‘Little Science, More Circus,’ Nobel Laureate on Science Congress

Nobel laureate scientist calls Indian Science Congress a “circus” where “very little science was discussed.”

File image of Venkatraman Ramakrishnan receiving the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry from Sweden’s King Carl XVI Gustaf. (Photo: Reuters)

Indian-born Nobel laureate Venkatraman Ramakrishnan has called the ongoing Indian Science Congress a “circus” where “very little science was discussed.”

Ramakrishnan, awarded the Nobel for Chemistry in 2009, spoke with the Times of India about why he wasn’t attending the Science Congress in Mysuru,

<p>I attended one day (of an earlier Congress) and very little science was discussed. It was a circus. I find that it’s an organisation where very little science is discussed. I will never attend a science congress again in my life.</p>

Showing scepticism towards some of the topics discussed at the Science Congress, Ramakrishnan said,

<p>The idea that Indians had airplanes 2,000 years ago sounds almost essentially impossible to me. I don’t believe it. The point is that if that technology was produced in a method so described that anybody could replicate it, then it becomes science.</p>

The 103rd Indian Science Congress kicked off in Mysuru on Sunday.

The annual five-day Congress returned to Karnataka after a 13-year hiatus. The decked up City of Palaces hosted the event after a gap of 34 years at a time when the University of Mysore is celebrating its centenary. The Congress, with the focal theme Science and Technology for Indigenous Development in India, is being addressed by over 500 scientists and experts.

In 2015, the Congress courted controversy after a NASA scientist launched an online petition demanding that a scheduled lecture on ‘Ancient Indian Aviation Technology’ be cancelled as it brings into question the “integrity of the scientific process”. The petition received over 220 signatures from scientists and academicians across the world.

The lecture involved a claim that eight years before the Wright Brothers’ historic first flight at Kitty Hawk in US, a couple, “Shivkar Bapuji Talpade and his wife gave a thrilling demonstration flight on the Chowpatty beach in Mumbai”.

An exhibitor, Kiran Naik, claimed there were “helmets on Mars” from an ancient war of kings from Earth. Naik also noted that heated sugar could have been used in the plastic surgery to affix Ganesha’s elephant head to his human torso.