 And a very, very warm welcome to the 2023 edition of the VG Kulkarni Memorial Lecture. This is the 22nd edition of our flagship series of annual lectures that we have in the memory of our visionary founder VG Kulkarni. And we've had a range of excellent talks from eminent speakers that have dealt with various aspects that are important issues in science, technology, education, society, etc. And it's an honor to welcome you all to this event. And always, it's a very special occasion, but this year it's a very special occasion in more ways than one. After three years, we are back in person. And those of you who are coming here after a while will probably recognize that this is a shiny new VGK Memorial Auditorium. So in the middle, we've managed to get this place refurbished. And I'm delighted that after this major overhaul, we can use this venue for many of the lectures we hold, including this particular event. Now we went online because of the COVID pandemic. And while the SARS-CoV-2 virus has gone, I am also reminded that there are other coronaviruses, including the influenza coronavirus, which has given me this thing, which I sound like a frog perhaps, but sorry about that. But anyway, I had said in more ways than one. So the second reason why it's really special today is that we are actually doing the VGK Memorial Talk on 4th of September, which happens to be VGK's birthday. So happy birthday VGK. I won't try to sing with this. So happy birthday. And my only wish is that Mrs. Vijaya Kulkarni, who was a very, very strong supporter of the lecture series. Unfortunately, not here with us, but I'm glad to see that the family has come, as always, and welcome, Anitha Ji. I don't see Kishorez yet here. Hopefully he'll join us in a bit. But it's a pleasure to welcome you here. And thanks for all your support over these years. So heard, so that was the second. Third is, this is the start of what promises to be another fantastic year as HBCSE enters its Golden Jubilee year. Yes, the seed planted by VGK is 50 years young. And we begin our celebrations with today's VGK Memorial Lecture. And we're going to have a series of wonderful events that will be happening over the year ahead. And it will culminate with the 10th edition of the Black Ship Conference Series Epistemi in 2024. So there's going to be a lot of delicious stuff happening in the next year ahead. Please be part of it. So we are on with HBCSE at 50. And for kicking this off, there is no better person we can think of than our very own beloved and respected Professor Arvind Kumar. AK, thank you so much for accepting to do this. Thank you very much. So I know you want to listen to AK, not to me. But before that, let me let me request two of the youngest members of the HBCSE family. Where are you guys? You guys are sitting there. Yes, Vishrut and Mishra, our students who have just joined us. Not even a month old, I guess. We would like you to welcome, where are the bouquets? There should be bouquets somewhere. I hope this was planned out. Okay. People who are joining. The scholars are still waiting. Very nice. So we would like to recognize Professor Arvind Kumar. Okay. So, yeah, before we get AK on stage, I'd also like to alert you to the next thing that's happening, which is going to be a symposium on physics education to be hosted right here in November. And you know, it's time just right that we can also celebrate the young at 80 AK. So that's the next thing coming up. And as we are now eagerly waiting to listen to Professor Arvind Kumar, let me hand it over to Savita, who will formally introduce the speaker. And I have a few thoughts, Mike. Thank you, Adna. It's my pleasure to introduce Professor Arvind Kumar, who actually don't require any introduction, but just for the benefit of audience. And Arvind Kumar, I have taken a liberty not to listen to you. He told me to keep the introduction short, but it is important that people here, the young who have joined HBCSE recently, should know about HBCSE and what happened in the history of HBCSE. So I'm going to say something in that context. So Professor Arvind Kumar did his PhD in physics at Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in area of particle physics. After his post-doc research at European Organization for Nuclear Research CERN, Geneva, and Westfield College University of London, he taught at the University Department of Physics, Mumbai, for more than a decade. He then joined Humiwa Center for Science Education and was the center director of HBCSE from 1994 till his retirement in 2008. He played a central role in launching the Science Olympiad program in India, which started in 1998. And just to let people know, as we have the Golden Jubilee year for HBCSE, it is also coinciding with the Silver Jubilee year of the Olympiad program. In fact, Physics Olympiad did complete the 25 years in this academic year. And next year, chemistry will be completed, and next to next year, the biology Olympiad will complete 25 years. So under his tenure as a center director, HBCSE became the nodal center of the country for the academic Olympiad program in basic sciences, including astronomy. Under his leadership, India organized and successfully hosted International Olympiads in Chemistry, which was in year 2001, Astronomy, which was in year 2006, and in Biology, which was in year 2008. He also has started and initiated another key impact program of HBCSE, which is known as National Initiative on Undergraduate Science, an IUS program of HBCSE. He helped establish a unique doctoral program in science education at HBCSE as part of the graduate studies at TFR, a Dean University. In 2001, he initiated organization of periodic international conferences, which is known as Epistemi, to be hosted by HBCSE to encourage the growth of science education in the country and enhance professional contact with scholars in the field abroad. Additionally, as part of the Center's science dissemination efforts, he guided and co-scripted a comprehensive exhibition on history of science, Science and Human Saga, in the 1990s. Now, this exhibition was on display, but now it has been converted into its digital form. His primary research interests have been theoretical physics and physics education. He has several research publications in reputed international and national journals in both these diverse fields. He has also authored and co-authored several curricular, co-curricular and expository books and material at different educational levels. A notable effort was his designing of a large number of instructive problems in the national physics textbooks at senior secondary level, brought out by NCRT in 1990s, which have retained in the successive editions of this book. He is a very passionate teacher, and his teaching has been centered around courses in theoretical physics. But his general education work is wide-ranging, spanning from university, college, and high school, which includes secondary and high secondary stages of education, of science education. In his four decades of teaching physics at graduate and undergraduate level, which includes 15 years of teaching at a weekly study circle for physics undergraduate, he has taught nearly every core course in physics theory and a number of specialized course like quantum field theory, general relativity, nuclear, and particle physics several times. At HBCC's graduate school in science education, he extended his intellectual interests and taught courses on philosophy of science and learning theories over a few years. During his tenure at HBCC, he chaired or was a member of several APEX committee in the country in areas of education and science communication. He was a member of national studying committee for National Curriculum Framework 2005, where he chaired the focus group on teaching science set up as a part of the CIFER. Earlier, he has also participated in designing of UGC curriculum for BSC. He is fellow of National Academy of Sciences in India, and he is a recipient of several prestigious award. To name a few, he is a recipient of Indian National Science Academy's INSA teacher award in 2014 for college and university education. The third world Academy of Sciences swaths a regional prize for work in school level that is in 2009, and Indian Nuclear Society Science Communication Award in 2003. He has also received prestigious Godavari Gaurav Puraskar from Kusumagaraj Pratishthan in 2006. In 2010, he was awarded Padma Shree by the Honorable President of India for distinguished service in the field of education. It gives me great pleasure to invite Dr. Sarvin Kumar to deliver his talk. