Homi J. Bhabha: the scientist who built institutions

The scientist

His family hoped he would become an engineer, and he went to Cambridge to study mechanical engineering. He finished it with first-class honours, and then followed his real love, theoretical physics.

In 1935 he worked out how an electron and a positron, its antimatter partner, scatter off each other. The process is still called Bhabha scattering, and electron–positron colliders around the world use it to count how many collisions they make. With Walter Heitler he explained how a single cosmic ray, striking the upper atmosphere, grows into a shower of millions of particles. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1941, at the age of 31.

For us at IMJIR this work feels close to home. One of our long-term goals is to hold electrons and positrons together in a trap and study how they interact: the same pair of particles a young Bhabha described on paper more than ninety years ago.

The institution builder

When the Second World War broke out in 1939, Bhabha was on holiday in India and could not return to Europe. He stayed, and joined the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru, where C. V. Raman made room for him to start cosmic-ray research. There he decided that India needed its own centres of first-rate science, built and run by Indians.

In 1944 he wrote to the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust asking for support to start a school of fundamental research. The letter is remembered for its foresight:

“When nuclear energy has been successfully applied for power production in, say, a couple of decades from now, India will not have to look abroad for its experts but will find them ready at hand.”Homi J. Bhabha, 1944

What followed in just over twenty years is remarkable:

• 1945The Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) begins, first at IISc in Bengaluru, then in Bombay.
• 1948He becomes the first chairman of India's Atomic Energy Commission.
• 1954The Department of Atomic Energy is formed with him as Secretary, and work starts on the Atomic Energy Establishment at Trombay, later renamed the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre.
• 1955He presides over the first United Nations conference on the peaceful uses of atomic energy, in Geneva.
• 1956Apsara, the first research reactor in Asia, starts up at Trombay.

He did not only start institutions; he shaped how they worked. He hired young people, trusted them with responsibility, and insisted on doing the hard things at home rather than buying them from abroad. He cared about how a laboratory looked and felt, too: a painter and a lover of music and architecture, he took a close interest in the design of the TIFR campus and its art collection.

Bhabha died on 24 January 1966, when Air India Flight 101 crashed on Mont Blanc. He was 56.

A true visionary

The rare thing about Bhabha is that he never stopped being a scientist while building institutions, and never let his own research make him forget the institutions. He understood that one good laboratory can train the people who build ten more.

IMJ Institute of Research is a very small laboratory in a village in coastal Karnataka. Our electron–positron work is carried out in strong collaboration with VECC, Kolkata, a unit of the Department of Atomic Energy that Bhabha founded, and our quantum work is supported by the Quantum Research Park at IISc, where his own Indian career began. We are building our ion trap and our lasers here, rather than waiting for them to arrive from elsewhere. That habit is part of Bhabha's legacy, and we are grateful for it.

Happy birthday, Dr. Bhabha.