Regarding the Meera Memorial Medal

Part of a letter I wrote to a student who was awarded the Kum. L. A. Meera Medal awarded to the best I. Ph. D. student at IISc, based on the grades in their first few semesters. It was instituted in IISc, where Meera had attended a summer school or two, by the Kum. L. A. Meera Meera Memorial Trust in Palghat, founded by late Shri L. K. Ananthakrishnan, the father of Meera.

``Meera was my friend. Couple of years senior to me. She did a Masters in Computer Science in IITM when I was in B. Tech. After my B. Tech I joined IMSc in Jan. or Feb. 1985 for Ph. D. programme. She also was selected. By June I had decided my background was not good enough to go straight for a Ph. D. and so I accepted the offer from U. Delaware. In the meantime, Meera had an offer from U. Pennsylvania. It turned out that Newark, DE was only about 50 or 60 miles away and I met her in Philadelphia once or twice. She even made a meal for me in her Graduate Towers. After the Thanksgiving break in November I got a call from the police saying that there had been a break-in and that she had been killed in a random crime. They called me because my number was in the telephone bill, and wanted to know who the nearest of kin were. A couple of years later I was called to testify in a lawyer's chamber about the events. Her father had an out of court settlement with U Penn and then with the funds set up a Memorial Trust. Much later I was inducted to the Board of Trustees. I worked for the trust for many years, organizing lectures, schools, etc. But after I became Chair, I could not do it any longer. I imagine their charitable work continues.''

The life and scientific work of Steven Weinberg (a proposed op-ed)

STEVEN WEINBERG (1933-2021) NOBEL LAUREATE (1979) AND PHYSICIST EXTRAORDINAIRE

Nobel Prize winning physicist and one of the most influential theoretical physicists of the twentieth century Steven Weinberg passed in July 23, 2021 in Austin, Texas, where he had been professor of physics and founder of the theoretical physics department at the University of Texas, Austin. Weinberg shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in physics with Sheldon Glashow and Abdus Salam for their construction of the unified electro-weak theory of the weak and electromagnetic interactions. Their work was associated with the correct identification of the mathematical structure of the underlying symmetries governing these interactions, and the incorporation of the Higgs mechanism into their model that would make the force carriers massive, and the mixing between them, which is characterised by the `Weinberg angle’.

Weinberg was born on May 3, 1933 in New York City and studied at the Bronx High School of Science, a school that produced a large number of gifted student of science. Glashow and Weinberg were from the same graduating class. Weinberg obtained his undergraduate degree at Cornell University and spent a year at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark after which he returned to the USA to pursue his Ph. D. at Princeton University under the supervision of Sam Trieman. He worked at Columbia University, MIT, and Harvard University before moving to the University of Texas. Over the course of his career Weinberg was considered a great teacher of physics, expositor, and also a supervisor for several Ph. D. students.

Weinberg worked in virtually all the important topics in the field of elementary particle physics, namely the phenomenology of the (electro-)weak and strong interactions and quantum field theory, where he has innumerable results which are named after him. In 1967 he wrote a short paper `A Model of Leptons’ which was his Noble Prize winning paper, which is one of the highest cited papers in the field in history. Weinberg was initiated the programme of `phenomenological lagrangians’ which was a framework that required one to use partial knowledge of elementary particles and their interactions at lowenergies even if a full theory that would reveal itself only at higher energies. He pursued the programme of renormalisation vigorously, studied CP violation, implications of phase transitions in the early universe, supersymmetric models to name some examples. After the Veneziano model was proposed, the precursor to string theory, Weinberg co-authored a paper with Gabriel Veneziano to improve its properties. Weinberg actively encouraged the study of string theory by appointing several persons to his group in Texas, thereby illustrating his genuine commitment to the growth of theoretical physics in every possible manner. Weinberg was intimately aware of experimental data and its implications to theory. He was also interested in physical cosmology and followed the subject.