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Savita and Arnath, for your introduction. I am really honored by this invitation to give the VGK VG Kulkarni Memorial Lecture 2023. So before I begin, I would like to pay my respectful tributes to Professor VG Kulkarni, the founder of Homegawa Center, and all that, I mean, he worked, he founded the center and worked tirelessly for more than two decades for its growth and much of what you see in the center is basically a result of that effort. So my respectful tributes to him again. I am very glad that the members of Professor VG Kulkarni's family continue to attend this session. So I extend my greetings to them. I would also like to extend my greetings on this golden, the beginning of this golden jubilee celebration, I extend greetings at best wishes and I hope that VCCC continues to go along its upward path in the future. Now I am actually very excited to give this, the topic of this lecture and the reason is one of the reasons is that it has been a very exciting fortnight for our country in the applications of modern science. We saw the great accomplishments of our space scientists and technologies only a few fortnight ago on the successful landing of Chandrayan 3 on the moon. And two days ago we sent again very successfully a probe to study the sun and it is not just these two projects, I mean they are going to be very exciting mega science projects in India. One of which as you might know is the LIGO project which is going to be I think situated in Maharashtra somewhere, Hingoli I think, Hingoli Maharashtra which is a mega basic science project, a part of international effort to detect gravitational waves. So it is an exciting time in our country as far as modern science and its applications are concerned. And therefore with all these accomplishments this topic I think is a very apt topic because what is it about modern science, what is it about this knowledge system of modern science that results in such fantastic accomplishments. What are the features of this knowledge system which help us arrive at such great achievements of human civilization. So I think it is very important that all of us and especially the young students get to know about the features, the distinctive features of modern science. So that is that is what I thought would be a nice topic and you have all seen the abstract I will not repeat it, let me begin with the introduction. Modern science is a massive global enterprise, science and technology now permeate every aspect of our life, large number of slides so I am going to read them out quickly. So what is the nature of modern science that means what are its methods of inquiry, what kinds of explanation does it accept or not accept and what norms and values under light's practice. Now there are diverse views on these matters, if you have some familiarity with the discipline of philosophy of science you would know there are large number of opinions on this matter, it is a deep subject but I am not going to go into it, I am going to build a very simple narrative that would not be philosophically rigorous at all but I believe it should be still educationally useful. We will describe the nature of modern science as viewed by some of its best practitioners, the great scientist who contributed significantly to its advance. I am going to quote number of them so with this lecture double quotes would indicate very reliable sources you know authoritative books and so on, there are a few two or three quotes which have been taken from the internet so I cannot be 100 percent sure, let us start with the end. The beginnings of modern science, modern science emerge I mean this emergence is attributed to the exposition of the heliocentric model by Copernicus in the 16th century. Now I must tell you that there are many other, this lecture is not on history so I am going to take a standard textbook narrative, historical narrative because my purpose here is to use that narrative as a vehicle to tell you the features of modern science. My purpose is not to talk about history and its various narratives that are coming up nowadays both by philosophers and historians, science, sociologists, science, etc. So that is not my purpose so this is a standard narrative and begin with Copernicus. Therefore in the heliocentric arrangement we find that the world has a wonderful commensurability and that there is a sure linking together in harmony of the movement and magnitude of the orbital circles such as cannot be found in the world. It is a flowery language it actually just means that his model allows him to calculate ratios of distances of planets from the sun. Commensurability means something you can measure, calculate the order of distances and the order of periods for the same. The farther the planet the higher is the period. So Copernicus completed his book the year of his death in 1543 and of course it met stiff opposition by the authorities of the time since it went against their beliefs. We move on to Galileo. A policy move, this is a and yet it moves, it's a very famous quote attributed to Galileo I'm sure you must have read it somewhere in some books. There is no written record obviously because Galileo is said to have whispered it while publicly renouncing the Copernican view at his tribe in Rome. Galileo is of course promoting the Copernican view in his whisper. It's symbolic of how in the early modern era in Europe scientists were made to say things which actually they didn't believe in yet they held on to their ideas in the private. Anyway the world view of the Greek philosopher scientist he was a great thinker natural philosopher and there was a polymath many things all into one person. It was dominant in Europe for 2,000 years but Galileo overthrew Aristotle in astronomy fundamentally and mechanics and that is why it's often regarded as father of modern science. Now we'll go to the epistemic features of modern science and just for clarity I'm going to use this word epistemic number of times epistemic or epistemologically epistemological etc. Just it's a simple compact word for anything related to knowledge it's generation methods of generating it's justifying how you justify knowledge and so on. So it's a nice word so I'm going to use it very often. There's going to be epistemic features of science and social features of science that's the way it is. So much of it will be epistemic features and then later social features. The role of mathematics in astronomy had been recognized in all ancient civilizations. Galileo sort of applied it to terrestrial motion free falls pendulum motion etc. Early great scientists you know Descartes and Newton etc were also great mathematicians and the scientific revolution in 16th century Europe basically was in astronomy and physics so mathematics was indispensable in those at that time. Hence these statements that the laws of nature are mathematical. The words by the hand of God in similar words were used by Newton and other and even sometimes metaphorically you know Einstein used them. Just their belief that the laws of nature were a manifestation of divinity so it's God who created these laws etc. However importantly modern science rested on the basic belief the laws of nature by themselves could be discovered by rational inquiry you don't need to invoke notions of divinity in the laws so that was one you can say epistemological feature no supernatural notions in science. It was not easy to displace the supernatural by the physical early scientists had to struggle with themselves also once I this is Kepler is saying it now Kepler had discovered that the planetary orbits are not circular elliptical and elliptical means the velocity of the planet is not uniform if it's a divine thing then it has to be perfect circular with uniform velocity the moment is how it was elliptical orbits with varying velocity he came to the conclusion that no it's not some