Prof Ashoke Sen may well be the right antidote to Sheldon Cooper’s superiority complex. Why, you ask? Prof Sen is one of the nine distinguished scientists to be awarded the Fundamental Physics Prize (FPP), established by Yuri Milner. What makes this awards special is that the prize money is a whopping $3million per awardee!
Prof Sen, a string theorist, is a professor at Allahabad’s Harish-Chandra Research Institute. This award recognises his work on strong-weak coupling duality. “This refers to certain symmetries of string theory which are hidden and not easy to discover. In the mid 90s, I devised specific strategies for discovering and finding evidence for such symmetries,” says Prof Sen. This was later used by others to discover many other duality symmetries and thus leading to creation of new theories. The 56-year-old, who was pleasantly surprised to hear about this prize, was awarded the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology in 1994, was appointed Fellow of the Royal Society in 1998, and awarded the Padma Shri in 2001.
This celebrated physicist believes that, “For a physicist, the main recognition comes from how your research is accepted by your colleagues, and how much it influences the later developments in the field. It is a continuous process.” He adds that this being the first FPP, he was not expecting it. “It was also a surprise that I was on the list of winners, given that there are so many other deserving people,” he says. Adding that this is certainly the biggest award he has received so far, he says, “I hope that this will be an encouragement for young students who are interested in basic research to take it up as a career option.”
Prof Sen’s tryst with physics was not accidental, one of the most important factors being that his father Anil Kumar Sen was a teacher of Physics at the Scottish Church College in Kolkata. “Also when I was growing up in Kolkata, physics was the most popular subject. For example, five of my UG batchmates in Presidency College were among the top 10 rank holders in the board exam of that year.” Physics surely looms large in Prof Sen’s life. He is married to Prof Sumathi Rao who is also a physicist at HRI. They do not have any children. In his free time, this theoretical physicist enjoys cooking. When he is travelling, museums are definitely on his itinerary.
The word professor and rich can hardly be said in one breath but Milner, a Russian physics student who dropped out of college in 1989 and went on to become a successful venture capitalist, has made this possible for nine scientists this year. The FPP has now earned the position of being the most financially lucrative prize. The Nobel Prize award money amounts to $1.2 million per category where the prize money is divided among the recipients of the award.
Prof Sen is yet to decide what he will do with the cash prize. He wishes to use a significant fraction of the money towards promoting education in India at various levels. “The prize money (`16.65 crore) was deposited into my savings bank account which previously had a balance of `7 lakh ($12,600),” he reveals. Of the $3 million, Prof Sen may lose $1 million as tax, “I have not thought about seeking tax exemption. I’ll be happy to pay whatever is needed,” he says.
Prof Sen was informed by Milner about the prize, which was announced in the first week of August, over a phone call. The other eight recipients are Alan Guth, professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Alexei Kitaev, professor at California Institute of Technology; Maxim Kontsevich (a Russian mathematician), professor at Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques, France; Andrei Linde, professor at Stanford University; Nima Arkani-Hamed, Juan Maldacena, Nathan Seiberg and Edward Witten, all professors at Princeton’s Institute of Advanced Study. Prof Sen who has over the years interacted with most of the recipients says, “I have interacted with all but one, whose field of study is somewhat different from mine. I have met the others on numerous occasions. I have not collaborated with any of them, but my research has been strongly influenced by their work, both directly and indirectly.”
While the inaugural winners were chosen personally by Milner, the nine awardees of 2012 will choose the next set of winners. FPP is not strict in many ways as it allows one person to be awarded more than once with no age limit and can be awarded to scientists whose ideas have not yet been verified by experiments unlike the Nobel Prize in physics. In addition to the FPP, Milner has instituted the New Horizons in Physics Prize — a $100,000 award, which can be given to young researchers in physics.
— susmita@newindian
express.com