Prof. Pradeep Sarin
Professor Pradeep Sarin caption
1. What has been your favourite research project/undertaking until now?
It’s hard to pick a favorite. There are many interesting projects I have worked on – the short ones with UG interns/BTP/MTP have been especially fun. I recently did a project with a Dual Degree student (Pradumn Kumar – class of 2021) that was particularly satisfying. The aim was to measure the radiation pressure of light from a laser source. The project meandered all over the place. It started off as a BTP in his fourth year (2019-20) with a technique that we found along the way was completely infeasible. For MTech Project(2020-21), we came up with a clever scheme using common electronics components generally in stock in the electronics lab – during the lockdown it was impossible to get parts. We managed measuring a force ��(nN) in an open air setup. These short projects with a few people working together in the lab are the most memorable – big collaborations tend to drag on and one can only make small incremental contributions. The above BTP+MTP project was just Pradumn and me working together – which was a lot of fun. Though Pradumn has gone off to work on Machine Learning for Jaguar-Landrover (he needed a job to pay off his student loans!), I am writing up the results for publication. Hope to make a permanent display of the experiment. This general idea has been in my mind for a while. There are many simple, elegant experiments one can do and put on display in department common areas like the library.
2. As an experimentalist, what is your opinion on the current state of experimental research in India, and how do you think it will develop by the end of this decade?
Context: Experimental research is hard in general. No matter whether you are working in US/Europe/Japan. In India it is made particular harder by the culture of imprecision. Everything works on ‘jugaad’ basis. Broadly speaking ‘experimental research’ spans beyond the domain of pure physics experiments. It is embedded in society and in daily life. So a carpenter building a chair also counts as ‘experimental work’(I do a lot of carpentry as a hobby). To my mind, thinking about a clever chair design, doing the calculations to work out whether it will support weight stably, and be useful + elegant = theoretical research. Actually building it = experimental work. If you have ever seen a carpenter working at home, they seem to be programmed to make imprecise cuts and then spend a lot of time sanding it down so it fits. I once had an argument with a carpenter to find out why: turns out they are paid by the hour to work. So if they do the work precisely and quickly, they will get paid less.
Status: This attitude unfortunately translates into other professional work too, including physics research*. It is virtually impossible, for example to buy a dozen matching M8 bolts and nuts in the Indian market to assemble a high precision mechanical assembly. Every bolt will have a slight mismatch in the threading which causes misalignment… So when we order something from abroad, we make sure the vendor includes lots of extra bolts and nuts. The same goes for cables, electronics – pretty much all the high precision things you need to do research experiments.
Future: Over the last couple of decades and hopefully in the coming times, the Indian government has been pouring a lot of money into basic research. In my personal opinion a lot of it is misdirected into working on imported problems with imported research techniques using imported equipment. There are very few exceptions – ISRO** being an outstanding example, though their budget has not dramatically increased to keep pace with inflation. There are other very important physics and technology problems which are not as glamorous as, for example, the Higgs boson or Gravitational Waves – but if solved can have a dramatic impact on human society (not just India, but the world) [*] There are some exceptions, typically in cases where the people concerned start with the intention of (re)inventing the wheel to perform an experiment using locally available things. An example dating back to the 1980’s is Prof. Dharmadhikari from Pune University whose work on AFM was documented in a recent book by Prof. Pankaj Sekhsaria (IIT-B, CTARA) [**] ISRO has a sub-division that makes their own bolts and other sundry hardware to assemble rockets – you can’t have loose bolts flying off in a rocket launch
3. How do you balance your time thinking about technical experimental questions and the physics behind an experiment you are performing? Have you ever felt the need to skip on learning the science behind an experiment to get an experimental result in time?