supernatural but must be some substantial means some material physical force you as a key figure in the scientific revolution you discovered is now famous three laws I will not repeat them the court shows how these early scientists struggle to replace the then dominant supernatural explanations by explanation based on physical material use this took some time it's not that it just comes through in one day still the urge to incorporate supernatural continued even after the scientific revolution it came to be regarded outside the domain of natural sciences only after you know biological and physical sciences particularly they were so stupendously successful without these notions that it finally was sort of regarded as not something part of modern science. The scientific revolution reached its climax in the work of Isaac Newton Newton's earlier published in 1687 found at modern physics but it influenced human civilization far beyond then from then on science progress rapidly there was a chemical revolution by Levoiser which eventually replaced Alchemy which was earlier good empirical science they did produce many good empirical results and chemical apparatus and so on for laboratories but it was based on some speculative aims we will not go into that but the modern chemistry in the modern's chemistry in the modern sense arrived with Galileo it became quantitative and so on the old fraudist on theory was replaced by a new theory of combustion similarly life sciences I must say in life sciences there was nothing immediately radical I mean there had been advances going on even before the so-called scientific revolution again this is a common word many people say often do not like to use the word scientific revolution but as I said I'm going to follow the standard narrative of scientists so an anthony even before the scientific revolution they were a development they later micro biology with the advent of microscope and so on and texonomy and so on there were developments going on but a real conceptual revolution arrived only with the theory of evolution by natural selection by Darwin these this progress in science wrote on the earlier various moments rena sa and various other moments we need not go into them and Europe which was sort of in dark ages from after the fall of the Roman Empire from something like around 500 to almost 1200 AD almost 17 nothing nothing much was going on there as far as science is concerned but this happened and then science lifted Europe science plus riding over earlier moments lifted Europe out of his dark ages now after this I will spend some slides on the epistemic features of science at the way I'm going to do it is not I list the various features for material but sort of how is science related to various other things this is how I'm going but first this important point about laws of nature how not to hire in the principia among other many other achievements Newton proved all the three capitalist empirical laws by his universal it was fair law of gravitation and he also unified terrestrial motion because he he tested the fall of a body on the earth with the fall of the moon moon is orbiting but you can regard it as falling towards the earth and from that he had already guessed the inverse square law which he used to prove mathematically three capitalist empirical how his theory was criticized by the followers of the car the great French philosopher a mathematician whose discovery of analytical geometry played a key role in scientific revolution these followers the Kardashians believed in a mechanical universe see it almost was like a like a reaction to the old way of thinking you know old Aristotelian metaphysical way of thinking and so so because it was in any revolution it just throw away the earlier things and they wanted everything to mechanical term force has to be explained to pushes and pulls and things like that and on the other Newton's theory said that one object acts somewhere distant on the is a force on the other object due to distant object nothing in between this look like this look like magic to to this Cartesian philosophy they were against it Newton's response is well known thus far I have explained the phenomena the heavens and our sea by the force of gravity but I have not yet assigned the cost to gravity and I do not faint I promise very famous line by Newton I do not faint I promise this line captures the spirit of modern science which first seeks the answer to how before turning to why the why is sometimes explained in a higher level it's not that you can never ask question why but you start with how how is it working but an unexplained why still remains at the end that's Newton's inverse square law was much later I mean 200 more later was found to be an approximation to the theory of gravity by Einstein but nobody can say why Einstein theory work I mean Einstein has given how how the universe works not why in general we do not know why our most fundamental theories are what they are now two important epistemic features of modern science I want to calculate this this is slightly less well known among students and that is one of which is teleological reasoning it is now not accepted in modern science what is teleological reason is one in which a phenomena is explained in terms of the purpose it's purpose final causality as it is called teleological reasoning is so much a part of our daily life that you can forget it's not acceptable in modern science I started from my home today at one o'clock so that I can come to give this lecture at 3.30 this so this is teleological my my starting from home that action is being explained in terms of a purpose in terms of a later this is very natural and all the time we are doing but look at Aristotle it's not acceptable in modern science but it Aristotle and physics was full of teleology for if a thing undergoes a continuous change towards some end that last stage actually that for the sake of which it's a very clear statement of causality based on teleology yes Aristotle had a very formal cause for framework of you know very elaborate framework of causality one of which was teleological Aristotle used it in his causal explanations a stone drop from a tower falls towards the earth because natural motion tends to make an object take an object which so you're explaining the motion of the object by the goal that it is going to achieve namely getting to its natural place it's a teleological explanation not acceptable the scientific revolution not only change the method of enquiry which we are always taught in school that experiments are central now that of course is true but it also change the nature of explanation this is less emphasized in our schools it removed teleology from physics in modern physics we explained the motion of an object using the laws of motion and initial condition not in terms of any purpose any final goal of the off sometimes in physics you might think some laws are teleological like the action principle etc but that is always really stable to a local law an action principle is a global law that a particle travels in such a manner that at the end of it all action becomes an extremum so it has teleological feeling but it is actually not really article because that is equal into a local law and local laws are not really only is still persistent biology the structure of an organ is so marvelously tuned to its function that it seems natural to think that the organ was designed for that goal it's very natural but however that's why it took a long time and such an counter in duty idea that the theory of evolution by Darwin Darwin well is in the mid 19th century however not really all species evolved through the blind process of inheritable variations acted upon by natural selection and it gets accumulated evolution has no purpose there is no such thing that the species want to improve themselves nothing like there are random variation which are we get selected the ones which are adaptive it's called adaptive selection with the success of this theory modern natural sciences do not admit of teleological not just physics chemistry of course is very closely related to physics but even biology as far as the non-volitional domain we are not talking of biology of volitional domain natural