From 'tapping the energy of djinns' to an 'Al Qaeda' mindset.

Survival of the fittest

Irfan Husain
Wednesday, 14 Oct, 2009

Dr Abdul Salam, Pakistani theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate in Physics. — File photo

Last night I saw the first in a new BBC series of nature programmes called Life. Narrated by David Attenborough, the TV show was a dazzling example of photography and painstaking research. We were treated to the sight of a dozen killer whales hunting seals in the Arctic; a mother octopus who starves to death while tending her eggs; and sundry other animals, birds and fish exhibiting the most extraordinary behaviour in their struggle to survive.

This endless struggle to survive and procreate was also the subject of a recent series about Charles Darwin. Written and presented by Richard Dawkins, the biologist and campaigner for Darwin’s theory of evolution, it was a brilliant exposition of our emergence from the primeval slime millions of years ago.

And finally, I watched hypnotised as a programme on the Hubble telescope filled our TV screen with stunning images of distant stars, nebulae and galaxies. Captured by the orbiting telescope, objects whose light has been travelling for thousands of years appeared in dazzling colours and forms.

All three TV programmes served as reminders of man’s insignificance when measured on the universal scale of time and distance. Although the universe was created around 14 billion years ago, it is still expanding. Life emerged hundreds of millions ago on our planet, and is still evolving.

Cern, the European nuclear research centre on the border of France and Switzerland, is currently trying to recreate the conditions that followed within milliseconds of the Big Bang that created the universe. Here, the Large Hadron Collider is man’s most ambitious to investigate the very origins of the physical universe, as well as other mysteries of quantum physics.

Given the cutting edge nature of the research at Cern, it was disconcerting to learn that a scientist had been arrested on the charges of corresponding with AQIM, the North African arm of Al Qaeda. Of Algerian origin, Adlene Hicheur was corresponding with the terrorist group by email, and apparently had been trying to identify possible targets.

Even though his research did not equip him to cause any serious damage, Hicheur, if found guilty, is clearly on the same ideological wavelength as Osama bin Laden. Somehow, I have naively assumed that scientists are above the siren call of religious extremism. After all, how can you explore the earliest moments of the creation of the universe, and simultaneously accept the literalist interpretation of the event given by many religious texts, and blindly accepted by extremists?

Pervez Hoodbhoy, in his eminently lucid book Muslims and Science, gave examples of Pakistani nuclear scientists who engaged in research into the supernatural. In a conference on miracles in Islam organised in Islamabad under Zia, one of our scientists presented a paper on the possibility of tapping the energy of djinns to meet our power requirements. Another worked out how to calculate the degree of hypocrisy in society.

Now I do not question anybody’s right to follow his own line of research, no matter how eccentric. However, if scientists are conducting research at institutions funded by taxpayers, we do have the right to expect some more meaningful output. And when retired nuclear scientists are found to be close to Al Qaeda, as at least two from our scientific establishment were after 9/11, eyebrows will be raised around the world.

As we have learned to our cost, many doors have been shut to Muslims after 9/11. Visas, never easy to obtain before that world-changing event, are harder to come by than ever before. Log on to visa requirements for most Western (and many Muslim) states, and you will see that applicants from over two dozen Muslim countries now have their applications processed through sundry databases in the countries they wish to visit. All this causes endless delays.

Many Western universities no longer admit Muslim students to nuclear or biological research centres. They have seen post-graduate students from their departments returning home and getting involved in weapons research and development. And after A.Q. Khan’s alleged theft of plans for uranium enrichment equipment from his Dutch laboratory, how many Muslim scientists would get jobs at similar nuclear establishments?

Understandably, many Muslims who do not subscribe to extremist philosophy feel bitter at being rejected because of the actions of a handful. But after Hicheur’s arrest, how can you blame Westerners for being suspicious? After all, he was a French national who had studied at some of the finest institutions in Britain and the United States. So if he could go over to Al Qaeda and seriously contemplate terrorist attacks, what’s to stop other Muslims from following the same path?

