It’s rocket science. And we’re loving it

During one of his interactions with people, A P J Abdul Kalam was asked why he didn’t get married. Never one to be offended, Kalam replied: “I find rocket science much easier to understand than marriage.” Most people have given up on understanding marriage, but many are trying more earnestly to understand rocket science, thanks to Kalam – and Chandrayaan-3.

After Kalam, it is India’s latest Moon mission that has kindled popular interest in science. Isro scientists are flooded with invitations to not just seminars, but showroom openings and corporate gatherings as well. Suddenly, the rocket scientist is a star. Companies have moved their products from the ‘pipeline’ to ‘launchpad’; boardroom presentations have replaced ‘markets’ with ‘orbits’, ‘growth’ with ‘propulsion’. Not just students, grown-ups with little background of science are thronging planetariums and watching science shows.

This newfound euphoria offers some lessons to science teachers: Popularise science and let students explore the themes behind the theorems, the romance behind rocket science. I am not sure if we would jump up in such unadulterated joy when a mission lands on, say, Venus or Jupiter. Those missions would be more difficult than Chandrayaan, but Moon has a special place in our hearts. Up and close, the lunar surface is a treacherous place of craters and mounds, dust, heat and cold, but we had Shammi Kapoor sing ‘Chand sa roshan chehra’ at Sharmila Tagore and Poornima fall for Mohan singing ‘Ilaya nila pozhigirathe’.

Our science education should tap on such popular missions to dejargonise and democratise science. If our scientists don’t have the time to move out of their workplaces, we should have storytellers who can take science from labs to lay people. It was here that Kalam was different. Focused on his work, Kalam was also a natural charmer who became the biggest ambassador of science. I believe that’s because Kalam was a great human being first, a scientist and statesman next.

When I was helping rocket scientist S Nambinarayan write his autobiography ‘Ready to Fire’, we discussed the competition between scientists led by Kalam who were working on solid propulsion and those like Nambi who were pushing for liquid propulsion systems. At a point, Nambi called up Kalam to brief him about a chapter that was critical about Isro favouring solid propulsion over liquid propulsion. Would he feel bad about it, Nambi asked Kalam. Kalam just laughed and offered to write the foreword for the book (Kalam died in 2015, before the book was published).

The biggest stupidity of our education system is trying to separate science and arts; now a shared passion is promising to bridge the gap. Stephen Hawking, the man who dared to peep into the mysteries of the universe and write ‘A Brief History of Time’, put it beautifully: “Science is not only a discipline of reason, but also one of romance and passion.” When you hold a pen or a pipette, whether you realise it or not, you are immersing yourself in the ether of science and art. Art may not follow the rules of science (maybe that’s why Claude Bernard said ‘art is I, science is we’), but science permeates every brushstroke of art. Look no further than some of the images of distant galaxies captured by the Hubble telescope for the brilliance of art in the depths of the cosmos. Science, like art, makes mistakes, but they are, as Jules Verne said, useful mistakes that lead us little by little to truth.