Pakistaniat.com
for an interesting article on Abdus Salam and very interesting comments and links in the comments ( see the links in saima nasir's comments to articles by Parvez Hoodbhoy).
Excerpt:
Pakistan’s space research agency Suparco was created by him and it is only symbolic that a group of Shia workers of Suparco were put to death in Karachi in 2004 by sectarian terrorists. Like Dr Salam, a lot of gifted Shia doctors have had to leave Pakistan because of the state’s twisted policies.
Dr Abdus Salam got his Nobel Prize for Physics in 1979. It was a most embarrassing moment for General Zia who had ‘supplemented’ the Second Amendment to the constitution with further comic disabilities against the Ahmedis. He had to welcome the great scientist and had to be seen with him on TV. Since the clerical part of his government was already bristling, he took care to clip those sections of Dr Salam’s speech where he had said the kalima or otherwise used an Islamic expression. It was Dr Salam’s good luck that one of the believers did not go to court under Zia’s own laws to get the country’s only Nobel laureate sent to prison for six months of rigorous imprisonment. Dr Salam then went to India where he was received with great fanfare. He had gone there to simply meet his primary school mathematics teacher who was still alive. When the two met, Dr Salam took off his Nobel medal and put it around the neck of his teacher.
One wonders why in spite of many new research institutes in India, where some of the elite ones have facilities comparable with the best in the west and with light teaching and relative job security, India has not been able to produce scientists of the calibre of C.V.Raman, S.N.Bose, Meghnath Saha, R.C. Bose, C.R. Rao (just to mention a few trained in India). In Pakistan,this article indicates the problems. It may be much more difficult to analyze the Indian situation; after all Vedic mathematics has not been a great success.
2 comments:
Possibly because the days of individual glory are gone. The great achievements of today are based on team work, I suppose. The individual heroes of the kind of Feynman are gone even in the West. But for an occasional Witten, it seems that no one titan dominates the scene. Of course, my points of view are dominated by the physics scene, but it must be similar in other fields.
My suspicion is that institutuinalization of research has some thing to do with it. Though they gave openings which have not been there before, I guess that by their very nature institutions cannot rise above their surroundings for long periods. This was what I used to think. I am not sure any longer. Some believe that both the daysof big ideology and big science are over and it will be only small incremental improvements from now on (e.g. Hogan in Discovery magazine).
Post a Comment