From the time of the ancient Indian 'gurukul' to the present day academia, the 'guru-shishya' (teacher-student) relation is inherently asymmetric. The teacher teaches, the student learns. The teacher assesses, the teacher judges and the student stays forever at the receiving end of such evaluations. And then, once in an interesting while comes a student's chance of chairing the judge's seat.
Arnab Rai Choudhuri, Arnab-da ('elder brother Arnab') to most of his Bengali speaking colleagues and students, is one of my dear old professors. In the physics department of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc, Bangalore) he is known as one of the best teachers around and for people like me he belongs to that remarkable group of foreign returnees who helped shape the Indian scientific scene the way we see it today. But for these people, many in our generation would not have had the luxury of finding world class researchers as PhD supervisors without leaving the Indian shores.
I have had the privilege of taking a course offered by him in my first year of graduate studies and later working with him as a scientific collaborator. I have to say that the pleasure and the privilege has been entirely mine. Inevitably, over the years we forged a friendship that is characteristically typical of academia. It's a valued friendship between a teacher and a former student, between two research associates bridging the generation gap which allows, even obliges one to be impartial while judging the work of the other and yet remain close to each other.
During my job hunting days, a couple of decades ago, Arnab-da had the unenviable task of writing scores of recommendation letters - an almost mandatory duty for being a teacher/senior collaborator. And suddenly, a few months ago, I find myself with the task of writing a review for one of his books for a science magazine. The onus is now definitely on me to be as fair and as impartial!
I have to admit upfront that I am totally impressed by the frankness shown by Arnab-da in exposing the reality of front-line research in this book. Instead of the standard de-humanised style of the popular science genre, this book has truly become Arnab-da's 'scientific autobiography'. He has lived through interesting times and the book takes us along this roller-coaster ride of frustration and joy that is the hallmark of every scientists' working life.
Of course, there have been difference of opinions about this particular style of writing even amongst his closest friends. We all know that there exists a gulf between the style and sense of presenting a narrative (from serious technical reports to spy-thrillers) between the two shores of the Atlantic. Most of us, given our personal trajectories, tend to subscribe to one style or the other. I suppose the debate arises mainly from this perception. But, after all is said and done, people belonging to the scientific community would immediately realise that the book has managed to capture the true essence of the scientific environment around him.
In defense of his style, Arnab-da himself says - "I have found that most scientists are reticent in making their life stories public - perhaps due to the general perception that an average scientist's life is rather drab and colourless compared to an average artist's life. Through my story, I have tried to give an idea of how science is actually done in our field. I have tried to write about a scientist's hopes and fears, friendships, competitors, jealousies, and the utter joy of occasionally discovering a clue to understanding some deep mysteries of nature." In my humble opinion his attempt is an unqualified success.
This review has appeared in
Resonance - Journal of Science Education. Given the academy (Indian Academy of Sciences, publisher of Resonance) website's not too commendable connection speed, I include it below.
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Going through "Nature's Third Cycle - A Story of Sunspots" by Arnab Rai Choudhuri is akin to having a ringside view of the gradual unveiling of one of the abiding mysteries associated with our friendly neighbourhood star, the Sun.
In the emergent era of gigantic telescopes, expected to straddle continents and sometimes place another foot far beyond mother Earth, Big-data (with a definitive capital
B) is inevitably giving rise to humongous collaborative groups in Astronomy & Astrophysics, the sizes of which can sometimes even shame an army division. The old world scientists, working with a handful of associates and students, building numerical codes from scratch on their puny desktop computers are but a vanishing breed. Arnab Rai Choudhuri, of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc, Bangalore), is one of those last Mohicans, belonging to a small minority of theoretical astrophysicists (since, astrophysics by its very nature is an applied branch of physics). He has even displayed the audacity of devoting his entire scientific career to stellar physics, wondering about the mysteries of our friendly neighbourhood Sun, an area which happens to be at the bottom of the pecking order as far as the current Astrophysics snobbery goes.
Sun,
the ultimate arbiter of human civilisation's fate, has fascinated
mankind from the beginning of history. And yet the attraction of Sun
in popular psyche has waned over the years to be replaced by newer
frontiers of science like cosmology. The author correctly notes that -
'the unwritten assumption (about solar physics) is that the underlying
science is a kind of dry boring science best left to the experts,
unlike the science behind cosmology or particle physics that can
excite general readers.' So the author wishes to go against this bias
by trying his hand at a popular account of the physics and the
sociological effects of the solar cycle after writing two completely
pedagogic textbooks very well received by practicing astrophysicists
and graduate level students (The physics of fluids and plasma, 1998,
CUP; Astrophysics for Physicists, 2010, CUP).
Our lives literally revolve around Sun, a rather ordinary main sequence star, through the diurnal and the annual cycles. Both of these cycles are imposed upon us by the motion of the Earth - the spin around its own axis, and the rotation in an elliptic path around the Sun. The other natural cycle is provided by the Sun itself, in the form of the eleven year sunspot cycle which is at the heart of all the unusual solar activities. It is this third cycle that Rai Choudhuri talks about in his 'Nature's Third Cycle : A story of sunspots' (2015, OUP). He accepts the challenge of explaining this behaviour to people not involved in solar science research and intertwines this account with the tale of his own career.
Interestingly,
we have witnessed a recent revival of an interest in the Sun
primarily because of two reasons. The more dramatic of these is the
arrival of space weather upon us. Solar flares launching bolts of hot,
electrified gas stir up magnetic storms around the Earth. Earlier
the effects of such space storms were hardly noticed. But in today's
electrically powered, space-based technology dependent society the
impact of the space storm induced by such solar activities is quite
significant. The other story is related to long term climate
changes. Accumulation of large timescale data on climate change and
its correlation with solar cycles has finally brought the connection
clear. As a result, popular accounts of the solar activity affecting
climate change, its history and its effect on space weather have
recently made their appearance on bookshelves (for example, Hoyt
& Schatten 1997; Carlowicz & Lopez 2002; Brody 2002 etc.).
