Sashibhusan Rath
Sashibhusan Rath | |
|---|---|
| Residence | West Singhbhum, India |
| Nationality | Indian |
| Known for | Cosmology, space and time |
Sashibhusan Rath is an Indian independent researcher, listed in The Worldwide List of Dissident Scientists, whose single catalogued work is a 1997 reflective essay on space, time and cosmology.
His recorded address is West Singhbhum, which at the time of the wiki's roster entry was in the state of Bihar; since the reorganization of 2000 the district has formed part of Jharkhand, with its headquarters at Chaibasa.
Not to be confused with Sashibhusan Rath (1885–1943), the Odia social reformer, industrialist and politician who founded and edited Dainik Asha, the first Odia daily newspaper, published from Brahmapur, and who was known as Ganjam Byaghra ("the Tiger of Ganjam"). A web search for this name returns that considerably better-documented figure, who is a different person and unconnected with physics.
Work
Rath's one entry on this wiki is "Reflection on our Picture of STC Space, Time and Cosmology" (1997). Despite the title, the surviving abstract is not a technical paper but a meditation on the practice of physics — on the physicist's way of looking at the world, on the limits of formalism, and on what one generation of scientists owes the next.
Its argument, such as it is, runs: that a physicist has a distinctive way of looking at and understanding the world, which Feynman held to be a major part of the true culture of modern times; that no formula can deliver simplicity or total insight, and that an account of the physical world can be illustrative but never exhaustive; that those who have the habit of asking good questions of nature hold a distinct place in human society, since without them nothing new would ever be learned; and that our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve solutions and pass them on — leaving the people of the future a free hand, since in the impetuous youth of humanity we can make grave errors that stunt our growth for a long time.
Relation to Feynman's "The Value of Science"
The abstract follows Richard Feynman's 1955 address "The Value of Science" closely, and a reader should know this in order to read the entry correctly.
Feynman is named openly in the opening sentence, so the piece announces its debt. But the closing passage reproduces his wording without quotation marks. Feynman wrote: "Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on"; "It is our responsibility to leave the people of the future a free hand. In the impetuous youth of humanity, we can make grave errors that can stunt our growth for a long time"; and "It has been done so many times before." Each appears in the abstract in nearly identical form.
What the entry records, then, is an endorsement and restatement of Feynman's argument for the value of doubt and against the suppression of dissenting inquiry — a position with obvious appeal to the community catalogued on this wiki, and one Feynman put more memorably than most. It is not an independent contribution to cosmology, and it should not be cited as one.
About this entry
This article is a stub derived from a membership roster entry. Beyond the name, the district, and the single 1997 abstract described above, nothing about the subject has been established: no further publications, affiliation, biographical detail or web presence could be found, either in this wiki's own collections or in outside sources.
Editors who can supply primary material — further papers, correspondence, conference records, or personal knowledge of the subject's work — are invited to add it. Please do not pad the page with general statements about cosmology or about independent researchers, which would add no information about the subject.
(An out-of-date personal telephone number was carried on this page from the original roster import and has been removed; contact details for private individuals do not belong in a public encyclopedia entry.)