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Homi Jehangir Bhabha

Dr Subodh Mahanti

"I know quite clearly what I want out of my life. Life and my
emotions are the only things
I am conscious of. I love the consciousness of life and I want as
much of it as I can get.
But the span of one's life is limited. What comes after death no
one knows. Nor do I care. Since, therefore,
I cannot increase the content of life by increasing its duration, I
will increase it by increasing its intensity.
Art, music, poetry and everything else that consciousness I do
have this one purpose - increasing the
intensity of my consciousness of life".

H.J. Bhabha

Homi Jehangir Bhabha is mostly known as the chief architect of India's nuclear programme. However,
his contribution to India's development goes far beyond the sphere of atomic energy. He had
established two great research institutions namely the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR),
and the Atomic Energy Establishment at Trombay (which after Bhabha's death was renamed as the
Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC). He played a crucial role in the development of electronics in
India. Bhabha was an outstanding scientist and a brilliant engineer. He derived a correct expression
for the probability of scattering positrons by electrons, a process now known as Bhabha scattering. His
classic paper, jointly with W. Heitler, published in 1937 described how primary cosmic rays from space
interact with the upper atmosphere to produce particles observed at the ground level. Bhabha and
Heitler explained the cosmic ray shower formation by the cascade production of gamma rays and
positive and negative electron pairs. 'In 1938 Bhabha was the first to conclude that observations of
the properties of such particles would lead to the straightforward experimental verification of Albert
Einstein's theory of relativity'. Bhabha possessed sensitive and trained artistic gifts of the highest
order. The environment in which he grew certainly helped him to develop all these fine qualities. He
loved music and dancing. He had considerable knowledge of both Indian and western music. He
painted and sketched. He designed the settings of dramatic productions. He was an architect of no
mean ability. Bhabha was a perfectionist. He was a true lover of trees and did everything under his
powers to protect them. In his tribute paid to Bhabha Lord Redcliffe-Maud has aptly described the
different facets of Bhabha's personality: "Affectionate and sensitive, elegant and humorous, dynamic
and now dead. Homi was one of the very few people I have ever known (Maynard Keynes was
another) who enhance life whatever the context of their living. In Homi's case this was because he
was fantastically talented but so fastidious about standards that he was never a dilettante. Whatever
he set himself to do, he did as a professional- but one who worked for love. He was relentlessly
creative, enhancing life because he loved all forms of it. So he became a living proof that scientific
excellence can go with excellence in arts and racial differences need be no bar to friendship. When
Indian Art was last exhibited in London, the one picture chosen for reproduction on the poster outside
Burlington House was one of Homi's. He was as fond of music as he was of pictures, contriving to fly
in from India as the first Edinburgh Festival began and, when the question of a late Beethoven quartet
was raised in conversation, knowing the opus number. At one UNESCO conference after another he
stood out even among the other distinguished members of the Indian delegation, as a world citizen
qualified in all three subjects - education, science and culture - as hardly another member of the
conference was. He was in fact an obvious choice for the headship of the Organization if he had felt

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inclined that way. Those qualified must judge how grievous was his death for India and for science and
for civilization".

Homi Jehangir Bhabha was born on 30 October 1909 in a wealthy Parsi family of Bombay (recently
renamed as Mumbai). Bhabha's family had a long tradition of learning and service in the field of
education. His grandfather, also named as Homi Jehangir Bhabha, was the Inspector General of
Education in the State of Mysore. Bhabha's father Jehangir Hormusji Bhabha was educated at Oxford
and later qualified as a lawyer. His mother Meheren was grand-daughter of Sir Dinshaw Maneckji
Petit, widely respected in Bombay for his philanthropic endowments. Hormusji's sister that is Bhabha's
paternal aunt Meherbai married Sir Dorab J. Tata (1859-1932) the eldest son of Jamshetji Nusserwanji
Tata (1839-1904).