sciences by at least my definition of non-volitional sciences where where human agency etc. we are not talking about so biology joined chemistry in a unified view of nature based on today this is by the great 20th century physicist Stephen Weinberg so biology now no longer has an independent principle which physics case simply cannot accommodate if it were then you would not have a modern unified natural science another important one is anthropocentric reason which is again very common before modern science but now has been replaced anthropo means home I mean human human so human centric reasoning gives a special unique status to us humans and by extension to the planet we inhabit the earth the Copernican revolution displays the earth is all known now very much it's just earth is nothing special about or just one plant it is special in the sense it has conditions in which life or which life can grow in that that's different and of course even solar system is nothing special is one among billions of others still humans continue to believe in the privileged status in the cosmic the theory of evolution by Darwin and Welles finally eliminated that view from natural sense we are like any other species we may have certain different properties very different from others that's some different matter the lack of the supernatural any purpose or special status for us in the laws of the physical universe is best captured by wine but it's a beautiful line modern science I'm talking of his laws not its practice what practice of course has values and everything associated human I'm talking of laws is impersonal without room for supernatural intervention it has no sense of purpose and it offers no hope for certain it's one of the finest lines I have come across both modern science and I already explained to you but no hope for certainty means it's all provisional orders cannot say what this is certainly correct all scientific knowledge is tentative and provisional the role of experiment in modern science I'll now be a little fast observations and experiments are natural to humans only civilization use them to develop technology and medicines form so it is not that first time only the modern scientists did explain nothing of the kind they were there in earlier times however the hallmark of modern science is a controlled experiment where you observe nature in artificial conditions control some variables and test theories or infer new regularities not seen otherwise so it has a different epistemic role the experiments have a different epistemic not that they were not earlier further if two or more theories agree with known dot data a critical experiment is devised where the predictions of competing theories are different that enables you to pick the right thing many times it is done in science if there are two theories then they give you a certain prediction and then you check out which of the theories is correct Galileo of course did his early experiments of modern science in inclined planes and he gave insights on freefall etc some of the very important experiments not so much talked about are the experiments on air pressure in the 17th century and these led to the rejection of Aristotelian doctrine nature abhors vacuum I will not go into detail but it's a very important thing there was this Aristotelian hangover for a long time and he said that for some theoretical metaphysical reasons that well there cannot be vacuum some of those arguments are now known to be wrong but anyway that's a different matter but these people experimentally prove no you can create vacuum modern science has elevated the epistemological role of experiment they are the final arbiters of that now of course the connection between theory experiment is is not as simple as I am telling it's it's a very complicated thing and experiments are theory laden and so on so these are philosophical issues I will not get into them but as far as I am concerned they don't undermine the objectivity of science also there is no clear sequence I don't have to tell you this theory sometimes such an experiment suggests experience theory can suggest even technology nowadays can create suggest new theories etc etc now we come to mathematics how is mathematics related to science I talked of experiments no mathematics the status of mathematics versus was not clear very clear mathematical physics and mathematics were thought to be somewhat indistinguishable it took some time to realize that two are fundamentally different disciplines though undoubtedly they greatly influenced each other mathematics is a logical structure based on axioms postulates it develops a particular kind of language to express logic the important point is the axioms and postulates of mathematics are a free choice constrained by only mutual logical consistency in a theory of science the starting concepts are not a free choice they are constrained by nature of course they are not fully this people call theory under determination it's not that since they have to agree with experiment they are unique it's not they are under several theories can give you the same experiment but still they are not just just anything you like you are not like any logic axioms this realization came that mathematics is a different discipline when mathematician discovered geometries which are nothing to do with the usual geometry were used to non-equilibrium geometry and algebraic systems which are not arithmetic systems which follow non-commitative laws they don't follow the laws that we are used to in arithmetic and so on and still they are important mathematical systems so these products of pure mathematics started in around 19th century or so and it is around that time that people realize that mathematics is mathematics is very useful for science it's a completely independent discipline of course it's amazingly nobody knows why some of these products of pure mathematics turn out to be useful in physics like Riemann geometry in the 1850s what some 50 years later was useful Einstein's general relativity so that's amazing this is a nice thing mathematics was still confused with mathematical physics such as it was then mathematical astronomy the vision of mathematics as an autonomous science had been lost sight of in the blaze of Newton splendor and it was not until the youthful Gauss again caught the vision etc etc I won't go into it but he's basically lamenting the fact that Carl Gauss he did great pure mathematics number theory etc in the in the prime in his earliest but then he turned to physics you know astronomy and the series you know the effect of this minor planet series on planetary motion etc he was involved in so this author is feeling I mean if he if he could still go on with pure mathematics what more what great things he could he have achieved that as it happened even Gauss even in these practical assignment discovered some great pure mathematics that's different yeah so overall science does not have this altitude of mathematics so that's the relations I'm talking of the relationship between mathematics it's obvious now but it took time to realize they'll be seen this is high gens great physicists in the generation between Newton and Galileo and Newton they'll be seen demonstrations of those kinds which do not produce as great a certitude as those are geometry means mathematics and each even differ much there from since whereas the geometers prove their propositions by fixed and incontestable principle he means actions here the principles are verified but the conclusions to be drawn by it's a very good description of science modern science made as long ago as you know more than 300 years ago modern science is characterized by its emphasis on approximation estimate of errors in experiments etc this again took time to realize the early great scientists including Newton was not so much careful about error analysis etc a mathematical model is always an approximation and then within a model you usually obtain results which are not exact results but we are often often approximation experiment measurements always carry errors so they are always reported with estimates of so that's the feature of modern science now in 20th century and beyond what happened was that the earlier science was