Indian astrophysicist misses the Nobel for physics 2011 by a whisker

By Syed Akbar
Hyderabad:  A group of Indian scientists and academics is
planning to approach the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences with
documentary evidence to prove that a city scientist had reported on
the accelerated expansion of the universe a year before the US team,
which won this year's Nobel in Physics, had published its work.

Dr BG Sidharth, senior astrophysicist and director of BM Birla Science
Centre here, had published his mathematical and theoretical
observation on the "dark energy driven accelerating universe", in the
International Journal of Modern Physics A in May 1997. He sent the
research work for publication on April 14, 1997, which was accepted by
the Journal a month later.

A year later in 1998, the US team comprising astronomers Perlmutter,
Reiss and Schmidt published their work after they observed the
accelerated expansion of the universe through telescope.

"Mine is a theoretical work based on mathematical calculations. The US
team's work is based on observation. Besides publication of my
research work in the International Journal of Modern Physcis A, I
presented it before an international conference held in Israel in
1997," Dr Sidharth told this correspondent.

Asked if he was planning to approach the Royal Swedish Academy of
Sciences, Dr Sidharth answered in the negative. "Others are planning
to approach them about my work," he added.

"The contents of my paper went diametrically opposite to accepted
ideas, that the universe, dominated by dark matter was actually
decelerating. Rather, driven by dark energy, the universe would be
expanding and accelerating, though slowly. I was quite sure that this
paper would be rejected outright by any reputable scientific journal.
So I presented these ideas at the prestigious Marcell Grossmann meet
in Jerusalem and another International Conference on Quantum Physics.
But, not giving into pessimism, I shot off the paper to a standard
International journal, anyway. To my great surprise, it was accepted
immediately," Dr Sidharth said.

There is a further cosmic foot print of this model: a residual
minuscule energy in the Cosmic Microwave Background, less than a
billion billion billion billionth of the energy of an electron. Latest
data has confirmed the presence of such an energy. All this is in the
spirit of the manifest universe springing out of an unmanifest
background, as described in the Bhagvad Gita.