Bhabha attended the Cathedral and John Connon Schools in Bombay. After passing Senior Cambridge
Examination at the age of 15 Bhabha entered the Elphinstone College in Bombay and later the Royal
Institute of Science, also in Bombay. In 1927 Bhabha joined the Gonville and Caius College in
Cambridge, the same college where his uncle Sir Dorab J. Tata had studied and who made a donation
of twenty-five thousand pounds to the college in 1920. He took the Mechanical Sciences Tripos in
1930. It may be noted here that both his father and his uncle Sir Dorab J. Tata wanted Bhabha to
become an engineer with the view that ultimately he would join the Tata Iron and Steel Company at
Jamshedpur. At Cambridge Bhabha's interests gradually shifted to theoretical physics. In 1928 Bhabha
in a letter to his father wrote: "I seriously say to you that business or job as an engineer is not the
thing for me. It is totally foreign to my nature and radically opposed to my temperament and opinions.
Physics is my line. I know I shall do great things here. For, each man can do best and excel in only
that thing of which he is passionately fond, in which he believes, as I do, that he has the ability to do
it, that he is in fact born and destined to do it... I am burning with a desire to do physics. I will and
must do it sometime. It is my only ambition. I have no desire to be a `successful' man or the head of
a big firm. There are intelligent people who like that and let them do it... It is no use saying to
Beethoven `You must be a scientist for it is great thing ' when he did not care two hoots for science;
or to Socrates `Be an engineer; it is work of intelligent man'. It is not in the nature of things. I
therefore earnestly implore you to let me do physics." For doing physics he wanted to do the
Mathematics Tripos. Bhabha's father had to yield to his son's firm determination. But he put a
condition. He told Homi that in case he could complete the Mechanical Tripos successfully he would
allow him to stay in Cambridge to take up the Mathematics Tripos. So when Bhabha passed the
Mechanical Tripos with first class his father allowed his son to fulfill his wishes. Thus two years later
Bhabha passed the Mathematics Tripos again with first class. Bhabha was taught by Paul Adrien
Maurice Dirac (1902-84), who was Lucasian Professor of Mathematics (1932-69) at Cambridge and
awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1933 with Erwin Schrodinger (1887-1961) for their work in
quantum theory. Bhabha joined the Cavendish Laboratory, from where he obtained his Ph.D. in
theoretical physics. During 1932 to 1934 he held the Rouse Ball Traveling Studentship in mathematics.
He also held Salomons Studentship in Engineering during 1931-1932. He traveled in Europe and
worked with Wolfgang Pauli (1900-58) in Zurich and Enrico Fermi (1901-54) in Rome. His first
research paper published in 1933 won him the Isaac Newton Studentship in 1934, which he held for
three years and mostly worked in Cambridge except for a short period when he worked with Niels
Henrik David Bohr (1885-1962) at Copenhagen. When Bhabha was at Cavendish Laboratory many
sensational discoveries were made. In 1932 James Chadwick (1891-1974) demonstrated the existence
of the neutron, John Douglas Cockroft (1897-1967) and Ernest Thomas Sinton Walton (1903-95)
produced the transmutation or artificial disintegration of light elements by bombarding high speed
protons and Patrick Maynard Stuart Blackett (1897-1974) and Giuseppe Paolo Stanislao Occhialini
(1907-) demonstrated by cloud-chamber photographs the production of electron pairs and showers by
Gamma radiations.

At Cambridge Bhabha's work centered around cosmic rays. It may be noted here that the existence of
penetrating radiations coming from outer space was detected towards the close of the 19th century by
Charles Thomson Rees Wilson (1869-1959) in simple experiments on electroscopes. Robert Andrews
Millikan (1868-1963), the US physicist and Nobel Prize winner, gave the name of cosmic rays to these
radiations consisting of highly energetic charged particles. The radiations reaching the top of the
atmosphere from outer space are referred, to as primary cosmic rays. They consist of various types of
nuclei but prominently of protons. Primary cosmic rays produced secondaries by interaction with the
atmosphere.

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As mentioned earlier Bhabha jointly with W.Heitler explained the cosmic-ray shower formation in a
paper published in 1937. Before this the mechanism responsible for shower formation was the subject
of much speculation.

