemed a most gloomy occupation, carried out by
people who seemed to enjoy doing things which they did
not know why they were doing, and appreciated by people
who did not know why they were appreciating it.
"Maybe. Which batch was that?"
After the lecture, Bibhas and I, and big Ranjan, together

with Phalguni and Sreedhar, made our maiden visit to the
college canteen, where we washed down our disappointment
with large cups of tea, and a cigarette or two. "Maybe I
should go back and continue to study Engineering", I said.
"Even if I never build something useful, I will at least get a
well-paid job. In Science, all my life I will never know what I
am doing." Sreedhar agreed with me heartily, while Ranjan
sat as if struck dumb.
"You must have come straight from Professor Sen Sharma's
lecture," laughed Arka, one of the seniors who had ragged
us in the morning, and was now enjoying his evening cup of
tea at the next table. Later we discovered that Arka, like
Shamik, knew everything, and, in fact, even knew the things
which Shamik did not know. "Don't worry," he reassured us.
"We have been through the same introduction. Today was
just the first day. When he begins to teach it will be much
worse."
And it was.
"That would be before my time, I'm afraid," said I, for in

1960 I had not been born either.
"Oh!" said the boy, looking surprised. "I thought..."
Just then a bunch of young people came down the stairs at
breakneck speed. "We're off to Lourdes College," they called
to my interlocutors. "If we start now, we'll be in time for the
fashion show."
"Sorry, sir," said one of the two boys. "We have to be on our
way. Please take a good look around and enjoy yourself."
And off they went.
In my time having a fashion show as an item in a college fest
would have been considered the height of apasanskriti. I
wondered what the English translation of apasanskriti would
be. Perhaps it should be 'unculture'. Anyway, clearly it was
no longer taboo. I suddenly felt all my fifty-two years.
I went up the stairs at a sedate pace. Pausing at the top to
catch my breath, I was again overwhelmed with memories.
For here was the undergraduate lab, where I had spent so
many happy hours, learning next-to-nothing, but enjoying
every moment of it. I walked into the laboratory through
the open doors. There was nobody inside except a solitary
pigeon perched on a rafter, which cocked a quizzical eye at
me. Perching myself on a high lab stool, I once again allowed
myself to drown in memories.
*
I got up from the stairs and went inside. The structures were
the same, but there had been a distinct attempt to clean up
and whitewash the place. The august soot and grime created
by Sir J.C. Bose's experiments no longer festooned the walls
and the giant cobwebs created by spiders in the days of
Meghnad Saha had been removed. The cubicles where the
office staff worked were the same, but swing doors had
replaced the threadbare curtains, and when they opened
one could glimpse natty computers where there earlier used
to be piles of ancient files. A couple of curious students came
up to me and asked "Are you looking for someone, sir?"
"No", I said. "I'm just looking around. I was a student of this
Department once."
"Really, sir?" said one of the youths, looking amazed. "And
which batch was that?"
I told him.
Giggles. "I'm not sure, sir. Somewhere around 1960... or

maybe 1970..."
The dark room, where we were supposed to conduct optics

experiments, was a fun place, for here the professors rarely
came in. Shortly after we joined, one afternoon, the dark
room resounded to the soft notes "dhin...dhaa...dhintak" and
the gentle thud of dancing feet. Surely some apsara was
performing inside. It was too much for a bunch of eighteen
year old males to resist. Most of us downed whatever
apparatus we were fiddling with and rushed to take a peek
into the dark room, while the girls in our class smiled or
looked disapproving.
Inside the dark room was a sight. There was no apsara, but
our culturally-adept classmate Bhanusingha was
demonstrating to his lab partner the first steps of kathak
dancing. The sight of a plump, heavily-bearded youth with
close-cropped hair assuming the dainty poses of a classical
dancer was nowhere near what we had rushed in hoping to
see. The fact that the light from the sodium vapor lamps
had imbued his skin colour with a greenish cadaverous pallor
did not improve the sight either. Nor did we know what to
I 77
say in answer to his soft inquiry "Did I disturb you guys in

your work?"
is still as fresh as if it happened yesterday.
Silently we went back to our apparatus.
A few years ago, I was called upon to give a semiphilosophical talk to a group of teachers on how to create a
good syllabus for a science programme. Nowadays, even
such talks must be accompanied by colourful slides prepared
with Microsoft Power Point or some such software, and so I
did my best to make my slides visually attractive, since the
actual content of my talk was going to be a bitter pill for the
audience to swallow. In preparing the talk, I tried to define a
logical sequence of causes and effects - why have a syllabus
at all, what a syllabus should aim at, whom should a syllabus
cater to, how do we get feedback on a syllabus... and a long
list of such issues which are of interest only to professional
pedagogues like me. Then I tried to show that, across our
country, this logical sequence is honoured only in the breach.
People make up syllabi mostly by copying from some other
institutions and more with an eye to what looks good on
the institution's website.
Professor Himanshu was in overall charge of the laboratory,

and years of experience had left him totally immune to the
havoc which a bunch of undergraduates can wreak in the
laboratory. There was one experiment in which we had to
prepare a sugar solution, weighing the powdered sugar very
accurately to many places of decimals, and then pouring it
into a transparent glass tube which would be inserted into a
delicate optical instrument. My lab partner Phalguni had told
me to go ahead and prepare the solution while he finished
his cigarette outside. In return, he promised to take the bulk
of the readings in the second part of the experiment. When
I had finished preparing the sugar solution, I left it on the
work table and went to Himanshubabu, asking him to issue
the optical instrument to me. He told me to go back to my
work bench, where he would bring the apparatus, and show
us how to properly insert the tube with the solution, for
that was a delicate task. When I returned, I found Phalguni
standing next to the table, looking very pleased with himself.
In a very businesslike tone, I told him that the solution was
ready, and that the Prof himself was coming with the
instrument. Surprisingly, these glad tidings had the opposite
effect of what I had expected - a hunted look came into his
eyes. And then I noticed that the solution had disappeared,
leaving the tube quite empty. "Where's the solution, I
demanded?" Avoiding my accusing stare, Phalguni explained
that he had come in while I was away, tasted the solution,
and finding it sweet, he had drunk it all up. "It was very
nice", he assured me.
While I was busy explaining to Phalguni that next time, I
would make the solution with potassium cyanide, the
Professor came along briskly, smiling as he always used to
smile when there was something to explain. "Here, boys,
place this on the table. Now where is the solution?"
Sheepishly, we had to admit that there was no solution. "I
threw it away by mistake, sir," explained Phalguni, trying to
make the best out of a bad job. "I thought it was an old
solution left by the last people who did the experiment, so I
poured it away in the wash basin. But we will prepare some
more at once, sir."
"Yes, prepare some more and then call me," said Professor
Himanshu, nodding his head and turning to go back to his
desk. Then, as if having an afterthought, he looked over his
shoulder and added "We have some ice for the
thermodynamics experiments. If you add a little piece of ice,
the sugar solution tastes much better."
I believe he is still alive, though he is now well over ninety. I
hear that he does not recognize too many people any more,
and his eyesight is also failing. But in my mind, the tiny twist
at the corner of his mouth as he delivered that Parthian shot
The more I waded into the preparation of my talk, the more

I began to hear the monotonous voice of Professor Sen
Sharma reciting the same questions he used to repeat to
every batch of students a quarter of a century ago and to
see his dead- fish eyes staring intently into mine, as I used to
see them in his classes. The Professor himself has gone to a
happier world now, where surely scientists do not make sign
mistakes or worry about loose contacts, and perhaps even
know why they are doing what they are doing. But the
realization slowly dawned on me that just as people go on
living through their children, so do teachers go on living
through their students. I, who had once hated this Professor's
monologues and thought him to be nothing but a big bore,
was now mouthing almost the same phrases and reiterating
exactly the same sentiments as he had done all those two
and a half decades in the past. Now I realised that everything
that lugubrious man used to tell us was just the plain
unvarnished truth... I ended up dedicating my talk to the
memory of the late Professor Sen Sharma.
I could see people squirming in their seats when I eventually
gave the talk, and most of the presentations which followed
mine were devoted to refuting all the points I had made. I
felt no sense of triumph in having thus made my point. My
only wish is that another quarter of a century later, someone
who gives a similar talk should not have to utter the same
sentiments as Professor Sen Sharma did, and as I perforce
had to.
*
There used to be an intra-college football tournament and

the best players would be selected for the College team,
which would then play in some inter-college tournaments.
One rainy afternoon in August, Arka and some other seniors
came into our class just after the professor had walked out.
The issue was grave - the prestige of the Department was at