The balance between the technical and ‘physics’ aspects of experiments is implicit, or at least should be. It is only in the last few decades that the dichotomy between ‘theoretical’ and ‘experimental’ physics has become explicit. This was brought on primarily by the advent of mega-projects like the LHC at CERN. Experiments at the LHC have become so vast and labyrinthine that a typical PhD student working on (for example) CMS may complete their entire thesis in ‘experimental’ particle physics by analyzing the data, without ever having even seen the experiment. Unfortunately, we are producing a generation of ‘experimental’ particle physicists who have no clue how to do experiments. This does not bode well for experimental particle physics in the future. Actually thinking back a little further into the development of physics post WW-2, the wedge between theory and experiment was driven by societal concerns in the west – specifically the US, where most research thrived after Europe had been bombed out in the War. Essentially Americans have always been a pragmatic lot, but in the Cold War era they became fanatically pragmatic – ‘it doesn’t matter if you can solve the complex math – can you land a man on the moon?’ or ‘it doesn’t matter how you interpret the equations of quantum mechanics, can you build a bigger nuclear bomb?’ In a big picture sense, the span of human understanding of the world around us (i.e. physics) has grown exponentially since the last ‘scientific revolution’ of quantum mechanics in the early 1900’s. Apart from engineering developments leading into the industrial revolution 1750’s – 1850’s, fundamental science was much simpler earlier. The first definitive textbook on experimental physics written in 1786* covered astronomy, geology, zoology, medicine and botany in a slim 250 pages. In this sense physics is often called the ‘mother of all sciences’. LIGO looks big, but I wouldn’t classify it as a mega project. From a pure theory perspective, gravity waves are simply predicted – with the known constants, the expected magnitude of spacetime perturbations is so small that Einstein dismissed them as a mathematical curiosity impossible to be ever observable. It took about a 100 years of technology development and some very clever electronics ideas to reach that level of precision measurement. In the years that I worked as a postdoc on LIGO, at any given time there were only 5 – 10 who understood the entire experiment. This was true since the time of its genesis in the 1980’s as a brain-child of Prof. Rai Weiss at MIT. There was a rolling stock of about 10 key people involved in the experiment who understood it fully. Most of them were Rai’s PhD students, or his students’ students. There were a lot of professional engineers to support their work. Similarly, Prof. Takaki Kajita (U. Tokyo) Nobel Prize winner for neutrino oscillations built the Kamiokande experiment literally with about 4 graduate students and a few helpful engineers. There are pictures of him floating in a raft inside the Kamiokande mine-shaft inspecting the photo tube detectors to check the connections as the tank was filled with pure water (neutrinos interacting with the water release Cerenkov radiation which is picked up by the photo tubes). Most of the mentors I was lucky to have did not think of themselves as ‘experimental/theoretical’ physicists: they were simply physicists. I shared an office with Rai Weiss as a postdoc – Rai worked out all the math for detecting gravity waves in LIGO including all the potential noise sources and technical details in the first department newsletter he wrote about it back in 1972: https://dcc.ligo.org/public/0038/P720002/001/P720002-00.pdf Everybody in LIGO has basically spent the next 40+ years working out the implementation details of that short 24-page note. Some of the experimental techniques required did not even exist at the time of its writing. One example is the Pound-Drever-Hall laser frequency locking (unfortunately the eponymous Ronald Drever passed away the year before the Nobel Prize was awarded – he was at least as deserving of the Prize as the other awardees).
- Antonio Genovesi (1786) Elementi di Fisica Sperimentale
4. If not a researcher, what other career option would you have picked?
The answer to this is perhaps framed by elimination. I knew very early on that I was not cut out for a 9- to-5 job: either a desk job pushing papers or making money for someone else or even doing engineering tasks as per someone else’s specifications. In my mind, to ‘research’ (verb) is to ‘find something out’ for yourself. You have an idea; you try to work it out with pen and paper or by building something (ideally both). There a couple of good books on this theme I can recommend: ‘The Joy of Insight’ by Victor Weisskopf and ‘The pleasure of finding things out’ by Richard Feynman. The first is more profound, the latter is well, by Feynman.
5. What was it like to collaborate on a project at CERN? That too, on a project related to something as seminal as the Higgs Boson?
I was formally associated with the CMS experiment at CERN for a few years (hence it’s mention on my webpage). Several of my PhD students, postdocs and UG (BTP, MSc etc) students worked on aspects of CMS data. But as explained above, experimental physics is about a lot more than data analysis. With such mammoth collaborations, it is very difficult to have a meaningful impact on the experiment itself. We did manage to do quite a bit of R&D on detector development in particle physics working one-on-one with some CERN physicists – an R&D program that continues in interesting diverse directions now that I have formally gotten out of CMS (my webpage has been updated!) The idea of LHC was germinated in ~ 1982. CMS was birthed around 1999. I joined formally in ~ 2014. So, quite late in the game. Ironically, I left LIGO before gravity waves were discovered, and joined CMS after the Higgs boson was discovered. My real work in experimental particle physics was while doing my PhD at MIT. I worked on the PHOBOS experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) in Brookhaven Lab. This was a great formative experience when experiments were still done on a small scale. We were a group of about 40 people total: ~ 15 from MIT, ~ 15 engineering support staff from Brookhaven Lab and about 10 others from UIC and UMCP. We designed, built and operated the experiment between ~1995 and 2004 (I was involved 1997 – 2003). We built the whole thing in our lab at MIT. Put it in the back of a big van and drove it down to Brookhaven Lab. Then we spent 6-8 months setting it up at the accelerator. We took about a year’s worth of data that produced the main physics results for my PhD. It was a complete package experience. Due to the scale of LHC experiments, students rarely get the same experience. They mostly do data analysis, often get bored and then transfer their skills over to a high-pay data analytics job. If you are truly passionate about ‘finding things out’ about particle physics you have to look elsewhere at smaller experiments. Like the COMET experiment I am working on now in Japan (and there are a few other cool ones in the US too).
