Insights into Editorial: A day to embody the true spirit of science

Context:

The Government is organising a Science Week, ‘Vigyan Sarvatra Pujyate’, as a prelude to National Science Day on February 28 that commemorates Sir C.V. Raman’s discovery on light scattering.

The programme appears to have been designed to make youth be proud about India’s scientific achievements.

Using this opportunity as nationalistic mission is rather unfortunate. On the contrary, this event should be used to celebrate the true spirit of science that defies all types of intellectual curtailments, thus promoting critical thinking in our academic centres.

Vigyan Sarvatra Pujyate’ festival showcasing India’s science successes since 1947:

With exhibitions spread across 75 locations throughout the country, Vigyan Sarvatra Pujyate (literally, ‘science is worshipped everywhere’) aims to showcase and pay homage to India’s achievements in 75 years of Independence.

The festival aims to highlight the work being done by research and development organisations from across the country, and their ideas for the road ahead to 2047, the 100th anniversary of Independence.

Pre-Independence India saw the successes of great individual scientists who contributed in a world where scientific institutions were sparse.

There were great scientists like Meghnad Saha, Janki Amal, Ramanujan, C.V. Raman who made extraordinary contributions. Post-Independence, major institutions like the CSIR, DAE, DST and DRDO were developed.

These institutions transformed research and development in India by interacting with the universities system in a manner that the best students came to these institutions and extraordinary work was done in fundamental research as well as in applications.

The university system became a feeder to research institutions, while less and less research was being done at the university level. This is not the way things have happened in rest of the world, he pointed out.

The new National Education Policy aims to correct this by bringing research and teaching together.

It aims to ensure that quality research takes place at the university level as well.

The sense of the programme is that there has been a tremendous scientific achievement in the recent past.

How best to combine the Indian tradition with the Indian scientific advancement, that is the crux of the programme.

Thematic exhibitions:

Programmes are being organised simultaneously at 75 locations all over the country, including a mega expo and book fair at the grounds of Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium in New Delhi.

Four themes have been identified for the week-long celebration.

The first is ‘Annals of Science’, which will trace how an individual’s contributions helped India establish a modern science and technology system.

This includes institutions of national importance that were established in India in the past seven years, and how they have contributed to nation-building.

The second theme is ‘Milestones of Modern S&T’, which will explore key discoveries, innovations or inventions that made a mark in the global science or India s development story.

The third theme is ‘Swadeshi Paramparik Inventions & Innovations’, which will highlight inventions or technologies that helped India’s goal of self-reliance, including modern innovations that draw upon the reservoir of the traditional knowledge system.

The fourth theme is ‘Transforming India’, which will cover grand science and technology missions, such as Gaganyaan and Samudrayan.

The essence of scientific knowledge:

1. A prominent physicist of our times, Freeman Dyson in his book, The Scientist as Rebel, makes a clear argument about why dissent is the soul of science: “There is no such thing as a unique scientific vision, any more than there is a unique poetic vision.
2. Science is a mosaic of partial and conflicting visions. But there is one common element in these visions.
3. The common element is rebellion against the restrictions imposed by the locally prevailing culture, Western or Eastern as the case may be.
4. The vision of science is not specifically Western. It is no more Western than it is Arab or Indian or Japanese or Chinese.
5. Arabs and Indians and Japanese and Chinese had a big share in the development of modern science.
6. And what is true of science is also true of poetry. Poetry was not invented by Westerners. India has poetry older than Homer. Poetry and science are gifts given to all of humanity.
7. For the Arab mathematician and astronomer Omar Khayyam, science was a rebellion against the intellectual constraints of Islam, a rebellion which he expressed more directly in his incomparable verses.
8. The main takeaways from Dyson are: one, science is universal, like music, dance or poetry… There is nothing like Indian, American or Chinese science.
9. Science was initially nurtured through exchanges of ideas that moved like merchandise between distant places over the ancient trade routes.
10. Two, Dyson considered evidence-based modern science as an intellectual rebellion or as a form of dissent against social constraints, as exemplified by the Islamic and the European renaissance of science of the Middle Ages, or the reawakening in India around the 19th century that formed the background for the independence struggle.

Then and now:

1. For Indian scientists of those days, science was a double rebellion, against English domination as well as the fatalistic ethos of Hinduism.
2. This rebellious spirit led to a resurgence of science in India in the pre-Independence days and Sir C.V. Raman’s discovery cannot be seen independent of the social reformism of those days.
3. With the ideological shift toward the right in recent times, the spectre of conformism that was lying low in our collective consciousness has now returned with a vengeance.
4. And, academic freedom is now under greater pressure to tow the official line than ever before.
5. If science must excel it needs to promote free spirit, and, as Dyson argues, science is an inherently subversive act, a threat to establishment of all kinds, whether it upends a long-standing scientific idea, or it questions the received political wisdom or irrationality.
6. Science is an alliance of free spirits in all cultures rebelling against the local tyranny that each culture imposes on its children.
7. Such ideas must have played in the minds of great physicists like Einstein and others when they turned the scientific theories of the day upside down.
8. The ecology of dominant conformist traits is intertwined with group identity that determines the attitude towards our superiors and subordinates.
9. As per Fundamental Duties, Article 51A in the 42nd Amendment of the Constitution in 1976 says “It shall be the duty of every citizen of India to develop the scientific temper, humanism, and the spirit of inquiry and reform.
10. The tradition-bound countries such as India need to free themselves from the cultural chains of the past to foster original thinking.

Conclusion:

The cultural shifts are not easy to accomplish, particularly in a tradition bound society.

And, scientists have a special duty to foster a free and unfettered intellectual ambience by actively engaging in the transformation of values both within and outside workplaces.

A fundamental challenge, of course, is how to strengthen the social democratic norms within the institutes, representative of Indian diversity and plurality. Only then will academic centres become a marketplace of ideas.

National Science Day should offer forums where freewheeling discussion of such themes are organised, epitomising the true spirit of science, thus unleashing its tremendous transformative power.