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SDM once showed me his article on Molecular Spectroscopy. I remember to have browsed through it. I saw a Table in it comparing the experimental values of some spectroscopic lines with his calculated values. That was perhaps one of the few papers in which his work had numerical calculations and comparison with experimental results. It was a remarkable work, reducing the solution of the complicated multi-dimensional Schrodinger equation to a one-dimensional Hill’s equation. He narrated to me how Coulson made him jump into his car and gave him a few minutes’ audience, during which Coulson suggested that he be careful about the BKW approximation he was using in the solution of the Hill’s equation. That work was the starting point of his entry into Group Theory.
He then drifted more and more towards pure theory. Even his Cherenkov work was heading for the unverifiable.
With my experimental physics background, I was trying to steer him towards predicting some of the experimental results and photos of Cherenkov rings obtained by Zrelov; but he was hesitant, a streak I could understand, but not appreciate. I wrote to Zrelov in Moscow to send me some photos of his Cherenkov rings in a uniaxial calcite crystal for inclusion in my thesis, with the promise that I would send him a copy of my thesis (costly those days, when no Xerox was available, and an extra copy had to be typed on the mechanical typewriter tap...tap...tap). Zrelov was pleased and sent me five sets of Black and White photos for my five copies of thesis and two big colored photos with rings along and perpendicular to the optic axis. I bought a stainless steel double-photo frame that made quite a hole in my pocket, inserted Zrelov's colored rings in it and gifted it to him. The ring diameter depends on the refractive index and hence dispersion in the optical region; therefore the rings are multicolored, like a rainbow, but elliptical, with a predictable angular distribution of intensity. He kept that photo frame on his refrigerator and used to show it off to one and all. So child-like innocent was he that he carried it wherever he went after retirement. And I was told by DB that the frame with the faded rings was still on his book shelf at Salt Lake just before he died.
In his later years, he himself wouldn’t touch anything to do with experimental results, a weakness which was to cost him dear in getting due recognition. And it was only after he left KGP that his students could extend his work into what IS experimentally verifiable in biaxial crystals (much more complicated but fascinating).
Most of his failings stem from his FIERCE independence (a trait I could guess he owes to India's Freedom Struggle through which that generation passed). .I watched SDM wince when he had to borrow any formula from anyone unless he happened to genuinely admire him. This meant that, while others were building Physics (as Fermi once said) one’s brick over his predecessor’s, SDM was plowing a lonely furrow.
Unfortunately, it works in Arts, but not Sciences. Sad!
SDM & Molecular Spectroscopy
He then drifted more and more towards pure theory. Even his Cherenkov work was heading for the unverifiable.
With my experimental physics background, I was trying to steer him towards predicting some of the experimental results and photos of Cherenkov rings obtained by Zrelov; but he was hesitant, a streak I could understand, but not appreciate. I wrote to Zrelov in Moscow to send me some photos of his Cherenkov rings in a uniaxial calcite crystal for inclusion in my thesis, with the promise that I would send him a copy of my thesis (costly those days, when no Xerox was available, and an extra copy had to be typed on the mechanical typewriter tap...tap...tap). Zrelov was pleased and sent me five sets of Black and White photos for my five copies of thesis and two big colored photos with rings along and perpendicular to the optic axis. I bought a stainless steel double-photo frame that made quite a hole in my pocket, inserted Zrelov's colored rings in it and gifted it to him. The ring diameter depends on the refractive index and hence dispersion in the optical region; therefore the rings are multicolored, like a rainbow, but elliptical, with a predictable angular distribution of intensity. He kept that photo frame on his refrigerator and used to show it off to one and all. So child-like innocent was he that he carried it wherever he went after retirement. And I was told by DB that the frame with the faded rings was still on his book shelf at Salt Lake just before he died.
In his later years, he himself wouldn’t touch anything to do with experimental results, a weakness which was to cost him dear in getting due recognition. And it was only after he left KGP that his students could extend his work into what IS experimentally verifiable in biaxial crystals (much more complicated but fascinating).
Most of his failings stem from his FIERCE independence (a trait I could guess he owes to India's Freedom Struggle through which that generation passed). .I watched SDM wince when he had to borrow any formula from anyone unless he happened to genuinely admire him. This meant that, while others were building Physics (as Fermi once said) one’s brick over his predecessor’s, SDM was plowing a lonely furrow.
Unfortunately, it works in Arts, but not Sciences. Sad!
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