based to a large extent on visualizable and intuitive concepts but this became a casualty from 20th century onwards most of the important discoveries of modern science later in the 20th century particularly in physics were highly non-intuitive so they had to be admitted no matter how non-intuitive because they were experimentally their consequences are excellent of course biology showed this great much great progress that you all know very well the offshoots of this progress we are all aware of these various great strides and computers and biotechnology etc still even though with all these complexities the aim of basic science is still to explain nature in terms of a small number of entities so the parsimony as an epistemic aim continues even now in 20th century modern physics here is great Einstein the grand aim of all science is to cover the greatest number of empirical facts by logical deduction from the smallest number of hypotheses or actions this is sometimes called reductionism and it's often very much criticized but that's that's the epistemic name of aim of modern science now does science have anything to do with aesthetics yes in its exploratory phase aesthetic judgments based on ideas of harmony symmetry unifications are quite common even in contemporary science they are not accepted per se this is a feature of modern science just because an equation looks beautiful to its creator it doesn't mean it will be yet accepted dirac the great physicists used to have this notion of beauty of equations etc but dirac equation was accepted not because it's beautiful but because it gave strikingly good experimental results which could not have been done before that some of such ideas can be formulated mathematically and their consequences tested sometimes they succeed sometimes they fail for example Einstein's heuristic ideas in many cases often based on analogies or aesthetic judgments they led to good theories experimentally verifiable results for example the idea of light quantum on the other hand his aesthetic drive experiment didn't suggest unification of gravity and electromagnetism but it was just an aesthetic drive since he had unified space and time and matter and inertia and gravity etc he went on to do this he failed because it was a perhaps a premature attempt but still it continues to be a drive even in contemporary particle physics and it's scoring great successes so far so in conclusion what is different about modern science to summarize science is often spoken of as a logical enterprise guided by observations and experiment that of course is true if you go to a lay person a lay educated person and say what is science oh it's very logical you know in our common language oh science is very logical and of course they also know it it's involved in accurate observations experiments that of course is true but logic is not the prerogative of science logic deductive inductive abductive means you know inference to the best explanation is used by all of us in daily life there is no there is nothing special about science as far as logic basic logic is concerned because every one of us has whether you are a scientist not a scientist anything everybody is logical modern science uses no different logic is a very important point to science students i mean i i think sometimes it's not a then what way is it different the key point is logic by alone cannot arrive at conclusions you have to feed in some concepts some premises then you get conclusions it is in these premises that modern science differs is distinctive in its premises i told you some teleological premise not allowed supernatural not allowed anthropocentric question not right it is in these things that this and if you have an aesthetic premise then it's allowed tentatively subject to experimental verification most importantly and i think that's the central point of what i want to tell especially the students that it's not some particular methodology or concepts it's not that concept of gravity or concept of relativity these so very well known concepts of modern physics modern science it's not one concept or one methodology that defines modern science so if you find these concepts somewhere else it doesn't mean that is modern science very important point because human beings are logic have been logical and great minds have always existed and they can always come up with concepts which sometimes match with the concepts of modern science the important point is the whole complex connected complex of epistemic and social practices also that correct lies modern science so before i have i'll take another 10 minutes i'll summarize these and then go to the social so summary of epistemic feature no supernatural notions premises no teleological and anthropocentric explanation the central role of experiments and suggesting and verifying concepts and theories whether intuitive or a counterintuitive whether you can picture them or not it's it's allowed viewing mathematics as an enormously useful but autonomous discipline distinctly from science emphasis on knowing the order of approximation estimating errors this again very important even the early modern scientists were not so much alert to this and a drive if there is a there is a certain error the drive of the experiment is to reduce that error to make it more and more precise aesthetic ideas not accepted per se but viewed as conjectures subject to experimentally and parsimony of basic concepts of course parsimony has led to reductive approach bulk property explained in terms of entities and if you take to the you see it has so far succeeded so it has become a kind of epistemic feature the reductionism things which were not understood in reducible in terms of physics started getting one after the other the concept of valency in chemistry it was a phenomenological concept now we understand in terms of more basic concepts gene which was a phenomenological sense you start explain so this is this is a success of reduction but may not be always to nobody can say so far it is succeed science is a relentless pursuit of knowledge it continually examines the limitations of its theories there is another very important attitudinal feature you never feel that is the end oh this is all over this is the final word nothing like that it is a path that never ends all scientific knowledge is provisional there is never a claim to any finality and of course modern science has numerous limited limitations so even we as we admire science and its accomplishments we have to note its limitations it is phenomenally successful for simple and moderately complex systems of physical sciences so physics particulates phenomenally successful because the systems of systems are simple hydrogen atom the energy level of hydrogen atom it is a simple system so modern physics is astonishingly successful you can explain the magnetic moment of electrons from eight places of this decimal so on but you cannot have that kind of predictability for complex systems so but its explanatory power is less spectacular for complex system though it is growing with computational power you are still doing till now you know very large-scale astronomical problems the galactic galaxy formation problems etc now people are doing better not that they have solved it but they are doing better with more and more computing power and and of course progress in theoretical ideas still it cannot yet handle this seems to be right now of all which there is much debate and nobody knows what it is the deep issues of consciousness and free will there is a lot of debate i am not i am not going to go into it at all but so we should also note the limitations even as we admire it's progress science and technology everybody knows i i'll just rapidly read this slide there it has been benign for early modern science it has cure diseases and we reduce drudgery of work etc we just saw its success in humanities fight against covid-19 but 20th century technology also brought up very harmful use of science basically technology very unwise use environmental damage damage climate change and potential for destruction on a colossal scale what's the way out the way out this only i don't i can't think of anything except that people have to come together and use science and