Karnataka - Bangalore

India can aspire for more Nobel prizes, says Sheldon Glashow

Sheldon Lee Glashow

BANGALORE: Being a Nobel Laureate is like “having a chauffeur for a week” says Sheldon Lee Glashow with a laugh. “My wife went around feeling like a queen in my arms and I felt wonderful, but it also comes with a whole lot of responsibility,” he adds on a serious note.

Prof. Sheldon, who was part of the 200-member team of Nobel Laureates who petitioned to free the nurses who were awarded death sentences in Libya. He quotes that as an instance of when he felt proud of being a Laureate.

Dr. Glashow shared the 1979 Nobel prize in Physics for his seminal contributions to the unified theory of weak and electromagnetic interactions.

Speaking to The Hindu while on his way to Belgaum to interact with students of Visvesvaraya Technological University as part of the Honeywell Nobel Initiative, he says that he hopes to inspire students to take up research. “It is important to get them interested. Ramanujan went ahead and did it himself, but now one needs to create an atmosphere where students find research a viable career,” he says.

He says that the Chinese have not only made it possible for their students to return and pursue academics, but have also attracted talent from other parts of the world. He doesn’t see why India cannot aspire to being awarded more Nobel prizes.

“With the current situation in India, it doesn’t look like it can be done…but the State and research organisations need to walk that extra mile,” he adds.

Dr. Glashow has taught at Harvard and is currently teaching at Boston University. He says he enjoys teaching, especially non-science students. “When they tell me that I changed the way they think, that is my reward,’ he says.

He takes a notepad and writes down a calculus problem. “When most students see this they start finding the answer but they never try to think how the function looks graphically,” he says. This, he says is the problem with education, and the reason why it ceases to inspire.

He says that the situation in the United States is similar to that in India, where young people want to make instant money and run after MBAs and engineering courses. “They do not realise that even to be an engineer who can innovate and make a difference, you need to have a strong grounding in basic sciences. Maybe youngsters everywhere lack inspiration.”

Talking about the dwindling number of students studying basic sciences, Dr. Sheldon says that it may be attributed to the fact that people do not trust science anymore.

“In the 1950s the average person saw science as something that solved problems. With the advent of nuclear weapons and pollution, the idealistic aura around scientific research has been replaced by cynicism,” he says.

There are so many issues that need to be addressed through unified research, Dr. Sheldon says. “Individual scientists cannot do much on their own. Heads of nations, corporates and economic giants should recognise the criticality of it. There is lack of research in this field and there is lack of initiative. I do not know if we have already reached that tipping point,” he adds.

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