The participants seem very interested in your time at MIT
6. Can you share your car tinkering adventures during your time as a student?
The tinkering with cars happened by chance. One of my close friends had an antique BMW (1979 320i). Somebody played a prank and cut the fuel line in it. So we had to get underneath to see what was wrong and fix it. We didn’t have money to take it to a mechanic. But we had all the required tools in the lab. In those days old cars (especially BMW’s) came with complete mechanics’ service manuals – they used to be called ‘Gray book’s – provided to the company’s service center but also available generally. So we fixed it. Then someone put up another used 1983 633csi for sale so I bought it when I moved from Cambridge to Long Island (Brookhaven Lab) and needed a car for a couple of years. That died in a fire caused by the air-conditioner. Later when I had a fatter pay-check as a postdoc (and less free time), I bought a spiffier 1984 M635csi that didn’t need too much work. This is the car pictured on my webpage. I left it with my friend in Ohio when I moved back to India, who still drives it. Earlier my UG days at IIT Bombay (1993-1997) appear as a dim haze… It was mostly a dogged slog through classes. Our curriculum was a lot more rigid (no electivies!). There were only 11 students in m class. So there were problem sets for every class every week. Usually Thursday nights were spent frantically trying to crack problem sets for all the classes (typically due on Friday’s). The campus was a lot less equipped with tinkering infrastructure than it is now. There was just one common use ‘supercomputer’ on campus whose computing capacity was about the same as a high end new PC. I was the only one in my hostel who had a desktop PC (an ancient hand-me-down from a foreign returned relative). 256MB RAM! A whole GB of hard disk! Nevertheless, there was always a queue outside my hostel door of people waiting their turn to write up their project reports… We did a lot of low-level systems programming and some of the guys went to work for Google before it became a verb.
7. When, during your undergraduate, did you start to incline towards a particular research area? In those days, going abroad for a summer internship as an undergrad was unimaginable.
In 3rd year I did a computational project on cellular automata with Prof. S. S. Manna (an idea that we reprised recently in a paper on epidemiology during the lockdown) https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0021113 In the summer between 3rd and 4th year was the only time we formally did an external project as part of our curriculum – it was called ‘Practical Training’ with PP/NP grade. The engineering department students went to some industry. I spent the summer at the Variable Energy Cyclotron Center in Calcutta. I landed the position because I had done well in the electronics lab in 3rd year taught by Prof. Raghava Varma, and they needed someone who liked lab work. I worked on the design simulation and construction of a gaseous particle detector. That work spilled over into my BTP in my 4 th year – Prof Raghava Varma was my guide. Apart from continuing as much work on the VECC detector remotely as possible, we did some work on neural networks for particle physics data analysis. Between these two theory/computation and one hands-on experiment project I found that I liked the latter much more. This is the most important point of research at the undergraduate level – more in the ‘advice’ section below)
