Cheers for Caltech Nobel winner’s Kolkata connect

KOLKATA: Physicist Kip Thorne, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics along with Barry C Barish and Rainer Weiss, took tips from a fellow scientist at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) before his trip to Kolkata in Dece-mber 2011.
“Kip knew I am from Kolkata and asked me details about the city, what to eat during the trip and what to avoid. He loves to experiment and try out new cuisine.So I suggested a few Bengali dishes that I thought would suit his palate. He did try them, and on his return, told me he had immensely enjoyed it,” recounted Goutam Chattopadhyay, senior research scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Caltech.
Thorne is the Feynman professor emeritus of Theoretical Physics at Caltech while Barsih is the Ronald and Maxine Linde professor emeritus of physics at the same institute. Weiss is the professor emeritus of Physics at MIT.
Incidentally, it was Thorne who inspired Steven Spielberg to make the sci-fi film ‘Intersteller’ that involves travelling through a wormhole seeking a new planet for mankind.
During the trip to Kolkata, Thorne, a leading expert on astrophysical implications of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, delivered the S N Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences silver jubilee lecture and spoke of objects and phenomena made of warped spaces in the universe. Liton Majumdar, then a PhD student at SN Bose Institute, had listened to Thorne’s lecture in awe. Now he is a post-doctoral fellow at Caltech.
Chattopadhyay, who was a graduate student in the electrical engineering department when he joined Caltech in 1994, got to interact with Thorne and other physicists like John Carlstrom, Jonas Zmuidzinas and Andrew Lange because his thesis advisor was in the physics department.
“Their offices were a few doors down the corridor. It was an incredible experience. Stephen Hawking used to visit Caltech every winter. His office used to be on the same floor, two doors down. Stephen, Kip, and John Preskill used to have animated discussions about black holes, gravitational waves, and LIGO,” he recalled.
Although Chattopadhyay did not work on the LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, a large-scale physics experiment and observatory to detect cosmic gravitational waves) project, he was involved along with Andrew Lange, John Carlstrom and Jamie Bock with another work that was related to Thorne’s project.
“We were building an instrument to measure the polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). I designed and developed antennas and other components for the BICEP2 instrument which measured the CMB polarization. The link between Kip’s and our work was that by measuring polarization of CMB, we were indirectly trying to prove the existence of Gravitational waves,” he added.