technology not abundant science but use science and technology with wisdom and here science alone cannot help you science plus socio-cultural interventions can help you this so now two three slides on the social features and i'll stop science emerge in a new social environment so i was so far talking of its knowledge features it does this it accepts it is experiment oriented etc etc but these things don't start don't happen among individuals they need a socio-cultural ambience for doing that so it would be wrong to think modern science arose primarily due to a bunch of great scientists in different fields they of course did significant work but that's not because outstanding figures exist in every field it's not just the Newton and Galileo and Einstein are the only great minds in humans are not at all the great minds always in it in civilizations everywhere in all ages they have been great minds but they alone are not sufficient for the great beliefs and humanistic the role of the society is just as vital modern science emerged in a certain social setting we need not go into its details and it's not even clearly understood how it all happened there are any number of books on these matters but there is no doubt that the intellectual and cultural environment in Europe was changing quite dramatically in the late middle ages the new environment called the age of reason dawned around the 18th century you know those earlier moments and then success of modern science it brought in the environment so-called enlightenment values the values of liberty fraternity etc of course it's very ironical that Europe recently violated all these values they called themselves to be an area era of enlightenment and yet they did these violations of these values in their colonial drives but in the course post-colonial era I think at least there is an element all over the world to to you know go by these values now the social culture social cultural norms of science scientific community is like like any other social community and therefore it has its own institutions universities research institutes academies and they have some unwritten norms of practice these are common ownership scientific knowledge unlike technology is free for everyone nobody has a patent for any law the concerned scientist all that he gets his recognition for being the first to discover and sometimes it leads to priority disputes peer review every new idea and science is peer reviewed by anonymous referees no matter how yes how how eminent you are because of your early great work it doesn't matter if you submit a fresh paper it's going to be reviewed consensus there is no single person group or institution that decides on the validity of it it's not that MIT or Harvard decide whether a theory is correct no it's a whole pool of science scientists reviewers and they criticize and through this organized skepticism as a sociologist called it the pool of widely accepted scientific knowledge emerges of course these norms are based on certain values personal values include patients diligence cooperative spirit which is now increasingly increasingly most important because the scientific projects are now very called collaborative and most importantly intellectual honesty because if you're if you're data or if you're results if you're putting out if they're not correct then the whole enterprise gets you know gets a step back so that so that in value is very important the most significant social market of science has that is this course is free and frank and cordial where disagreement is not equated to disrespect skepticism is valued and there is no overseeing body to govern in this so if you an international conference on certain something it's very possible that there will be competing thoughts and people will be arguing against each other very strongly in the conference all but when they come out for tea it's not that they're they're very cordial they'll be friendly outside so disagreement intellectual disagreement is not equated to disrespect and things like that and in fact it is valued the more alternative theories are proposed it's valued another vital social marker is the irrelevance of identity labels race gender religion class language etc it doesn't matter who is proposing an idea ideally speaking these values were not always there in the early modern science but they are in 20th 21st century the aberrations of these values are getting much reduced still they are not completely out but they are being mitigated it doesn't matter who from where the person is it's what the idea is that is what is that is discussed so when these you know these values pervade across the world modern science will be a truly great international enterprise so at the end now that last slide will be some concluding remarks now I have spoken very admiringly about modern science and sometimes it gives rise to a feeling that well science is everything modern science everything so I want to clarify the purpose of this talk was to characterize what modern science it was not to make judgments or anything else it was to characterize modern science in terms of its basic features as a cognitive and social endeavor so if you want to call a product as belonging to modern science it's likely to be have these features but my aim was not to privilege natural sciences over other great intellectual and cultural endeavours there are all kinds of endeavours natural sciences is one very important endeavours but there are endeavours arts music humanity is even spiritual pursuits the humans respond to nature in different ways and modern science is one way of responding to nature to to understand the physical endeavours we talked of the great progress of modern science and the phenomenal success of the mathematical theories of physics however for a balanced perspective here are the last quotes so I'll end with these last quotes one thing I have learned in a long life Albert Einstein is saying one thing I have learned in a long life that all our science majored against reality is primitive and childlike and yet it's the most precious thing we have a little more interesting quote is physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical but because we know so little it's only its mathematical properties that we can discuss so I leave the interpretation to you but it seems to mean Russell saying that nature is very complex there are various other aspects is the mathematical or the major one you can say aspects that science can discover but that doesn't mean you have exhausted the real the reality of nature it's that is his view it's for everyone to formulate their view okay that was the end I just acknowledge some of these slides overlap with my earlier talks and this epistemic features that I talked about about they appear in a joint paper with Mashood and Majumdar was just published last month and I thank colleagues from HVCC as well as many many friends for many discussions that helped me shape these ideas these are the references that I quoted you know most of them are very reliable from books and one or two Galileo quotes are from Internet there are different narratives of historical narratives I that was not my purpose but if you are interested in alternative narratives about science of course this is a famous book by various very great scholars on the history of science in India so another very good book on history of mathematics there is this book very I think very famous historian of science who basically counters the idea that there was anything very abrupt I think the idea is that it was a continuity rather than an abrupt act or something like it is an interesting recent book which has given a very different perspective to the whole of history of science I mean it is a very interesting which is dead you know decidedly against the Eurocentric view so you can have a look at it so and some nice book on evolution and some some of these problems of consciousness etc which I did not discuss and about which I do not know much these are just references and this if you want a very quick review I mean many of us at HBCSE contributed to the history of science exhibition which was mentioned so it will give you a it is not it is nowhere comparable to these great scholarly books