stake. In the last few years the Physics Department had been
unable to scrape up enough players to form a team and play
in the intra-college tournament, and all our matches had
been walks-over gained by the other sides. Surely this state
of affairs could not be allowed to continue? The third year
students,including hulking Biswajit and super-brilliant
Sourabh, had refused to participate, citing the Pressure of
Studies in the third year. Clearly it was up to our batch to
help the second year lads put up a good show against the
Geology Department, whose team had won the intra-college
tournament three years running, and whose students never
failed to sneer at us bookish types in the Physics Department.
Arka was a genuinely good player - he had even played for
some professional club before joining Presidency College. It
turned out that little Shankar was also passable. The rest of
us had not played any serious football since... well, it was
hard to remember. So we went around asking everyone, in
turn, to join in. Amitabha, who knew more mathematics
than all of the teachers except the Famous Scientist, merely
looked up from the book he was immersed in and sniffed as
if we had just asked him to join us in a bank robbery. Shamik,
normally in the forefront of everything, promptly fled,
uttering weird cries as if he had been shot. Sukanta had a
sprained ankle, Phalguni had a bad back, Ashani had been
born with a congenital heart problem and Bhanusingha
utterly despised games in the field. Eventually we scraped
together a team of nine members, including myself, with
my high power spectacles and big Ranjan, who assured us
that if he could not stop the ball, he would at least stop the
players. Two girls, Arati and Madhumita, were willing to join
us they had played football with their brothers as kids,
they explained. Our captain Arka went to the referee - the
College's sports instructor - and secured his permission to
field a mixed team. The only stipulation was that in case of
injuries to the more delicate members of the team, he should
not have to face irate parents. This being promised, the match
started.
A light drizzle began almost at the same time as the kickoff. The College grounds had already been churned into mud
by some of the previous games. Keeping one's balance in
that treacherous, slushy ground was itself a difficult matter,
but we tried manfully to do that and get to the ball as well.
Sreedhar was our goalkeeper, for he had honestly declared
that he did not know how to run and keep the ball at his
feet at the same time. Ranjan, of course, was our star
defender and he was accompanied by Durgadas, who was
almost as big as him, and by little me, who was instructed
to dribble the ball away when these big fellows got into a
tangle with the opponents. Arka was the centre-forward, of
course. The girls were kept in the middle, since they would
then neither have to charge or be charged by the hefty
Geology team members. Actually, given the circumstances,
the girls played rather well and survived the match without
loss of limb or prestige. But after five minutes, the Geology

forwards had shot past them, dodged past Ranjan, outwitted
me, and came right in front of our goal. Poor Sreedhar, whose
courage far outstripped his skill, immediately dived at the
feet of a Geology forward who did not have the ball, allowing
the one who did to neatly place the ball in the net. It was
0-1 in favour of Geology.
Six more goals followed, in quick succession. But we kept
our heads high, and when the whistle blew to signal the
end of the first half, we could proudly claim to have saved
one goal the ball had bounced high into the air off the
ample behind of Durgadas when he had suddenly bent down
to tie his bootlaces and two or three inroads into the
opponent's goal area, for which we had Shankar and Arka
to thank. True, these attacks had not resulted in goals, but
at least we were not surrendering meekly. In fact, Babu (I
forget his real name), one of our more intrepid forwards,
had actually jumped up and tried to head the ball into the
goal la Paolo Rossi, but had unfortunately encountered
the goal post instead. He was now an injured veteran,
recuperating on the sidelines with an ice pack to his forehead.
During the half-time break, between gulping down glasses
of water, we had a conference of war. Some changes in
positioning had to be done. Sreedhar, who refused to stand
by and watch anymore goals scored at his expense, was
promoted to the forward line in place of the retired Babu,
since there was not much work to be done there anyway. I
was ordered to take his place in goal, since I had not actually
touched the ball any time during the first half. Indignant, I
declared that there had been no tangles, and that the only
time I had charged a player, it had turned out to be Ranjan,
and he had politely informed me that the ball was in the
other half. However, Arka convinced me that it was a far, far
better thing to do, so eventually I agreed.
A few minutes into the second half, the rain started coming
down in torrents, but of course, that does not stop a football
match in Kolkata. Three more goals followed, of which I was
more or less an inert spectator. What could I have done
anyway, I consoled myself, since Ranjan and Durgadas were
clearly not doing their job properly ... The ground in front of
the goal was now a morass, with six inches of water stagnant
on top of another six inches of slush. I stood rooted in this,
like Napoleon at Waterloo, when a long shot came rolling
along towards me, from beyond the half line. None of our
players were in any position to stop it, but the ball slowed
down as it approached me. A roar went up from our
supporters to stop the ball, for by that time it was moving
only at about two kilometers per hour. Determined to have
my moment of glory, I stepped forward determinedly. But
horror of horrors, the soft slush under my feet squelched
loudly, and I found myself stretched full length on the wet
ground as the ball rolled in at slow speed just beyond my
clutching fingers. It seemed to pause sympathetically just
I 79
before striking the net, but then seemed to think better of

it, and eventually made a graceful little jump and nestled
gently into the net. It was 0-11.
There was still half- an-hour of play left, but the skies had
really opened up by then, and the referee called a conference
in the middle of the field. "What's the use of playing any
more?" he reasoned in honeyed tones. "Let's just get cleaned
up and there are hot samosas and tea waiting for all of us in
the canteen." Personally I was too dispirited to argue.
Years later, when I watched the German team score goals
at will in their World Cup match with hapless Brazil, I
was strongly reminded of our memorable match with the
Geology Department. Perhaps this augurs well for Brazilian
Science ... .
*
I slowly walked back past the main building and wended my

way to the canteen. This had changed vastly, what with its
crisp sunmica-covered tables and coffee machine and packets
of potato chips and chocolate wafers. Still, sitting at a table
and sipping at a cup of thin machine-made coffee, I was
again taken back into the old days. When the tabletops were
plain wooden planks, mottled and scarred with spilt tea and
carelessly laid-down cigarette butts. When a solitary yellow
light bulb, festooned with cobwebs, was the only
illumination, instead of these glaring tube lights. And when
the only food available was a ghoogni tasting subtly of
detergent and a 'mutton chop' of doubtful contents, both of
which we used to gulp down with all the gusto of hungry
twenty-year olds. When Ranjan would tunelessly sing Tagore
songs in the canteen, to the disgust of the smart girls from
the Humanities Departments, and Phalguni would keep him
company, playing the tabla on the table in front of him,
without too much attention to rhythm. When Atanu, our
master card sharper, would invite everyone to play teen patti
with him, keeping small stakes like ten paise yes, my
friends, ten paise existed at that time and could even buy
you a cup of tea, sweet as the solution which my friend
Phalguni had gulped down in the laboratory.
Once, Professor Sen Sharma, in intervals of teaching us the
theory of Lagrange's undetermined multipliers, told us that
once upon a time, in the canteen of the Georgia Augusta
University at Gttingen, people used to discuss Science
problems, scribbling on the tables in pencil. Once it turned
out that two people had gone off to class, leaving some
Science problem unsolved. When they came back, they found
that somebody else had sat there in the meantime, read the
Science problem with interest, and written down the solution
before leaving. All fired up, we decided to write down a
problem which was worrying some of us on a table in white
chalk, before going off to a class. If it could be done in
Gttingen, why not in Presidency College?
When we came back, all we found was that someone had
sat there in the meantime, read the Science problem with
interest, and carefully poured out the dregs of his - or was it
her? - tea cup so as to wash off all the tricky formulae. Alas!
It was clear that Presidency College had not quite equalled
Gttingen yet. But all true-minded Bengalis will surely agree
with me that one day, it will, just as one day Kolkata will be
the Centre of the Universe again ... .
*
At the end of James Hilton's classic novel Lost Horizon, where

the protagonist Conway finds an unexpected haven of peace
and knowledge and fellowship in the remote monastery of
Shangri-la somewhere in the rugged mountains of Tibet,
the narrator writes:
"We sat for a long time in silence, and then talked again of
Conway as I remembered him, boyish and gifted and full of
charm, and of the war that had altered him, and of so many
mysteries of time and age and of the mind, ... and of the
strange ultimate dream ... .
"Do you think he will ever find it?" I asked."
Like Conway, it was time for me to pass out of the story
now, having re-lived in about forty minutes three of the
happiest and most formative years of my life. We had learned
so much, dreamed such dreams and looked at life with such
unblemished innocence ... May the young people who read
this each find their own Shangri-la and pass it on to the
generations which come after them.
(All the names in the narrative have been changed, but those
who were 'there' at 'that' time will surely recognise
themselves... I know that they will not mind my little
manipulations of the facts, for I have meant no disrespect
to anyone who is anyone in this story.)
Sreerup Raychaudhuri is an alumnus of the erstwhile Presidency College (BSc: 1983). He obtained his MSc and doctoral
degrees from the University of Calcutta, following which he held postdoctoral positions at TIFR and CERN before joining the
IIT Kanpur in 1999. Since December 2007, he has moved to TIFR, where he is a Professor in the Department of Theoretical
Physics.
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I 93
21 YEARS AT PRESIDENCY COLLEGE
21 Years at Presidency College

Pradip Kumar Datta
Ex-Head of the Physics Department,
Presidency College, Kolkata
The author reminisces

about academic evolution
experienced in erstwhile
Presidency College, during
his twenty-one-year-long
journey with memorable
colleagues and students.
Apart from narrating
departmental stories of
revising laboratories and
special papers and
democracy of students in
evaluating teachers, even
in those days, he does not
keep aside the ramified
political influences on
academic exercise.
n February, 1986 when I was posted at Krishnagar College I was asked to visit
the Education Secretary. He said that Presidency College needs a teacher in
Electronics as Prof. Rashbehari Chakraborty will retire soon and I would be
transferred soon to Presidency College and I would have to join immediately. I
joined Presidency College in April, 1986 and retired from the college in September,
2007 as the Head of the Department of Physics. In long association with the
college I observed many changes. To mention a few, in 1990 independent P. G.
teaching in Physics was introduced due to the effort of Prof. Subrata Datta, the
then Head of the Department, with the condition that the number of seats has to
be increased from existing 30 to 50. When Biophysics was withdrawn by the
Calcutta University as a Special Paper at the P. G. level, the need for a new special
paper was felt. It was decided to introduce Electronics as special paper. The
Biophysics lab was converted temporarily to Electronics lab and later it was shifted
to a larger room that was previously used for ISc Classes. The author and Prof.
Murari Mohon Kundu were entrusted with setting up of the Electronics Special
lab and taking theoretical classes. Later the special paper classes were held jointly
with the Calcutta University till the P. G. courses at different colleges were given
autonomous status. Later the special papers were replaced by advanced papers 1 and 2. The course of Electronics special was split into Communication Electronics
and Solid State Electronics. Some new elective papers, such as Microwave,
Astrophysics and Remote Sensing were also introduced for the P. G. students. I
was very much shocked to learn that Advanced papers in Electronics are not being
offered at Presidency University.
I had the fortune to teach many brilliant students at Presidency College. I found
an Honours student giving very precise answers to questions without omitting a
single point. Some of the students were very good performers. At the Physics reunion they staged a drama with adequate efficiency after a short preparation.
It is to be mentioned that though most of the teachers tried their best to help the
students and the Honours lab was good, some students took private tuition and
even did their practical at private coaching centers. I must mention the very names
of Dr. Debapriyo Syam, Dr. Shyamal Chakraborty, Prof. Prasad Sengupta and Dr.
Bikash De who inspired the students in various ways.
Once the MSc students complained that they are not being benefited from the
lectures of some teachers. In a departmental meeting it was decided to evaluate
the teachers by the students, keeping their identity undisclosed and the comments
of the students will be assessed by the HOD and he will inform the concerned
teachers about the remarks of the students confidentially and request the teachers
to rectify themselves. It yielded some good result. I feel that the assessment of
teachers by the students is necessary, but only for academic purposes and should
be confined between the HOD and the concerned teachers.
21 YEARS AT PRESIDENCY COLLEGE
I may mention one incident where I was benefited by the

