New Delhi: Three scientists walked into a pub at Hauz Khas. What followed was not a bar joke with a corny punchline, but a freewheeling conversation from dark matter and quantum mechanics to cosmic hiccups.
It marked the UK-based non-profit Pint of Science’s debut in India. True to its motto—Come meet, chat, have a drink and quench your thirst—the event was held at Fort City Brewing on 21 May. It was part of a three-day festival across Delhi’s pubs and eateries. Similar events were held in Bengaluru and Pune as part of the Pint of Science Festival.
“We live in two Indias,” said science communicator Kshitij Pandey, who was one of the speakers along with Anantharaman SV, a PhD scholar from Ashoka University, and Preksha Sethia, a Commonwealth Scholar from University College London. As many as 50 people sipped on their IPAs and munched on fries, tikkas, and dim sum as they listened to Pandey talk about how India sent Chandrayan-3 to the Moon in less than the money it took Christopoher Nolan to make Interstellar. “But we live in an India where we crack coconuts for successful rocket launches.”
For three hours until 9 pm, the audience engaged in a no-holds-barred discussion on science.
Pint of Science is an attempt to free science from the tyranny of labs and complicated research papers. It began in London a decade ago, when two scientists from Imperial College wanted people to know about their research on neurological conditions. Since then, the movement has spread across 500 cities in 27 countries from Croatia to Kenya, and is now finally in India.
The aim was to cultivate a scientific temperament without being intimidating. And it worked.
“Is there a nebula of gas somewhere which smells like beer?” asked someone from the audience. Nobody laughed. There was no stupid question.
The response has been great and tickets were sold out, said Vishaka Ranjan, the Delhi coordinator for Pint of Science. But it is only the beginning.
“Pint of Science will explore other cities across India. We already have an overwhelming interest from many other cities to present their research, ” said Debarati Chatterjee, associate professor at IUCAA and director of Pint of Science.
STEM charades
A game of charades between the talks helped break the ice and get everyone in the mood to have fun with science. People paired up in teams of two. One man had to act out ‘eclipse’. He used his fists to signify the Sun, Earth, and Moon to somehow convey the meaning. Fortunately for him, his frenzied hand movements made sense to his teammate—a science student—who guessed correctly. Another volunteer began spinning like a dervish to convey a ‘spinning galaxy’.
It was a perfect entry to Anantharaman SV’s talk on ‘The Mysterious Glitches of Spinning Stars’ where he took the audience back to 1967. That was the year when Ravi Shankar debuted at a world stage in Monterey International Pop Festival, said Anantharaman. It was also the year when The Beatles released their iconic album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and India was fighting a war at the Chinese border. And it was the year when Jocelyn Bell Burnell at Cambridge University made an important discovery.
“The peculiar observation Bell Burnell found was a ‘radio pulsar’ that led to a confirmation of a neutron star,” Anantharaman said. But she was not recognised for it, even though her supervisor Anthony Hewish shared the award with astrophysicist Martin Ryle.
Another game of charades followed this talk, and then Preksha Sethia stepped up in front of the projector to talk about ‘Cosmic Clues: What Stars Tell Us about Our Galaxy’. She painstakingly broke down her research to explain why astrophysicists like her are chasing stars with unusual chemical fingerprints.
“Stars are like masala dosa with a crispy outer layer and a spicy filling with a blend of spices. The crispy outer layer is the visible surface, the spicy filling is the hot core, and the blend of spices is the unique ‘recipe’ of elements inside,” Sethia said.
A star’s birth certificate, she added, reveals where in the galaxy it originated from. “Too much nitrogen tells us it was born somewhere near an inner galaxy. If it is iron rich, the star was born after lots of supernova.”
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Energy, light, timelines
Most of the attendees were students, mostly from IIT Delhi. After a day of scratching their heads to absorb lectures and turning in assignments, they decided to go to a pub for some beer—and some more science. While waiting for the event to begin, one student told his friend that the Rs 422 he paid for entry and a beer was a little too high.
But once it started, both of them jumped into it enthusiastically.
“What is dark energy? Where does it exist?” asked an audience member. He wanted to know if the actual universe is larger than the observed universe. And then the question everyone keeps asking: What does it all mean?
Pandey, who was giving a lecture on the link between dark matter and quantum worlds, stopped to answer this.
“The universe is expanding, and expanding at an accelerating speed. The accelerating speed at which it is expanding is, however, a problem. Where is this energy coming from? This invisible energy that we do not see is dark energy,” he said.
But his answer only opened the door for a slew of questions. Another audience member was puzzled by the timelines.
“If the Big Bang happened 13.8 billion years ago, then how come we can see things back as far as 46.1 billion light years ago?” he asked. According to Pandey, the expanding universe stretches the light as it travels greater distances.
“The longer light takes to travel, the more it gets stretched.”
For all the celebration and revelry in science, there was a poignant note to the event—the passing away of astrophysicist Jayant Narlikar. He was more than just a scientist and dedicated his life to science communication, from textbooks to short stories.
“Usually, people hold a two-minute moment of silence,” said Pandey. But this time, they raised a toast and Pandey clicked a group selfie with everyone to remember the “champion of science”.
Upasana Adhikari is an intern at ThePrint and an alumna of ThePrint School of Journalism.
(Edited by Prasanna Bachchhav)