AKR Memorial Lecture
From Hubble's Law to Hubble-Lemaître Law: A Brief History of Cosmology!
Prof. Ajit Kembhavi
Jan 5th, 2019
14:30
PLT-1 (Presidency University)
AKR The Legend
Prof. Amal Kumar Raychaudhuri, popularly known all over India as AKR, was the discoverer of the Raychaudhuri equation of general relativity, and was, since 1961, the foremost among pedagogues in the physics department at the erstwhile Presidency College. Generations of physicists among Presidency alumni, who have excelled academically around the world, owe their intellectual prowess to the inspiring initiation to theoretical physics they received in their youth, at the hands of AKR.
Along with well-known colleagues, AKR had turned physics teaching at Presidency into a glorious exploration well-integrated with research, even though the institution was primarily an undergraduate college at that time. This had been possible because, as a struggling young physicist with an uncertain future in academics, AKR had nevertheless dared to doubt some work of Albert Einstein himself. Inspired by this doubt, he had worked relentlessly and succeeded in superseding that work of the great master, by producing an equation - the Raychaudhuri equation - which made a profound impact on general relativity and continues to be widely used in frontline research even beyond.
As Stephen Hawking remarks in his famous textbook with George Ellis, this equation is of `great importance' for the proofs of theorems in general relativity which establish the generic existence of "spacetime singularities" - phenomena which demonstrate that the fabric of the general relativistic universe is anything but smooth. He was thus a pioneer of independent India in the field of theoretical physics, along the lines of his renowned Presidency predecessor Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose who was a pioneer of experimental physics in colonial India.
Along with well-known colleagues, AKR had turned physics teaching at Presidency into a glorious exploration well-integrated with research, even though the institution was primarily an undergraduate college at that time. This had been possible because, as a struggling young physicist with an uncertain future in academics, AKR had nevertheless dared to doubt some work of Albert Einstein himself. Inspired by this doubt, he had worked relentlessly and succeeded in superseding that work of the great master, by producing an equation - the Raychaudhuri equation - which made a profound impact on general relativity and continues to be widely used in frontline research even beyond.
As Stephen Hawking remarks in his famous textbook with George Ellis, this equation is of `great importance' for the proofs of theorems in general relativity which establish the generic existence of "spacetime singularities" - phenomena which demonstrate that the fabric of the general relativistic universe is anything but smooth. He was thus a pioneer of independent India in the field of theoretical physics, along the lines of his renowned Presidency predecessor Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose who was a pioneer of experimental physics in colonial India.