comments of the students. After joining Presidency College
I found that some students are not attending my classes
after a few classes were taken by me. When I met the students
and asked them why, they answered that they are not
interested in detailed deductions, they are interested in
detailed discussion on the subject. As the students of earlier
colleges, where I served before joining Presidency College,
wanted detailed deductions I was used to that. But after
hearing the students I changed the mode of my teaching
and the students were satisfied. Till retirement and even after
retirement, as a part-time teacher, I found most of the
students to attend my classes. This incident has made me
believe that the students' assessments help teachers to
improve them. But the assessment of teachers by the students
should not be used by the authorities as an instrument
against a teacher.
When Prof. Mamata Ray was the Principal and I was the
HOD it was decided in a Heads' meeting that the students
who have not the required percentage of attendance would

not be sent up for university examinations. A student of this
department was the daughter of a Minister, Govt. of West
Bengal. Her attendance was less than even 40% and was
not sent up along with few more students who did not have
40% attendance. But at the request of the Minister, the
Officer-in-Charge of the college, in absence of the Principal
due to her illness, allowed all the students. I lodged my
protest to the Officer-in-Charge, but in vain.
During my stay at Presidency College I found that in rare
cases the students' agitations in the college hampered the
normal flow of work of this department. The attitude of the
students of this department was praiseworthy.
I have many sweet memories about Presidency College. But
I have earned the displeasure of the authorities of the
Presidency University as I was critical about the happenings
of the University. I hope, that the Physics Department of the
University will flourish and I am always ready to render any
service to the department.
Pradip Kumar Datta was born in September, 1947. He obtained BSc (Honours) and MSc degrees in physics in 1965 and 1967,
respectively, from Burdwan University and obtained PhD (Tech.) degree from the University of Calcutta in 1981 in Radiophysics
& Electronics. He joined West Bengal Junior Educational Service in 1970 and served in A. B. N. Seal College, Hooghly Mohsin
College, Krishnagar Govt. College and then Presidency College, Kolkata. He retired as Reader and Head, Department of
Physics, Presidency College, Kolkata in Sept. 2007. He is the Treasurer, Indian Physics Association, Calcutta Chapter and also
Kalpana Chawla Centre for Space & Nanosciences. He is a life member of IACS. He is the author of more than 100 articles and
a book on popular science, and two textbooks.
I 95
SUPERCONDUCTIVITY: THE JOURNEY FROM DISCOVERY TO UNDERSTANDING
Superconductivity: The Journey from

Discovery to Understanding
Rajdeep Sensarma
Homi Bhabha Road, Colaba, Mumbai 400005.
Superconductivity, the
phenomenon where
electrical resistance of
materials vanish when
cooled below a critical
temperature, baffled the
best minds in 20th century
physics for more than 40
years. The article tries to
trace the journey from
discovery of
superconductivity in 1911
to its microscopic
understanding in 1957.
n 1911, Heike Kamerlingh Onnes discovered that mercury, when cooled below
4.2 K, shows zero electrical resistance. Thus began the scientific journey towards
understanding one of the most novel phenomena known to man,
superconductivity. The problem puzzled the best minds in their heydays and the
list of people who failed to understand this phenomenon includes Albert Einstein,
Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg and Richard Feynman, to name a few. It was finally
in 1957, 46 years after its discovery that the work of John Bardeen, Leon Cooper
and Robert Schrieffer gave us a glimpse of the delicate dance of electrons that
leads to this novel phenomenon.
But every historical event has a pre-history. The pre-history of the discovery of
superconductivity goes back to the steam engine. After the discovery of steam
engine, the emphasis in materials research shifted from study of metals to study
of gases, whose properties were crucial to the industrial age that was coming
about. On the theoretical front, this led to rapid developments in kinetic theory of
gases through the works of Maxwell, Boltzmann, Gibbs, Van-der Waals and others.
On the experimental front, Humphrey Davy, one of the foremost chemists of that
time, proposed that if gases can be turned into liquids or solids, they would behave
as metals. This led to a mad rush to liquefy known gases, with the charge led by
Davy's protege Michael Faraday. By 1883, all known gases were liquefied with the
exception of hydrogen. This set up a race between Kamerlingh Onnes at Leiden
and James Dewar in London to bridge the gap between then achievable 80 K and
the transition temperature for hydrogen, predicted to be 33 K by Van-der Waals'
theory. Dewar won the race in 1896, with the use of his famous double walled
Dewar's flask, but the victory was short lived. In 1895, William Ramsay had isolated
Helium from terrestrial sources, and in 1908, Kamerlingh Onnes managed to
liquefy it to reach the coldest laboratory temperatures then known to man. It was
this technology that enabled the study of very low temperature properties of
materials, leading to the discovery of superconductivity in 1911.
A microscopic understanding of matter started with John Dalton, who put forward
the hypothesis that matter is made of indivisible entities called atoms. However,
as scientists turned from chemical combination to physical properties, they found
that the atomic hypothesis does not explain the fact that out of 40 known elements
at that time, 26 showed common properties like shiny appearance, ductility, high
electrical and thermal conductivity; i.e they were metals. This led Davy to propose
that there should be a "principle of metalization", based on internal structure of
atoms, which was finally proven in 1897, when J. J. Thomson discovered the
electron.
Soon after, in 1900, Paul Drude published his theory of conduction in metals. This
theory assumed that electrons bump into lattice ions randomly and hence loose
track of where they were going. If you are trying to walk very fast after coming
out of Howrah station during rush hours, you would not go very far before bumping
into somebody. The faster you try to walk, the more you
bump into others, till you give up and flow with the crowd.
Something similar happens to the electrons as they bump
into the ions and this shows up as electrical resistance in
metals. In the early 1900s there were fierce debates about
what happens to this picture as temperature is lowered.
Using the nascent ideas of quantum theory, Einstein had
shown in 1907 that the lattice vibration quanta decrease in
number as temperature is lowered. With decreasing density
of obstacles, one would expect the resistance to go down.
The other idea, propounded by Lord Kelvin, was that at low
temperatures the electrons fold into the atoms; hence there
are less charge carriers and resistance goes up. Kamerlingh
Onnes and others were actively looking to settle this question,
which explains why they focussed on measuring electrical
resistance at low temperatures.
When Gilles Holst, a graduate student under Onnes, and his
lab technician G. J. Flim cooled mercury below 4.2 K, they
found that the resistance dropped to zero. Like any good
experimentalist, their first reaction was that they had a shortcircuit, but they carefully ruled it out. They found that the
short always repaired itself above 4.2 K. They increased the
sensitivity of their measurements and Holst showed that at
3 K, the lowest temperature he could reach, the resistance
dropped by 10-7 of its value at room temperature. They had
discovered a new phase of matter.
Onnes presented the work in the 1911 Solvay Conference
under his own name, depriving Holst and Flim of any credit
for the discovery. Onnes then set up a very interesting
experiment. He designed a coil of lead wires, cooled them
below superconducting transition, and induced a current in
the loop by magnetic means. In absence of resistance, the
current maintained its value, and the leading scientists of
the day went to Leiden to see this miracle till World War I
interrupted the scientific pursuits in 1914. Onnes was
awarded the Nobel Prize in 1913 for his work on helium and
not for discovering superconductivity. The Leiden group also
found that superconductivity is destroyed by application of
magnetic fields. This killed Onnes' biggest dream of making
powerful magnets with superconducting materials. The most
powerful magnets in the world today, used in the recent
LHC experiments at CERN, of course realize Onnes' dream,
but the materials, which can withstand such high magnetic
fields, were not known in those days. The monopoly of the
Leiden group on superconductivity research continued till J.
C. McLennan in Toronto (1923) and Walther Meissner in Berlin
(1925) managed to liquefy helium. Meissner in particular,
played a pivotal role in the history of superconductivity. In
1933, with his graduate student Robert Ochsenfeld, he found
that the superconductors are perfect diamagnets, i.e. they
repel magnetic field. The Meissner effect, shown in popular
videos of levitation of a magnet above a superconducting
material, actually provided a crucial input towards a
theoretical understanding of superconductors.
Superconductivity attracted the attention of Einstein and he

