Jayant Narlikar (1938-2025): A bright star who rewrote the story of the cosmos

A bright star has gone dark.

Astrophysicist Jayant Narlikar died in Pune on May 20. He was 87.

He devoted his life to the quest for scientific knowledge, the advancement and dissemination of rational thought and the steadfast struggle against pseudoscience.

There is perhaps no student of science in India today who must not have heard of Narlikar. Using chalks of various colours and a blackboard, Narlikar imparted lessons on the universe, and our place in it, to generations of students.

Narlikar was born in Kolhapur in 1983. His father was a professor of mathematics at Banaras Hindu University. Narlikar followed in father’s footsteps, graduating in mathematics from Banaras Hindu University and then pursuing higher studies at Cambridge, where he was awarded the Tyson Medal in the Mathematical Tripos course. At Cambridge, Narlikar met renowned British physicist Fred Hoyle.

In the 1960s, radio astronomer Martin Ryle provided new experimental data to Cambridge University’s Cavendish Laboratory, supporting the Big Bang Theory. The universe began as an infinitely small, hot, and dense point that swiftly expanded and proceeded to stretch for 13.8 billion years, according to the Big Bang Theory.

Narlikar and Hoyle used Ryle’s data to show that his results were inconclusive for the Big Bang Theory. Their research yielded the Hoyle-Narlikar theory,...

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