When I arrived at TIFR (Tata Institute of Fundamental Research), a seminar given by a Nobel prize winner was just finishing. It’s that kind of place, a spacious 1950’s building reminiscent of the RFH in London, with gardens running down to the sea and corridors full of crates with tempting labels such as “Danger – Femtolaser”. I was greeted by C.S Unnikrishnan, a large South Indian with the smooth solidity of a rock, and introduced to his chum from college days, Sukant Saran, who now works as the TIFR publications officer. In that capacity, Sukant has produced over the years a very attractive series of posters for conferences on various topics, and recently decided to exhibit the images used in the posters as Scientific Art, a concept he was keen to explain. Whilst I sympathise with, or share, his aim of exploring scientific questions through art, I see no point in a proliferation of categories, since context is basically everything. Either by intent or co-option, art has to be part of contemporary discourse. Perhaps, as Sukant argued, everyone is an artist, but then I think most of them don’t know when. It’s about a capacity for self-criticism, really.
TIFR have quite a fine collection of 20th century Indian art, donated by the founder Homi Bajba, though it doesn’t seem that anything is being added to it. They do, however, have regular concerts in their auditorium, and on Friday I was able to hear the renowned flute player, Shri Rupak Kulkarni. Unnikrishnan (or Unni, as I think I have permission to call him) was at the concert too, and it turned out that he had studied flute with Shri Rupak’s father. Back in his office, he showed me his collection of flutes, which are made from bamboo. He was experimenting with adding an extra hole to allow a smoother bridging between the two octaves that can be played. It was a nice illustration of the mixture of theoretical and practical curiosity that drives his research, a combination that is surprisingly rare in science. Other people that I met at TIFR were either focused on the technology, or pure maths theorists such as Sunil Mukhi, who freely admitted that his interests in string theory had no immediate correlation or relevance to the observable world.
It’s not that Unni’s lab was short of technology. Two PhD students were manipulating an assembly nearly the size of a small car, at the heart of which was a Bose Einstein Condensate (or BC in lab slang), an exotic state of matter in which supercooled atoms collapse into a dense clump. This is trapped in the intersection between two laser beams, and experiments can then be performed on it, such as bouncing the BC off its own reflection. Since the jitteriness due to thermal energy and quantum effects is largely absent, other aspects of these interactions can be more clearly observed. What I particularly liked was that the output of the experiment was visual, a shadow pattern created by flashing another laser beam through the BC.