worked on it till 1922 without much success. Einstein was
however handicapped; quantum mechanics, the language
to describe these systems, was formalized around 1926
through the work of Schrodinger, Heisenberg, Born, Dirac,
Pauli etc. By 1929, Felix Bloch had formulated a quantum
theory of conduction in metals, but a quantum theory of
superconductivity eluded the likes of Felix Bloch, Werner
Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, Niels Bohr and others who
worked on it. As the shadows of 2nd World War loomed over
Europe, Fritz and Heinz London, a brother duo who had
emigrated from Nazi Germany to Oxford, made the first
breakthrough in 1935, when they showed that the vanishing
of resistance and the Meissner effect can both be explained
if one assumes that electrons have suddenly condensed into
a macroscopically large object. Going back to our Howrah
station analogy, this would imply a huge giant coming out
of the station, and bulldozing through the crowd. The London
brothers could not explain why this would happen, but their
work laid down the markers, which future theories would
use. The key insight was that it is not the infinite conductivity,
but the perfect diamagnetism that requires an explanation.
The infinite conductivity then simply follows from Maxwell's
equations of electrodynamics. The other key ideas, like a
macroscopic quantum state, a rigidity to change this
macroscopic state, a finite energy gap to breaking up this
object would find their place in the theory that Bardeen,
Cooper and Schrieffer later wrote down.
After the 2nd World War ended, isotopes of various elements,
which were by-products of the atomic bomb project in USA,
became available for scientific research. In 1950, Bernard
Serin at Rutgers and Emanuel Maxwell at NIST, noticed that
the critical temperature at which the material turned
superconducting, scales inversely with the square root of
the mass of the isotope. John Bardeen at the AT&T Bell Labs,
whom Serin told of his results, immediately realized its
significance - lattice vibrations or phonons and their
interaction with electrons were the key to understanding
superconductivity. Bardeen had thought about the problem
of superconductivity on and off throughout his career.
Following London brothers' work, he worked out a theory of
superconductivity in 1941, which got all the experimental
observations wrong by a factor of 10, and he junked it. In
between, he had studied semiconductors at the Bell Labs,
and with Walter Brattain and William Shockley invented the
first point-contact transistor. Bardeen, as he moved from
Bell Labs to University of Illinois at Urbana, decided to take
up the challenge of superconductivity again.
Bardeen, however, had stiff competition. Herbert Frohlich
had already proposed a model of electron phonon interaction
and predicted the isotope effect. However, both Frohlich and
Bardeen encountered the same problem: to bind into a
macroscopic object, the electrons need to attract each other,
while their calculations showed that the Coulomb repulsion
I 97
between the charged electrons always won over the

attraction due to electron-phonon interactions. Bardeen
brought in David Pines, who had just finished his PhD on
treating Coulomb interaction between electrons with
techniques of many-body theory. Bardeen and Pines worked
out the effective interaction for low energy electrons and
found that, with the many body nature of electron-electron
interactions properly accounted for, the attraction from the
electron-phonon interaction wins at low energies.
Bardeen had competition from another quarter. Richard
Feynman was trying to solve the same problem using all the
tools of quantum field theory that was developed by him
and others to study quantum electrodynamics. Feeling
outgunned on the technical fronts, Bardeen asked his friend
C. N. Yang at Princeton to send him someone "versed in
field theory who might be willing to work on
superconductivity." On Yang's recommendation, Leon Cooper,
who had just got his PhD from Princeton in high energy
physics, joined Bardeen in 1955. The third member of the
team, Robert Schrieffer, was a graduate student working
with Bardeen. In 1956, Cooper made a breakthrough,
showing that two electrons near the Fermi surface form a
bound pair, the Cooper pair, with a macroscopic size and
a tiny binding energy. Cooper was talking about an effect
104 times smaller than the electronic energy scales using a
crude model, but Bardeen, with his faith in the London theory,
decided to pursue this further.
The next course of action was to find out what happens to
many electrons. This turned out to be very hard, and by the
time Bardeen was going to Stockholm to collect his first Nobel
prize for his work on transistors, Schrieffer went to him with
a suggestion of a change in his thesis topic, but Bardeen
calmed him down. The main problem was that the Cooper
pairs were large, so in the space between a pair there would
be thousands of other pairs. Schrieffer later described it as a
dance where the partners are separated, with thousands of

dancers filling the space in between them, maintaining a
complicated dance pattern so that they do not step on each
others' toes. It is the mathematical description of this
enormously complicated choreography that Schrieffer finally
managed to write down in 1957, the famous BCS
wavefunction describing the macroscopic condensate (of
Cooper pairs) that London brothers initially talked about.
The BCS theory was immediately attacked by experts, as it
violated principles of gauge invariance, while its success grew
by the days in explaining observed phenomena. Philip
Anderson soon settled the theoretical issues, and as a byproduct discovered the principle of "broken symmetry".
Yochiro Nambu took these ideas to particle physics, where it
took on a life of its own. Bardeen, Cooper and Schrieffer
were awarded the Nobel Prize for their work in 1972.
Epilogue: In 1986, J. G. Bednorz and K. A. Muller discovered
a new class of materials, the high temperature
superconductors, whose phenomenology cannot be
described by the BCS theory. Thus began another journey,
which, after 28 years today, is yet to reach its destination.
References:
Discovery of Superconductivity by Dirk van Delft and

Peter Kes in Physics Today, 63, 9 (2010).
American Institute of
Superconductivity archive
Physics
History
of
True Genius: The Life and Science of John Bardeen by

Lillian Hoddeson and Vicky Daitch
Richard Feynman and the history of superconductivity
by David and Judith Goodstein, Physics in Perspective
2, 30 (2000).
Rajdeep Sensarma is an alumnus of Presidency Physics Department (BSc 2001). He earned his PhD in physics from Ohio State
University in 2007 and is currently a faculty in the Department of Theoretical Physics at the Tata Institute of Fundamental
Research, Mumbai, where he thinks about phenomena involving macroscopic number of quantum particles, including
superconductivity.
FROM PRESIDENCY COLLEGE TO THE HEART OF NONLINEAR DYNAMICS - AN ONGOING JOURNEY
From Presidency College to the Heart of

Nonlinear Dynamics - An Ongoing Journey
Surajit Sen
Department of Physics, State University of New York, Buffalo,
New York 14260-1500, USA
This is a story of my
journey from Presidency
College days to that of
becoming a nonlinear
dynamicist where with an
amazing group of students
and collaborators I study
ways of manipulating
mechanical energy flow
through both natural and
man-made nonlinear
systems.
rowing up in Calcutta through the 60s and 70s perhaps had something to do
with me being socially conscious, something I likely share with the majority
of my fellow Presidencians. Thus, as a scientist, being able to do something for
those who need help seemed like a worthwhile and attractive notion to me.
However, as I left college and entered graduate school in the US, getting a
comprehensive education in physics took precedence and I became busy with the
usual stuff graduate students here worry about, courses, grades, research, papers
and all that! About a decade after I left college I became an assistant professor of
physics in my current institution - a major research university. My specialization
was in non-equilibrium statistical physics, some background in studying low
dimensional phase transitions and in the study of avalanches in dry granular
materials. The euphoria of getting a job ended quickly though as I soon started
working on a research plan leading up to tenure - in other words insuring the job
becomes permanent. In US schools, this point must be typically reached in five
years or else bad things happen!
Five years isn't typically a long time when it comes to solving something terribly
important in physics. The problem I was dealing with was I was also eager to do
something useful for the society at large and for science with the opportunity
that life had afforded me. Somehow strategically tuning my research to how I
could get healthy funding and publish enough papers in high profile journals did
not seem like the right way to go. So I decided to take a risk - I wanted to do good
science that was both fundamental and interesting, and of strong and direct
relevance to improving the lives of those who live around us.
This was a time when there were some 127 million buried landmines, the deadly
detritus of past and ongoing wars, claiming the lives and limbs of innocent men,
women and children each year in 55 (the UN claimed 64 and International
Campaign to Ban Landmines claimed 88) countries.1 There was a critical need to
detect, disarm and remove these deadly homemade devices. Bill Clinton was then
the US president and Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont was pushing hard for the
US to take a lead in developing a comprehensive land mine banning treaty and
taking a key role in humanitarian de-mining. The treaty was eventually signed,
but the US which uses "smart," self-deactivating mines in the demilitarized zone
between the two Koreas refrained from signing the treaty with a promise to lend
indirect support to de-mining.
In spite of the world wide attention to the problem in the early 90s, it was clear
that mine removal was done using adept human hands and inexpensive metal
detectors. Naturally, many of these de-miners were severely injured or killed in
the process. Princess Diana was about to start her mission to raise awareness
about land mines. A few engineers in the defense sectors in the US, Canada, UK
and elsewhere were beginning to think of possible ways to efficiently find land
mines.2
I 99
Economics is always important. It takes merely 30 cents to

typically make a mine which is designed to injure and maim
a person. When a person is injured, others must help, which
means several people could be taken out of active combat
through just one mine blast or an expense of 30 cents! Thus
these were affordable and efficient weapons of war. Typically
placed within inches of the soil surface, they were often
detectable using metal detectors. But then a tiny piece of
metal on a dirty surface with possibly other metallic entities
in the vicinity does not call for an unequivocal signal. Thus
false alarms were high when it came to using metal detectors.
That made things expensive. Using dogs to sniff out
explosives also was an effective way, but training the dogs
and have them work with trainers was also very expensive
(~$25000). Other electronic methods (electronic dogs nose,
nuclear quadrupolar resonance, etc) were simply
unaffordable to countries that needed help then and remain
so to this day. In the end, human hands were most often
used to feel out mines. De-mining remains a serious challenge
in a great many poor countries in Asia and Africa and in
some parts of eastern Europe.
them.6 Regardless, a major observation by Russell in 1838

and then in 1845 of a curious non-dispersive propagating
wave pulse through a shallow, long channel followed by a
breakthrough in 1895 when Kortweg and de Vries showed
that one form of a nonlinear equation with the right
boundary conditions could explain Russell's observations
started the modern era of nonlinear dynamics. Korteweg
and de Vries' solution admitted non-dispersive pulse solutions
or solitary wave solutions.7 Several nonlinear equations that
are appropriate for describing many body dynamics have
since emerged. Further, besides the solitary waves
(compression pulses), there can be anti-solitary waves
(dilation pulses) and long-lived localized nonlinear excitations
called breathers (these are not harmonic oscillations!).
Nonlinear equations fall into two classes - integrable systems
and non-integrable systems - literally relating to whether
one can integrate out and solve the second order dynamical
equations (like Koretweg and de Vries did) or not. Not
surprisingly, the latter may be more exciting than the former.
The simplest non-integrable system links directly to granular
systems!
I wondered whether one could use weak mechanical impulses

that are way below a hundredth of an atmosphere in pressure
to detect mines.3 The short answer turned out to be yes.
Low frequency sound waves and impulses may be reasonably
effective in finding mines in some soils,4 dry and wet, but
the presence of debris such as leaves etc. can complicate
matters. Frozen soils are also a challenge when it comes to
exploring the subsurface.
Let us consider an alignment of mono-sized stainless steel
In spite of the issues with regard to impulse based de-mining