The danger is that through the misguided actions of Hicheur and a few scientists like him, the Muslim world will find itself cut off from the mainstream of scientific research. Already, we are trailing far behind the rest of the world in the sciences, as we are in so much else. For decades, virtually no original research has been conducted in Muslim nations. And when we miraculously produce a Nobel-prize winner like Dr Abdus Salam, we drive him away by our bigotry.

Our excuse for our backwardness in the sciences is the poverty that is endemic in so many Muslim countries. But this is not true for several oil-rich states. The reality is that there is not a single world-class research institution in any Islamic country. Instead of squabbling over the fine points of dogma, if we could devote some of our energy to acquiring knowledge, we would all be far better off today.

I have no doubt that Hichuer is a hero to many Muslims who remain mired in a permanent sense of paranoia and past grievances, real and imagined. When I mentioned A.Q. Khan’s nuclear proliferation activities in a recent article, I was attacked by several readers for not appreciating his efforts to make Pakistan a nuclear power. And now, as the Kerry-Lugar Bill continues to be criticised, in part because it seeks to curb future proliferation, I am sure many Pakistanis will fulminate against the injustice of the American legislation. But the harsh reality is that life is unfair; and as Darwin has outlined in his theory of evolution, only the fittest survive and prosper.

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The UN General Assembly confers the prestigious UN Human Rights Award on the late Benazir Bhutto

Our heroes and heroines

ON Wednesday, the UN General Assembly conferred the prestigious UN Human Rights Award on the late Benazir Bhutto. Her son, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, received the award from the UN Assembly chief Miguel D’Escoto Brockman. Benazir Bhutto deserved the award not because she was the Muslim world’s first woman prime minister but because of her struggle against Ziaul Haq’s military dictatorship. Although she was subjected to the trauma of her father’s judicial murder and the tragedy surrounding the death of her two brothers, her spirits were not dampened. Arrested several times, Benazir Bhutto was put in solitary confinement by Ziaul Haq for five years. She was persecuted by others after the general as well but astounded the world by returning home in triumph — only to be felled by an assassin. While the world honours Pakistan’s heroes and heroines, we ourselves hound, persecute and murder them for parochial and political reasons. Liaquat Ali Khan, the first prime minister, was assassinated in the same park in Rawalpindi where Benazir Bhutto was killed 56 years later. Her father, who laid the foundation of Pakistan’s nuclear programme, was thrown into jail, maltreated and finally hanged after a morbid political drama in which some politicians acted as the military’s stooge.

We also know how Prof Abdus Salam, our first scientist to win a Nobel Prize — in fact the only recipient of the prestigious award from Pakistan — was unwelcome in this country. Prof Salam wanted an institute of theoretical physics set up in Pakistan, but bigots unhappy with his religious affiliations deprived the country of this honour which then went to Italy where an institute set up by him has benefited students who upon completion of their degree in higher physics go out to serve the world of science and their own countries. Pakistan has also produced heroes of international standard in cricket, hockey and squash — Jahangir Khan has just been given this status at the Olympic Museum. While the world honours our heroes, we must reflect on how we treat them.
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The genius of Jhang: Dr Abdus Salam

(Zahida Hina, 23 Nov 2008, Express)


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The genius of Jhang: Dr Abdus Salam
By Ahmad Faruqui (Daily Dawn)

EVERY October, the Nobel Academy announces the names of individuals whose genius has earned them its coveted prize.

The winners are awarded the prize by the King of Sweden in a formal ceremony. The prize in physics garners much attention, focusing as it does on the fundamental forces of nature.

So it was with great wonderment on Dec 10, 1979 that those who were gathered to witness the physics award saw a tall, bearded figure walk towards the stage. The very antithesis of western formalism, the man was draped in a long fully buttoned black suit with a closed upright collar, white baggy pants and white turban. Decorative shoes that could have come out of the Arabian nights completed the profile.

The man was Prof Abdus Salam. He had the honour of being the first scientist from the Muslim world to get the Nobel. His presence was a visible reminder of how far the young boy from the obscure town of Jhang on the banks of the Chenab had come.

Abdus Salam had shown evidence of brilliance at a young age by scoring the highest marks ever in a matriculation examination in Punjab. After studying at Government College, he went to Cambridge University (St John’s College), where he scored a double first in mathematics and physics and later obtained a doctorate. He would later teach at Government College, Imperial College (London) and the International Centre for Advanced Physics (Trieste, Italy).