The important contributions made by Bhabha while working at Cambridge have been summarised by
G. Venkataraman (in his book, Bhabha and His Magnificent Obsessions, Universities Press, Hyderabad,
1994) as :

The explanation of relativistic exchange scattering (Bhabha Scattering).

z The theory of production of electron and positron showers in cosmic rays (Bhabha-Heitler
theory).
z Speculation about the Yukawa particle related to which was his suggestion of the name meson.
z Prediction of relativistic time dilatation effects in the decay of the meson.

About the importance of Bhabha's research work Cecil Frank Powell (1903-1969) who was awarded
the 1950 Nobel Prize for physics wrote: "Homi Bhabha made decisive contributions to our
understanding of how they (the showers) developed in terms of electromagnetic processes. He was
also well-known at this time for his attempts to account for those elementary particles then known to
exist by a method using group theory. He was thus a very early exponent of those methods used
many years later for a similar purpose by Gell-Mann and others. My friend, Leopold Infeld says that he
was a distinguished and elegant theorist and his papers were always written in the best of taste".

It was Bhabha who suggested the name 'meson' now used for a class of elementary particles. When
Carl David Anderson (1905-91) discovered a new particle in the cosmic radiation with a mass between
that of electron and the proton he named it 'mesoton' which was subsequently changed by him to
mesotron presumably at the advice of Millikan. Bhabha in a short note to Nature (February 1939)
proposed the name 'meson'. In this note he wrote: "The name 'mesotron' has been suggested by
Anderson and Neddermeyer for the new particle found in cosmic radiation with a mass intermediate
between that of the electron and the proton. It is felt that the 'tr' in this word is redundant, since it
does not belong to the Greek root 'meso' for middle; the 'tr' in neutron and electron belong, of course,
to the roots "neutr" and "electra".... It would therefore be more logical and also shorter to call the new
particle a meson instead of a mesotron." Anderson's particle (mu-meson) was first thought to be the
particle predicted by Hideki Yukawa (1907-81) that was thought to carry the strong nuclear force and
hold the nucleus together. However, later when it was found that its interaction with nucleons was so
infrequent it became doubtful whether it could perform the role described by Yukawa, that is to act as
nuclear 'glue'. This was finally resolved when in 1947 C.F. Powell discovered a particle again in cosmic
radiation with a mass of 264 times that of the electron (pi-meson or pion). Pion interacted very
strongly with nucleons and thus filled precisely Yukawa's predicted role. Mu-meson or muon is the
decay product of pi-meson.

In 1939 when the Second World War broke out, Bhabha was in India. He came for a short holiday.
However, the war changed his plan. Most of the scientists in England had to take part in war activities
and there was no scope for doing basic research. So Bhabha had to abandon his plan to return to
England to resume his research work at Cambridge. It may be recalled here that Prasanta Chandra
Mahalanobis (1893-1972) who after completing the Physics Tripos made arrangement to work under
C.T.R. Wilson, the inventor of the cloud chamber, at the Cavendish Laboratory came back to India for
a short vacation. He also could not go back because the First World War broke out. In 1940 Bhabha
joined the Indian Institute of Science at Bangalore where a Readership in Theoretical Physics was
specially created for him. Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman (1888-1970) was then the Director of the
Institute. Bhabha was made a Professor in 1944. Vikram Sarabhai (1919-71) also spent a short period
at the Institute when Bhabha was there. At the Indian Institute of Science Bhabha guided research on
cosmic rays. He organised a group of young researchers in experimental and theoretical aspects of
cosmic ray research. After spending a few years in India Bhabha was no longer interested in going
back to England. Perhaps this was because of his growing sense of responsibility towards his
motherland. Gradually he became convinced that it was his duty to build up research groups in the
frontier of scientific knowledge. On April 20, 1944, Bhabha in a letter to Subrahmanyan
Chandrasekhar (1910-95) wrote: "...I have recently come to the view that provided proper
appreciation and financial support are forthcoming, 'it was one's duty to stay in one's country and

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build up schools comparable with those that other countries are fortunate in possessing."