(which is just one way among many) the problem of how
mechanical energy penetrates into a granular system slowly
took center stage at this time in my research career. And
soon I learned that there were significant gaps in our
fundamental understanding of granular systems and of
nonlinear many body systems.5 All of this seemed like an
unbelievable opportunity to work on an area that was not
only of importance with regard to useful and perhaps
futuristic applications but from the standpoint of
fundamental physics as well. What else could one ask for?
From here onwards I will mostly talk about` nonlinear many
body physics. I hope the following materials will not only
encourage the reader to explore this field but also inspire
more to embark on their own bold journeys to push the
frontiers of knowledge both for knowledge itself and for
insuring that the same is useful to society, which eventually
makes science exploration possible, in multifaceted ways.
Studies of nonlinear systems began out of need some 450
years ago because the European explorers were losing too
many ships to rogue ocean waves on the Atlantic. Thus began
the study of nonlinear waves and Newton, Euler, Lagrange,
Airy, Stokes, Earnshaw, Boussinesq and many others are just
some of the major figures who got involved in studying
Fig. 1: A very long Newton's cradle (this one with grains of

progressively smaller radii). Courtesy: Prof Stephane Job
spheres that are gently touching one another as the simplest
many body system of grains (Fig. 1, by the way, these
experiments are not easy to do correctly!). To insure the
spheres don't get away, you place them within hard walls,
say (not shown in Fig. 1). Imagine now that you gently tap
on an edge grain. With the naked eye you may not observe
a whole lot except that a compression pulse propagates down
the alignment. At the simplest level, we can regard these
spheres as infinitely hard which would mean there is no
potential energy associated with the dynamics. Hence one
can simply use energy and momentum conservation to infer
what happens.
But nothing is that hard - in fact we have a problem making

very hard materials and this actually is an important issue
because such materials could be very useful in protecting
human lives from bullets etc which typically travel at about
a kilometer/second. So these spheres must be quite soft on
the hardness scale!8 In 1881 Heinrich Hertz9 observed that
when two spherical grains press against each other the
contact area is a circle. For circular and elliptical contact
cross sections, the grains repel in a nonlinear fashion. If V is
the potential energy during grain-grain contact and if d
denotes the distance by which the grains have come nearer
with respect to the case when they simply touched one
another, then V = ad2.5, where a depends on the grain radii,
the Youngs modulus and the Poisson's ratio. There is no
interaction between the grains when they don't touch.
The dynamical equations describing this alignment (with
nearest neighbor interactions obviously) are completely
nonlinear and non-integrable. Some careful calculations
and direct numerical solution of Newton's equations reveal
that the tap propagates as a non-dispersive bundle of
energy or a solitary wave. But guess what - this solitary
wave is actually quite different than the one KortewegdeVries and Russell described or any other known species
of solitary waves.
In integrable systems, solitary waves pass through each
other unscathed except for a temporary change in speed
during the period of crossing each other. It became quickly
obvious that solitary waves in discrete and particulate
systems must interact albeit weakly. To see this observe
that when two identical waves traveling in opposite
directions from the two ends of an alignment meet at a
grain center, the meeting point very nearly behaves as an
infinite mass. Thus bouncing such a wave against an
infinitely hard wall would be a very similar problem. When
a solitary wave which is several grains wide hits a wall, its
front hits first and must instantly turn around. When the
leading edge turns around, the trailing edge is still moving
towards the wall. Thus the wave is no longer a solitary
wave but a squeezed version of the same. It turns out
though that a squeezed solitary wave does not quite
satisfy the Newtonian equations involved and conserve
energy (assuming no dissipation of course though this is
not quite physical because these are after all macroscopic
grains). So these waves must break and reform producing
lots of low energy solitary waves from the collision region
as debris of sorts. Progressive breaking and reformation
of such waves eventually leads to a strange state where
the system is composed of a very large number of solitary
waves of all possible amplitudes about a mean. In our
studies I have named this the quasi-equilibrium state,
because our work reveals that the system has substantial
memory of the initial conditions even deep into quasiequilibrium.10
The main feature of quasi-equilibrium seems to be that
large fluctuations and even rogue waves or rather (energy

in our system) fluctuations are possible.11 Further, under
the right conditions, a normal equilibrium state with
equipartitioned energy is also possible. And the quasiequilibrium state can spontaneously come out of what
seems like utter chaos into a fairly organized though
fleeting state of propagating solitary waves.
I have only described the very simplest systems we have
worked on. We have worked on systems of various sizes,
impurities, cases of various grain shapes, walls and so on.
Here are some broad observations - it is possible to convert
completely noisy forms of energy such as road or machine
noise into useful and recoverable forms of energy and it is
possible to construct systems that can sit on a sea beach
and spontaneously convert the energy dissipated by the
oncoming waves into electricity, thereby addressing the
world's energy problem and while reducing beach erosion;
one can design systems that are very thin and can be powerful
impact absorbers; systems made of granular alignments in
3D can make it possible to channel mechanical energy along
desired channels; it is in principle possible to make inkjet
printers that can make droplets that are as small as 10s of
nanometers, the list goes on. And yes some of these studies
can be of direct use (down the road) in helping people lead
better lives.
In closing, for a physicist, nonlinear dynamics of many body
systems is an enormous field which remains almost
completely unexplored. I dream of a day in which one can
easily make materials that are capable of absorbing and
harvesting a very significant part of all the energy that is
incident on it, in which one can survive among nanometer
scale dust in satellites and asteroids without getting silicosis,12
and volcanic ash will no longer bring air traffic to a standstill.
And I dream of a day in which we would use no fossil fuels
whatsoever, simply because it would be cheaper to use
nanoscale granular materials to suck energy out of nature.
References:
1. http://www.icbl.org/en-gb/home.aspx
2. See Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference
on the Detection of Abandoned Land Mines - MD'98
Institution of Electrical Engineers Conference Publication
No. 458 (IEE, London, 1998).
3. Typically the release of a child's foot would set off a
small land mine, I estimate this to be about 1/20th of
an atmosphere.
4. S. Sen et al, Int. J Mod. Phys. B 19, 2951 (2005).
5. The simple problem of masses connected by springs
with quartic interactions already ends up being one of
the most complex many body problems that has not
been adequately explored, for an early jab at this see
I 101
the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam work (1955) - http://

denali.phys.uniroma1.it/twiki/pub/TNTgroup/
AngeloVulpiani/FPU.pdf.
6. See S. Sen et al., Phys. Repts. 462, 21 (2008).
7. http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Soliton
8. One way of measuring hardness is via the Rockwell
hardness scale.
9. H. Hertz, J reine u. Angew. Math. 92, 156 (1881).
10. E. Avalos et al, Phys Rev E 84, 046610 (2011).

11. H. Ding et al, Phys. Rev E 90, 032904 (2014).
12. By the way, this is why no astronaut has spent more
than 3 days on the lunar surface, the most being spent
by the scientist-astronaut Dr Harrison (Jack) Schmidt
who ended up with lunar dust inside his body. This raises
the question of whether we can make clothing which
would prevent the entry of nanoscale entities (living or
non-living).
Surajit Sen got his BSc with honours in Physics in 1982 and completed his PhD from The University of Georgia under M
Howard Lee in 1990. After postdocs in Minnesota and Michigan State, he moved to SUNY at Buffalo where he has been
pursuing research on non-equilibrium statistical physics and nonlinear dynamics since 1993. He is an elected Fellow of the
American Physical Society and also of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
CAN PHYSICS HELP RETHINK ECONOMICS?
Can Physics Help Rethink Economics?

