Jayant Vishnu Narlikar
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A brief biography
Ardhra Nair, May 21, 2025: The Times of India
Pune : In his last blog on March 24 this year, celebrated astrophysicist Jayant Vishnu Narlikar wrote about the importance of stepping back and looking at one’s creations in a detached manner, and delegating work to youngsters. “This is where the IUCAA story is supposed to end,” he said. “Karmayoga advocated by Bhagwad Gita shows the way for a graceful exit,” the founder-director of Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics concluded, almost like a prophetic farewell. Narlikar — rationalist, cricket lover, science communicator, author andscientist who dared challenge the Big Bang theory about origin of the universe — passed away at 86 early Tuesday in his sleep at his Pune home. Just the previous day, Narlikar — who recently underwent hip surgery — had spent three hours reading in the massive wooden recliner that belonged to his father. He then stepped out of his modest home and went for a drive. Later that night, he told his daughter to give him a hug before he went to sleep. Narlikar’s wife Mangala, a mathematician, passed away in 2023. The couple’s three daughters — Geeta, Girija and Leelavati — pursue research careers in science.
Narlikar: Father of Indian cosmology
Narlikar is best known for Steady State Cosmology, an alternative to the widely accepted Big Bang theory. He also worked on Mach’s Principle, quantum cosmology and problems related to quasars and black holes, earning the epithet “Father of Indian cosmology”.
“Life beyond earth was another topic that interested him. Since 1999, he also collaborated with Isro and a group of scientists to design experiments that sampled air at altitudes of up to 41km to search for microorganisms. The samples collected in 2001 and 2005 found live cells and bacteria, opening up new possibilities to be explored through experiments,” IUCAA director R Srianand said.
Born in Kolhapur, Narlikar graduated from Banaras Hindu University, where his father was a mathematics professor, before going to Cambridge. His mother was a Sanskrit researcher. JNV became a household name in India in 1964 when newspapers across the country wrote about the research by the young Indian and his senior, Fred Hoyle, at Cambridge. Their research looked be yond Einstein’s Theory of Relativity to give an alternative model for gravity that fits into the quasi-steady state model of the universe.
At Cambridge, Narlikar became a Wrangler and Tyson Medallist in Mathematical Tripos, was awarded the Smith’s Prize in 1962, and the Adams Prize in 1967. He returned to India in 1972 to join TIFR in Mumbai. It was there that he worked on the idea of founding IUCAA. “It was considered crazy to leave a secure job at TIFR for an unknown, undefined idea. But we did it anyway, setting up IUCAA in 1988, where Narlikar remained founder director for three terms till his retirement in 2003,” Ajit Kembhavi, one of the other founding members and ex-director of IUCAA, said. Carl Sagan’s ‘Cosmos’ At heart, Narlikar was as much a science communicator as he was a researcher. Arvind Gupta, known for his creative ways of explaining science through toys and other means, points to the IUCAA tradition of hosting lectures for schoolchildren every month. This has continued for over 40 years. “The science centre in IUCAA was set up with funds from Pu La Deshpande's trust, but I was sceptical as it was a govt institute. But I got a free hand to shape it and was told I could leave after six months if it felt too bureaucratic. We owe science popularisation to Narlikar. He believed that good PhD students don’t fall from the sky — we have to nurture and inspire them from a young age,” Gupta said. Narlikar’s love for explaining science led to him being featured on Carl Sagan's popular TV show Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. Colleagues remember him as a remarkably structured individual — someone who, despite wearing many hats, was never in a hurry; despite his fame, never unreachable; and a person who always made time for badminton and tennis during his IUCAA days. His love for cricket was probably only a notch less than that for science. In his blog, he wrote about playing matches during his time at BHU, with Pakistani students when in Cambridge, and recalls being complimented for his batting and bowling by former Test cricketer Chandu Borde during a chance match in Birmingham in July 2002. Rationalist above all For a man who loved science, belief in rationality came naturally. Hamid Dabholkar, son of slain rationalist Narendra Dabholkar, said Narlikar spoke out against the tendency to find pseudo-scientific reasoning in mythology, published a research paper debunking astrology, and even provided a mobile planetarium to activists working to dispel superstition — enabling them to travel to villages and explain eclipses and other natural phenomena. Narlikar’s friendship with eminent Marathi writer Pu La Deshpande is well-known. But even among ordinary citizens, he had a lasting impact. Jasin S, who works for a private firm in New Delhi, said he may not remember what he recently read online, but vividly recalls two chapters from his Class VIII and IX NCERT English textbooks. “One was ‘The Comet’ and the other was ‘The Adventure’ by Narlikar. That was my introduction to science fiction. I didn’t know who he was, but he was an amazing writer. I was fascinated by the concept of a parallel universe in The Adventure. Now, I read everything I can about black holes, astrophysical discoveries, and life on Mars,” he said. Narlikar’s body will be kept at IUCAA from 11.15am till noon Wednesday before the final journey to Pune’s Vaikunth crematorium.