8. Can you share the best moments of your time at MIT?
Life as an undergraduate at IIT-Bombay (or any young person in any college for that matter) was my first taste of independent ‘adulthood’. It’s the first time you’re out of home on your own. You get to choose and make your own friends – not the ones who happen to be your playmates at home since childhood or neighbourhood mates on the same bus route to school etc. Those first friendships at IIT last through the rest of your life. I am still in touch with many of my Hostel-2 friends from back then – every year on alumni day (Dec 26) there’s a raucous union of everybody who can make it to campus. As you grow older it becomes harder to make friends. You have formed your own character with likes and dislikes and get lucky if you happen to meet someone who overlaps. My closest friend is an American – the BMW guy mentioned above. We chat every weekend though we’re able to meet only every couple of years if we happen to be in the same city for a conference somewhere in the world. Both of us tended to look beyond the surface of things and try to see ‘what’s inside’. We also like old things (eg antique cars, antique vacuum tube radios/audio equipment which we rebuilt to high audiophile quality). Being American he had had access to a lot more things than I did growing up in India. He had actually been to a Pink Floyd concert! That was the time we got into coffee, after picking up a broken high-end Italian espresso machine which we fixed up. We ended up sharing an apartment with a couple of other like-minded guys. We did a lot of photography: go out trekking to random places in the countryside. Take real photos with real cameras and film. At MIT we had a photo club and darkroom where we could develop the film and make large format prints using interesting chemicals (look up: cyanotype, kallitype etc) I remember the club got together and once made a 40ft long mural with cyanotype. Printing a cyanotype picture requires UV exposure. So we picked a sunny day and simply unrolled the 20ft long roll of exposed fabric down the side of the building. Coming from a background where you had an interest in finding things out but did not have access to much of anything, being in America (especially a place like MIT where you have access to pretty much anything you can think of) you can really bloom. Probably the best part of being in Cambridge for about 13 years (as a PhD student and then a postdoc) was the variety of people I got to know from all around the world. Chronologically as I think back – (I have forgotten many): My first flatmates when I landed at MIT in a dorm (equivalent to our H15-16, except much nicer 3-BHK shared flats) were (a) a much older Greek guy who frequently brought home his supermodel girlfriend and (b) a Korean guy who didn’t speak much English, but boiled live lobsters in the kitchen sink (that’s how you cook them). My office mate was a thoroughbred American from Wisconsin who mostly ate pizza and smelly ground beef. My other officemates were (a) a Dutch guy who is the most physically fit person I have ever met – his idea of a fun weekend to go run+swim+cycle in a 100km Ironman race and (b) a girl who was a relative of the queen of Spain. In our group we had an undergrad intern who was a child prodigy. He had come from Germany, finished his UG studies by 12 and joined us a grad student at 14. All the grad students mingled freely with the faculty. There was a common conference room where we often brought our lunchboxes and ate together. We used to have lunch with Jerome Friedman, Henry Kendall (a super-fit guy who sadly passed away in a freak diving accident). Jeff Goldstone (of the eponymous boson) and Frank Wilczek joined sometimes. My thesis advisor Bolek Wyslouch didn’t actually have an undergrad degree – he was Polish. He had come to the US as a UG intern when the USSR invaded Poland and closed the Iron Curtain. He stayed and graduated with a PhD from MIT before joining as a faculty. My core experimental work was done alongside an Austrian postdoc Heinz Pernegger, who is now leading some of the cutting edge semiconductor R&D for future experiments at CERN. There were also a couple of old-timer American electronics+instrumentation engineers who had earlier worked on the invention of the radar during WWII and the invention of the transistor. Similarly, at Brookhaven Lab I worked with a couple of Russian engineers trained from JINR in Dubna (the USSR equivalent of CERN). I learnt most of my electronics instrumentation skills from these guys. Later when I joined LIGO as a postdoc, I worked alongside Prof. Nergis Mavalvala who was originally from Pakistan and had come to the US for her undergrad studies before joining MIT as a postdoc and then faculty. She was a crackshot experimental physicist (still is, now she is also the Dean of Science) We used to often work 20-hour days (though she had to also juggle caring for her newborn baby). Rana Adhikari was the hotshot grad student in LIGO back then, later postdoc and faculty at Caltech – Rana and Nergis were two of the 10 people I mentioned above who understood LIGO completely. I have mentioned Rai Weiss already – he’s the compleat physicist and my model of who I want to be when I get to be his age (~ 80 now). He had worked in pretty much every area of physics research one can think of: early cond-mat experiments on trapping cold atoms at MIT to make Bose-Einstein Condensates, to a somewhat hopeless idea of testing gravitational frame dragging by putting these atoms in a very-lowaltitude orbit (altitude = top of a long tube extending up to the roof of tallest building on campus)* LIGO just happened to be his last most ambitious idea which he ended up chasing for an extended time. There was another postdoc from Iceland whose brother was the drummer for the band Sigur Ros. There was a guy from Ireland (very Irish – most Irish are) and an Australian who never got used to the upsidedown weather patterns of North America (he eventually moved back to Australia). *As I was writing, I noticed in the current issue of Nature journal, an article was published setting a new world record for measuring time dilation between atomic clocks placed a mm apart at JILA: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-04349-7 I was also lucky to be in Cambridge with an interest in music and arts. I don’t play any instrument myself (yet), but developed a keen interest in Western classical music, jazz and world music over time. The New England Conservatory located across the river in Boston is the premier school of classical music where student concerts happen more or less every evening. For jazz there’s the Berklee college of Music, whose students earn tuition money playing in the jazz cafes around town. So on any given day if you’re bored with slogging in the lab all of previous night + day, you can simply bike down to one of the music concerts in town. Through a chain of coincidences, I got to know a few Indian classical music performers. My interest in Dhrupad deepened and I became a serious listener. Tinkering with audio electronics had always been a hobby (still is), so I rigged up a high fidelity recording setup and went on tour a few times with Pandit Uday Bhawalkar on his performance tours around the US making live binaural recordings. On weekends, you could pack your tent and sleeping bag and go out camping in the Berkshires (many Tolkien-like woods and campsites are just an hour’s drive away). That’s the other big difference to things in India. There are actually many nice places to go outdoors in the Bombay vicinity (within a 70-100km radius). But getting there will take you half a day even if you drive. So a weekend trip leaves you more tired after getting to spend just Saturday night in a supposedly quiet place which may often be overrun with a party-ing crowd.. I think IIT-Guwahati and IIT-Mandi are much better if you are an outdoors person.