In the early 1940s when Bhabha was working at the Indian Institute of Science, there was no institute
in the country which had the necessary facilities for original work in nuclear physics, cosmic rays, high
energy physics, and other frontiers of knowledge in physics. This prompted him to send a proposal in
March 1944 to the Sir Dorab J. Tata Trust for establishing 'a vigorous school of research in
fundamental physics'. In his proposal he wrote : "There is at the moment in India no big school of
research in the fundamental problems of physics, both theoretical and experimental. There are,
however, scattered all over India competent workers who are not doing as good work as they would
do if brought together in one place under proper direction. It is absolutely in the interest of India to
have a vigorous school of research in fundamental physics, for such a school forms the spearhead of
research not only in less advanced branches of physics but also in problems of immediate practical
application in industry. If much of the applied research done in India today is disappointing or of very
inferior quality it is entirely due to the absence of sufficient number of outstanding pure research
workers who would set the standard of good research and act on the directing boards in an advisory
capacity ... Moreover, when nuclear energy has been successfully applied for power production in say
a couple of decades from now, India will not have to look abroad for its experts but will find them
ready at hand. I do not think that anyone acquainted with scientific development in other countries
would deny the need in India for such a school as I propose.

"The subjects on which research and advanced teaching would be done would be theoretical physics,
especially on fundamental problems and with special reference to cosmic rays and nuclear physics,
and experimental research on cosmic rays. It is neither possible nor desirable to separate nuclear
physics from cosmic rays since the two are closely connected theoretically."

The trustees of Sir Dorab J. Tata Trust decided to accept Bhabha's proposal and financial responsibility
for starting the Institute in April 1944. Mumbai (then Bombay) was chosen as the location for the
prosed Institute as the Government of Bombay showed interest in becoming a joint founder of the
proposed institute. The institute, named Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, was inaugurated in
1945 in 540 square metres of hired space in an existing building. In 1948 the Institute was moved
into the old buildings of the Royal Yacht club. The present building of the Institute was inaugurated by
Pt. Jawaharlal Nehru in January 1962. Nehru had earlier laid its foundation stone in 1954. While
inaugurating the building in 1962 Nehru said : "Normally speaking, a delay of eight years in
completing this structure seems rather excessive. But coming once in-between and today, going
around partly over this building, my original impulse to criticise the delay was considerably modified
because it has been a great effort to put this up as it has been done. There have been difficulties and
anyhow the result achieved is something very much worthwhile." The Institute received financial
support from the Government of India from its second year, through the Council of Scientific and
Industrial Research (CSIR) and the Ministry of Natural Research and Scientific Research. Today the
main financial support for the Institute comes from the Government of India through the Department
of Atomic Energy. It should be emphasised here that no organisational chart for future development
was prepared for TIFR. Bhabha picked up the right kind of people first and then gave them
opportunities to grow. The same kind of principle that was followed by the Kaiser Wilhelm Society
while building the Max Planck Institute in Germany: "The Kaiser Wilhelm Society shall not first build an
institute for research and then seek out the suitable man but shall first pick up an outstanding man,
and then built and institute for him". In this context the following observations made by Bhabha in his
speech at the annual meeting of the National Insitute of Sciences of India (which was leater renamed
as Indian National Science Academy) in October 1963 are worth noting. Bhabha said: "I feel that we in
India are apt to believe that good scientific institutions can be established by Government decree or
order. A scientific institution, be it a laboratory or an academy, has to be grown with great care like a
tree. Its growth in terms of quality and achievement can only be accelerated to a very limited extent.
This is a field in which a large number of mediocre or second rate workers cannot make up for a few
outstanding ones, and the few outstanding ones always take at least 10-15 years to grow.

Too many of our National Laboratories have been established by deciding upon the field in which it
was desired to work and by drawing up an organisational chart on the pattern of some corresponding
large laboratory abroad. It was then assumed naively, that the posts in the chart could be filled by
advertisement, forgetting that workers of the appropriate and high level either do not exist in India, or
can only be obtained at the cost of some other institution, which thus becomes weaker of it. Our
Universities, weak as they always were, have been further weakened in this matter."