Details
Vithal C Nadkarni, May 21, 2025: The Times of India
Stellar cosmologist Jayant Narlikar’s passing at 86 on Tuesday, peacefully and in sleep, is reminiscent of the gift of death at will, or the “ichha-mrityu” that grandsire Bhishma supposedly had in the Mahabharata. And speaking of grandsires, the demise of this much-decorated and beloved doyen of Indian astrophysicists coincides with the departures of larger-than-life grey eminences M R Srinivasan, venerated “architect” of India’s atomic power programme, and Saroj Ghose, the much-admired “father of the science museums movement” in India.
A man of exemplary personal grace and modesty, Narlikar epitomised what the American adage of “walk softly but carry a big stick” advocates. And what a shtick he wielded. Barely in his twenties, had he not the intellectual audacity to challenge the scientific theories, if not shibboleths, advanced by mages of the calibre of Albert Einstein and (posthumously) Ernst Mach and Kurt Godell? The Hoyle-Narlikar Theory of Gravity challenged the more popular Big Bang Theory of the birth of the universe, ostensibly fromnothingness.
Rather than sudden inflation, Narlikar and his mentor envisioned a steady expansion as an alternative model of cosmic genesis. Of course, in the true spirit of science, evidence “background radiation” garnered later put more bucks on the Big Bang than on Slow Pulse (prompting Prof Hoyle to recite a line to The Times of India during a long interview: “Theories that come roaring like lions also, alas, retreat bleating like lambs!”)
Like our early science stalwarts C V Raman, Homi Bhabha and Meghnad Saha, Narlikar was brilliant at public outreach and pedagogy. And the centre he set up for inter-universities research in Pune did win him a Unesco Kalinga Award.
When he won the Sahitya Akademi Prize for his Marathi autobiography Narlikar spoke out against kite-flying —flights of fancy and fashionable claims being made on behalf of “ancient” Indian science these days. These included make-in-India vimanas and astras used by gods, demons and heroes for settling local landdisputes.
To separate such claims from science fiction — a genre in which Narlikar had also made a mark just as his mentor Fred Hoyle did — pure science demands stronger proof, or Pramana. The latter also happens to be the title of the India-born research journal on physics and maths, an arena in which Narlikar excelled winning a Wrangler at Cambridge (with a mathematical Tripos), just as Narlikar’s father had done.
By claiming credit for things about which we have no evidence or proof, Narlikar warned we run the risk of reducing the credibility of what our scientists did achieve in the past.
Conversely, in his book Scientific Edge, Narlikar exhorts our science buffs and aficionados to boast about epic inventions of our ancestors, such as the concept of zero that completely revolutionised mathematics globally.
In his fireside chats about the story of “Zero as a Hero”, Narlikar also used to highlight a “publish or perish” (aka ‘publicise or perish’ for scribes) moral for wannabe scientists. For the longest time, he emphasised, Arabs got exclusive credit for what are now rightfully called “Hindu” numerals.
The polymath also used to extol the ancient roots of scepticism in India, not perhaps of the kind of journalism practised by Skeptical Inquirer today but that of the Rig Veda, the oldest recorded Sanskrit poem in the world, which contains the priceless Nasadiya Sukta, an epiphany that dares to question the very existence of gods while raising cosmological questions of such profundity as would gladden moderns seers such as Guth, Hawking and Penrose.
