Concern for kids: Simon Singh at the IICB auditorium

Simon Singh fished out a toy ? a piece of plastic looking like the butt of a knife ? from his pocket and gave it a spin. The piece started rotating on the slender space of the arm of the chair he’s sitting. “Now I’m giving it a spin in the opposite direction,” he told me with child-like glee and asked me to notice the result. The piece didn’t rotate in the opposite direction so enthusiastically, and, in fact, stopped dead in a moment. “Why doesn’t it rotate this time?” he asked me the way he puts the question to school kids in the UK. The toy, he explained, was not symmetric in its structure and so not ready to rotate equally easily in both directions.

The author of such titles as Fermat’s Last Theorem, The Code Book and Big Bang was in the city and I was interviewing him. Our discussion veered around the lack of interest in pure science among students, a global phenomenon these days. “A recent report says that in the last 15 years the number of British students going in for higher studies in physics has decreased by 38 per cent,” he told me.

Alarmed by the fact, Singh has taken upon himself the task of making school kids in the UK interested in science. He was visiting schools there and meeting science teachers, because, as he explained, only they could hook bright young students to science.

“I’m really worried, you know,” he told me. “My parents went to the UK from India, and I was lucky to have a good education there. But now that atmosphere is no longer there. The problem is that there aren’t enough good science teachers in British schools these days. If there aren’t good teachers who’ll inspire the kids to go in for science? I want to do something that wakes up the UK government to initiate actions to arrest an alarming trend.”

Earlier, Singh delivered a lecture ? ‘Big Bang - the history of the Universe in 60 minutes’ ? at the auditorium of the Indian Institute of Chemical Biology (IICB) at Jadavpur. It was jointly organised by the IICB and the British Council.

Singh’s lively power-point presentation comprised the history of the humanity’s idea about the origin of the cosmos. In fact, he described how the idea that once reigned supreme among physicists ? the so-called Steady State Theory, or an eternal Universe with no beginning or end in time ? finally gave way to the Big Bang which holds that everything was born in a cataclysmic explosion of energy 13.7 billion years ago.

Singh played on parts of the now-famous talk on BBC radio delivered by Sir Fred Hoyle in which he first used the term ‘Bing Bang’. A staunch supporter of the Steady State Theory, Sir Fred used the term to poke fun at the new concept. The name, however, caught on among its supporters.

With beautiful examples, Singh explained the effects of bias on the human mind, pointing out that even scientists, supposedly the most rational of humans, were not immune to it. According to him, not only Albert Einstein, who vehemently opposed Belgian priest Georges Lemaitre’s idea of a cosmic birth despite it being a logical conclusion from his theory of relativity, but also all the leading physicists initially disliked it.

Lemitre came up with the idea of cosmic birth in 1927, but when Sir James Jeans, famous British astrophysicist, wrote his popular book The Mysterious Universe in 1930, it did not mention the Big Bang, concentrating, instead, on the Steady State Theory, the reigning idea of those days. Still the title became a bestseller, and the Hollywood actress Tallulah Bankhead, who read it, commented that “every girl must read it.”

Now that the Big Bang is the accepted view of the origin of the cosmos, Singh expected his book would be a bestseller too. “I have a fantasy; I hope Hollywood actress Cameron Diaz will go through Big Bang and recommend it to every girl,” he said amid wide applause of the audience.