Dr B. G. Siddharth
Profile: Director-General, B.M.Birla Science Centre, Adarshnagar, Hyderabad 500063 (India)
Email: birlard@ap.nic.in iiamisbgs@yahoo.co.in
Qualifications: B.Sc (Hons.), M.Sc.,Ph.D(1977-78), all from Calcutta University, one of India's three best Institutions. At present (Founder) Director-General, B.M. Birla Science Centres, Hyderabad & Jaipur, India. Founding Director of International Institute for Applicable Mathematics and Information Sciences, Hyderabad, Udine (Italy).
Elected Fellow of AP Academy of Sciences. Elected Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society 1985. Member of Board of Studies, Astronomy, Osmania University. Member, Academic Council, College of Science, Osmania University. Member, Board of Studies, Mathematics, Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University, Hyderabad. Consulting Member, International Astronomical Union, Commission 46. Honorary Member, Societa Indologica, "Luigi Pio Tessitori", Italy. Only Asian on the first ever Planetarium panel of the International Astronomical Union, USA, 1988. British Council Scholar 1988. One of the few professionals invited to contribute to UN study in this field. Contributor to the SUSY Encyclopedia.
Abstract:
Some two thousand years ago, people thought that the earth was flat and at the centre of the Universe. Slowly ideas evolved. First the stars and planets were fixed to transparent crystalline spheres which helped support them on top. Next these spheres would be rotating. Eventually the rotation patterns became more and more complex to explain what was seen.
Copernicus displaced the earth from the centre, some 500 years ago, while by early seventeenth century Kepler was forced to introduce elliptical orbits. This meant that the crystalline spheres had to be abandoned once for all. That paved the way for Newton to introduce his law of Gravitation. In his universe the sun surrounded by the revolving planets was at the centre, while the stars were very faraway. He recognized the sun to be a star too, which were the building blocks of the Universe.
More than two centuries later, Edwin Hubble realized that the true building blocks were Galaxies, which themselves contained thousands of millions of stars. Later in the twentieth century we learnt that the universe is expanding in an accelerated way due to what we call dark energy. Today we suspect that the building blocks of the Universe are Universes themselves!