Hoyle–Narlikar theory of gravity
May 20, 2025: The Indian Express
Astrophysicist Jayant Narlikar Theory Gravity was an eminent Indian astrophysicist, science communicator, and Padma Vibhushan awardee.
He was best known for propounding the Hoyle–Narlikar theory of gravity (also known as conformal gravity), which he developed with English astronomer and professor Fred Hoyle in 1964. The theory sought to improve on Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, published in 1915. Here is a look at the Hoyle–Narlikar theory of gravity.
Link to Mach’s principle
At the heart of the Hoyle–Narlikar theory of gravity is the Mach’s principle, which says that the mass of every object in the universe is affected by its interaction with every other object. Einstein was greatly inspired by the principle, but could not incorporate it into his theory.
Hoyle and Narlikar took Mach’s principle more literally and claimed to have successfully included it in their theory. They said that the inertia of an object, that is the tendency to resist change in its state of motion, arises from its interaction with all other matter in the universe.
“As Hoyle and Narlikar see it, a universe with nothing in it is impossible. There must be at least two particles, each to give mass to the other. The masses, and therefore the gravity, of the sun and the earth are partly due to each other, partly to more distant objects such as the stars and galaxies,” according to a report in Time Magazine.
Concept of C-field
The Hoyle–Narlikar theory of gravity also proposed a “creation field” (C-field), a hypothetical negative-energy field responsible for the continuous creation of matter. This helped explain the steady-state cosmology, which said that the universe had no beginning and will endure forever.
The steady-state concept of the universe is essentially an alternative to “Big-Bang” cosmology, which proposed that the universe originated 13 billion years ago with an expansion and has been expanding ever since. Hoyle and Narlikar said that if the universe were this old and always expanding, we would not see anything in the sky.
“Hence, Dr Hoyle and other proponents of a steady‐state situation have proposed that hydrogen atoms are continually being created in space to fill the void resulting from such expansion. It is to account for this that Dr Hoyle has proposed the existence of an unseen force, or C-field. When this field becomes strong enough, at any point in space, a new hydrogen atom appears,” according to a report in The New York Times.
Challenges to the Hoyle–Narlikar theory of gravity The Hoyle–Narlikar theory of gravity was not widely accepted, especially after the discovery of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation in 1965. CMB — considered as an echo or shockwave of the Big Bang — is the cooled remnant of the first light that could travel freely throughout the universe.
However, the theory continues to draw attention for its attempt to integrate Mach’s principle in cosmology.
The steady-state theory of the universe
Amitabh Sinha , Alind Chauhan, May 21, 2025: The Indian Express
Professor Jayant Narlikar was one of India’s most prominent scientists. An astrophysicist, Narlikar is best known for his work on an alternative model of the universe, separate from the Big Bang, in collaboration with his PhD guide Fred Hoyle, one of the leading figures of 20th-century astrophysics.
The Hoyle-Narlikar theory produced evidence to support what is known as the steady-state theory of the universe. Unlike the Big Bang theory that suggests a definite beginning, and possibly an end, to the universe, the steady-state theory maintains that the universe has always been, and would continue to be, the way it is — infinite in extent, without a beginning or an end. It acknowledged an expanding universe, which was experimentally verifiable, but proposed that the universe was able to maintain a constant density by continuously creating new matter.
The steady-state theory, mainstream in the 1950s and the 1960s, has become less popular over time, mainly because of the emergence of new evidence that better supports the Big Bang theory.
Narlikar’s contribution
Born in 1938 in Kolhapur, Maharashtra, Narlikar was a young PhD student at Cambridge University in the early 1960s, when he produced a series of influential works in cosmology. He did so under the guidance of Hoyle, who had come up with the steady-state theory of the universe in collaboration with Hermann Bondi and Thomas Gold.
Incidentally, Hoyle is also the one who coined the term ‘Big Bang’, referring to that theory in a rather dismissive manner in a radio interview in 1948.
