Rocket science, chess board and the elusive tiger

It is rare to see people other than movie stars and sports gods being mobbed for autographs and pictures. Nobel laureates and eminent scientists Ivar Giaever, Walter Kohn and Douglas Osheroff managed just that after they caught the imagination of the 2,000-odd students by peppering presentations on their award-winning work with their amazing life stories, their inspiration and some self-deprecating humour.

Eighty-four-year-old Norway-born professor Ivar Giaever, who won the award for his work on discoveries regarding tunnelling phenomena in solids 40 years ago, started the Sixth Science Conclave with his presentation on Future of Science. He said the age of discovery was almost over and it was the age of inventions, as action moves to the area of applied sciences.

Giaever compared science to a chessboard. In chess, there are 10 rules or so. "The number of chess games you can play is a big number. It is 1 followed by 100 zeroes. It is 10 raised to 100. It is bigger than number of all sand particles in India... more than water drops in an ocean..."

Similarly, nature has some 10 rules. But unlike chess, the number of players are infinite. "The number of inventions nature can make are infinite. It is up to you to find that."

Ninety-year-old Kohn, who got a chemistry Nobel in 1988, recalled how two of his best doctoral students were Indians. "I have worked with some 40 or 50 doctoral students. Two Indian students were among the first three students I took. They were among the best," Kohn said to wild cheering.

He emphasised on the need for alternative energy in the face of depleting oil resources and rising population. "We are going to move from an oil- and gas-powered world to a solar- and wind-powered world. That is going to change everything we do," said Kohn. At 68, Osheroff was the youngest of the trio and excited the crowd with his love story that ran concurrently with his Nobel Prize winning research work on super-fluidity in Helium-3.

Osheroff talked about his interests in photography and lamented how he couldn't get to see the tiger on a jungle visit before arriving at the conclave. Osheroff had taken part in a post-crash investigation of the Columbia space shuttle. "That should not have happened," said Osheroff, explaining how it was avoidable. Osheroff's fascination for experimenting made him quit astrophysics, which he initially studied.

Asking youngsters to ignore failure, Osheroff recalled how his Nobel Prize winning work was initially rejected. "If your work ever got rejected, remember even Nobel laureates get their papers rejected. Not just any paper, the very paper for which they got Nobel prize."

The trio also engaged with questions from inquisitive students. When someone wanted to know if it was possible to create an element in liquid state, Osheroff said: "I suppose all elements nature has already made." Then he asks Kohn: "Do you know?"

"Walter says I don't know. That means I don't have to know I am only an experimentalist," said the former Bell Labs scientist. When a student asked if he would come back to India, he said: "You have to show me the tiger."