National Science Day 2021

 How wonderful it is to have a national holiday dedicated to science.

I want to make a preemptive statement here that I have been on a visit to RRCAT twice before: once in 2016 and once in 2017. (That would put me in tenth and eleventh class respectively.) As a result, I already had an idea of what to expect from the webinar.

That being said, I feel that Science Day this year was at an advantage due to being virtual. It goes against intuition, I know. But I do have a justification for saying that.

A lot of the work that happens at RRCAT – which is also what puts it at the frontiers of research – is high-energy research, or even research that requires extreme environments. Even in an in-person visit, it would not have been possible to look at those experiments as closely as we would have liked. Thus, that is a parameter that remained largely unchanged over a virtual meet.

By virtue of having visited RRCAT before, I feel justified saying that in terms of the material that was presented, there are few things I can say that were really in the realm of “new information” for me. For the sake of completeness, I can add it here, but with the above preemptive statement in mind.

There were several video presentations on the Nd:YaG laser. Its applications appeared to be mainly medical: detection and eradication of cancer cells and such. In materials science, laser cutting and engraving seemed to be taking huge strides.

In terms of new information I gathered, there was talk of roughening a metal in such a manner that it became highly affinitive to a certain liquid. The example they used was water and how the hydrophilicity of the metal could find major use in ocean pollution mitigation. (The principle being that water could be separated from oil and thus oil spills could be cleaned up on the ocean effectively.) It is a strong example of how high-energy physics can find solutions to real world problems. This roughened material, in a month, would become phobic to the same liquid. As an example, a hydrophilic material will become hydrophobic in a month. That can also be used in a similar way to mitigate ocean pollution. (This was, in fact, a question that I had asked the panelists and had been answered.)

Other experiments were the Indus 1 and 2 particle accelerators. This actually highlights how the virtual mode was at an advantage. Even in an in-person visit to RRCAT, due to the high-energy nature of the accelerators, the best that could have been done was to show a video of that the accelerators actually did. That is exactly what happened in the virtual session as well.

And thus, I want to get to the new information that I learned. Among the applications of lasers is a technique that allows one to “see” air. Perturbations in the air are easily monitored, and this concept was used to reinforce the importance of wearing a mask in these pandemic times. It was enriching to see.

Also related to the pandemic were technological breakthroughs such as the Neel Bhasmi: an irradiation unit that looks like a fan whose arms are UV-c tube lights. This device is used to sanitize an environment (such as a hospital room). As a protective measure in observance of the fact that the radiation is quite harsh, the device also comes with motion detectors that stop the activity of the device if there is a human around. In a similar vein, lasers were also used to sanitize food and vaccine packets that are being dispatched all over Indore. This information made me very hopeful that the control and eventual eradication of the pandemic is now a fulfillable reality.

Liquid nitrogen experiments are perhaps my favorite part of RRCAT visits; hence I feel the need to add them here. (That’s it. That’s the only reason I want to include it here.) It’s no secret that materials behave differently at low temperatures. Thus, a series of experiments demonstrated freezing effect of liquid nitrogen, a ball that seemed to spin with almost no external force prompting it to do so, and the lowered resistance of a wire when dipped in liquid nitrogen.

The best part of the entire day is the amount of attention that was paid to interactions. This is a distinct advantage the virtual meet had over an in-person visit. There were somewhere between four hundred to five hundred participants in the virtual session. In real life, this type of number becomes a crowd where it’s close to impossible to give attention to every individual query and raised hand. However, the panelists were very accommodating of our questions and put in effort to answer every question very thoroughly. It is in fact my favorite thing about scientists: they encourage curiosity and no question is a “bad question” for them.

The entire afternoon session was dedicated to such interactions, and in these interactions, scientists became not just people who sit in a lab and stare at screens all day, but humans who just want to make the world a little more accessible to those around them. The afternoon session was less like a webinar and more like an extended conversation. The most notable thing that happened was a divergence from the topic of materials science towards astrophysics and really the very frontiers of research on a global level. One question leads to another question, and the divergence was entertained.

I find this notable because it’s very easy to dismiss a question just because “this isn’t our department” or “this isn’t the subject of this session.” However, it was stated from the beginning that this will be a purely interactive session. There was no mention of the “topic;” we just went with the flow. It was wonderful to be able to connect with the panelists in a very conversational manner. Again, in person this would not have been so successful with somewhere around one hundred participants all abuzz with questions that are pondered by even the greatest minds.

The real success of National Science Day 2021 was just the fact that science was able to connect the students to the masters regardless of location, of field of inquiry, or the fear that naturally accompanies being in the presence of experts in the field.

This writeup is also my submission to my university, Shri Vaishnav Vidyapeeth Vishwavidyalaya.