Dulal Krishna Basu
Ex-executive, State Bank of India, Kolkata, India
Amidst the existential crisis

of economics and its
practitioners, ranging from
wretched policymakers to
Nobel Laureates, the world
tends to turn around and
rethink this subject of
public interest. In order to
radically revamp the ideas
concerned both in
academics as well as in
global market, the author
is in search of
twinkling hints Physics
may provide.
"As I see it, the economics profession went astray because economists, as a group,
mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth." How did
economists get it so wrong? Paul Krugman, the 2008 Nobel Laureate in
economics, New York Times (NYT) 06 September, 2009.
"You can disguise charlatanism under the weight of equations, and nobody can
catch you since there is no such thing as a controlled experiment." Nicholas
Nassim Taleb on economic sciences in 'Fooled by Randomness' (2004).
rticle summary: Economists (Macroeconomists, to be as precise as in physics),

these days, are a troubled lot. Their failure to predict the Global Financial
Collapse which started in 2008, has been sharply criticized by Heads of State,
politicians, economics journalists, academics and other experts. There seem to be
hardly any agreement between two sets of them on matters of public interest.
And as the entire subject of economics is in public interest, policymakers' lives are
not being made simpler by their economist friends / advisors. Some of them,
including Nobel Laureates in economics, seem to be passing through an identity
crisis, posing questions like, "Is economics a science?" Economics students in many
universities across the globe are demanding a wholesale revamping of their courses
and teaching methodologies. There is a concerted move to 'rethink' economics.
Can methods used in Physics be of any help to 'cure' the maladies of economics?
The background: The first major trigger for the Global Financial Collapse was the
bankruptcy of the Lehman Brothers, a very large (Too big to fail -TBTF) banking
corporation, which went bankrupt on 15 September, 2008. Since then, many large
and small banks followed suit, many governments like Greece etc., came to the
brink of Sovereign Default on the debts raised by them through Government Bonds.
As a result, the world has been passing through a severe economic crisis, which has
been likened to a Financial Tsunami, the after-effects of which are still being felt
in almost every country / economy, be it the very large economy like that of the
USA, or, the Eurozone, or, smaller economies in other parts of the world. Even in
China, the so-called growth engine of the World, growth has been faltering, and
slowing down noticeably. As a result, there is recession (two consecutive quarters
of declining Gross Domestic Product (GDP)) in many countries, resulting in largescale unemployment almost everywhere. People have started to compare the current
state of the World Economy to the decade-long Great Depression1 of the 1930s.
The Queen's question: While the full impact of the crisis was unfolding, Her
Royal Highness, the British Queen, during an official visit to the most prestigious
LSE (The London School of Economics), asked Professor Luis Garicano, one of the
leading economists from Spain, "If these things were so large, how come everyone
missed them?"... "It's awful - why did nobody see it coming?" [05 November, 2008].
Professor Garicano, explaining the nuances of the credit crisis, told the Queen:
I 103
At every stage, someone was relying on somebody else and

everyone thought they were doing the right thing.
With trillions of terabytes of data available to them as
instantaneously as (almost) the speed of light, no economist
had a ready answer to the Queen's question.
That was a question, which a group of 33 leading economists,
academicians, experts, policy makers, economics journalists,
past and present civil servants, Central Bankers, and other
practitioners, took more than 8 months to respond in the
form of an Unofficial Command Paper (UCP) sent to the
Queen (22 July, 2009). What did the UCP say? "Everyone
seemed to be doing their job properly on its own merit.
According to standard measures of success, they were often
doing it well." However, "...the failure was to see how
collectively this added up to a series of interconnected
imbalances over which no single authority had jurisdiction"...
"In summary, Your Majesty", the authors concluded, "the
failure to foresee the timing, extent and severity of the crisis
and to head it off was principally a failure of the collective
imagination of many bright people, both in this country and
internationally, to understand the risks to the system as a
whole."
In other words, it was nobody's baby! How convenient and
hardly scientific!
Naturally, this answer failed to assure the Queen and the
rest of the world that the economists' community had the
means (tools) and the ability to forecast and prevent such a
crisis in future.
The economists' identity crisis: In his first major article ("Is
economics a science?" Project Syndicate, 06 November, 2013),
written after announcement of his Nobel award (08 October,
2013), Robert J. Schiller attempted to defend the 'science' in
economics, but finally admitted that My belief is that
economics is somewhat more vulnerable than the physical
sciences to models whose validity will never be clear... .
Economics presents its own methodological problems... . As
economics develops, it will broaden its repertory of methods
and sources of evidence, the science will become stronger,
and the charlatans will be exposed.
So, the problem is the methodology! But aren't being
scientific and methodical two sides of the same coin?
Referring to Alex Rosenberg and Tyler Curtain's criticism on
economics as a non-science (What Is Economics Good For?
NYT 24 August, 2013), Paul Krugman admitted, "...they're
entirely right that economics isn't behaving like a science,
and economists - macroeconomists, anyway - definitely aren't
behaving like scientists" (The real trouble with Economics,
NYT 27 August, 2013).
Rethinking Economics: Economics students from 19
countries have joined forces to call for an overhaul of the
way their subject is taught, stating that the dominance of
narrow free-market theories at top universities harms the

world's ability to confront challenges such as financial stability
and climate change.
"It is not only the world economy that is in crisis. The teaching
of economics is in crisis too, and this crisis has consequences
far beyond the university walls. What is taught shapes the
minds of the next generation of policymakers, and therefore
shapes the societies we live in (http://rethinkecon.com/anopen-letter-for-change/).
An Institute for New Economic Thinking, INET (http://
ineteconomics.org/) has been set up to restore some of the
lost glory / standing of academic economics.
An International Student Initiative for Pluralism in Economics,
comprising of 65 groups from 30 countries has been formed
to voice students' discontent about current economics
courses.
At the University of Manchester, a Post-Crash Economics
Society has been formed with similar objectives.
As a result of these initiatives, Universities across 4 continents
have agreed to revamp their economics courses2.
Economics or 'Datanomics'? The present-day economics
seems to be bogged down with collecting and analysing a
great deal of 'data' using fancy spreadsheets, but not applying
too much thinking behind the mechanisms at play in the
real lives of people who are similar to the electrons, protons
and neutrons in a physical system. The only difference is
that these players in economics have minds of their own
and can and do take decisions to maximise their personal
interests, thus distorting the expected / observed data-pattern
at every juncture. A look at any graph of movement in stockmarket or, price-indices would make this point clear.
Moreover, very often, the data collected are themselves
suspect, and / or, (sometimes, deliberately) wrongly used /
interpreted / manipulated3,4! For obvious reasons, official
statistics, be it the rate of inflation, or, the consumer /
wholesale price indices, or, GDP, or, the data on poverty /
crime, or, the death toll in a natural disaster / stampede /
railway accident, etc., (which form the basis of various
economic studies), are often 'doctored'.
In March 2014, Thomas Piketty, a French economist, after
15 years of research, released his 685-page5 tome, Capital
in the Twenty-First Century, linking growing economic
inequality with unbridled capitalism. The book quickly
became a best-seller and has just been awarded the
McKinsey-Financial Times (FT) Business Book of the Year
Award 2014. Yet, the data collected by him for over 300
years and 20 countries have been rubbished6. Piketty himself
laments, "publications of the international organizations or
national statistical agencies...usually focus on indices that
deliberately ignore the top end of the distribution..." and
"they often give an artificially rosy picture of inequality." (p.
268)
From a physicist's point of view, this is quite expected,
because the purity (correctness), quality (completeness) and
integrity (consistency) of economic data will always remain
suspect, inter alia, for the following reasons
(i) It's part of human nature not to disclose all the economic
information to the authorities, sometimes deliberately,
sometimes inadvertently, or, merely thinking, "What's the
use?", (ii) The difficulties in collection of all the relevant data
at once from the same source, and (iii) Varying definitions
(even in the same jurisdiction, for example, Consumer Price
Index (CPI) or, inflation rate may be measured differently in
different periods of time), differing National Accounting
Standards, etc. There is no simple way such data can be
normalised for logical analysis to arrive at meaningful
conclusions.
In contrast, the physicists' search for data against theoretical
predictions is an entirely different ball game! I quote two
examples only
(A) Einstein published his General Theory of Relativity in 1915
and in 1916, he proposed three areas in which it could be
readily tested (a) the perihelion precession of Mercury's
orbit, (b) the deflection of light by the Sun's gravity, and
(c) the gravitational red-shift of light. While (a) was proved
using pre-existing astronomical observations, for conclusive
proofs of the other two, physics had to wait till 1919
(Eddington's Solar Eclipse experiment), and 1959 (the PoundRebka experiment), respectively.
(B) The more recent discovery of the Higgs Boson, nearly 50
years after its existence was predicted.
In physics, hypothesis / theory / laws are put to the grind
mill of data / observations repeatedly till proved (or,
disproved) conclusively.
In economics, this is rarely the case, leading to much debate
/ controversy, and sometimes, to faulty projections /
predictions / policy-prescriptions, making lives difficult for
the policymakers, the politicians!
Never-ending debates: On important questions of interest
to the common man, economists seem to be forever engaged
in verbose debates, without coming to any definitive answer
/ solutions. Some of these questions relate to whether
(a) The Central Banks (such as the Reserve Bank of India, RBI)
should keep the interest rates on bank-credit at a very low
level (near zero) as prevailing in the USA, Japan, UK and the
Eurozone7. Although there has been very little / negative
growth in these economies despite such low interest-rates
for a prolonged period, this has been a repetitive demand
of the Indian Finance Ministers (FMs) / industrialists in recent
decades, and a cause for great debate / dispute with RBI.
But the FMs / industrialists conveniently forget that the most
prolific growth that the Indian economy has ever witnessed

since independence was in the decades following the Gulf
War in 1991, when interest rates were at an all-time high! A
detailed analysis using, for example, CMIE (Centre for
Monitoring Indian Economy) data, would reveal that interest
on borrowed funds forms a minuscule component of a firm's
overall costs, and is definitely much lower compared to Top
Managerial compensations, marketing, selling and
advertising expenses, etc., which, if curbed, would still make
the firm adequately profitable.
(b) Governments should practice austerity and curb public
expenditure, knowing fully well that this would necessarily
curtail some public services like healthcare, public
infrastructure, etc., and often lead to unemployment, directly
or indirectly, and
(c) Governments / Central Banks should go on 'printing' more
money8 to 'stimulate' (?) the economy by enabling the banks
to extend credit to the less fortunate ones, although such
'easy money' is quickly cornered by those who already have
a lot of it.
Physics provides (?) the solution: Definitive answers to all
the issues listed above and other problems before modernday (Macro)economists, can be found not just by collecting /
analysing 'tons and tons of data', but by undertaking, what
in Physics, is known as 'thought experiment' or Gedanken
experiment, and thinking through the consequences of each
of these and / or other actions / issues. Due to space constraint,
I am refraining from elaborating on this concept9. But in all
such cases, the questions that need to be asked are:
(1) What would be the detailed implications of taking (or,
not taking) such a course of action? (2) Who will be the
gainers, and who, the losers? (3) How will each segment of
the economy / population be affected by such action? (4)
What will be the environmental costs, if any? (5) In balance,
whether it will be beneficial to the national / global economy
as a whole? These and other questions relevant to the issue
at hand will form the basis for the Gedanken experiment.
Economics has many laws, but there are very few that are of
universal validity, and some (like Say's law which states that
aggregate production necessarily creates an equal quantity
of aggregate demand) are totally at variance with
observations. The only one law from Microeconomics that
seems to have stood the test of time is the Law of Diminishing
Returns, which implies that we cannot increase production
infinitely.
What economists need today are not simple data-crunching,
but more of such laws / theories / hypotheses which are of
universal and temporal validity, and which are backed by
detailed, due processes of thought (Gedanken experiment),
and then look for data to support the same, just like the
cases of Einstein or Higgs quoted above. Difficult, but not
impossible!
I 105
May the Universities and expert thinkers move in this direction

