Around this day last year, July 16, 2015, I visited the
United States after a fifteen year hiatus. I lived, studied, and worked in the
US between 1991 and 2000, when I returned to India , hoping to embark on a
writing career, which never took off – I don’t think I have the discipline to
be a writer. In 2000, I thought that what I wanted out of life was a career in
a different field for every decade of my life. Now I realize that I need not
have conceptually compartmentalized my life by decades. I can be interested in
multiple things concurrently, though perhaps I cant really have a career in any
of them.
Since I quit my software career, I have been mostly
reading books, on a variety of subjects. Three subjects which I found boring in
my teens and twenties, Art, Biology and Economics, have captured my attention
in the last ten years or so. In the last couple of years, especially after
reading Thomas Hager’s excellent book, The
Alchemy of Air, on the Haber Bosch process, I have been fascinated by Chemistry
and its modern history – and how poorly this history is explained to us or
discussed in public fora.
But in the last few years, I have had a chance to travel
to some parts of India, mostly visiting temples, more for their art, sculputre
and painting, than for spiritual or religious pursuit. Occasionally, in India, I
have visited places that provoke scientific curiosity or are famous for a
scientist / mathematician, like :
·
the Calcutta Botanical Gardens
·
the Trivandrum Museum which has a
marvelous Biology exhibit, especially, a superb Invertebrates section
·
Ramanujan museum in Royapuram, Madras
·
Ramanujan house in Kumbakonam
·
Vishveshvarayya Museum, Bangalore
·
Gass Forest Museum, Coimbatore, which
has a fantastic butterfly collection
·
Gunduperumbedu fossil site, near
Sriperumbudur, TN
·
Tiruvakkarai fossil site, near Vilupuram,
TN
Unfortunately, except for the fossil sites, almost
everything related to science in India, is of the British period or later. I
would have loved to visit an Aryabhata museum in Bihar, a Varahamihira museum
in Ujjain or a Brahmagupta musuem in Rajasthan – or even their birthplaces. We
have no such thing; there are even scholarly disputes over where they were born
or which city they lived in.
Anyway, ever since I read books like Charles Darwin’s
Voyage of the Beagle, Alfred Russel
Wallace’s Contributions to the Theory of
natural selection, Jared Diamond’s Guns,
Germs and Steel and perused portions of Henry Bates’ Naturalist on the River Amazons, Alexander von Humboldt’s Personal Narrative of a Journey to the
Equinoctial Regions of a New Continent, and most influentially, Iain McCalman’s
book Darwin’s Armada, I developed the urge to travel the world, and see
its scientific treasures, not just its artistic wonders or other monuments,
mostly political. My innate laziness, ridiculous visa hassles, extreme
fussiness and wariness over food, and lack of like-minded travel companions
have held me back from doing indulging. I’ve wanted to visit Europe, especially
Germany, Greece and Italy for the last three years. Similarly Brazil, Mexico,
China, Japan, and of course, in the footsteps of Wallace to the islands of
Indonesia. I’m even quite tempted to visit Baghdad, scientific centre of the 8th
and 9th centuries, though it’s perhaps not suitable now. And
Khwarizem, home of two all times greats, Muhammad bin Musa al Khwarizmi and
Muhammad bin Ahmad al Biruni.
Considering all this, it was simply easier to visit
the US. I already had a visa, and I could see friends and family there. Also
food is not a problem in the USA, and I was looking forward to various cuisines
I became accustomed to in the years when I lived there. I had a multi-city tour
planned, which didn’t work out, because I had some problem renting a car, but
it turned out to be good luck, because this way I spent less time traveling
between cities and more time visiting actual places of interest. Everywhere I
went, except LA, I ended up staying with family.
These are the places of scientific interest which I
visited in the US
·
July 24 - Golden Gate Park, San
Francisco
·
July 25 - Botanical Garden in the Golden
Gate Park
·
July 27 - Stanford University campus
tour, Palo Alto
·
July 28 - Computer History Museum, Mountain
View, California
·
Aug 1 - Atlanta Botanical Garden
·
Aug 6 - Natural History Museum,
Washington DC
·
Aug 7 - Aviation and Space Museum,
Washington DC
·
Aug 9 - Benjamin Franklin Museum, Philadelphia
·
Aug 10 - American History Museum (Edison
exhibit), Washington DC
·
Aug 13 - Norman Borlaug Center, College
Station, Texas
I started the visit with a tour of popular tourist
spots in southern California – Seaworld in San Diego and Disneyland and
Universal Studios in Los Angeles. The tour of the Library of Congress,
especially its paintings and statues turned out to be as substantially about a
vision of Science, as of books in general. I got a lot of advice from various
people on places to visit, but I haven’t written about most of the places I
visited, yet, except San Francisco Botanical Garden and the first Google computer
at Stanford. And Facebook has started to toss up memories from last year. I
will write about some of these in the next couple of months. I regret not going
again this summer; I should have planned visits to Chitchen Itza and
Tenochtitlan and of course, the Burgess Shale, in Canada.
If you have undertaken a Science Yatra of some sort,
please let me know. I’d love to read about it, and perhaps visit the sites.
US Science
Yatra Essays
எண்ணெழுத்தும் கையெழுத்தும்- A Microsoft memory (in Tamil)
ஞானதேவதைகள் - The paintings in the Library of Congress
India Science Yatra Essays
Midnight Sun in Sriharikota – An Indian Rocket
launch
Video of my lecture on Astronomy of Ancient Cultures
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