9. Did you ever think you would be doing the work you are currently doing when you were an undergrad? Please tell us more about your undergrad exploits!
UG life at IIT-B was a lot more social and colourful those days. It doesn’t appear to be the same now. We are periodically asked to volunteer for squads of faculty that inspect the hostels late at night to make sure nothing untoward is happening. Whenever I have been, it’s not been a lively state of affairs in the hostels… People mostly stuck to their laptop/phone screens. Partly, it’s your digital generation and partly it’s the fault of the ‘modern’ hostel design (H12/13/15/16) There is hardly any common area for students to get together. In H-2, we hardly spent any time in the room. Most of the night was spent out in the corridor or the lawns chatting with wingmates. The hostel lounge (which still exists) had a nice loud music system gifted by an alumnus and well-stocked with records + CD’s we used to get from our seniors. This is where we got our first taste of ‘Western’ music. Both rock music – this was the age when Pink Floyd, Dire Straits, Led Zeppelin were our idols and our first introduction to Classical music – Beethoven, Bach et al. There were other fun communal activities that have petered out in the last decade or so. One was trivia quizzes. ‘Trivia’ sounds non-substantial, but this was at a much higher level than what you later got to know in TV shows like Kaun Banega Crorepati. We had some of the all-time great Quiz masters amongst us (for a flavour, you can look up the blog of Abraham Thomas (BTech. EP ~ 1999 http://coffeeshack.blogspot.com ) he has neglected updating it for a while now – because he has since retired (more-or-less) as a multi-millionaire. Context: you may have heard of the ‘tech boom’ in the early 2000’s also called the ‘dot-com-bubble’. Many of the people my age coming out of college around the late 1990’s rode the crest of that boom and were rich enough to effectively retire by ~ 2010 just around the time the dot-com bubble burst. Anyway, back to IITB fun, there were a lot of other extra-curricular activities to keep us engaged. There was something called the Institute ‘Treasure Hunt’ which was a night long event. Essentially clues were placed in absurd locations all around the campus. Each clue, when cracked gave you information on the location of the next clue… until you got to the final treasure. Imagine solving ‘trinity of the underworld dungeons where the wild beasts reside’ to crack ‘under the 3rd manhole cover leading out of the road opposite Hostel-2’ Reading – we read a lot of stuff outside our textbooks. The Central Library at IIT Bombay was and still is quite well stocked with good quality world literature. The Physics library focuses on Physics books. Though I have put one rack of my private collection in there – spillover books from the ones I can’t fit in my office or home (I have 2500+ books). I still make it a point to spend a pleasant post-lunch browsing session in the fiction/literature/design stacks in the Central library. This is partly out of sentimentality, but I’m often pleasantly surprised by some new book added to the collectin. It is a very pleasant, quiet place to hang out in the company of books. A few books I read in my formative years that I would recommend to people your age now: ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’ and ‘Identity’ by Milan Kundera. ‘Designing Design’ by Kenya Hara. And ‘Japan Style’ by Gian Carlo Calza. Also ‘The Golden Gate’ – Vikram Seth’s first published novel in verse. But his earlier ‘From Heaven Lake’ is much nicer. In recent years I have developed a strong affinity to Japanese culture (and science too – most of my active scientific collaborations are now in Japan). Junichiro Tanizaki’s ‘In praise of shadows’ and Kakuza Okakura’s ‘The Book of Tea’ will probably give you the as deep an insight into Japanese culture as living there. This library habit was amplified later at MIT. The MIT library has many sections devoted to literature (you can get a Bachelor’s degree from MIT in the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences – HASS). The MIT library is stocked with books from all around the world. It had 20ft tall French windows facing onto the Charles river and the Boston skyline. I remember spending one weekend reading straight through Carlos Feuentes’ ‘Terra Nostra’ in 48 hours with short breaks for meals. Then I found Jorge Luis Borges on Monday morning (stacked close to Feuntes in the library stack on Latin American fiction). The MIT library also had a huge audio/video section. You could borrow DVD’s and CD’s that you would normally not find anywhere else. Mind you there was no torrent back then and even copying DVD’s wasn’t so easy. I got to watch great cinema from around the world. Tarkovsky’s ‘Nostalghia’ has the greatest cinematic compositions ever captured on film. Satyajit Ray’s ‘Pather Panchali’ is pretty good too, but it is tied to a very particular context. Tarkovsky rises to universal human values (his autobiography ‘Sculpting in Time’ is pretty good). Ingmar Bergman’s ‘The Seventh Seal’ trilogy deals with humanity’s relationship with God, and Kurosawa is, well, Kurosawa.