at lightning speed!
Economists transform a 400% Price Increase into a 7.1%

Decline', 06 November, 2014 (www.zerohedge.com).
And will some bold physicists please stand up and hold hands
with economists to improve human thinking on economic
matters, because it affects every one of us and our future
generations?
5 Excluding the data and sources which are put online in a

companion website (http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/en/capital21c2).
References / notes:
1. In economics, a depression is a sustained, long-term
downturn in economic activity in one or more economies.
It is a more severe downturn than a recession.
2. 'Universities to revamp economics courses', 22 September,
2014 FT.
3 'Reinhart, Rogoff, and How the Macroeconomic Sausage Is
Made', 17 Apil, 2013 Harvard Business Review.
4 'The Magic of CPI (Consumer Price Index) - Watch How
'The Most Important Book Ever Is All Wrong' - 20 April, 2014 FT.
7 'Low rates: the drug we can all do without' - 31 January,

2012 FT.
8 Referred to as Quantitative Easing (QE) in economists'
jargon. Incidentally, the Bank of Japan had for many years,
and as late as in February, 2001, claimed that "quantitative
easing is not effective" and rejected its use for monetary
policy, yet was the first to adopt QE on 19 March, 2001 to
fight domestic deflation (Wikipedia). As per latest data,
Japan is in recession despite repeated rounds of QE.
9 For the inquisitive ones, I would say that my answers to each
of the questions in the preceding paragraph, is a definitive
and bold "NO", for the reasons briefly indicated there.
Born in August 1951, Shri Basu joined Presidency College in 1966 for P.U. (Sc) Course and became a physics graduate in 1970.
He did his MSc (Pure Physics) from Calcutta University (1972). After serving as a science teacher-cum-vice principal in
Ramakrishna Mission School in Arunachal Pradesh for three years, he joined State Bank of India as a Probationary Officer, and
retired from the same bank in 2011 as a top executive. Meanwhile, he also became a Certified Associate of the Indian
Institute of Bankers (IIB) and the first Certified Basel-III professional from India. He served in the editorial board of the
monthly magazine, 'Indian Banker', and as an expert in Risk Management and Basel Accord Committees of the RBI and IIB.
Settled in Kolkata, he is passionate about travelling and reading. While physics remains his first love, he also takes keen
interest in economics and finance.
LIFE : A PHYSICIST'S PERSPECTIVE
Life: A Physicist's Perspective

Amitava Banerjee
Department of Physics, Presidency University,
86/1 College Street, Kolkata-700073
The subject of Physics

dealing with matter and
interactions can give useful
insights to many biological
systems. Although many
pioneers predicted how to
describe life in terms of
complex interactions long
time ago, it is only in the
recent few decades, that it
was possible, with
sufficient computational
support, to simulate
equations which were
previously intractable
analytically. However,
certain philosophical
questions still remain,
about whether the
grandeur of life can be
described only in terms of
equations and codes.
t all started when you began your life in the very beginning. All metazoans[1]
start their lives with a single cell and being so, you were no exception. But that
first cell was very special. It contained, within its tiny 0.1 mm space, all the
information needed to bring its change. Thus, like a Japanese expert's origami
work[2], it grew to be divided and differentiated in a programmed way. Starting
from a single cell at first, a hollow ball of cells was formed and then it buckled to
give the shape to the future embryo. As the number of cells increased, they
separated into different groups to work and develop together and thus the first
of the tissues were formed. All this was merely the next level in the hierarchy of
organisation and interactions of different components in the body, which
characterises life itself. Of course, there are ample instances of complexity in nature,
from the galaxy clusters to river deltas to speak of a few. But the fine blend of
complexity to structural and functional organisation is the ultimate trademark of
life. It is that which, starting from the molecules, supports a self-sustaining and
self-replicable body and a mind capable of being curious about its own origin.
The human body in full size contains as many as 1014 cells[3], of 200 different
types! This immense diversity is grouped into tissues, then organs and limbs. Thus
the functionality of the body owes not only to the individual cells alone but to
their coherent cooperation also. Within a cell too, this complex organisation is
unmistakable. Lots of busybodies from oxygen and smaller nutrients to the
giant molecules like proteins all are rushing in and out of the cell to their target
places. Molecules in interaction with each other are twisting, bending, zipping
and unzipping all the times to do their specified works. Even the membrane of
the cell is not at rest. It is constantly passing molecules and ions[4] in and out and
changing its shape and properties as per the need of the cell. All these are working
hand-in-hand systematically to realise the miracle called life.
People have always been curious about the nature and that is true particularly for
physicists. The living planet has much in store for them. In fact, there is a lot
about life and living systems for them to be amazed of. After all, the spectrum of
happenings told above all are governed by the laws of physics. From this point of
view, it seems that life is just a mere play of matter and forces - rushing and
collision of interacting molecules, absorption, emission and transport of energy,
juggling of electron clouds resulting in making and breaking of bonds. Speaking
strictly theoretical, there is nothing wrong in this view[5], but the question is, is it
only that simple? The answer is no. Closer focusing to any single event shows that
even the smallest part of it is so complicated that a complete description needs
inputs from multiple physical principles, often at multiple scales. Those physical
I 107
processes have been optimised through evolutionary

seletions over the past three and half billion years of life on
earth, to the present level of sophistication and complexity.
way. In a strongly interacting system like life, as they say,

"More is Different"[8]. To have a feel of this, consider this
very simple example from elementary electrostatics:
HOW DID (OR DOES)

THE LEOPARD GET ITS SPOTS
CELLULAR CIRCUITS
I started this article with a developing embryo and gave a

hint of the drama that goes on there. An embryo develops
by programmed division and differentiation of its cells,
which is believed to be triggered through the signaling
by some special molecules. Thus, tracking those molecules
could help us understand the complex process of
development and this is where physics comes in.
Modeling the concentration distributions of the interacting
chemicals ("morphogens") starts with the observation that
a molecule can appear at a certain place at a given time
by only two ways : it can be created there by reactions of
other molecules, or, it can just spread there from
elsewhere. So, the rate of concentration change depends
on kinetics and diffusion and thus, we can write the PDEs
for the concentrations, called "the Reaction-Diffusion
Equations".
Once we model the kinetics, the above equation set can
be solved (possibly numerically) and we can get the
distribution of the molecules in space and time. Knowing
that enables us to understand the process of development
(not necessarily for an embryo) and it works in many
interesting real cases, from Drosophila babies to plant
venation patterns.[6] One such is the following.
The idea that animal coat patterns can be generated by
morphogen inhomogeneities was first given by the famous
code-breaker and mathematician Alan Turing. According
to him, it is those chemicals described above, which set
up a concentration distribution in the animal skin, that in
turn governs the pigmentation preferences of the cells.
Thus the much-bragged-of stripes, patches and marks of
tigers, leopards and ocelots are nothing but differences
in reaction kinetics, changes in numerical parameters or
boundary conditions - which control the fate of the PDE
solutions. It was found to be true also. After computers
became well capable of numerical simulations, people
tried to generate animal coats on computer screens and
they got very inspiring results.[7]
Still scientists invent methods to study seemingly formidable
things and make new discoveries on the way. In fact, in a
material world, every piece of it is so and hence living forms
are not excluded too. The present foundation of Physics is
believed to be matured enough to describe the interactions
between materials and between their constituents, at least
up to a scale not too unreasonable for describing biological
systems. But life's signature tune of complexity blocks the
The human brain, with its hundred billion of neurons,

consumes nearly 30 Watts of electric power on average.[9]
Its network of neuron and neuroglial cells acts as a giant
complicated circuit, which generates and transports
electric currents. Analysing such a network as total is a
growing challenge for physicists today.[10] Though for a
single excitable cell, very nice models exist, which are often
close to experimental findings.
One such model, a pretty old one too, was described by
Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley back in 1952, which
gave them the 1963 medicine Nobel.[11] Their model
described the dynamics of electrical activity of a single
cell by thinking up a circuit element out of each of its
major components. Thus the membrane lipid bilayer was
supposed to act like a capacitor, ion channels as
conductance, electrochemical gradients as voltage sources
and the ion pumps as current sources.Putting all in their
places, one can design the circuit as good as we do in
labs and write the differential equations for its charging
and discharging. Of course, for a large number of
components, the equations have to be solved numerically,
but still, the Hodgkin-Huxley model remains as the basic
mathematical understanding of the electrical activity of a
cell.
In the recent times, there are many improvements and
extensions. Some of which consider thermal fluctuations
and different errors, some try to make it work in complex
cellular geometries, while some simplify it only to use it
as a part of a more formidable neural network consisting
of a multitude of these "circuit cells". Some variants also
study certain spatio-temporal properties. They need heavy
inputs from classical electromagnetic theory.[12] Many
computational software have supplements now, built
specially to solve and simulate neural networks. But, even
though single cells correspond well to models, a large
interacting system like the brain remains a far-off dream.
If you have a uniformly charged spherical shell of radius 'a',
then you can write the expression of its electrostatic field E1.
The energy of this field, if there is nothing else in the world
is integral (E12 dv), where the integral is done over all space.
Again, if there is a similar bigger shell of radius 'b'(and nothing
else anywhere), and it has a field E2 and energy integral (E22
dv) like before. But now suppose both of them are present.
From a seductive superposition principle, you immediately
write the net field as E1 + E2, but what about the energy
now? It is integral (E12 dv + E22 dv + 2E1.E2 dv) and not
simply the sum of the individual energies before. As the
energy depends on field in a nonlinear way, independent
contributions simply don't add up to give the net field and

