Homi Bhabha

Remembering one of India's greatest scientists, Homi Bhabha, on his birth anniversary:

Homi Jehangir Bhabha (30 October 1909 – 24 January 1966) was an Indian nuclear physicist, and the  founding director and professor of physics at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR).  Colloquially known as "father of the Indian nuclear programme", Bhabha was also the founding director of the Atomic Energy Establishment, Trombay (AEET) which is now named the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre in his honour. 

Awards:

Bhabha was awarded the Adams Prize (1942) and Padma Bhushan (1954). He was nominated five times consecutively for the Nobel Prize in Physics between 1951 and 1956, by French Mathematician Jacques Hadamard. However, the Prize eluded him.

Early life:

Homi Jehangir Bhabha was born into a prominent wealthy Parsi family, through which he was related to businessmen Dinshaw Maneckji Petit, and Dorabji Tata. He received his early studies at Bombay's Cathedral and John Connon School and entered Elphinstone College at age 15 after passing his Senior Cambridge Examination with Honours. He then attended the Royal Institute of Science in 1927 before joining Cambridge University. 

Higher Education: 

Bhabha took the Tripos exam in  Mechanical Sciences in June 1930 and passed with first class. Afterwards, he excelled in his mathematical studies under Paul Dirac to complete the Mathematics Tripos. Meanwhile, he worked at the Cavendish Laboratory while working towards his doctorate in theoretical physics. At the time, the laboratory was the centre of a number of scientific breakthroughs, the most famous being  James Chadwick's discovery of  the neutron.

During the 1931–1932 academic year, Bhabha was awarded the Salomons Studentship in Engineering. In 1932, he was awarded the Rouse Ball travelling studentship in mathematics. During this time, nuclear physics was attracting the greatest minds and it was one of the most significantly emerging fields as compared to theoretical physics.

Conducting experiments on particles which also released enormous amounts of radiation, was a lifelong passion of Bhabha, and his leading edge research and experiments made many Indian physicists switch their field to nuclear physics.

In January 1933, Bhabha received his doctorate in nuclear physics. He won the Isaac Newton Studentship in 1934, which he held for the next three years. The following year, he completed his post-doctoral studies in theoretical physics under Ralph H. Fowler. During his studentship, he split his time working at Cambridge and with Niels Bohr in Copenhagen. 

In 1935, Bhabha published a paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society,  in which he performed the first calculation to determine the cross section of electron-positron scattering. Electron-positron scattering was later named Bhabha scattering, in honour of his contributions in the field. In 1937, Bhabha was awarded the Senior Studentship, which helped him continue his work at Cambridge until the outbreak of World War II in 1939.

Professional career:

In September 1939, Bhabha was in India for a brief holiday when World War II started, and he decided not to return to England. He accepted an offer to serve as the Reader in the Physics Department of the Indian Institute of Science, then headed by renowned physicist C. V. Raman. 

With the help of J. R. D. Tata, he played an instrumental role in the establishment of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai.

During this time, Bhabha played a key role in convincing the Congress Party's senior leaders, most notably Jawaharlal Nehru, to start the ambitious nuclear programme. He established the Atomic Energy Commission in 1948, serving as its first chairman.  In the 1950s, Bhabha intensified his lobbying for the development of nuclear weapons. Soon after the Sino-Indo war in 1962, Bhabha aggressively and publicly began to call for nuclear weapons.

Bhabha is generally acknowledged as the father of Indian nuclear power. Moreover, he is credited with formulating a strategy of focussing on extracting power from the country's vast thorium reserves rather than its meagre uranium reserves. This thorium focused strategy was in marked contrast to all other countries in the world. The approach proposed by Bhabha to achieve this strategic objective became the country's  nuclear power programme goal. 

Bhabha paraphrased the  approach as follows:

The total reserves of thorium in India amount to over 500,000 tons in the readily extractable form, while the known reserves of uranium are less than a tenth of this. The aim of long range atomic power programme in India must therefore be to base the nuclear power generation as soon as possible on thorium rather than uranium. 

Death:

Bhabha was killed when Air India Flight 101 crashed near Mont Blanc on 24 January 1966. Many possible theories have been advanced for the air crash, including a claim the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was involved in order to paralyse India's nuclear program. 

Gregory Douglas, a journalist who taped his interviews with former CIA operative, Robert Crowley, for four years, published the transcripts in a book called Conversations with the Crow. Douglas writes that CIA was responsible for assassinating Homi Bhabha. He claimed that the US was aware of Indian nuclear progress. He said that a bomb in the cargo section of the plane exploded mid-air, bringing down the commercial Boeing 707 airliner in the Alps.