10. What advice do you have for undergraduates wanting to do research?
1) Do lots and lots of research projects. You can potentially do a research project every semester from second year onwards. In our department, you a lucky that there are ~50 faculty working in diverse fields and ~60 students per class. So it’s almost a 1:1 ratio and you have plenty of chances to pick
2) How to approach faculty for research projects? If a topic interests you, read up all about it. Read all the papers published by that faculty (http://scholar.google.com will help you find the papers). Then go talk to them about how fascinating you find their work. It’s a little bit of a con-job… but if your genuine interest comes through, people are happy to hire undergrads for semester long research projects. Of course, if you’re taking a course with the faculty, show extra interest – come forward and bug them with lots of extra questions, ask for extra reading material.
3) Why does this matter? One project leads to another – it’s a stepping stone. If you do a good job with one person, they will be happy to keep you on for an extended period or give you a good recommendation when you approach the next one. These are informal recommendations. Some other faculty often stops me in the hallway and casually asks: Hey, this kid worked with you earlier, or took your class – now s/he has asked me for a project, is s/he good?
4) ABOVE ALL: In your UG research phase, you must find out whether you are a ‘doer’ or a ‘thinker’. Eventually, when you become a physicist, hopefully you will be involved in both theoretical and experimental work to some extent to be a ‘good’ physicist. But unfortunately due to the dichotomy mentioned above there is now a sharp divide as your career progresses. Some people have an aptitude for doing hands-on work in the lab. Others are good at sitting down with pen/paper and pulling out clever ideas by staring off into blank space. It is extremely important that you find out which category you belong to as early as possible. The subject area of your UG research doesn’t matter too much. In fact, you should try to explore as many areas as possible in the short 3 years you are here. These projects need not even just be in Physics. Our students often do projects in EE. Many cutting edge areas of Electronics require a deep understanding of Physics. If you are more inclined towards theoretical work, make sure you like math. Mathematics is the language of physics (and science generally), so to work out clever ideas you need to be able to communicate fluently in math. Projects in 1st year are unimaginable as you recover from the IITB shock (though the institute does run a mini-project program for students in the summer at the end of 1st year). So if you do projects in the remaining six semesters you will cover a lot of ground. Of course you will have to hone your time management skills, since these will be alongside your regular course work.
11. Do you have any pointers for students doing their graduate studies?
The easiest thing for me to do is point you to Matt Might’s illustrated guide to a PhD – he explains it really well: http://www.pkross.ca/phd/
12. How would you suggest undergraduate students choose their fields of research for higher studies? What level of background would you advise?
(a) Find out whether you like to do experimental work or theoretical work
(b) You do have to put in a target research group you would like to join in your graduate school application. You will choose the target group on the basis of the cluster of UG research projects you did and pick the subject area(s) you liked most
(c) The faculty who supervised those UG research projects will write you a letter of recommendation. You will need three letters – these will be formal, confidential letters, not the casual verbal opinion exampled above. So you better have at least three solid UG research projects under your belt by the time you apply to graduate school. 3 rd year SLP is just one, and in 4 th year you will have just started your BTP as you start putting together your graduate school applications in autumn. Many students manage to get an internship project abroad during the summer (after 4th sem or 6th sem) – those will provide opportunities to join the groups you interned with, or at least a letter of recommendation from your internship supervisor. Course projects don’t count for much in terms of recommendation letters.
