To get confidence in present one sometimes looks for solid rocks in the past to get a place to put a foot on. There should have been enough foot steps to follow in a history that is more than 135 years long. Sadly there are not many. The situation is only slightly better at the national level. In fact late Professor Babu Lal Saraf (1923-2009), like many others, once asked with lots of pain as to the number of technical terms that have been introduced by us into Physics-his specialization. Question is much more acute in the context of Aligarh Movement.
Professor Piara Singh Gill (Wikipedia, Current Science Obituary, The Hindu Obituary) is one name where one gets some glimpse of those things that could be heart warming. Here we have a man, who expired nearly a decade back in the US, who could at least talk of some stalwarts of Physics as personal friends. We see that in his autobiography Up Against Odds ( googlebooks, amazon). Out of the four customer reviewers at Amazon at least one of them calls his a Nobel level physicist.
He headed our Physics Department from 1949 to 1963.
Professor Piara Singh Gill (Wikipedia, Current Science Obituary, The Hindu Obituary) is one name where one gets some glimpse of those things that could be heart warming. Here we have a man, who expired nearly a decade back in the US, who could at least talk of some stalwarts of Physics as personal friends. We see that in his autobiography Up Against Odds ( googlebooks, amazon). Out of the four customer reviewers at Amazon at least one of them calls his a Nobel level physicist.
He headed our Physics Department from 1949 to 1963.