earlier but it will give you a good overview of science from the beginning to the 20th century so that is all I have to say thank you okay thank you very much professor Vin Kumar so the talk is open for some questions from audience we will just take in person audience question yes thank you sir for us such a lovely and enlightening talk I had a curious question sometimes in a in a scientific study some scientists may take a leap of faith like when they are studying something and things are not making sense it could be like tectonic plates moving or vaccination at that time when when these things were being studied it was not backed very well by the scientific literature then so exploring such era where leap of faith is required will that be also part of modern science or it should strictly be whatever is known and what's the best direction the foundation allows you're talking exploring some technology I don't know get it so exploring some so right science yeah so where would leap of faith fit in in the nature of modern science no faith is no not not faith like some some some wild guess sometimes scientists make some claims if the scientist is making saying that it is a conjecture and I'm going to try it then there is nothing wrong because but without verification if the claim is that no this is the right thing then of course it's not scientific yeah that's what I said a conjecture heuristic is his country is always there in science how how how do you go further in science you have to so can one start with it I won't yeah yeah yeah can one start with that and maybe build on it or something yeah well I will not uh congratulate you for this talk it was wonderful as everybody expected but I found it a bit surprising that you did not mention falsifiability at all and as a feature of science yeah so would you comment on that see what what happens is I mean it's a very popular thing among scientists uh especially falsifiability criteria that anand the book is talking about is the criteria advocated by popper you know great philosopher of science and the whole idea was to distinguish science from pseudoscience so science is something in which you stick your neck out as he said good science and give a clear cut prediction if it is correct then it is your theory is not falsified the he didn't say theories theories correct or confirm no theory is not yet falsified and if it is wrong of course however what has happened in modern science science this criteria is not always employed it's a very good criteria but it's not always employed so and it is fairly uh strongly opposed by philosophers of science they for various reasons first of all when you some when you say you are falsifying are you falsifying the whole theory are you falsifying can you falsify each and every concept of theory etc there are some deep issues about it and therefore although popper is a scientist philosopher he is he's not the philosopher of modern philosophers of science so I just wanted to avoid that and I have I've been saying it is experimentally verified see falsification criteria is nothing is nothing is confirmed things are either falsified or not falsified that's a bit too much you know science in practice doesn't follow this we say the standard model is now is reasonably well verified to say it has not yet been falsified yet you can see that but now what part of the standard model standard model gives you certain predictions has every bit of the standard model has it been verified etc there are some issues like this so I didn't want to one next okay so one question and then we have one online question so any one last question from audience there were a few hands up initially I missed it okay let's take online question then by this time okay so this question is from Rohini good boy Rohini asks while ideally we would like science to be truly objective and independent of the attributes such as the nationality gender etc of scientists there are very stark examples like the work of great Chandrasekhar on his famous limit which indeed took much longer than it should have to be accepted because it was not acceptable in the citadels of science at that time what can scientists do that the effect of such impacts of attributes of a person on the development of science is mitigated no I already agreed in the last point that these are the values see one is values the other thing is the departure from these values these are the values of modern science and they are being increasingly you know sign modern science is increasingly going along those values of course the time that dr. Rohini go to police mentioning of course was not the time it was at that time racism from science had not yet gone completely it's probably not gone even now but but everybody will agree it is it's much less than what it was before so it's a progress along those values and what can you do about it I mean scientists especially the great leaders of science should promote these values you know in a very positive way values are always ideals which there and there are delinquencies you know even the norms that I told you norms social social norms of science are something there are people who don't follow those norms so any social enterprise has certain values and then there are delinquencies about it and what is regarded as is a very big delinquency and what is a minor thing even that we have you know social life also some things are regarded as minor deviations some are major same thing in science so whenever there is a collection of human beings it cannot follow a certain given norms perfectly the point is the direction of progress are we going down or are we going that as far as I think about basic science I'm not talking of anything about the enterprises of basic science currently from what one reads in good international magazines I think these values there is a progress towards mitigation of those those aberrations of those values that's all I would say thank you so we'll take one last question from ks yes thank you thank you okay for the nice talk so my question is about textbooks in school and the role of history in those textbooks and a good comparison is with mathematics in mathematics history does appear in school textbooks Pythagoras theorem Euclid and so on while we don't teach Aristotle Aristotle's physics maybe a little bit of Archimedes but hardly any you know thing before modern science in science textbooks of course the reason I'm asking is that the present dispensation makes it a point that we should correct some of these historical notes which appear because you know all western names were not really the first to discover those theorems etc so maybe there's some justification for saying that Pythagoras theorem was also there in Baudhiana and so on now do you see anything like that in science or you know what you must have you know reflected on this so is there something because even in science we keep hearing that one you know in ancient Indian history you find scientific ideas and so on so do these deserve to enter textbooks school textbooks what is your view on this no actually I was very personally involved in it in the higher secondary physics textbooks and you know in the text writing of course I entirely first of all I entirely agree that textbooks should have historical orientation history must inform science education historical sense that is one point because science education without you know telling science without its history in fact is quite boring history makes it very interesting so that is one point now you are right the whole problem is there are so many narratives historical narratives so for a textbook author it needs a very important judgment you know it needs quite complex judgment to be able to say just the right thing I mean what is the balance thing one should say so it is a very difficult problem but but still textbook authors shouldn't do that and we in fact tried it if you have seen if you see ncrt books I do not know the latest versions but the laws of motion which I myself wrote in the earlier ncrt I did start with Galileo experiment I didn't start just Newton's laws of motion etc and I we did talk about I don't recall if we mention there is total but sometimes we say we should mention some of these