Youth are keen on science: Souradeep

Youth are keen on science: Souradeep

Pune: Prof Tarun Souradeep, Spokesperson, LIGO-India, Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) on Thursday said it was encouraging to see young people interested in science. 

"Within a short span of time, the LIGO-India Facebook page has become popular among students and researchers. The page, which talks about the project and related information, is always flooded with curious queries. It is good to see that young students and people in general are interested in science and have a scientific temperament,” he told Sakal Times. 

"We get queries from people of varied backgrounds. There are people from Information and Technology industry who are interested in the project. Then there are students, researchers and people from various science and engineering branches,” he said. "When we put an advertisement for hiring people for LIGO-India project, we were flooded with applications. This shows that more and more people are interested in scientific experiments and science. Social media is an effective medium and it can be used effectively for public outreach," he added. 

He told Sakal Times, “Research in India is still done and encouraged to be done in silos in the country. To be at the frontier of sciences, the world across, we must be open to collaborative research in the science community. Hopefully, with LIGO-India project, Indian scientists have a opportunity to showcase their mettle in frontier collaborative science to the world.” 

"To be part of path-breaking science, we should come out of individualistic research and encourage involvement in larger collaboration with scientists the world over,” he added. 

"LIGO and Planck Surveyor (Cosmic Microwave background) are good personal examples at IUCAA as to how international collaborative work can be transformational and fruitful. Acceptance for participation in frontier big science is necessarily highly competitive at the global level and it already proves that you are at par with the world within the associated scientific community. This fact needs to be appreciated and accepted more widely within the current Indian science community. We need to learn to value Indian researchers who work in global frontier collaborations,” he said. 

One of the recipients of Breakthrough Prize for the discovery of Gravitational waves, he said, “All the 37 Indian researchers recognised in this award, were co-authors on the discovery paper only because their efforts in various forms are deemed make significant contribution to the LIGO Scientific Collaboration. And an appreciation of such facts is what I mean by a healthy appreciation of collaborative research and its associated ethos." 

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