Even though he had started out as an experimental physicist, he quickly turned into a theoretician, citing his lack of patience for accumulating data and working with “recalcitrant equipment”. His focus was on subatomic particles and the forces of attraction and repulsions that existed between them.

A century earlier, British scientist James Clerk Maxwell had shown that electricity and magnetism were two manifestations of a common electromagnetic force. Others had shown in the early part of the 20th century that a ‘weak’ nuclear force existed between subatomic particles and was responsible for phenomena such as beta-radioactive decay. This happens when a neutron in the nucleus spontaneously shoots off an electron as it turns itself into a proton, hence transmuting the element. However, the best available theory of weak force reactions by Enrico Fermi was known to be only valid at low energy levels.

In the 1960s, Abdus Salam, along with two Americans, put together a theory that described the weak force and electromagnetism as low-energy manifestations of a single ‘electroweak’ force. This theory agreed with all the observed data and behaved nicely at higher energy levels, unlike Fermi’s.

But there was a catch. It relied on the existence of several new particles that had never been seen in any prior experiment. One of these implied a set of ‘weak neutral current’ reactions, a brand new concept.

The Nobel was awarded to Abdus Salam and his co-researchers once the existence of the particles implied by their theory was confirmed by experimental scientists at CERN, the European test facility in Geneva. Prof Salam’s Nobel lecture, ‘Gauge unification of fundamental forces’ was a model of scientific eloquence (http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1979/salam-lecture.html).

Almost three decades later, his electroweak theory still stands, despite an extraordinary amount of testing. It has led to the development of the Standard Model in particle physics (quantum chromo-dynamics), which combines the electroweak theory with the ‘strong force’ theory.

However, from the days of Einstein onwards, no one has been able to integrate gravitation with the other three forces. Grand unification of the four fundamental forces remains an aspiration for future physicists. In science, theories are only interesting if they can be rejected. In his Nobel lecture, Prof Salam quoted from Einstein to affirm his belief in empirical testing: “Pure logical thinking cannot yield us any knowledge of the empirical world; all knowledge of reality starts from experience and ends in it.”

One of the loose ends in the Standard Model is the existence of the Higgs boson, which is still to be observed. Physicists around the world are anticipating that once the multi-billion-dollar Large Hadron Collider at CERN that runs under the Franco-Swiss border is operational again, it will be able to test for the existence of the Higgs boson.

It is fitting that the life and work of Prof Salam have been celebrated in a new biography by Gordon Fraser, Cosmic Anger (Oxford, 2008). In the book, Abdus Salam emerges not just as a world-renowned scientist but as a humanist committed to the advancement of the developing world and as a humble man with a tremendous sense of humour.

During the Ayub era, he served as chief scientific adviser to the president and was a member of the Atomic Energy Commission. In those days he inspired countless students in Pakistan to pursue the physical sciences.

Unfortunately, serious policy differences between him and the country’s top leadership surfaced when Zulfikar Ali Bhutto ascended to power. Bhutto was committed to bringing a nuclear weapons capability to Pakistan even if that meant, as he famously put it, that Pakistanis would have to eat grass for a thousand years. Prof Salam disagreed with Bhutto’s idea and felt it was ill-suited to a country as poor as Pakistan. Further difficulties arose with the passage of a law that excommunicated people of his faith from Islam.

A deeply religious man, Prof Salam was heartbroken. That year, with much anguish, he left the country for good.

He came back only once, at the behest of President Zia who wanted to recognise his achievements to the cause of science in Pakistan. He continued his work in the years that followed and travelled widely to compare notes with scientists around the world.

In 1996, at the age of 70, Prof Salam passed away in Oxford after a prolonged illness. But his legacy lives on. Many centres and professorships are named after him across the globe. His work continues to inspire new generations of graduate students to seek out the mysteries of particle physics.

But one would be hard pressed to find much evidence of his legacy in the land of his birth. That is a genuine tragedy since Pakistani science attained a high-water mark during his tenure that has yet to be surpassed.

The writer is the author of Musharraf’s Pakistan, Bush’s America and the Middle East.

faruqui@pacbell.net
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