Weinberg is also known for his monumental books on many technical fields, on field theory and particle physics, as well as on gravitation and cosmology. He also wrote popular books, The First Three Minutes, the story of the big bang and its aftermath being a huge best-seller. In his later years, he put forward his views on the evolution of western science.

Not a stranger to controversy, Weinberg was an avowed rationalist and atheist, and a defender of reductionism in science, which made him a proponent of the Superconducting Super Collider, a high energy collider in the US which eventually was cancelled due to the expense. He pioneered the debates around such topics and participated in them, especially regarding collective effects in physics, such as in the phenomenon of superconductivity. A key notion of `spontaneous symmetry breaking’ was proved by him with Jeffrey Goldstone and Salam in relativistic field theory, supporting the hypothesis of Yoichiro Nambu (Nobel Prize 2008), which is a manifestation of collective effects. These debates continue to this day.

Weinberg also did not shy away from his duties as a scientist and citizen. He advised his country’s government whenever called upon, including as a member of Jason, an elite group of scientists. He was a vocal supporter of Zionism by his own admission and protested against what he considered an unfair targeting of Israel for international sanctions.

The life and work of Steven Weinberg stand as a sacrament to all those who are committed to knowledge and science and its application. In the present era, where collaboration and team work is more the order of the day, one can learn the importance of understanding a subject from a very fundamental point of view, which was the hallmark of his style and approach (many of his papers are single-authored and have few references). The legacy of Weinberg will be one which brought simplicity and order to the world of elementary particle physics.

B. Ananthanarayan is Professor and former Chair of the Centre for High Energy Physics, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. A B. Tech. in Chemical Engineering from IIT Madras (1985) he obtained his Masters (1988) and Ph. D. (1991) from the University of Delaware in physics. He is an author of over a 100 refereed publications in international journals in elementary particle physics and field theory, and held the MSIL Chair of the Div. of Physical and Mathematical Physics, IISc (2015-18) and serves on the board of Springer Publications and was Associate Editor of Current Science. He is also a keen populariser of science and is active on Social Media.

Memories

When I was a kid, for some years, my sister and I would spend a lot of time in the home of my Periamma and Periappa, partly because my maternal grandmother was living with them, and also my mother was like a daughter to the two of them, and also because for a year and a half, my parents were in Agartala and our education in the AP Board could not be interrupted, and another year when my mother was away in the US, we used to stay both with father about 2 km away and with Periamma and Periappa. Their home had a garden, large enough for us to play a lot of cricket very noisily, table tennis and also some card games. My uncle was a judge of the high court and a person with remarkable concentration and could work despite our shrieks and screams. Later on in life he became hard of hearing but not during this years that I am talking about. The house was full of books of all kinds that belonged to his children, our much older cousins, from various bound volumes of magazines of yore, to comics, to very heavy stuff like Goethe's Faust, and also vinyls of Beethoven and Bach and such exotic stuff as Flight of the Bumble Bee and some calypsos. No one would listen to them except for me! Not far were the City Central Library and later the British Library and the Max Mueller Bhavan. And Moghul and RK Libraries about which I wrote. So the experience of actually sitting with physical books remains indelible and I do remember some of the things I read those days. Later when I went to IIT Madras, there was the German Lab with lots of music, and the USIS Library in Nungambakkam, where one entered into a world of splendour, or large halls and spotlessness and a large collection of books and magazines that you would have to read and then leave. I think I had a card that allowed me to borrow one book at a time. They even had movies on some days and I remember seeing some. The experience of getting ready, riding a bicycle in the heat of Madras, catching a bus to see a one hour movie still seemed to be worth the trouble. I think the mind is an amazing thing. If you have to work for something it stays with you longer. With the passage of time, and with the internet, I do read and look at things, but rarely remember things. Of course I am 4-5 decades older...as my mind goes back again and again to Hyderabad and parents and aunts and uncles and grandmother, none of who is here any longer, each of these memories plays itself out, like those gramophone records at 77 rpm...