In contrast, `Nature's Third Cycle' in unique in its subject matter as it explains the physics behind the solar cycle itself. And it certainly is not a popular science book intended for lay readers. The author expects the readers to, at least, have worked through Resnick & Halliday (1966) (the absolute last word in high school physics) and in some places the expectation is even higher. The real intended readership is the aspiring physicists at undergraduate level upwards, the physics teachers and, of course, the practising physicists.
Sunspots are dark areas of irregular shape on the Sun's surface, some as large as 50,000 miles (80,000 km) in diameter,i.e., they can even be seen by naked eye. Their incidence varies cyclically and has an average period of eleven years. They move across the surface, contracting and expanding as they go and actually correspond to regions of higher magnetic field that inhibit convection and result in reduced surface temperature compared to the surrounding photo-sphere. This is the reason they appear as dark spots compared to surrounding regions. Because it is rather difficult to observe the Sun directly, records of sunspots are almost non-existent before the seventeenth century but have only been observed through telescopes since the time of Galileo. 'Nature's Third Cycle' traces the history of sunspot science from the first discoveries through the numerous stages of the puzzle to the latest results on the magnetic cycle of activity.
Magnetohydrodynamics (MHD), governing the behaviour of plasma under magnetic field, is a difficult subject. The author manages to bring the basics of MHD and dynamo theory, underlying the physics of sunspots, to a level accessible to a large non-technical readership. In the academic community Rai Choudhuri is known as a wonderful teacher and a brilliant scientist. He uses his expertise as a teacher to take the readers effortlessly through the complexities of solar physics. One of the interesting plus points of this book is the section entitled "Notes" in the end. Apart from a list of popular and technical books as suggestion for further reading, the author provides a compilation of chapter-wise appropriate research articles and his own clarifications on various issues. This would be invaluable for experts and aspiring students alike.
As far as the style goes, it is an unusual offering from a practicing scientist though not entirely unexpected. Arnab Rai Choudhuri is known for his brutally honest opinion about everyone and everything; sometimes even to the discomfiture of the listeners themselves. It is no wonder then that he bares his soul in this book and gives the reader a glimpse of the real world of research, contrary to the sanitary and impersonal fares that we have typically come to expect. I myself have seen part of the story, narrated in this book, unfold in front of my own eyes while I was a graduate student in the physics department of IISc. And we all know that such stories inevitably abound the corridors of every department of every research institution. On the one hand, there exist an unwritten code to keep scientific writing objective and impersonal. On the other hand, the practice of science is a very human enterprise, and personal clashes and disagreements are very much a part of this process.
To be sure, the maximal impact of the book comes from this particular aspect as it makes the book a compulsive reading. While this may inevitably attract controversy, in my view this also would be of immeasurable value to those young readers who are aspiring to take up research as their future career. Quite aptly, Nigel Weiss terms this book as the 'scientific autobiography' of Rai Choudhuri, written at a time when the author was undergoing treatment for a life-threatening illness.
Also, Rai Choudhuri's personal commentary on the struggling phase of Indian academia is quite valuable. After completing his graduate studies in Chicago he made the decision to return to India. At that time research facilities in India were limited and funding was minimal. Yet, like many of his peers, he and his students persevered and developed a theoretical model of Sun's magnetic cycle which has been quite successful in predicting the nature of the upcoming solar cycle. Over the years Indian research infrastructure has improved significantly. But it needs to be remembered that the bunch of foreign returnees like Rai Choudhuri have made an invaluable contribution in shaping the Indian scientific scene the way we see it today. This historical element, touching upon the early phase of Indian scientific research, is another invaluable aspect of this book.
There
exist some other minor points which many people may not agree with.
For his doctoral thesis Rai Choudhuri worked with Eugene Parker,
regarded as the most influential solar physicists of our time. He is
one of the originators of the flux transport dynamo model, the
currently favoured theoretical model of the 11-year sunspot cycle. My
personal feeling is that a somewhat more impersonal depiction of this
giant would have been more appropriate. Since there does exist the
possibility of a reader automatically assuming a not-quite-objective
view of the author precisely because of his close association with
Parker.
I also have some reservations about the author's faith in citation index. It is, at best, a rather faulty indicator. We are forced to use it for want of something better. But readers outside the research community may not be aware of the pinch (or the sackful, that is needed in some cases) of salt that should go with it. Moreover, for the general reader the author order may not make much sense. In fact in many branches of physics the author order is strictly alphabetical. The Physical Review Letters (PRL) may not be a very good indicator either to illustrate the import of a research article. Because while PRL is arguably the last word for areas like condensed matter physics it certainly does not enjoy the same status in the Astronomy & Astrophysics community.
One
of my minor complaints about this book is the absence of a
photograph of the physics department of IISc. Since the author has
included a picture of his PhD institution, it would have been
appropriate to also include a picture of his workplace from where
significant contribution of India to solar physics has emerged.
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| Physics Department (old building), IISc, Bangalore |
In summary, this delightful, most unusual book on
the solar magnetic cycle, explains the complex science behind sunspots in a wonderful manner and goes far beyond being a simple
popular science book. It provides more than a glimpse behind the
professional curtains of leading scientific research, and would
probably end up greatly influencing many a young minds preparing to
be the practitioners of science in not-too-distant a future.
This
review has been prepared with valuable inputs from Biman Nath and Niruj
Mohan Ramanujan. The reviewer would like to thank both of them.
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