13. What advice would you give to someone who is studying physics but doesn’t know what to do with life?
Many young people happen to be in such a situation. When your performance in primary/secondary school is good, you have a lot of parental pressure to join engineering / medicine ‘stream’ – regardless of whether you are actually interested in either. Getting into IIT is the top of the ladder so cracking JEE becomes a ‘do or die’ thing. Only after you get here the scales fall and you realize you’re in the soup… Anyway, IIT offers you plenty of time to find out what you really like. I have had fun interactions with many students when I was faculty advisor. There was one girl who would just sit and doodle in class and barely pass. Turns out she was really into poetry – that was her vocation (now she’s a published poet). There was another guy who kept falling behind into ARP, had depression and alcohol problems for a while. Then he took some courses in the Humanities Department on sociology and anthropology. Turns out he was really interested in problems of social (in)justice – now he’s a graduate student at Tata Institute of Social Sciences – he’s done some very good work on the pan-India labourers’ migration catastrophe during the pandemic. There was one guy who would have graduated ~ 2002. But he lost interest in his 3rd year, gave up and dropped out. He was making a (good) living teaching in some coaching class till he realized it was a dead end job 10 years later. He came back in 2015 to finish his degree – most of the courses he needed to do did not exist in the curriculum anymore. He appeared to be so passionate that we made some exceptions for him and allowed him to compensate with special advanced projects. Well, he completed his BTech with a spectacular BTP in the foundations of QM. He then joined TIFRICTS for a PhD in theoretical physics – he recently co-authored a book with Prof. Ramadevi on Group Theory! There was a guy who was really into dancing in the inter-hostel competitions; much more than in coursework. He dropped out and joined Cirque du Soleil (look up R. Samanth Vinil). Travelled all around the world with them. I saw him in the department sometime ago – he’d come back to finish his degree with remarkable maturity. He said ‘I’ll be young and flexible and able to dance for a while, then I have to have a real degree to get a job’ So the point is to not give up and ‘let things be’ – you have to actively take things up and try many things till you find out what it is you really want to do. Getting through the BTech degree is do-able even if you just scrape through with a low CPI. At the end of the day, it will at least get you a decent job (though that would be poor use of the four best years of your life).
14. How much do grades matter to be accepted into a good grad school like MIT, and what do you think was the selling point in your MIT application?
Grades matter to some extent, but are not the most important thing. It would be too ambitious to apply to MIT with a CPI of 4.x, but you don’t necessarily have to be a 9.9+ (I vaguely recall my CPI was 8.low-x) The single most important thing in your application is the letter(s) of recommendation. You go to graduate school to do research. The people hiring you want to find out what is your potential to do well in their lab from people you’ve worked with before. Other than that, a lot depends on timing and luck – your application landing at the right place at the right time when the person is looking for a graduate student matching your profile. I’d have to write a whole separate document to answer the question fully. I put up some tips on my facad page a while ago on what you can do to engineer things in your favour: https://homepages.iitb.ac.in/~pradeepsarin/notfacadanymore/fourth/index.html The bottomline is that it might seem like a daunting problem to you ‘how will I land a good scholarship’… But from the other side, faculty in universities are actually desperately looking for good students – they are the ones who will be doing most of the research work in the lab. It’s a matter of making the right connections.
15. What advice would you give to a student studying physics but they don’t want to pursue a career in physics? How do they make the best of their physics degree?
Answered partly above, I think. You learn deep analytical thinking skills in IIT, even if you did your courses only half-assedly. You do absorb the thinking culture almost by osmosis. So there’s a lot you can do as a thinking person. A few students have gone on stints for the ‘Teach for India’ campaign. Some have gone into entrepreneurship. Some have studied for IAS – some of the best bureaucrats in the country happen to be IIT alumni. Manohar Parriker (ex-CM of Goa) was an IITB alumnus. So also Nandan Nilekani (co-founder of Infosys, and later head of Aadhar development). Essentially, my point is that a product of the IIT system is a ‘thinking person’ by design and we need more thinking people taking an active role in society. One example is Ravi Chopra who founded the People’s Science Institute in Dehradun. We don’t particularly care where you are in the world. Some (now many) have gone into the finance world: Viral Acharya (deputy governor of RBI for a while, and based in New York) was AIR-1 and PGM of my batch. Victor Menezes (BTech EE, 1970) ex-CEO of Citibank group – it’s easy to pick out the stars. In my experience, there are others (perhaps a majority) who get into finance because they are very good at it in the beginning, but saturate very quickly. There was a star student from EP around ~ 2010. Class topper, Chief of Mood Indigo etc got a star startup package from some MNC in finance (about 5x more than my salary!) But he came back a year or so later to ask for recommendation letters to apply to graduate school. He said he had a flat in Nariman Point and drove a Mercedes but essentially had to work 24 x 7 to make money for his bosses in New York.
16. The past two years have had online labs, and as students, the difference has been massive. How is it different for you, and what challenges have you faced in this?