names in connection with the ideas which they had they were brilliant thinkers but their ideas have now been found to be have now been replaced by such and such ideas historians of science by the way don't like such things to make use of history you know to gauge history from the present point but for science educationist I believe history has to be gauged from because if you want to teach modern science you have to see how it came along and whatever the alternative ideas without sounding disrespectful to them you should not sound disrespectful but you have to pick up the idea that led to modern science etc so I don't know what you're asking I mean yeah I agree historical narratives should inform but the only thing is there should not be any specific purpose for that the purpose should be good science education of students if Indian author if it is Indian authors good science education of Indian students that is also they should be able to understand science and feel interested in science whatever whatever it takes to use history to further this purpose you should you should do this so the learning of science should be the center of the not some other goal other goals you satisfy in some other curricula on history or anything that is for a science education books are concerned their goal should be to use history to to teach to be able to learn science well okay so now about the count other narratives the point that I said the central point of my talk I think it has to be driven home to many many people that science is not one concept I don't know if you appreciate that but when I thought about myself I thought why is something nice that has occurred to me that not that it's an original idea it's very well known but I sort of appreciated it that it's a one particular concept if has been talked about elsewhere somewhere else that's interesting it's very interesting but that doesn't show that the whole complex was there in that alternative thing science is not just one concept relativity is not that things are relative relativity means its kinematics dynamics it's all its exploration all that makes the relativity principle interesting and somebody if somebody has said all motion is relative in somewhere else that doesn't mean oh we relativity was discovered at that time however all this has to be researched if indeed it was the whole complex was discovered then then of course we have to give credit to that for instance Indian in mathematics in India there is there has been a series of great mathematical achievements for example in the Kerala school which which came quite close to infinite series and calculus and things like that of course I think in any mathematics this should be this should be mentioned because that is authentic knowledge and it is it is quite a connected piece of knowledge that was established in some part of the world so not ignoring in that and only saying Eurocentric things is also not correct so we should not be anybody centric it should be science is nobody centric yeah thank you I think concept versus theory maybe that captures the yeah concept versus the connection I learnt it from G. Nagar you know I don't know he is there he used to always say that concept doesn't have its meaning by itself a concept derived is meaning from the when it's a beautiful idea and I think cognitive scientists probably Sanjay would know much more about how how it is it's a beautiful idea so I sort of in my think I applied that idea for the exposition of modern science thank you any other questions okay so there's if you like to ask yes the role of history in science education as a student when I was a student in school and college and when I was learning mathematics or science the reason why the people or the scientist felt to discover something for example derivatives and that what was the need if that would have been explained in those times in that perspective I think that will make it interesting rather who should get the credit of discovery what was the reason for derivative yeah why they felt that derivative should be involved in what way the differential coefficient so what was the need what made them why they were forced to discover that what was the situation behind it if that would have been explained then it would become the issue was variable speed you know when a speed varies then you should be able to define speed at every instant okay so whenever the varying things are concerned you have to the notion of derivative comes up I think his question was he was just saying that in textbooks we should emphasize on why there was a need for science to develop at any stage instead of focusing on who should get credit for the development yeah agreed who is yeah less who is not as important as the motivation for it why was the concept needed yeah that's correct certainly all right if there are no question there is one related which you partially answered earlier but aesthetic like premise may have even may serve as a purpose how science or technology may look like hundred years down the line so how as a teacher or teacher educator would you make the teachers to like emphasize this idea or like when they hear something like stick to science but this is equally important in class so would you like to comment anything about how talking about premises is equally important maybe when you are when you are having a scientific discourse in class would you like to comment anything on that talking about the premises yeah so any so aesthetic is one example that was asked but no I think people this point should be told to science to science student at science the logic of science is the same logic as all of us in science differs from its premises that is one point the aesthetic point was different that the premises could be an aesthetic premise but aesthetic you can use aesthetics but that that that is not justified per se I mean you can develop theories based on your aesthetic judgments but that does not constitute a justification and justification is only in its experimental verification okay so if there are no more question we have reached to the end segment of this session which is sport of thanks so thank you professor Arvind Kumar for this insightful talk and about the nature of modern science and I know there are many questions because it has given us a way or a direction how to connect nature of modern science also also with with the premises and how would you take this connection to school and to all other educators and other community members in audience and outside so I hope we will have more stimulating discussions outside on this and so thank you again first of all professor Arvind Kumar for accepting VGK Memorial talk invitation and it is also as Professor Bhattacharya already pointed out it is our first event of HBCS golden jubilee celebration so it's double celebration for us today I also take this opportunity to thank members of VGK's family who have showed the same love and affection towards the institute by actually being physically present here I some of the VGK's friends and also professor Arvind Kumar's friends HBC alumni and other dignitaries are present in the audience today so I would like to thank all of them and also those who are present online and are listening to the talk thank you all for your honorable presence I thank professor Arnab Bhattacharya and professor Savita Ladage for this event and there are a few people who are behind the scenes but have made this event successful so I would like to acknowledge a few here thanks to Manoj Nayar for creating the VGK Memorial poster thank you to the members of center director office dean's office and public relation office of HBCSE particularly Gajananji Ravindra Savan, Sumana Amin and Gaurav Gidnar for your help in email communications invitations and social media publicity thanks to HBCSC's technical support team for managing this event in hybrid mode thank you to canteen service security and cosmetic staff for your effort to make this event more comfortable for all of us and special thanks to Mr. Krishnasahu head finance and services HBCSE thanks to the audience both in person and online and I request now all to proceed for the high tea outside and let's continue these discussions further so thank you everyone