This year IETE had the proud privilege of having Padma Vibhushan Prof Dr Jayant Narlikar, the world renowned scientist and Emeritus Prof IUCAA as the chief guest for delivering the above prestigious lecture. Following is a brief summary of the lecture:
Prof Narlikar expressed delight in addressing an audience consisting mainly of young engineers apart from the dignitaries. The title of his brilliant and interesting lectue was “ Searches for life in outside Universe”. He started by paying tribute to Sir J C Bose and high lighted some of his important works namely response of plants to stimuli, his discovery of electrical nature of plant stimuli and his demonstration of millimeter waves by performing an experiment in public. Prof Narlikar also recalled that Sir JC Bose was the first person to employ semi conductor junctions to detect radio waves.
Prof Narlikar then turned to his own topic. He started with depicting the place of earth in solar system, the place of Sun in Milky Way galaxy and the subsequent discoveries of clusters and supper clusters of galaxies. The earth and the sun were quite ordinary and insignificant entities in the cosmos. He thus explained the strong possibility of their being abundant number of extra solar planets( 200 extra solar planets already identified) in this vast universe. The cosmos contains about 10 exp 21(one followed by 21 zeroes) sun like stars! Logically there is a strong likelihood of a good number of life supporting planets in existence among atleast some of the extra solar planets, surrounding these Suns. In this connection he explained Drake’s equation which estimates, there being possibly more than 1 million super civilizations in this vast universe even after taking in to account all negative factors.
Prof Narlikar then described various logical approaches of investigating life in outside universe and indicated that the most practical approaches were the sending and receiving messages to Extra Terrestrial advanced civilizations if any, and also trying to monitor intelligent messages possibly being transmitted among civilizations if any in the outside universe. He described the SETI experiments and showed some interesting photographs of giant millimeter wave antennas at West Virginia and Arecibo.
He then turned towards the discovery of molecular clouds in which simple inorganic and complex organic molecules have been reported as existing in the out side universe. This has in turn led to the possibility of there being micro organisms such as bacteria and viruses in the universe and proving their existence beyond doubt could be a humble but very practical approach in finding Extra Terrestrial life.
Prof Narlikar himself for past few years has been associated with research carried out by sending balloons at a height of 41 kms and collecting samples. He briefly described the findings in which microbes which can not possibly reach such a height from earth have been detected by careful analysis using filters. He explained that this research is still in progress and promises to yield important results.
His lecture was naturally very lively and hence followed by a number of questions from the audience. The learned Prof answered all of them in simple language. The entire lecture was literally an experience out of this world. |