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The first step towards organising research in atomic energy was the creation of a Board of Research
on Atomic Energy that was constituted as a part of CSIR with Bhabha as its Chairman. While
proposing to create a Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR) as a full-fledged
department of Government Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar (1884-1955) proposed that the Board of
Research on Atomic Energy be shifted to the newly proposed Department. However, Bhabha had his
own ideas. He felt that the atomic energy programme should be kept outside this new department. On
April 26, 1948 Bhabha sent a note entitled 'Organisation of Atomic Research in India' to the then
Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru. In this note Bhabha wrote: "The development of atomic
energy should be entrusted to a very small and high powered body composed of say, three people
with executive power, and answerable directly to the Prime Minister without any intervening link. For
brevity, this body may be referred as the Atomic Energy Commission". Bhabha emphasised that the
proposed Atomic Energy Commission should have "its own secretariat independent of the secretariat
of any other ministry or department of the government, including the envisaged Department of
Scientific and Industrial Research". He also suggested that once the Commission was appointed the
existing Board of Research on Atomic Energy should be abolished. The Government of India accepted
Bhabha's proposal within a few months after its submission and with the promulgation of the Indian
Atomic Energy Act 1948, the Atomic Energy Commission was formed in August 1948 with the
following charter:

1. "To take such steps as may be necessary from time to time to project the interests of the
country in connection with Atomic Energy by exercise of the powers conferred on the
Government of India by the provisions of the Atomic Energy Act.

2. To survey the territories of the Indian Dominion for the location of useful minerals in connection
with Atomic Energy; and

3. To promote research in their own laboratories and to subsidise such research in existing
institutions and universities. Special steps will be taken to increase teaching and research
facilities in nuclear physics in the Indian universities." The first Atomic Energy commission had
three members with Bhabha as its Chairman. The other members were Shanti Swarup
Bhatnagar and Kariamanikkam Srinivasa Krishnan (1898-1961).

The first three things that Bhabha felt necessary for putting India's nuclear programme on a sound
footing were:

z The survey of natural resources, particularly materials of interest to atomic energy programme
such as uranium, thorium, beryllium, graphite etc. To achieve this a special unit, Rare Minerals
Division was created at Delhi with the help of Darashaw Nosherwan Wadia (1883-1969).

z Development of strong research schools in basic sciences particularly physics, chemistry and
biology by providing facilities to and training up high quality research scientists.

z Development of a programme for instrumentation particularly in electronics. A unit called

Electronics Production Unit was started in TIFR, which later formed the nucleus of the large
corporation known as Electronics Corporation of India Limited (ECIL) at Hyderabad.

When Bhabha realised that technology development for the atomic energy programme could no longer
be carried out within TIFR he decided to build a new laboratory entirely devoted to this purpose. He
managed to acquire 1200 acres of land at Trombay, near Bombay for this purpose. Thus the Atomic
Energy Establishment started functioning in 1954. The same year the Department of Atomic Energy
(DAE) was also established.

Bhabha was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1941. In 1943 he was awarded the Adams Prize
by the Cambridge University for his work on cosmic rays, and in 1948 the Hopkins prize of the
Cambridge Philosophical Society. In 1963 he was elected Foreign Associate of the U.S. National
Academy of Sciences, and Honorary Life Member of the New York Academy of Sciences. In 1964 he
was made Foreign Corresponding Academician of the Royal Academy of Sciences, Madrid. From 1960
until 1963 he was President of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics. He was president
of the historic International Conference of the Peaceful uses of atomic energy held, under U.N.

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auspices, at Geneva in August, 1955. Bhabha was President of the National Institute of Sciences of
India in 1963 and President of the Indian Science Congress Association in 1951. He was awarded the
title of Padma Bhushan by the Government of India in 1954.

Bhabha was killed in an air-crash near the famous Mont Blanc peak of the Alps on January 24, 1966,
while he was on his way to Vienna to attend a meeting of the Scientific Advisory Committee of the
International Atomic Energy Agency. At the time of his death, Bhabha was Director and Professor of
Theoretical Physics of the Tata Insitute of Fundamental Research, Secretary to the Government of
India in the Department of Atomic Energy, ex-officio Chairman of the Indian Atomic Energy
Commission, and Director of the Atomic Energy Establishment at Trombay. We would like to conclude
the sketchy and perhaps incoherent account of Bhabha's life and work by quoting J R D Tata on
Bhabha: "Scientist, engineer, master-builder and administrator, steeped in humanities, in art and
music, Homi was a truly complete man".

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