Sankar Hajra
Sankar Hajra | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | 1946 Rajagram, Hooghly district, West Bengal, India |
| Residence | Calcutta (Kolkata), India |
| Nationality | Indian |
| Known for | Classical electrodynamic interpretations of relativity |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Physics |
Sankar Hajra (born 1946) is an Indian researcher in theoretical physics based in Calcutta (Kolkata), West Bengal. Working outside mainstream academia, he is known for a research programme that seeks to reinterpret the effects predicted by the special and general theories of relativity as consequences of classical electrodynamics, drawing on the field equations of James Clerk Maxwell together with Newtonian mechanics.
Biography
Hajra was born in 1946 in the village of Rajagram, in the Hooghly district of West Bengal, India. His father, Ratimohan Hajra, was a primary school teacher noted for his proficiency in mathematics. Hajra received his early schooling at Bajua High School, where he studied mathematics under H. C. Ghosh. He went on to graduate from Presidency College, Calcutta, a college of long standing repute in India.
After completing his education, Hajra joined the Reserve Bank of India in Calcutta, where he worked until his retirement in 2005. His interest in the foundations of relativity was encouraged by Debabrata Ghosh, a Calcutta-based critic of relativity theory, under whom he studied the subject. Hajra has been associated with the Indian Physical Society and the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science, both in Kolkata.
Scientific contributions
Hajra's work concerns the foundations of the special and general theories of relativity. He contends that the phenomena usually attributed to relativity can instead be derived from classical physics, treating them as consequences of Maxwell's electrodynamics combined with Newtonian mechanics rather than as evidence for the relativistic reformulation of space and time. In this programme he has attempted to obtain electrodynamic relations, including forms of the Lorentz transformation equations, directly from the Maxwell field equations.
Among the topics he has addressed are the electromagnetic behaviour of moving bodies, the interpretation of classic experiments in the history of relativity, and the relativistic precessions. In a paper published in *Pramana – Journal of Physics* (2016), he argued, from considerations of classical electrodynamics, that an effect measured in certain rotation experiments should be understood as a Coriolis effect rather than a Sagnac effect. His articles have appeared in journals and proceedings including *Pramana*, *Chinese Physics B*, *Galilean Electrodynamics*, and the *Physical Interpretations of Relativity Theory* (PIRT) conference series.
Abstracts
- 2011 - "The Cross Radial Force" (Read in full)
- 2010 - "[[Electric charge, Light, Gravitation and Old Physics
]]"
- 2010 - "Some Experiments that Shook the World"
- 2008 - "Large-Charge Electrodynamics and SRT"
- 2007 - "Collapse of GRT: EM Interactions with Gravity Derived from Maxwell and Newton"
- 2006 - "Collapse of SRT 2: Earth Carries Along Electric and Magnetic Fields"
- 2005 - "Collapse of SRT 1: Derivation of Electrodynamic Equations from the Maxwell Field Equations"
Media
- 2010 - Maxwell, Maxwell and Maxwell: Collapse of Relativity, Special & General (Video Lecture)