God’s Own Physicist – E C G Sudharshan, by Devika Saju

 

   E. C. G Sudarshan was the India’s best-kenned Indian-American theoretical physicist. Sudarshan has been credited with numerous contributions to the field of theoretical physics, including Glauber–Sudarshan P representation, V-A theory, tachyons, quantum Zeno effect, open quantum system and Lindblad equation, spin–statistics theorem, non-invariance groups, positive maps of density matrices, and quantum computation. 

     Ennackal Chandy George Sudarshan was born in Pallom, Kottayam. His father was a Revenue Supervisor for the Kerala Goverment Service. His mother was a scholastic edifier. Nobody in his family had a science background. He was intrigued with mathematics. He understood maths even without getting it explicated. His fellow students, very often, endeavored to test his cognizance by asking him to solve maths quandaries. He was impressed by the duration of a simple pendulum. He verbally expresses all these occured so naturally and he did it all without competition, for none seemed fascinated with them. He deems it a privilege to have grown up in Kerala, with its great culture that gave paramountcy to learning. He recollects how well they were edified maths and language. According to him, Kerala was ahead of the rest in terms of pursuit of erudition. But outside of that, both curriculum and texts were dull. Physics meant everything to him. He said that he took to Physics as a duckling to water. He liked the excitement of looking at the world through the prism of science.

     In Madras Christian College, he had good edifiers and their edification provided an inspiration to ken more. He verbally expressed that Mr. Thangaraj’s optics course was inspiring, who profoundly relished to edify without notes. He recollected how optics was edified earnestly in India. Once he went abroad, he realised that Optics was an old fashion there. He described the experience at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. He verbally expressed that the aliment accommodated was not congruous for a South Indian Palate. His contemporaries at TIFR were S S Jha, Raja Ramanna, Suryanarayan and K K Gupta. He had been assigned to the experimental work which involved identifying emulsion tracks of cosmic rays with great precision. But Sudarshan's hand was not steady and because of this reason he couldn't do it with precision. During his first year at TIFR, Paul Dirac, the world-famous English Physicist, edified them a course in quantum mechanics for six months. He was very convivial to Sudarshan. Upon the completion of his PhD, he was given fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study. He had a very short interview to test if he authentically kenned anything beyond theories and diagrams. He was hired determinately. He was offered job by Schwinger.In the meantime, Bhabha withal offered him a job. Sudarshan joined Rochester.He verbally expressed that Rochester days were genuinely memorable one.

     The Nobel Prize is the greatest Laurel in the academic world. He verbally expressed that they could have nominated him for this prize for my PhD Thesis 1957. Atleast they could have given him the same after 10 years. But they didn't. But he verbally expresses that his life is not dependent on a nobel prize. Sudarshan and team set up the Centre for Theoretical Studies in IISC, . Its mandate was to carry out research applying maths to both applied and rudimental sciences.When asked about the present standards of scientific research in India, he verbally expressed that except the hype, we could scarcely optically discern any results emerging from it. Most of the scientists are locked up in their comfort zones with no desire to excel.It is not the facilities but posture that genuinely matters in India. He verbalizes that he can now optically discern that the trait of doing things out of one's own curiosity or interest or by one's own efforts have gone from students.As a result our inculcation has gone down. Sudarshan verbally expresses that, while he was at MCC, he learnt more than people learnt for their PhD course. Especially those who opt physics should realise that physics is a connected subject. If you are a physicist, you must ken about the melting of frozen dihydrogen, erudition of the sundry allotropic variations of frozen dihydrogen monoxide. So, things are connected. This was his message to the students. He passed away on 13th May 2018.