Narlikar entered the picture at a time when fresh experimental data produced by radio astronomer Martin Ryle, at the Cambridge University’s Cavendish Laboratory, seemed to support the Big Bang theory, and provided new energy to the debate. Narlikar and Hoyle used some of Ryle’s own data to show that Ryle’s results were limited, and not conclusive evidence of the Big Bang theory.
The two developed their work further, and produced their famous Hoyle-Narlikar theory that promised to alter several other established theories, including gravity. Their main motivation for an alternative theory seemed to stem from a few major shortcomings of the Big Bang theory that continue to puzzle scientists even today. The Big Bang theory says the universe came into being in one single instant about 13.8 billion years ago. All matter and energy in the universe were created in that single instant, and all subsequent events are only transformations of this pre-existing matter and energy.
The Big Bang theory is unable to explain, even today, where the matter and energy produced in that instant came from, or what happened before that. That sudden creation of the universe out of nothing has been an uncomfortable issue for a lot of scientists.
Hoyle and Narlikar instead worked to explain the steady-state theory. One of their key ideas in their hypotheses was the constant creation of new matter in the universe. This was important for the model of the universe that they proposed.
In building this model, they also sought to modify Einstein’s general relativity. In general relativity, gravity arises out of local curvature of spacetime caused by heavy objects. Hoyle and Narlikar proposed that gravity at any location in the universe could also be affected by far-away objects. In a way, all the matter everywhere in the universe contributes to gravity at any given place.
In an expanding universe, the distribution of matter in the universe would change, and that would affect gravity at any given location. To keep gravity unchanged, Hoyle and Narlikar had to introduce the idea of constant creation of matter.
In his autobiography, My Tale of Four Cities, Narlikar himself explains how the universe can be seen as expanding steadily, while maintaining a constant density.
“To understand this concept better, think of capital invested in a bank which offers a fixed rate of compound interest. That is, the interest accrued is constantly added to the capital, which therefore grows too, along with the interest. The universe expands like the capital with compound interest. However, as the name ‘steady state’ implies, the universe always presents the same appearance to any observer. Such an observer, for example, can measure the density of the universe from time to time. He or she should find the universe to have the same density at all times. How is this possible, when we know that anything that expands becomes diluted and less and less dense? To answer this question, Bondi, Gold and Hoyle had to conclude that there is new matter created to make up for the diminishing density of existing matter,” Narlikar wrote.
That was the reason why the steady-state theory proposed that the density of matter in the universe was constant. “It was the same, say a few billion years ago, as it is now, and as it will be a few billion years in the future. In this respect, the theory differed from its rival, the big bang theory which assumed that the entire universe that we see today came into existence in one go, through a primordial explosive creation event,” Narlikar wrote.
His major contribution was in modifying Einstein’s general relativity equations in a way that was consistent with the creation of new matter in the universe.
Decline of the theory
Despite the elegant mathematics that Narlikar had produced, the steady-state theory slowly lost out, with the emergence of new observations that fit the Big Bang model better. One of the most prominent discoveries in this regard was that of cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation in 1965.
Discovered accidentally, CMB refers to the microwave radiation that fills the universe and is considered to be remnants of the Big Bang event. The Big Bang theory predicts the existence of this kind of background radiation. It also proposes that this radiation would have a uniform temperature everywhere. The accidentally discovered CMB has properties that are well aligned with the predictions.
Some other observations made later, including evidence to show that galaxies evolve, and that distant galaxies are younger and more chaotic, and some of the work of Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose on singularities, piled more evidence in support of the Big Bang theory. They also challenged the steady-state theory.
Narlikar and Hoyle tried to address some of these challenges, but by the 1980s, Big Bang theory had emerged as the dominant explanation for the origin of the universe.
Narlikar, while acknowledging the growing evidence in favour of the Big Bang, maintained that the evidence was still not unambiguous, and was based on several unproven assumptions that were open for challenge. He considered himself amongst the minority that believed that sufficient evidence existed to re-examine the situation.
Although their big ideas have largely become out of fashion now, the work of Narlikar and Hoyle has not been discarded. The underlying mathematics was based on very sound foundations, and many of the frameworks and methods developed by them continue to be useful in different situations.
