- Lived:
- 30 October 1909, Bombay (Mumbai) → Cambridge and the great European laboratories → wartime Bangalore → Bombay again, where he built everything; died 24 January 1966 on the slopes of Mont Blanc
- Field:
- theoretical physics — quantum electrodynamics and cosmic rays — and then the founding and command of India's entire atomic establishment
- The Big Idea:
- A poor new country should not wait its turn at science. Build the school first, decades before the need, so that when the nuclear age arrives "India will not have to look abroad for its experts" — and he built it: TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission, and a three-stage plan running to this day.
- In their words:
- "It is one's duty to stay in one's own country and build up schools comparable with those that other countries are fortunate in possessing." (from his letter to the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust, March 1944)
- If you remember one thing:
- In March 1944 — sixteen months before Hiroshima, three years before independence — a 34-year-old physicist wrote about a page and a half to a charitable trust asking for a school of fundamental physics. From that letter came the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, the atomic energy programme, Asia's first research reactor, and the scattering formula bearing his name that every particle collider on earth still uses as its measuring stick.