Organizing the logistics of getting the labkits out to the students was a big headache. We designed the kits so that we were still able to follow the same pedagogy – we teach you how to solve problems with the given tools after you’ve learnt how to use the tools properly. The point is that when you’re doing research (in the broadest sense of the term) nobody gives you the procedure to solve the problem. You sort of know the general idea and how to use the tools – but you have to develop the procedure yourself. This way you get an ‘ownership’ of the problem. It’s the only good way to solve a problem. Usually the procedures are not unique (not even the solution). I have had students come up with amazing tricks to solve problems that are close to publication worthy. Of course in the department teaching lab we have a lot more sophisticated tools than the scaled-down ones we were able to send you at home. So the problems were also scaled down accordingly. But we were able to cover most of the topics regardless. As far as I know, at least a couple of students are going to summer internships in quantum computing soon – they will need all their electronics chops to get to work on those experiments.
17. Sir, you teach extremely well. Is there any particular pedagogy you adhere to or is this a natural style of teaching?
The former statement doesn’t quite reflect in my course feedback score. I have answered the latter question above.
18. Describe the wildest party you’ve been to!
I don’t like loud environments and have trouble talking to too many people at once, (though I am happy to talk one-on-one at length, as the length of this document attests). So I generally don’t go to parties.
19. Which professor would you say is your best friend in the department? (Is it Pawar Sir?)
It gets harder to form friendships as you grow older. I do depend on Nitin Pawar for a lot of things – he and his assistants in the electronics lab are the ones who handle the day-to-day operations of the lab. I am generally friendly with other coffee loving folk in the department, and the ones who like opening up stuff to find out what’s inside.
20. What’s your favourite ice cream flavour!
I’m not so hot on ice cream. But the Anjeer ice cream from Natural’s is pretty good.
21. Do you have a dog?
Yes. Or rather the dog has us. Chini landed in our garden when she was about a week old, abandoned by her mother. There are lots of resident dogs on campus and they used to reproduce copiously. So it’s not uncommon for one of a litter to be dropped here or there (the mother dogs keep moving their litters here and there for safety). Anyway, Chini’s been in our house for 6 years now and basically she owns it. Many faculty and students have taken active roles in the welfare of dogs on campus. We have hired a person who goes around and feeds dogs every evening (everybody contributes towards the cost of the dog food). I’d say IIT campus is unique in that the stray dogs get Pedigree dog food every day. There’s even an email address dogs@iitb.ac.in and wildlife@iitb.ac.in where you can send in alerts if you find some dog or other animal in trouble. There’s a vet who comes to campus nearly every week to attend to issues. The campus community (students, faculty, staff and their families) consist of three types – those who are very dog friendly and actively take care of them, others who are mostly neutral and the third type who are very anti-dog. The sum of the first two far exceeds the third.
22. What is the Poomale Wilderness Collective? What do you think of the relationship between technology, capitalism and climate change, and are you worried about it?
That was an interesting idea by some well-meaning folks (mostly IIT-Madras alumni) so I got involved. They found a vast 150-acre abandoned coffee plantation abutting Nagarhole tiger reserve in Coorg, Karnataka. We decided to collectively purchase the land and keep it as a wilderness. I’m interested in coffee from first principles – not just drinking coffee. Coffee is essentially a wild plant. The coffee-cherry bearing trees grow only up to 8-10 feet. They need a canopy of shade (i.e. a forest) lots of water but not standing water, hence the sloping hill forests of Coorg where it rains year-round are ideal. Squirrels eat the cherries and the seeds (the coffee beans) germinate in their droppings on the forest floor. Harvesting coffee from an estate means going around picking the ripened cherries which are manually processed in different ways to get the dried seeds out (these are called ‘green’ beans) I buy green coffee beans. Roast them every weekend in small quantities and grind a few minutes before brewing the coffee. Having your own plantation meant going one step deeper into the chain. Start with processing at the cherry picking stage. Studying the cross-germination of coffee plants and seeing how it affects the final taste of coffee (i.e. coffee from 0th principles). For example, you can have a forest which happens to co-host wild fig or cocoa trees alongside coffee: the insects cross-pollinate and the coffee has subtle flavors of fig or cocoa. Just look at some of the jargon labels of one of the high end ‘specialty’ coffee vendors Blue Tokai: https://bluetokaicoffee.com/collections/coffee/products/attikan?variant=1086510128 So the Poomale collective seemed like a nice blend of wilderness preservation and a biology lab of coffee. Unfortunately, over the past year or two as more members joined the collective, views diverged and I have gotten out of it. Too many members wanted to put up their own houses around there. The original idea was to construct only a single 10-room common-use guesthouse in a corner of the land and leave the rest as untouched wilderness. Now it’s shaping up to be more like an ‘eco-sensitive’ housing development.
23. Your blog suggests that you seem to have a relationship with coffee, how has it changed over the years? Do you plan on writing another entry for your blog?
Answered above.