"cross-terms" like the third ones turn up to make life harder.
WHY MATH IS MAGIC

(OR WHY EXTINCTION MAY BE GOOD)
Mathematics is often regarded as a different species than
the other so called natural sciences. Be that just or not,
the true power of math lies in the universality of its
approach to describe nature, a character which modelbuilding greatly appreciates. In writing the equations for
two quite unrelated systems, if the assumptions are
analogous then the equations and their results are too.
This means, knowledge of any one of these systems
suffices. If that one belongs to a well-studied and
established field, then the other is predictable. This may
be considered to be a naive explanation of why we see
similar patterns and behaviours in quite different places
in nature- why cloud linings look similar to broken river
banks and why broccolis grow like crystals. This is why
courting fireflies flash in synchrony like a coherent laser
light[13] and natural selection plays the games of gamblers.
Similar power laws explain why nature is alive with selfsimilar structures. As a closing piece, let us see a recent
example.
Mathematical population models are very old, perhaps
present from the time when people observed that an
unrestricted population goes up geometrically. The models
of interacting species are not new also, Lotka-Volterra
predator-prey model was a hot topic in contemporary
mathematics. Today, armed with numerical and
computational tools, we dare to venture more complicated
extensions like the application of the RD equations to
ecology to consider migration of animals in space. Ecology
modeling is an established field by now.
On the other hand, cancer is a complex system which
people have not studied in paper until very recently.
Generally a carcinoma has many different kinds of cells,
which interact and spread like migrating animals. Special
cells of them produce and secrete growth factors for the
tumour and take the role of producers. Cells compete for
space, oxygen and growth factors like it occurs in inter
and intra-species struggle. Also, constant predation is on
the go by immuno-cells, drug molecules and rays. So, it
looks like we can apply our well-studied ecology equations
to them and by doing this, we are starting to get insights.
In ecology, it is known that an interacting species cannot
survive with a population below a minimum limit, this is
known as Allee effect. So, now some people believe that,
to cure a cancer, we won't have to kill all the tumour cells.
Just decrease the number below a limit and it would die
off gradually by itself. Really it would save wealth, in the
form of money as well as health. [14]
The above example is so simple that many people overlook
its implication. But is contains the roots of a motto- whenever

some quantity is a nonlinear function of interacting individual
contributors, time is up for our favourite superposition
principle. Perhaps, you are starting to have a feel of this
from now. If your system has many species, them tracking
up all the cross terms is a huge job, even for a computer.
Thus, exact analytical solutions are often rare species. But,
you can always find a way out by the so-called 'spherical
cow' approximation. As suggested by the nickname, this
popular method relies on the assumption of "diluted"
interactions. For a specified level of accuracy, one can
determine the minimum amount of interaction one needs
to consider and of course, that should be tractable. Often,
we use averaged quantities and describe the situation in
their terms. In some cases, we are not bothered about the
exact value of a variable but rather describe the problem in
terms of probability of that variable taking a value and
tracking the ways it can change. After all, if we can gain any
insight, then something is better than nothing.
References :
[1] A fashionable name for multicellular organisms, for
example, rabbits.
[2] This comparison is from the works of the biologist Prof.
Richard Dawkins, who, when once asked about whether
evolution is true, answered, "You did it yourself in nine
months". It is fascinating to see how a human embryo
drives the way through all the major developments
reflecting the original process of evolution of life- a story
of four billion years summarized in nine months. See the
book "The Greatest Show on Earth" by Dawkins.
[3] To say nothing of the microbes outnumbering the cells
10 to 1, living happily inside your body. There is a rising
concern among biologists to integrate them to the human
physiology, thinking them as a part of a larger entity, the
human microbiome.
[4] At times it even pumps those stuffs against their existing
gradient of density by a process called, not without
reason, active transport. Of course it needs energy for
that.
[5] Are you sure it does tell the whole story? Any chemical
reaction (even as simple as adding salt to water) involves
all these things. So, what is the "X-factor" that makes
such complex life? This is a philosophical question that
baffled many scientific minds long ago, persuading many
of them to think of some weird kind of "vital forces" in
living beings. Even today (as in the past), many people
continue to give this logic in support of theism.
[6] Apart from living systems, the RD equations often turn
up in many artificial chemical reactions too. One famous
example is the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction, which can
create "abstract art" in your laboratory petri dish.
I 109
[7] For a recent work, see the paper- "Two-stage Turing model
for generating pigment patterns on the leopard and the
jaguar- Phys. Rev. E 74, 011914 - R. T. Liu, S. S. Liaw, and
P. K. Maini". It is easy-to-read and enchanting.
try this paper in the PRL :-"Brain organization into resting

state networks emerges at criticality on a model of the
human connectome - A. Haimovici et al -Phys. Rev. Lett.
110, 178101".
[8] See the wonderful little article under the same title written
by the famous P. W. Anderson in Science - "More is
Different- Science, New Series, Vol. 177, no 4047 (Aug 4,
1972)" for an exciting reading.
[11] Of course, they did more than just writing down the
equations.
[9] If you feel "shocked", then you can consult any standard
textbook on neuroscience for the figure.
[10] Still, people are getting new insights in neuroscience from
physics. There are actually certain statistical physics
methods, which, although somewhat simplified, give
some impressive results. If you want to have a taste, then
[12] See this review in the RMP- " Dynamical principles in

neuroscience - Rabinovich et al, Rev. Mod. Phys., volume
78, October-December 2006".
[13] See the book "Nonlinear Dyanamics and Chaos" by Steven
Strogatz for a 'unified' discussion of fireflies and lasers.
[14] Cancer as an evolutionary and ecological process -Lauren
M.F. Merlo et al, doi:10.1038/nrc2013
Amitava Banerjee is a current 2nd year BSc student at Presidency University. He is looking forward to taking the plunge into
the world of quantum mechanics next semester.
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Presidency Physics Reunion Souvenir 2014

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Presidency Physics Reunion Souvenir 2014

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REUNION

DEPARTMENT OF PHYSICS, PRESIDENCY UNIVERSITY, KOLKATA

Reunion Souvenir 2014

Reunion Souvenir Committee

Design and Computer Setting by

2 I PRESIDENCY PHYSICS REUNION SOUVENIER 2014

Treasurer: Ritaban Chatterjee

Vice Chancellors Message

PRESIDENCY PHYSICS REUNION SOUVENIER 2014

4 I PRESIDENCY PHYSICS REUNION SOUVENIER 2014

PRESIDENCY PHYSICS REUNION SOUVENIER 2014

Subhrangshu Sekhar Manna

6 I PRESIDENCY PHYSICS REUNION SOUVENIER 2014

Asterix and Obelix in the Physics Department

Puzzles in the Sky

Being Struck by the Time Arrow In Presidency

The Girl from Suburbia..

Presidency College in the Late Sixties ....

Jayanta Kumar Bhattacharjee

Those Were the Days, My Friend ...

Three Years in Shangri-la

21 Years at Presidency College

Pradip Kumar Datta

Superconductivity: The Journey from Discovery to ....

From Presidency College to the Heart of ...

Can Physics Help Rethink Economics?

Dulal Krishna Basu

Life: A Physicist's Perspective

PRESIDENCY PHYSICS REUNION SOUVENIER 2014

8 I PRESIDENCY PHYSICS REUNION SOUVENIER 2014

xy xy! ye y!y y & ! xyy ~ )

yy !Ky# yy !Ky y y xz !Ky y yy

18 I PRESIDENCY PHYSICS REUNION SOUVENIER 2014

!y Brian Greene ~ The Fabric of the Cosmos xyy

!Ky !m## xyhsy! yy yz xyy y y

PRESIDENCY PHYSICS REUNION SOUVENIER 2014

20 I PRESIDENCY PHYSICS REUNION SOUVENIER 2014

depthis beyond our scope of imagination. The vigour that

And all colours within hues of black and white.

PRESIDENCY PHYSICS REUNION SOUVENIER 2014

965 y yy uy! y xy! !! xy! % z_y !

22 I PRESIDENCY PHYSICS REUNION SOUVENIER 2014

% # Ryy D ~! y!O y& ~y!!z y

24 I PRESIDENCY PHYSICS REUNION SOUVENIER 2014

Asterix and Obelix in the Physics Department

This is a parody of the

PRESIDENCY PHYSICS REUNION SOUVENIER 2014

Now I am the real physicist. With a lab that's full of meters,

look around the place.

Action : Looks up the register.

Action: Bell rings, students take their seats.

Physicist2 - But now it's spring! You were asked to join in

Quantumemchanix - We continue with our discussion of

Action : Obelix falls with a thud.

26 I PRESIDENCY PHYSICS REUNION SOUVENIER 2014

Obelix - A boar? Roasted? Fried? With sauce? With mustard?

Action : Man busily walks away.

Mathematix - So we have proved that lim

Action: God sleeps.