Remembering mother on International Working Women's Day

My late mother, Saraswathi, was a little over 21 when she was married and went with her newly married husband to Shillong where father was working in the Accountant General's Office, I guess of undivided Assam. She worked there shortly in Lady Keane College, teaching Chemistry. She has asked me couple of times to take me back there, but it was never to happen. In a few years, she had lived in Trivandrum and then in Delhi and Hyderabad, by which time she had two children, and then in Ahmedabad. By the time we were little older, she went back to to Osmania University, first getting a degree in Journalism, and then eventually settled down to a career in education, earning a Bachelors and Masters in Education first from Osmania and then a Masters from SUNY Buffalo working on a short thesis with the renowned Philip Altbach, and then her Ph. D. from Osmania under the supervision of Prof. Ramachandra Reddy of a different department. Her thesis work was published as a book and now I have two copies. In the meantime, she started to work in Neelam Sanjeeva Reddy College of the Vivek Vardhini Society in Putli Bowli and spent a couple of decades there as a teacher, in toto and retired in 1996. A very practical person, who taught her subject of educational philosophy and science methodology with a rare passion, she trained a generation of students many who went back to the hinterland as teachers. Her infectious enthusiasm for science rubbed off on everyone and love for kids. Her other major love was for the language of Telugu from which she translated several stories and the like. Although in essence she stood for the rights of, and emancipation of women, I rarely heard her talking about it. I guess actions are louder than words and to us those stay etched in our minds. Also a tireless fighter against discrimination and caste system, she could speak her mind fearlessly. Even though it is over 13 months since her altogether early departure, I thought it fit to think about her on the day after the International Working Women's Day.

Yukawa Unification -- 30th Anniversary of the Discovery

Going down memory lane, my mind went back 30 years to my last year at the University of Delaware. At this time I was busy with a small project suggested by my thesis advisor Qaisar Shafi , which was to look at the possibility of seeing what happens to the Yukawa couplings of the top-quark, b-quark and tau-lepton in a supersymmetric extension of the standard model.

Recall that the top-quark had not yet been discovered at that time. I had a set of renormalization group equations for these, but the model also had an unknown parameter called tan(beta), the ratio of the vacuum expectation values of the u- and down-type Higgs fields that are present in such supersymmetric models.

Using a bit of numerical analysis that I had learnt during my hoary B. Tech days in IIT Madras, I wrote a program (these days we don't call them programs but codes) which I could in Fortran and also because I had a terminal on my desk, having spirited away from from my advisor's office since he was not using it. I used a 4th order Runge-Kutta integrator and then I had complicated do-loops in fortran with the coupling constants input into the program, and a search for these Yukawa couplings.

I remember that the program would keep exiting and then entering the loop again and again, and one day, late in the evening, it found a solution. It pinned down the tan(beta) to a ratio of the masses of the top- and b-quarks at the low-scale, and then the program also evolved the couplings to the unification scale (of the coupling constants) and lo and behold the Yukawa couplings also got unified! The mass of the tau-lepton was an input, and the b-quark mass was taken within its experimental range, and out popped a value for the top-quark mass which was much larger than the experimental limit.

I soon afterwards showed these results to my advisor. I remember that he was planning to set off to a conference in Boston. Anyway, it was also a tough period because I had accumulated over 50 regrets and the thought of being unemployed loomed large on the horizon. When my advisor returned from Boston towards the end of March (I just googled and found that the conference was held at North-Eastern University and proceedings were published by World Scientific edited by Pran Nath and Stephen Reucroft), he told me that he showed these plots to Richard Arnowitt. Arnowitt told him he had not seen anything like this before and that we should write it up.

We did, along with George Lazarides write it up and it was all of 3 pages long and we submitted to Physical Review as a `Brief Report'. This section is now extinct. I saw that the received date on the paper is April 22, 1991. And the rest is history.

Over 300 citations later it stands as an important piece of evidence in support of supersymmetric unification.